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- [00:04]
A
Hello, everyone. This is Tom Muran. I'm here with the Gruk for another between two nerds discussion. G', day, Gruk. How are you?
- [00:10]
B
G', day, Tom. Finding yourself?
- [00:12]
A
I'm good. This week's edition is brought to you by Spectrops, the creator of Bloodhound, the attack path management tool. Find them@Spectropsio. So this week, as is your one, you sent me another paper. Now, this one's 30 years old. It's from Dr. Martin Lubicki, who's still kicking around. He's at the center for Cybersecurity Studies at the US Naval Academy now. But this paper was written when he was at rand, and it is. What is information warfare? My understanding is it's a bit of a think piece about whether the Air Force should get into information warfare or create a organization or something like that. But it starts off with this wonderful little vignette where they divide two teams into a red team and a blue team. They tell them to have at it in a given scenario, and the blue team immediately does what I would call the Cyber Command solution, where they think of hacking and exploiting critical infrastructure and taking down an enemy state. Doing Cyber Command, like, things like this is like, decades in advance of Cyber Command actually existing. And the red team thinks of psychological warfare, manipulating the information environment, getting people to change their minds. And so he concludes that there was no conflict because they never contested the same environment. They're doing totally different things. And that seemed like just a wonderful. Is it a truism at this point that that's the way sort of states have behaved ever since then?
- [01:52]
B
No, absolutely. So there's a lot about this paper I like. Some of it is just the antiquated language. Some of it is. I mean, he's just amazingly prescient, but, like. So his actual conclusion is, given that information warfare is these multiple different things, and some of it's like psychological warfare, and some of it would be information warfare, sort of as we understand it in a narrow scope. But some of it would be this sort of technical warfare, and some of it would be electronic warfare, because these are so many disparate things. There is no information warfare that covers all of them. That doesn't exist. So that's his conclusion, not mine. Right. And then because this was for the Air Force, he looks at sort of like what cyber can actually do as. As just the, you know, using a computer to attack this other stuff. And he says something along the lines of, this is weak source. Right? Like, it only works because the other Side chooses to be vulnerable. You know, if you actually put in the effort, you wouldn't be vulnerable, which is wonderfully antiquated. He basically says like, cybersecurity only exists because people refuse to solve the problem and it's easily solvable. But he is correct in his ultimate assessment of like, it, it's not as powerful as a bomb. Like, it's not a substitute.
- [03:15]
A
Yeah.
- [03:16]
B
So it just comes out and says like, yeah, it's, it's confusing. It's across all these different institutions that already exist in and of itself. It's not very powerful. And so the Air Force should not create a unit or a division or whatever specifically for this thing.
- [03:34]
A
Yeah. So I found it a very interesting paper and at the time it was written, it seems like a, a very good statement of the way things are. Now I came across this other piece of. I guess it's fairly recent news. So the story is that a Chinese commentator, ethnic Chinese commentator online, was approached by a person claiming to work for the Chinese Communist Party's external propaganda apparatus. And so he recorded that conversation like a voice to voice conversation. He's published it on YouTube and there's a little write up about it here. So the blogger approached by someone who claimed to be a former intelligence agency and he attempted to recruit the blogger at a rate of €40,000 per month.
- [04:34]
B
Which is euros or like yuan, because.
- [04:37]
A
Euro.
- [04:38]
B
Wow. Okay.
- [04:39]
A
Yeah, yeah. So that's an astounding amount. And you know, I'd just like to say that between two nodes we've always been very open to different perspectives.
- [04:48]
B
Right. I've questioned whether anyone's really in a position of authority to speak morally about China's actions.
- [04:55]
A
You know, I think they're perhaps potentially just a misguided.
- [05:01]
B
There's many perspectives that we are willing to explore.
- [05:06]
A
So a tremendous amount of money and. Well, so the idea was that he would not do anything like overtly promoting the Communist Party or the prc.
