Chapter 1: The Zone

No, these things are happening all over the world. And some of the side-offs that we see are from our own government. They're from companies that we're attracted to. But on a larger scale, we have a lot of enemies. They try to mental in our elections. They try to mental in our media. They try to put us against each other because they just keep figuring out ways to divide everybody and travelize America. And that's how we're going to fall. And so we are a massive target for SIO campaigns. [MUSIC PLAYING] Now for the enhanced visual episode of Target Intelligence, SIO, an Ironclad original, posted by Sean Ryan, presented by SBIR Advisors. Ironclad, the most trusted name in high-stakes storytelling. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] This is Target Intelligence, SIO, an Ironclad original, Chapter 1, the zone. [MUSIC PLAYING] On the afternoon of November 3, 2021, a college chemistry professor named Marie Amar Abra was returning home after a day of meetings at Ethiopia's Bahier-Dar University. [MUSIC PLAYING] As he was opening the main gate to his home, several men on motorcycles pulled up behind him. Several other armed men were hiding in the shadows. Before he could get into his house, they took out guns, shot him, hit close range, stole his car, and sped off into the city. [MUSIC PLAYING] Just weeks before his murder, posts on Facebook accuse Maryg of backing a rebel group during a period of regional violence that centered on tensions with an ethnic minority group in Ethiopia called the Tigray. One of the posts included his picture and his home address. Over the time that I was at Facebook, a huge conflict went from being kind of like, oh, we think this is going to be a problem to half a million people died. That's Frances Haugen. She's a Silicon Valley insider who has served in leadership positions at Google, Yale, Pinterest, and Facebook, where she was a product manager when violence first started breaking out in Ethiopia. You had expats. You didn't even have people in the country. You had people who had left the country who were targeting psychological operations back into the country, saying, there is this ethnic group, the Tigray. They are the worst thing in the world. They're persecuted. You should go kill them. The posts that have been linked to Maryg's murder accused the professor of providing resources and money to the Tigray forces. Eventually, Facebook took the post down for violating community policies. But for Maryg, it was too late. An Ethiopian man whose father was murdered during the country's war as joined in a lawsuit against Mitha. In according to Haugen, this wasn't an isolated incident. Foreign governments and violent groups were using the platform to execute well-planned sions. Many of them involved using fake accounts on the platforms to spread targeted misinformation, meant to spark violence, and in power groups already predisposed to political and racial violence. An adversary wouldn't need their own ground forces in a country if they could simply convince parts of their population to carry out violence on its behalf. Without even knowing, they were doing the bidding of a foreign enemy. Less than two years after Haugen joined the Facebook leadership team, she testified before Congress. Facebook had become ground zero for psychological operations that were rapidly reshaping geopolitical power. And now a brief message from our responses. Selling to the Department of War is hard, especially if you don't know who to talk to, where the real buyers sit, or how to find funding. That's where SBIR advisors come in. They help you find the right buyers, find the money, and write winning proposals so you can get on the right contract fast. Their team of veterans are dedicated to getting great tech into the hands of our war fighters, and they've helped small businesses like yours win millions. If you're serious about selling to the military, go to SBIRadvisors.com. And if you mention SIOP, you'll get your first month free. And now back to our program. During my time working with the threat intelligence org, so I was a product manager supporting the counter-SBNOS team. Here is Francis testifying before the Senate Commerce Committee on October 21, 2021. Tracking Chinese participation on the platform, surveilling, say, weaker populations, my team directly worked on and places around the world. That you could actually find the Chinese based on them doing these kinds of things. We also saw active perspiration of, say, the Iran government doing SBNOS on other state actors. So this is definitely a thing that is happening. And I believe Facebook's consistent understaffing of the counter-SBNOS information operations and counter-terrorism teams is a national security issue. The statement surprised members of Congress. So you are saying in essence that the platform, whether Facebook knows it or not, is being utilized by some of our adversaries in a way that helps push and promote their interests at the expense of America's? Yes, Facebook's very aware that this is happening on the platform. And I believe the fact that Congress doesn't get a report of exactly how many people are working on these things internally is unacceptable because you have a right to keep the American people safe. Great, thank you very much. Thanks, Senator Selvin. You may have just opened an area for another year. