Disinformation

Understanding cyber operations in the 21st century is impossible without first understanding intelligence operations in the 20th century. Attributing and countering disinformation today is therefore also impossible without first understanding how the United States and its allies attributed and countered hundreds of active measures throughout the Cold War. Nobody summarized this dark art of disinformation better than Colonel Rolf Wagenbreth from the Stasi, who headed the Department X there. He said, "A powerful adversary can only be defeated through a sophisticated, methodical, careful, and shrewd effort to exploit even the smallest cracks within our enemies and within their elites." The tried and tested way of active measures is to use an adversary's existing weaknesses against himself, to drive wedges into preexisting cracks. The more polarized a society, the more vulnerable it is; and America in 2016, of course, was highly polarized, with lots of cracks to drive wedges into. But not all wedges; improved high-tech wedges that allowed the Kremlin's operatives to attack their target faster, more reactively, and at a far larger scale than ever before.