- [05:21]
B
Right.
- [05:21]
A
But to like, according to the conversation, focus on things like the Ukrainian armed forces equipment obsolescence. And it says here, drawing implicit parallels to suggest that Taiwan's military would likewise be ineffective. So it's kind of a couple of steps removed from the China good is creating.
- [05:42]
B
They want to create parallel narratives that advance their. Their themes, but without having clear ties and links.
- [05:52]
A
Yep, yep.
- [05:52]
B
So the idea is quite sophisticated actually. Like.
- [05:55]
A
Yeah, yeah, they still want the log to be objective or appear objective. I think is perhaps more to a.
- [06:02]
B
Point objective, but with a strong bias maybe.
- [06:07]
A
Yeah, well, I guess it has to be A hidden bias rather than a clear bias. So, I mean, obviously this blogger didn't accept the money. He published the conversation, which means that.
- [06:19]
B
There'S still a position open on their roster or maybe a podcast with a very wide reach to an influential audience.
- [06:30]
A
Yeah, unfortunately they seem to be targeting Chinese language broadcasters, so my Chinese is not. So the things that struck me were, it's not clear to me how effective these things are, but that a country is willing to spend what seemed like a lot of money when you multiply it by however many hundreds of people per month. And I guess there was that story about the US guy who was getting paid quite a lot as well by the rush.
- [07:06]
B
100,000 an episode or a month, maybe it was some astounding amount of money for someone who was getting 20,000 views maximum on a video, which.
- [07:18]
A
Yep, yep.
- [07:19]
B
And so I think that that means actually considering our view count, we should be getting at least 5,000 again.
- [07:32]
A
So again, like some countries willing to spend a lot of money, does that indicate that it actually does work?
- [07:38]
B
YouTube. YouTube influencers do make a lot of money, so it must. Something must work. I don't know if, I don't know if the political thing works as well as maybe promoting cosmetics.
- [07:51]
A
Right, right. So your argument here is that there is a ton of money in YouTube itself. And so the whole advertising industry, where metrics are very good, especially digital metrics are very good, you're saying, because YouTube even exists and it's an advertising related business and the metrics are good. There are measurable effects of that kind of clunky advertising you see in podcasts.
- [08:21]
B
Right. And, and even on Instagram, where I think that Instagram is more subtle in that, like you don't have, you know, and today's sponsor is. They don't necessarily have those sections, but they do have what seems to be more in line with this suggested form of propaganda of the, you know, implicitly recommending something as opposed to saying that this is sponsored content and advertisers continue to pay for that, so they must feel it works.
- [08:53]
A
Yeah.
- [08:53]
B
You know, again, I would just say, well, it definitely appears to work for cosmetics, but does it work for promoting the two session approach of the Communist Congress for 2016 as opposed to the previous one session? Like, is. Is that a thing, thing that is amenable to the same sort of promotion?
- [09:13]
A
I don't know. So it also struck me as something that it's very difficult for democracies to do anything about. So this individual has published a conversation, the blogger, the interlocutor who claimed to be from the CCP external propaganda department. He kind of. His online Persona kind of disappeared, is my understanding. So that individual action has made some impact, but it seems, yeah, it costs.
- [09:40]
B
Someone $40,000 a month. But I don't think that there's that many people who would turn that down just to expose. Right. Like, if our defense is reliant on people turning away money, like good money on moral principle, we're screwed like that.
- [10:08]
A
So it seemed like, also from a government perspective, a Western government perspective, it's not at all clear what I would do about that. So in a previous job, I had some dealings with the State Department's Global Engagement center, and we did some work basically revealing the shape of some Chinese propaganda campaigns on social media. So we did some work around the, you know, this many accounts. These were the themes, yada, yada, yada. And I always thought that that work was good, but also, to some degree, like, kind of missing the point in the. Yeah, I thought that being transparent about them was great, like allowing people to make up their own mind. But also at the same time, it seemed to be several steps removed from where or how those things might actually have impact. And I guess, yeah, this example I've just talked about is totally different. It's finding an influencer who already has an audience and just shaping what they're saying.