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah, I have strong national security concerns about how Facebook operates today. Well, Mr. Chairman, maybe we should, right? I mean, it's a-- I'm not being at all facetious. Here at Metta, connectivity and security is our top priority, giving you the same thing. We at Facebook want to ensure that technology-- User interface. That's what I'm thinking. Thank you. Howgen had been called before Congress to discuss how toxic and dangerous trends on Instagram and Facebook both owned by the company that is now known as Metta, worked at children, particularly ones struggling with eating disorders. The statements about adversaries using the platform for violence IOPs seem to catch congressional leaders off guard. So it's funny. When I came forward, I did not think about kids at all. And very ironic that my brand in the United States is the nice blonde lady who worries about the kids. Because maybe 5% of what I brought forward was about kids. Overwhelmingly, it was about content moderation as a lie. The algorithm-- they've known the algorithm was actually influencing politics, at least in Europe for years. That was the focus of it. For most Silicon Valley-based tech companies, the algorithms that control what shows up in your feed are primarily meant to increase the amount of time you spend on the site in encourage engagement. Like and subscribe. Like and subs. And there are perhaps no more powerful emotions that keep people glued to their devices than outrage and fear. During her time in Silicon Valley, she not only witnessed how destructive the algorithm could be. She also came to realize that our adversaries did too. And they were actively finding ways to weaponize it and organize psychological operations that were becoming the front lines of an invisible war. I think it's the number one national security issue for the United States. And so it's one of these things where I've always been really sad that Facebook's propaganda machine did such a good job of kind of silencing this conversation. The thing that matters is not that my uncle post something Wackadoodle, the question is, like, are there foreign agents picking up that Wackadoodle thing and making sure it's the thing that everyone gets to see? [MUSIC PLAYING] In 1999, a book written by two Chinese military colonels was released in the United States. The book attempts to answer a question that China was openly contending with. How can they defeat an adversary that is technologically and militarily superior in a war, a country like the United States? The book's title, Unrestricted Warfare, reflects its central idea that when an enemy cannot be defeated by conventional military forces, warfare shifts to spreading social division and undermining trust and key institutions, essentially destroying the enemy from within. Here's what they write. If one party is at war with another, and the other party does not realize it is at war, the party who knows it is at war almost always has the advantage and usually wins. And this is the strategy set forth in unrestricted warfare, waging a war on an adversary with methods so covert at first and seemingly so benign that the party being attacked does not realize it's being attacked. In 1960, the Twilight Zone aired an episode in which the power and phone lines went out on a tree line suburban block called Maple Street. The neighbors gather outside to try to figure out what's going on. When a boy obsessed with comic books suggests his theory. What do you mean Tommy? What are you talking about? They don't want us to leave. That's why they shut everything off. What makes you say that? What'd you get that idea? He's not the craziest thing you've ever heard. It's always that way. In every story I've ever read about a ship landing from outer space. Not long after, one of the neighbors decides to walk a few blocks over to find out if the blackout is affecting them as well. He was just going over to the next block to see if the power was on. As afternoon turns into night, the neighbors become increasingly suspicious of each other. I know where the monster is! Then a figure is seen walking onto the street from the darkness. One of the neighbors, who has become increasingly paranoid, pulls out a ship. As the figure gets closer, the armed neighbor aims and pulls the trigger. As the group approaches, the figure that had been shot, they realize that they've killed the neighbor who was returning from a few blocks over. Moments later, the lights in the house of the man who fired the gun start flickering. "It's Pete Van Horn!" "He Van Horn!" "Well, he was just going over to the next block to see if the power was on." "Try you, Captain!" "I know who he was." "I certainly didn't know who he was." "We're trying to protect my home." "And know with somebody we