Psychological Operations
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Psychological Operations
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Re: Psychological Operations
#2I imagine it would be more or less appealing for persons interested, to see the engineering side contributions of PsyOps. Individuals wearing fatigues sitting moderating social media all night long will be soon forgotten. Like the horse driven plow. The idea of mechanized disinformation as a trend moving forward seems likely. The results of planting personnel into social/familial groups as counter insurgence have been inefficient. this is due to the human condition and our ability to forget key fragments of an operation protocol that is so personalized. Deep undercover agents in the past proved to be high risk for defecting. It is perhaps most efficient in terms of delays to produce systems such as counterfeit blockchain technologies, automated subversion of academic journalism, ect. PsyOPs is really a long term tool beyond elected governments and generations of people. It would involve hardware specifications in manufacturing and global natural resource management schemes.
Re: Psychological Operations
#3I imagine it would be more or less appealing for persons interested, to see the engineering side contributions of PsyOps. Individuals wearing fatigues sitting moderating social media all night long will be soon forgotten. Like the horse driven plow. The idea of mechanized disinformation as a trend moving forward seems likely. The results of planting personnel into social/familial groups as counter insurgence have bee…
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Re: Psychological Operations
#4I would think this specialty would build skills that are well compensated in the private sector: public relations, marketing, political campaigns, journalism, SEO. Since gaslighting and enlightening aren't all that different in terms of PsyOps, also include teaching. Convincing a population that they are being liberated rather than invaded is good training for convincing another population to use chorizo flavored toothpaste.
Re: Psychological Operations
#5Former PsyOp guy here with OEF experience, now working in cybersecurity. Please feel welcome to ask me (almost!) anything, and I'll do my best to respond.
edit - this TTP FM [0] (warning, PDF ahead) seems to be freely available, and gives a comprehensive overview of what PsyOp actually does in the modern US Army. Perhaps most relevant for today is propaganda analysis and the SCAME method, a multi-faceted approach to determining information about enemy capabilities and intentions.
Re: Psychological Operations
#6To deceive your enemy is a valuable thing. I just watched this excellent lecture on the Colossus machine [0] and learned that our invasion of Normandy was successful in part thanks to US communications being able to "leak" plans to Nazi code breakers and fool them into thinking we would land in an entirely different beach. (The colossus decoding high command communications allowed us to confirm the deception was successful)
OTOH, mass deception of a population is a little newer, and anytime Russian PSYOPS are brought up I like to drop this link [1] about US Army developing social media "sockpuppets" back in 2011, years before we ever heard of the Internet Research Agency (founded in 2013 if wiki is credible)
Now that the disinformation cat is out of the bag, I wonder what kind of internal fact checking tools the Army uses to separate fresh SIGINT from trash. The videos purportedly coming out of Ukraine are impossible to sort through, the strangest thing to me was seeing hundreds of accounts post the same video, instead of quote tweeting or retweeting or linking to a source, just, 'I've never mentioned Ukraine before but here's a video of what's happening right now!'
[0] https://youtu.be/g2tMcMQqSbA
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...
Re: Psychological Operations
#7I would think this specialty would build skills that are well compensated in the private sector: public relations, marketing, political campaigns, journalism, SEO. Since gaslighting and enlightening aren't all that different in terms of PsyOps, also include teaching. Convincing a population that they are being liberated rather than invaded is good training for convincing another population to use chorizo flavored too…
has a population ever been convinced they were being liberated? seems to me that's more of a lie to tell the invading soldiers to give them high morale until the truth sinks in
Re: Psychological Operations
#8I would think this specialty would build skills that are well compensated in the private sector: public relations, marketing, political campaigns, journalism, SEO. Since gaslighting and enlightening aren't all that different in terms of PsyOps, also include teaching. Convincing a population that they are being liberated rather than invaded is good training for convincing another population to use chorizo flavored too…
has a population ever been convinced they were being liberated? seems to me that's more of a lie to tell the invading soldiers to give them high morale until the truth sinks in
So roughly as difficult as selling chorizo toothpaste. Capturing hearts and minds is tough all over.
Re: Psychological Operations
#9To deceive your enemy is a valuable thing. I just watched this excellent lecture on the Colossus machine [0] and learned that our invasion of Normandy was successful in part thanks to US communications being able to "leak" plans to Nazi code breakers and fool them into thinking we would land in an entirely different beach. (The colossus decoding high command communications allowed us to confirm the deception was succ…
> To deceive your enemy is a valuable thing. I just watched this excellent lecture on the Colossus machine [0] and learned that our invasion of Normandy was successful in part thanks to US communications being able to "leak" plans to Nazi code breakers and fool them into thinking we would land in an entirely different beach. (The colossus decoding high command communications allowed us to confirm the deception was successful)
The same pattern of confirming the success of a deception via Ultra/Colossus occurred with Operation Mincemeat:
Re: Psychological Operations
#10I imagine it would be more or less appealing for persons interested, to see the engineering side contributions of PsyOps. Individuals wearing fatigues sitting moderating social media all night long will be soon forgotten. Like the horse driven plow. The idea of mechanized disinformation as a trend moving forward seems likely. The results of planting personnel into social/familial groups as counter insurgence have bee…
> The idea of mechanized disinformation as a trend moving forward seems likely.
It think this is no longer a trend but reality. I often post on the Chinese propaganda Facebook page (CGTN), and the nationalists who answer usually use the country of origin to craft their response. America is a fascist state who invades countries. Canada is "America's lapdog". African countries "benefit from China". And so on. When I removed any reference to my country of origin the answers got fewer and weirder, to the point the sentences made no semantic sense. The profile of those answering were obviously fake and looked different but semantically similar. A few pictures of them with landmarks, private friends list, random interests, everything else private. To the untrained and non-careful mind these can more than convincing.