- [11:16]
B
Right. So my thinking is that the Western approach to dealing with this stuff is that, first of all, we don't recognize it as a style of warfare at an institutional level. Right. Like, we don't have the Department of Paying Influencers to promote general themes during times of peace.
- [11:37]
A
Yep.
- [11:37]
B
For advancing our sort of general perspective, like, that's. That's not a thing that the State does because we don't believe that's what the state should be doing. Not every state agrees with that, of course, which is the issue here. And so what do you do in a world where you refuse to engage in a battlefield that another state has selected to fight in? And sort of. I think the analogy I would use here is that it's sort of like a football or a soccer match where, you know, you've got the Western side which is willing to put up a goalie as, like, this last line of defense. Maybe, but they don't have, like, a center forward or they don't have, like, any defensive line. They don't have. They don't have the rest of the team. And so you see the entire football pitch to the other side and then hope that every time they Try and score, you can block it.
- [12:32]
A
Yep.
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B
And like that. That strikes me as not a winning strategy.
- [12:36]
A
Yeah. So the Global Engagement center stuff was very reactive in that it was to try and identify inauthentic campaigns and shed light on them. Just do the work, to be transparent and make people see, well, these aren't real people. And so the other thing that struck me about that work is that it's very, I guess in the context of Libicky's little vignette, the red team, blue team. It's a very blue team thing. It's a kind of technical answer. Looking at the.
- [13:11]
B
Let's look at the infrastructure that was used to push this narrative.
- [13:15]
A
The infrastructure, the tactics, the themes. It's a very technically focused approach.
- [13:23]
B
How did he dribble the ball before he scored his goal on this?
- [13:26]
A
That's right.
- [13:28]
B
Certainly interesting, right? That's right. So, yeah, I would say that we actually have an example of what effective information warfare from the west looks like. And I would bring up the Biden pre Russian invasion of Ukraine intelligence leaks. Right.
- [13:48]
A
Yep.
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B
So where Biden was using intelligence that they'd collected in an offensive way to preempt Russian actions, say, like this is what they plan on doing.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Which meant that when the Russians did it, it didn't come as a, like, organic, like, no part of it seemed natural. Because you were saying, here's the script that they're following. Right. And by exposing it beforehand, you rob it of all of its power. Like it becomes sort of this pre scripted, staged event as opposed to natural.
- [14:19]
A
Now you say that it was effective, but it obviously didn't stop the invasion. Right. So it was effective in neutering Russian propaganda.
- [14:28]
B
I guess.
- [14:28]
A
So it was contesting the information space.
- [14:31]
B
Right, That's. Yep, that's what we're talking about. Because I think that that's like, it is a blueprint for how this can be done. But I think there's a lot of institutional problems to it, one of which is that you're basically saying to the intelligence services, all of the stuff that you collect we're going to burn within 24 hours incredibly publicly. And yeah, it might put people in danger and it's sort of going to expose our sources and methods. Possibly. Right.
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A
But now isn't that.
- [15:05]
B
That's not necessarily true. But also isn't that the point of having intelligence is to advance the States?
- [15:12]
A
I mean, I was going to say, isn't that kind of what they do sort of with some of the. What is it the annual global threat? Is it a Threat analysis or they, they do a kind of wrap up of here are the big problems. And it's not quite as pointed as the stuff on just immediately before the invasion. That was a lot more. This is what they're planning to do. Here's the pretext that they're setting up. But it's kind of one or two steps removed where they try and wrap up everything that they're worried about in a way that doesn't betray sources and methods.
- [15:49]
B
Yeah. So I think that that's less effective simply because it's less pointed.
- [15:54]
A
It's just too far away, too many steps removed or whatever.