knew." Soon, lights on the whole block begin flickering, as the neighbors descend into violence, throwing stones at one another. "No!" "Look! Charlie!" "Charlie, the lights just went on in your house. Why did the lights go on in your house?" "No. No, it's nothing in the store. I didn't know the lights had. I swear I did." "Somebody pulling a gag or something." Before eventually focusing their rage on the boy. "I know who the monster is. I know who it is that does the belong among us. I swear I know who it is." "All right, Charlie. Let's hear it." "What are you waiting for?" "Well, come on, Charlie. Come on." "Who is it, Charlie? Tell us." "It's a kid." "He was the one who knew." "How did he know? How could he have known?" "Make out of your name, Charlie." "What's the matter with you, people? I'll stop." In the closing scene, two men stand outside of a spaceship, looking down on the people of Maple Street, which is now in complete chaos. Throw them into darkness for a few hours and then sit back and watch the pattern. And as pattern is always the same with few variations. They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it's themselves. All we need to do is sit back and watch. "Then I take at this place, this Maple Street is not unique." "By no means. Their world is full of Maple Streets. "And we'll go from one to the other and let them destroy themselves. One to the other. One to the other. One to the other." The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bonds and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy. And a thoughtless frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout, all of its own. For the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the twilight zone. Part of why these things are so complicated and why they're so important is, you know, I don't have to send you lies to destabilize your country. I can come in there and say, in order for you to solve problems in your community, these two factions need to trust each other and they need to work together. I can just remind you of ways that other group has treated you badly in the past. I can make you doubt that we could ever work together. And so one of the things that we have lost from psychological operations and the algorithm, the biases of the algorithm, is that we don't believe we have a future together. And that's because the things that divide us have been the things that have been allowed to give to get the most airspace. The conflict that played out on the twilight zone's fictional maple street, orchestrated by figures standing in the shadows, follows a playbook now being used on the world's most influential social media platforms. But to understand how we got here, we have to look at another sci-fi pop culture artifact in the man who admired its maker. I don't know if you've ever seen "Stocker" but like the whole point of it is there's this zone where everything is different, where like physics doesn't make sense anymore. It's an old creepy Russian film. And I'm an amazing film, definitely worth a watch. That's popular YouTuber, musician, and tech expert Ben Jordan. Along with being an enclaimed recording artist and audio engineer, he's also an avid researcher of Russian troll farms. The film "Stocker" is considered one of the Soviet Union's greatest cinematic achievements. In it, men called "Stockers" are paid to covertly guide clients into a quarantined wasteland known simply as "The Zone". Experiments. The facts. On the absolute truth. There's no such thing as facts. Especially here. At the center of the zone is a mysterious room that is said to grant the deepest desires of anyone who makes it there. The film was admired by a man named Vladislav Sarkov, who studied both theater and politics. In 1999, Sarkov became the first deputy chief of the Russian presidential administration and later served as the Russian Federation's deputy prime minister in a personal advisor to Vladimir Putin. He was also a noted fan of Russian avant-garde cinema. He basically took that framework and put it into politics. After a brief career in advertising in public relations for a Russian TV channel, Sarkov was appointed the deputy chief of staff of the president of the Russian Federation. And not long after, became a public relations mouthpiece for the Kremlin. But his most notable contribution to how Russians understood information was done away from the camera. His philosophy was essential to turn the idea of truth into a version of the zone, where basic rules begin to simply break down in lines between reality and fiction blur. Misinformation was obviously like Russian siops is nothing new, but this was just kind of the evolution of it. Rather than just making up a rumor about your opponent, or rather than just sort of creating an alternate time, you create so many different realities that all oppose one another in ways or completely and then give them all a form of legitimacy. And then people have no idea what to believe anymore. And it's just like a nuclear bomb on truth. Like nobody knows. And so all of a sudden, if you think that Putin is going to attack people