PSYOP and Magic

 

Greetings,

While I have produced PSYOPREGIMENT.BLOGSPOT for many years, however, I have written every piece.

These are, as the Chinese say, “interesting times”. I have been teaching online for American Military University for over 10 years. One of the subjects I teach is INTL 653 “Propaganda, Deception and Disinformation”, a graduate course.

One of my students, William Zaggle, addressed one of our weekly questions with a comparison of PSYOP and Magic.

I thought it was so unique and creative that I would share it with the PSYOP Community. Here is the unedited conversation.

Interestingly enough, both magic (Quiroga 2016), and CyberWar (Panayotis and Vernal 2017) have been related to being cognitive arts.  Scott’s “magic” lens into the mental world of cyber operations offers a familiar bridged analogy from magic to cyber-intelligence.  Here are a few small examples of how, when performed correctly, these operations all interweave and work together as a team to essentially form their own false realities.

Palm: Holding something you can’t see.  Hiding behind my hand, all you see is what you believe you see, an empty hand.  Far from empty.  A trojan horse by any other name. Easy enough to carry this to all of the many innocent carrier applications that move malware in the world today.  After all, it is such a cute little App, and it was FREE! It is the foundation of stealth.  Or maybe you are secretly allowed to “see” what is being palmed! Instant misdirection if you focus for too long.

Ditch, Steal, Switch: Secretly losing, obtain, or switch something such as to simulate magic. Most of cybercrime leans on these. So many clever ways to secretly establish command and control, or ditch your IP address in a maze of bot-nets, steal another and move along. These can be real, simulated, or even purposely failed if it helps to tell the story of new virtual reality where your mind has journeyed.

Simulation:  Pretending something happened that really didn’t.  A great cyber simulation magic act was performed in research by Woods and Siponen  (2018) when they fooled more than 80% of people into typing in various versions of their password (or passwords) by simply having false software tell them they typed it wrong, even when they actually typed it correctly until they tried a different password. After trying a different password, once they tried the correct password again it was accepted and users left assuming it was all their fault.  They simulated your fat-fingered password attempt and then stole your “other” passwords as your meta memory failed and you rummaged through your scattered memory looking for how that could have happened.  Mis-remembering is also a form of magic where the simulation becomes the misdirection.

Misdirection: Leading attention away from a secret move.  Decoys, False-Flags, double agents are all about deception.  Panayotis and Vernal (2017) call misdirection one of the four axioms of cyber power. They describe the required “Control” of cyberspace as being the ability to get a computer to hear secret “magic words”.

So, the magician practices and perfects his physical skills as a cyber warrior would practice and perfect his technical prowess.  The magician started with a mental lapse in human reasoning as a goal just like the cyber warrior hopes to find and exploit or defend a lapse in human reasoning (their own, or their opponents). somewhere within the man-made cyber domain. Both seek to exhibit their cognitive arts inside a zone of alter-reality, zones highly susceptible to what Mercier and Sperber (Mercier and Sperber 2017) call the enigma of reason.  Such a focused exhibition of cognitive art is either a great magic act, or possibly an act of war.

Photo Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-art-and-magic-of-harry-houdini/

William

Works Cited:

Mercier, Hugo, and Dan Sperber. 2017. The Enigma of Reason. Harvard University Press.

Panayotis, A., and David Vernal. 2017. Four Axioms of OFfensive Cyberpower. Air University. https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/CyberCollege/portal/article/Article/1208903/four-axioms-of-offensive-cyberpower/.

Quiroga, Rodrigo Quian. 2016. "Magic and cognitive neuroscience." Current Biology R390-R394. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2016.03.061.

Woods, Naomi, and Mikko Siponen. 2018. "Too many passwords? How understanding our memory can increase password memorability." International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 36-48. doi:10.1016/j.ijhcs.2017.11.002.