- [15:57]
B
It's too vague and it's too far away from the actual events.
- [16:00]
A
Right.
- [16:01]
B
So if you're saying like, oh yeah, six months ago we were suggesting that there was a potential for, you know, some sort of action towards this direction, you know, like that's not quite as useful in terms of blocking things.
- [16:15]
A
Right.
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B
Like you, you very much have to come out sort of just before and say here's what they're going to do. And then it happens that that robs those propaganda events of all of their power because you expose it beforehand and that's hard to do obviously and you can't do it for everything.
- [16:35]
A
This makes me a lot more optimistic than I was before in the sense that it seemed to me that Libicky had found in that case study it was a paradigm of how Western democracies fail to react. And so I guess they've been several. Well, I guess the 2016 election, US presidential election where there was an attempt at interference.
- [17:04]
B
Yeah, well there was a, there's a number of coordinated information warfare campaigns which may or may not have been overall successful. So like, and this is my opinion, not the opinion of BTN is I think it was, they were successful and that they had a material impact on the outcome of the election. I think that you kind of have to give it to Russia for an effective use of cyber to achieve their state objectives. They achieved strategic effect. Part of why they were successful is, as we've said, it's that the blue team just doesn't respect the red team approach as being real. Like it's not an actual warfare type event. It doesn't count because it's using influencers and bloggers and there's like, you can't task, plan, execute and then assess in the same sort of military cycle that they want. It doesn't have a discrete event that has a decisive outcome which is what they're looking for. You do this sort of vague thing and stuff kind of shifts maybe, and then you. And you might or might not get the response that you want, but that just doesn't really fit with Western paradigms of how to do conflict. However, this technical approach that the west loves, we will use our great economic power and our intellectual investments and all that to have these really clever, sophisticated attacks to manipulate the technology that you rely on to create a space that we can operate in. And so, like, that's wonderful for the West. Like, that really fits within the way that we conceive of things. And I think part of that is sort of to go back to the Beaky's diagnosis is that all of these different types of information warfare exist in different institutions. There's like a psychological warfare thing and that there's a. I get for State Department, there'll be a, you know, analyzing what other countries do in the information space. And so because they exist in all these different places, it would have to be united under. This isn't his prescription, but it would sort of. It'd have to be united under one organization that brings all of this together. And, like, I don't see that that is a viable solution that you could propose at this point in time or even 30 years ago. Like, you'd have to. You'd basically be saying, you'd go to the Department of Defense and say, all right, we're going to create another branch of the military that deals only with information, the entire information sphere. And the Navy is going to look at it and be like, so what you're proposing is a sort of air force of the Internet. Like, that is not going to happen. And the Air Force will look at it and be like, you want, like, a army. Like, you want an army of information warriors. Like, that is not going to happen. And the army's going to look at it and be like, so you're talking about a Navy of the super information highway. Like, absolutely not. I can't see it happening because it would cross so many institutional boundaries.
- [20:25]
A
Yeah, yeah. So I think there's a couple of things you've said. One is that you have this belief that it influenced the election or changed the action. Yeah, it may have, but I think that's arguable.
- [20:38]
B
Right.
- [20:39]
A
So, yes, you've got.
- [20:40]
B
Which is part of the problem, I think.
- [20:41]
A
Yeah, exactly. And you've got this very finely balanced election that probably could have gone either way.
- [20:48]
B
Absolutely.
- [20:49]
A
And then, you know, you've got, like, feather on the scale.
- [20:52]
B
Any. Yeah. Like, maybe at any other time in history, it wouldn't have had any impact, but it happened to be there. So, I mean, my belief of the causal chain for how it impacted the election is that because there was this strong her emails narrative and the releases that were coming out were emails, it kept the idea of emails in the news, which kept everyone primed. So at. At the very last minute, when Comey came out and said, we're reopening the emails investigation, it was salient due to having been preserved. So I'm not suggesting, basically, I'm saying that they created the space where that was more impactful than it would have been otherwise, and that's why it had the impact, which is like, it's so tenuous that that's what I believe happened. But, you know, that's what you could put on a PowerPoint slide to say why you need more budget. But it's not necessarily the other way.