in his own country, that is as valid as Putin being the savior of Russia. You know, there is no ground. Target Intelligence Sia is an iron cloud original. Iron cloud, we specialize in telling high-stakes stories. Our teams of filmmakers and storytellers give audiences access to the world's most important people, dangerous places and interesting voices. They were ghosts. Who are these guys? That's when my eyes were opened. I've never heard this before. All right, action. There were some dark moments. - I probably have dinner sometime. (laughing) - Our generation has to be the one step and step up. - He just teaches you so much about life. - People ask me this all the time, well how do I know if my goal was big enough? And my answer then is it should scare you. - It's an iron clad original. - An iron clad original. - Iron clad original. - And iron clad original. - Find out how iron clad can elevate your brand. Go to thisisironclad.com. Ghostbed didn't just step up to sponsor one episode. They sponsored the entire iron clad network. Ghostbed is built by people who care about quality. These beds are designed for people who work hard every day and need actual rest at the end of each day. They have three different collections to choose from and they've built an online sleep quiz so you can dial in exactly what works for your body. And behind it all is a real in-house team of sleep experts. Never outsourced. Right now we have an exclusive offer for our listeners that beats any other discount out there. Go to ghostbed.com/syop and use code "syop" for 15% off. - And now back to our program. (dramatic music) And his method wasn't just through misinformation campaigns. It was to change actual reality in such a way that nothing even made sense. - The way that he initially did this was by funding, by having Cremlin fund a bunch of different groups that opposed each other. Right wing fascist groups, white supremacist groups, left wing groups, anti-government groups and secretly funding them all. And then announcing that Cremlin had funded them all. And everybody was like, what? - No one could be sure anymore. Was anything at all real? The whole idea was to profoundly confuse people. If supporters of political groups and fringe factions began to accuse each other of being secretly backed by the Cremlin, what would happen if it was revealed that they were all somehow right? Some would simply choose to believe their group couldn't possibly be guilty of taking Cremlin money. And for others, their accusations would become meaningless. Everyone was both right and wrong at the same time. Is CYOP expert and novelist Greg Hurowitz explains, the method of backing opposing groups creates a vacuum of trust, leaving it open for some other institution to step in, along with writing best-selling thrillers like the Orphan X series, Hurowitz is also a researcher of foreign CYOPs. - If you can erode distrust, then nobody trusts anyone being in charge. And if we can't figure out how to be in charge, somebody else is. And a great number of them are designed to feed both sides of the dynamic. - It's a method Russia is still employing in contemporary CYOPs. - The aim isn't one position on trans rights or immigration or antisemitism, or vaccinations, it's for both sides to be furious so that we're stuck in a gridlocked position, where we're hapless before on the world stage, let's say. - And CYOP battlefield facts didn't matter anymore. Only what people felt was right. Here's Ben Jordan again. Truth becomes less subjective and more subjective and more malleable. Soon CYOP would become one of the most powerful men in Russia. - The CYOPs serving is a personal advisor to Putin until 2020. His role involved overseeing propaganda on state TV, as well as campaigns to destabilize Ukraine, a country to which he said this about. - Coversion to fraternal relations by force is the only method that has historically proven its effectiveness in the Ukrainian direction. I do not think that some other will be invented. - Though he would later fall out of favor with Putin, his legacy made a lasting impact on Russia's approach to psychological operations by combining the drama and character tension of theater, the absurdism of Russian sci-fi cinema and the contentiousness of politics. Sirkov may have invented this unique method of CYOP, which pity groups against each other by blurring truth, but it would be another infamous Russian figure who would truly weaponize it. (dramatic music) - Yavgerny Pregorgin made an incredible journey from a Soviet prison cell to leading a private army that marched on the Russian capital. - Brutal and ruthless, he grew rich after the collapse of communism and became known as Putin's chef after winning Kremlin catering contracts. But as a fanatic supporter of the war in Ukraine, he clashed with other allies of the Russian president and was ultimately declared a traitor. - Yavgerny Pregorgin is one of modern Russia's most infamous figures. After being released from prison following a string of violent burglaries, he used profits from his Kremlin and military catering contracts to found the internet research agency. - He was like, "Okay, I'm gonna start this thing that's gonna go on the back of what Cerkoth is doing and it's gonna take advantage of this new social media thing." And it really took off and then the Kremlin threw money at it and so did companies. - The IRA employed hundreds of low-paid Russians to run elaborate misinformation campaigns, creating fake social media accounts and websites publishing false stories and seating rumors to steer public opinion for its clients. - It wasn't only a Russian tool. It didn't only do things for Russia. It did things for a lot of companies too, but obviously that client list is as obfuscated as the truth is. - Pregozion's business was essentially a place where shady corporations or nefarious governments could outsource online side-up campaigns. Some of those campaigns involved spreading actual fake news and misinformation. (dramatic music) - We're not between. - We're not. (dramatic music) - Some, however, use seemingly simple tactics like the idea of repetitive association to shift public opinions about officials. - I think a name calling is one of the weirdest ones like that actually has a lot of roots in reality. It just calling Russian figures. I mean, when it started, it was mostly based in Russia and Ukraine. And just calling them stinky or fat or ugly or dumb. The lot of times it was weird words like, you know, just weird and petty insults like, you know, dickhead Putin. And it would just say dickhead Putin. And every time they mentioned him, they would say that. And then again, it's one of those things that you ended up seeing over here. And you start seeing like every single politician all of a sudden having a goofy nickname in front of them because it makes them seem like it makes whatever comes out of their mouth ultimately after months and years of this. It makes them seem less reputable and it makes believing them harder. - What seemed like genuine online insult trends in early joky memes were actually highly organized and highly anti-sciop campaigns intended to discredit whoever their targets were. But as their techniques evolved, so did the level of sophistication when it came to deceiving people on social media platforms and to believing they were interacting with actual people. Not profiles created by members of a siop troll farm. - The playbook was to buy a bunch of accounts and create some accounts. And then they just had to, I don't remember what the ratio was. It always changed, but they would have to post a bunch of, it started with Facebook and they would have to post a bunch of things on Facebook just hanging out in the sun with the football. And it was always these very sports oriented, that was a common thing where it's like, a lot of times if you go on X or if you go on Facebook and you see an account that looks a little sus, you always see like, the person really likes the NBA. And so they basically would legitimize themselves through stuff like that, talking about, you know, their family and sports and then, every now and then in a Facebook group or in a comment, they would have an opinion. And that opinion would usually be weird and kind of off and interesting. And through hundreds of thousands, if not millions of posts, they created this entire world that didn't exist. That wasn't organized at all, it was very noisy. By the time Francis Hogan joined Facebook in 2019, Russian troll farms had evolved into highly organized influence operation centers. Far more sophisticated than ad hoc trolling, but they were still largely operating below the platform's radar. So when I joined Facebook, this is the time this Facebook, it wasn't metty up, I thought I was gonna work on the prep going into the 2020 elections. And I showed up and found out that my job, even though I had a title that seemed like that might be so this was called Civic Misinformation. It was actually focused on all the misinformation beyond third-party fact checking. So third-party fact checking was the story that Facebook Metta had told the world about how, oh, we are so responsible, we hire journalists, the journal school fact check things. We've had a lot of controversy about fact checking over the last five years. As she explains, Facebook's solution to misinformation was to use professional fact check records to verify information contained within post. Though it soon became apparent to her that the move was essentially just for show. Troll farms like the one run at the IRA were massive, well-funded operations. The developed ways to state steps ahead of a few dozen quote unquote "fact checkers." It companies like Metta that would simply single out individual posts to review. They only fact checked maybe a couple hundred, like 200, 300 stories in the world every month, every month, and I even every day. Billions and millions of pieces of content, 300 stories. So the real issue then becomes, well, if we can't solve this problem based on content, so the core of what I brought out was Facebook told us AI's could assess whether or not content was good or bad based on whatever our