- [21:58]
A
You could interpret that is that it was James Comey's fault.
- [22:02]
B
Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
- [22:05]
A
And it also struck me that it fits into what I understand of Russian patronage networks, where money gets shoved around and you go and do this stuff and maybe it'll work or maybe it won't, but the point is that you.
- [22:19]
B
Took part, which is. Yeah.
- [22:21]
A
And because it's quite hard to measure, it's also. If you don't have to justify it, it's fine. Whereas I think in most Western governments there's a fair bit of emphasis on measurability and actually.
- [22:35]
B
Right. It's not very quantifiable to say that we kept. We kept a concept in mainstream consciousness for a while that allowed it to be more salient.
- [22:43]
A
People are still talking, probably.
- [22:45]
B
Yeah. So I, Yeah, I could talk a lot about those campaigns because I think some of them were very funny. When the report of all the attacks that the Russians organized came out, which included a bunch of. I wouldn't say physical attacks, but they pay people to go and protest. They tried to do a color revolution as they understood it. And Politico got a list of all of these things and tried to go from FBI says on July 2, the Russians paid for a Florida or whatever to do something. And they try and find the report from the news at that time in Florida to say, this is the thing that was paid for. One of those was the Russians paid to have a woman dressed in an orange jumpsuit in a cage on the back of a. Like a Hillary impersonator in a Gitmo prisoner uniform on a cage on the back of a truck. And they couldn't tell which of the three Hills, Hillary impersonators in Gitmo costumes in cages on the back of a truck was paid for by the Russians that weekend. Like one of the three was them and the other two were organic. And I think that that kind of sums it up.
- [23:59]
A
That's a 50% increase.
- [24:04]
B
But you know, like, I think that that's. That sums it up. Is that like, yes, they were doing things, but they were indistinguishable from organic stuff. Was it the feather that broke the camel's back? I think so, but it's very, very arguable. But I think his point of that, it's like it's split across all these institutions and we can't unify it because that's just how it is right now. And we'd have to reshape the entire government and all of our institutions to reframe around this. I think that's true. But as we've said, I think part of it is also this is not the way that liberal democracies think. Like we don't have like the institution of influencing foreign countries thinking during peacetime.
- [25:02]
A
Well, we used to during the Cold War.
- [25:04]
B
Right, right, right.
- [25:06]
A
But, but the other thing I was going to say is that in some ways it feels somewhat pessimistic that these things go on. There's not much of a government response. But I was thinking back to one of Trump's, his advisors. They were hacked by the Iranians and there was a hack and leak. The, I think it was the Iranians tried to leak his email to a number of different organizations. And even though the government, you know, the Global Engagement center, it's been disbanded, the way that the newsrooms handled that material was very different from the 2016. So as a society.
- [25:52]
B
Right.
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A
People have actually learned things. It felt like they were responsibly handled. That material, like the hack itself became the news rather than.
- [26:04]
B
Right. Not the risotto recipe. Right. Which was actually a news cycle. But I was going to say, I think you're addressing a key point in how as a society we've learned how to deal with Internet things a lot better. Do you remember it was almost 20 years ago now, there was a teenage girl who did a music video called Friday, which was that long ago? Yeah, it was forever ago. And the entire world, like the print media, the Internet, everyone jumped on her to make fun of her. And now we realize maybe the entire world shouldn't be making fun of like 17 year old high school girls who do like a little side project on YouTube. That's probably not an appropriate thing for us to be doing. But we didn't know it at the time. I mean, we obviously should have. In a way, it seems pretty obvious, but these days you don't have that sort of dogpile effect from the entire global community over minor things that go viral. It doesn't happen in the same way because we have learned that it's not really a thing that we should be doing. It hasn't completely gone away, but, you know, it's not. It's not true.