definitions of code are bad or even while they were telling us that. Whether or not you agree with what their categorizations were, even at the time, they knew those systems couldn't even do that. When it became evident that the few hundred staffers couldn't possibly police everything posted to the platform, the meta teams created new systems that would identify the most popular posts. However, that led to even greater problems. People don't understand the role of influence operations and information operations. Like that's the actual problem. Someone being wrong somewhere on the internet is not the problem. Someone saying something hateful somewhere there is not the problem. The problem is people weaponizing these platforms. The CERCOF method didn't rely on misinformation. It relied on paranoia, distrust, and confusion. This is part of why fact checking was so controversial was they were given a tool that let them see what the most popular stories were on Facebook. They were given some metrics to be like, hey, we think these things will probably go viral based on how they are currently trending, how they're getting distributed on the platform. Because remember, a fact check takes like three days to do. By the time something got fact checked, usually it's already been seen by 75% of the people that were going to see it. Right? What are we actually doing here? But beyond the logistical problems of attempting to fact check the platform, meta's response fundamentally misunderstood the problem with foreign siop's. CERCOF's great breakthrough in creating a new kind of psychological operation wasn't just to persuade people with propaganda. It was to create a zone of confusion, an intense emotion, and then eventually fuel paranoia that will make people suspicious of anyone with whom they might not agree. The job was to make simply finding objective truth like searching for something with the lights turned off. And this pattern is always the same with few variations. They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find and it's themselves. We knew that the style of how people weaponized these platforms had changed. So I can go in there and cause a lot of havoc with true information. Like we're even talking about misinformation. But I can present true facts and ways that are polarizing that might not be willing to hear you on other things that might not engage. In these type of campaigns could be deadly effective. Back in 2017, inflammatory posts about a minority group in Myanmar called the Rohingya started going viral across the platform. The posts went from just sewing distrust about the Rohingya community to eventually openly calling for violence against them. Following months of Facebook post targeting the Rohingya community, Myanmar's military launched a brutal operation in August of 2017. Tens of thousands were murdered, raped, and had their villages burned to the ground. The 700,000 fled across the border into Bangladesh. Years of dehumanizing social media content, it helped normalize the violence, conditioning parts of the public to accept, or encourage, the atrocities. Senator, what's happening in Myanmar is a terrible tragedy and we need to do more. We all agree with that. But. That's Senator Patrick Leahy, questioning Mark Zuckerberg in a joint session of the Senate commerce and judiciary committees back in April of 2018. You and investigators have blamed Facebook for playing a role in their genocide. We all agree with this terrible. How can you dedicate and will you dedicate resources to make sure such hate speech is taken down within twenty-four hours? Yes, we're working on this. France's team was asked to investigate the incident and made a disturbing discovery. So they were sending members of their military to Russia to study under the SIAP information warfare parts of the Russian military. What she found was that the government didn't act alone. Their SIAP operatives who had orchestrated the efforts had training. They were sent to learn under the masters of online SIAP's running Russian troll farms. This is like a common thing, right? Like countries will say, "Come, send your soldiers. They'll do operations together. They'll learn about new guns, new ways of taking down planes." In the case of Russia, if you're an ally, they'll teach you how to do information warfare too. They came back and developed a series of Facebook groups. They developed a series of individual Facebook accounts. They worked with celebrities to all begin to be able to send out coordinated messages. And those messages over time escalated from calling out this religious minority they were Muslim for being dangerous to society, all these different things. And one day they pulled the trigger and everyone started saying, "Going from just saying these people are like insect. These are a pest. They're a threat." To say, "It's now time for you to go and attack your neighbor." Facebook recently released a report showing it had not done enough to prevent its social platform from being used to incite violence in Myanmar. By the time she got to Facebook, these type of SIAP efforts