- [27:27]
A
The opposite has happened, isn't it? That if you go viral, it's an opportunity for.
- [27:31]
B
Right. You hawk to wealth.
- [27:35]
A
Exactly. Regardless of, you know, how embarrassing the virality is, it's an opportunity to leverage it into something else.
- [27:44]
B
Right. Like a rug pull.
- [27:49]
A
I don't know what. I don't believe that we've become better people, that the Internet has made us better somehow.
- [27:57]
B
But yeah, I think you're right that it's not necessarily that we've matured as a nation or as a society. It's that we've just become more predatory and opportunistic to see anything to take advantage of.
- [28:15]
A
Happy days.
- [28:18]
B
While we're here talking about sort of how we have changed as a society, I want to point out some of the prescient things that Labicki said when, you know, 30 years ago, he was imagining the world that was going to exist based on this new technology. So he lacks the language because the technology didn't exist and the ways of describing it didn't exist. So he's talking about, like, the cost of accessing people has really. It's become super cheap. So it says, like, you know, for $2 million, anyone could lease a direct broadcast satellite and beam their message to the entire globe. $2 million is maybe not a lot of money if you work at Rand and you deal with the Air Force. But for the rest of us, it's.
- [29:07]
A
Not exactly chump change, especially back in those days.
- [29:10]
B
Yeah, especially back then. But he was right in where he was going that the cost is going down from, you know, it used to cost a billion dollars to launch a satellite to now you could just lease access for 2 million, which.
- [29:23]
A
Or just publish on YouTube.
- [29:25]
B
Right. And now we've got, you know, you have Facebook, you have YouTube, you've got Instagram, you've got Twitter, you've got all of these other things. It's free.
- [29:32]
A
Yeah.
- [29:33]
B
And you might remember that way back in the day when we were imagining this sort of bold new future where everyone would have all the world's information at their fingertips at the click of a mouse. Right. You know, like, and there's this very utopian idea that because we would have all this information and everyone would have all this exposure to everything, we would become these global citizens who are very enlightened and very tuned in to like all of these different perspectives and this deep understanding. And we would be, everyone would be like a well educated intellectual with a deep wealth of information that they could draw on. And what he proposes is he says, like, he says this is probably not going to happen. Probably what's going to happen is things are going to be very, very localized because there will be so many options. And the way he phrases it is a 500 channel supranational information superhighway, which is beautiful. So he's imagining there's just going to be so many options. What's going to happen is the amount of information going to overwhelm any one person. So instead of consuming it all, you'll have some way of filtering just the bits that interest you that will then be packaged and given to you in what he calls MeTV. So you'll have your own personal set of information. And it will become very, very difficult to have this sort of globalized audience in, in the way that like a CNN had back in 1992. And that's just amazingly prescient. I mean, the way he phrases it is very antiquated. Even the idea of channels is just.
- [31:20]
A
Yeah.
- [31:21]
B
So weird.
- [31:22]
A
But yeah, yeah, it's. The general shape is exactly spot on. Like, I think kind of the way he describes the implementation is not right, but the actual, like, it's not channels, it's algorithms that shape what you see. And yeah, my YouTube, I'm sure, is very different from your YouTube or my MeTV.
- [31:46]
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, so he says, like you will have an agent that will go out and collect information and instead we don't. We have these centralized.
- [31:53]
A
Yeah.
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B
Companies that pick for us, which is, it's the same result of what he's talking about, but it's very different. Like we don't have agency in the reality that we have. It's a lot more dystopian. So you might be, you might be less pessimistic because we deal with this stuff better. But I'm more depressed because even his dystopian vision of the future is better than what we ended up with.
- [32:26]
A
Thanks a lot.
- [32:27]
B
Thanks a lot, Tom.