had become transnational operations involving kids in Pakistan, shady Russian tech companies, and global intelligence agencies. Back in 2019, the level of complexity that people did for making these humanish fake accounts was a huge continuum. There was actually an entire cottage industry in certain parts of the world. So Pakistan, for example, was a hotspot where people would hire children to go and they'll steal someone's photo. They'll spend a month. They'll spend a month, six weeks going and following groups, liking posts, sending messages to other people. They'll do things to try to look like a real human. But you only need, you know, 100,000, 20,000 of these accounts to do huge amounts of trouble. Everybody, let's be real with each other for a second. Most doctors do not care about optimization. They do care about you, but they're checking your basic labs. They tell you that everything is looking normal and they're going to send you on your way. Meanwhile, you're feeling tired, your performance is slipping. And you know that something is off and that is where Merrick Health comes in. Merrick Health isn't your typical doctor's office. They're a next level health optimization platform that actually listens to you, runs advanced lab testing and helps you optimize your hormones, your metabolism, and your overall performance. So whether you're looking to boost your energy, maybe gain some muscle mass or you just feel like you're not your best self anymore. Anyone who change that, Merrick gives you those tools and can help you make it happen. You have two options. You can go with their guided optimization program and get a dedicated health coach and medical provider to help you with supplements and prescription treatments. Or if you're more of a do-it-yourself type of person, you can order self-service lab tests and take control of your health on your own terms. Best part is either option that you pick, you can get 10% off of your order right now. Let's go to MerrickHealth.com and use the code "Syop" at check out. That's m-a-r-e-k-health.com with the code "Syop" for 10% off. Our forefathers carved the path for the American Dream with courage and conviction. It's up to us to seize that legacy and shape it into something greater. Spartan Forge was born from these ideals, driving useful technology to its limits in the pursuit of individual autonomy. This season, let us honor the spirit of independence and embrace the boundless possibilities it offers. Spartan Forge, the American mapping company. Spartan Forge combines LiDAR and UAV imagery with advanced mapping, trusted by hunters, law enforcement, and first responders. Visit Spartanforge.ai/ciop for 40% off an annual subscription. That's Spartanforge.ai/ciop. After the fake accounts were created with enough strategic intention that they could fool casual users, the operatives were taught methods that would deliver the desired results. For traditional military-ciop campaigns targeted the masses with messages and propaganda. Circov style campaigns were focused on small individual groups and influential members of communities. These weren't the top-down kind of "ciop campaigns" like dropping leaflets over populated areas. These worked to destabilize societies at their foundations by selling distrust and basic institutions from churches to law enforcement. So if you look at historic military-ciops, you kind of have different two big buckets of how you influence a society. One is you do mass propaganda, so that's you drop leaflets from planes, run radio free Europe, and you have a radio life scope across the border. You distribute thumb drives in North Korea that have stuff like you do mass propaganda. The second one is you say, "Hey, people trust certain people in society more." Like if you have a priest who goes and talks to their congregation every month, like that person is very effective for actually changing minds. Like you might not trust a leaflet from the sky, but you're going to trust your priest. Can we figure out ways of getting information to the people you trust and then they will promote that idea? If you have a priest who goes and talks to their congregation every month, like that person is very effective for actually changing minds. If you are an activist, an influencer, or even a pastor on Facebook at this time, one day someone might contact you and seem to have a mutual friend. From there, you are instantly vulnerable to subtle "ciop tactics" from this new stranger who seems to share mutual interest. You'll get a message from someone on Facebook Messenger. Maybe they'll go in friend to one of your friends and then do that. They'll do these kind of network-based intrusions. However, Hogan's team's work investigating the "ciop in Burma" came to an abrupt halt. When the Facebook system's flags suspicious activity within certain groups of the platform, the system identified a "ciop unfolding in real time." We got pulled off that because they found a Russian operation. There was targeting misinformation at the leaders of a variety of left-wing causes. This was like environmental activists, African-American activists, gay activists, and police officers. Basically, they found a group of people acting accordingly in the United States, sending this targeted misinformation. This "ciop" campaign that they tracked back to Russia had been completely operating under the radar up to now. Because it didn't target the masses. It only focused on niche groups, meaning it wouldn't trigger the system's traditional alerts. They weren't trying to make individual pieces of content go viral. Their goal was to infiltrate the groups and communities of individuals responsible for making ideas go viral. Here's a great example. If I send a thing that is customized to "enrage" an environmentalist, or customized to "enrage" a police officer, that is never going to be a viral enough piece of misinformation that a fact-tracker would ever notice them. It's never going to reach a threshold where you would go and train an AI to find it. So you can't look at content. How can Hatred team adapt to the increasingly shifting troll farm tactics? Maybe we can find these non-viral misinformation campaigns by finding people who are very clearly not talking to cohesive communities. Maybe, I think another thing too, is people take for granted, you know, the vast majority of users post once a week, once a month. If you're going in there and posting 50 times a day, just that alone means they're going to be a second level of checking on top of it. With social media companies underprioritizing their counter-espionage efforts, it became easier for the people conducting these "ciop efforts" to evade detection. To hide the source of the "ciops", the operatives would make sure there was no single identifiable ideology that they could be traced back to. So Russian "ciop" staged a video during our presidential election, alleging that Kamala Harris was involved in a hit and run, and that reached 7 million people. Greg Hurowitz explains that these "trollen" bot farms don't maintain traditional political or partisan alliances. Though they can push for the strategic geopolitical goals of the Russian government, they are often simply meant to incite division. Now again, you can dislike Kamala Harris all you like, but the point is, is we should be disliking or supporting our political candidates on things that are truthful and be originating in the US. Russia has been all over public opinion on the war in Ukraine. They've impersonated 80 different credible organizations. They're constantly putting up sort of fake headings under trusted news sources. The alignments with the political left and right often shift, depending on the conflict. And other actors who oppose America are now using these tactics. Often with the help of operatives in Russia. During Operation Rising Lion, with attack on Iranian nuclear sites, there was 100 counts linked to 240,000 bot posts aimed at negative threats. And the most significant operation from these bombings for public were systematic efforts to turn American public opinion against Trump while we're targeting Iranian nuclear infrastructure. So again, it doesn't mean we shouldn't be having these conversations about whether a strike makes sense or doesn't make sense. We just shouldn't be having them with hostile foreign regimes, posing as American citizens and engaging with utter psychopathy from influencers with dark tetrad personality disorders. I mean, imagine if we let Japan have open broadcasting during World War II. To whoever they wanted, they could talk to all of our kids, they could talk to everybody, they could simulate that they were news sources. I mean, it just, it clearly doesn't make any sense. And so what you're trying to do first is to destroy trust and then you destroy competence and then you destroy health and unity. And if we have trust destroyed sufficiently, who gets to decide and determine what foreign interference is. And so that's another thing that they're constantly trying to do, which is to turn everything into a partisan issue. And anything in America that has turned into a partisan issue, we're the ones who lose because it becomes a zero sum game. And so they're feeding both sides of that under magnifying glass effect. One social media algorithms began pushing content into user's feeds based on engagement, not just based on the pages they follow. SIOP operatives have adapted their methods. Foreign governments can now use bot farms and troll farms to flood platforms with targeted messages in effort to destabilize communities. And in some cases, spark violence without the use of their own militaries. Under the philosophy of SIRCOP and the savvy of Pregozion, Russia created a model for new online SIOPS. But it was another adversary that evolved it. And in doing so, allowed for one of the strangest SIOP campaigns to carve out its own corner of the Internet. That's next time. [Music] New episode every week. Subscribe to Target Intelligence SIOP with Sean Ryan, an Ironclad original, wherever you get your podcasts, or on YouTube at This Is Ironclad. They're called SIOPS. It is my control. All new SIOP operatives are available at SIOPShow.com.