Booming Job Market For PSYOPers

 

In case you are thinking about transitioning from PSYOP, it looks like your skill set is in high demand. The NY Times online edition, 25 July 2021 and the 26 July 2021 print version ran an article "Disinformation for Hire, a Shadow Industry is Quietly Booming". (See https://nyti.ms/2Wu7EcX, which is also a photo source.)

The essence of the article is that the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook incident has stimulated disinformation into a big business. While nation states such as Russia, Iran and China among others employ shell proxies, now this service is available to anyone who will pay for it. According to the article, "The result is an accelerating rise in polarizing conspiracies, phony citizen groups and fabricated public sentiment deteriorating our chared reality beyond even the depths of recent years".

The article summarizes the business this way:

"Private firms, straddling traditional marketing and the shadow world of geopolitical influence operations, are selling services once conducted principally by intelligence agencies. They sow discord, meddle in elections, seed false narratives and pus viral conspiracies, mostly on social media And they offer clients something precious: deniability."

Business is so good that some experts believe that the for profit disinformation segment is actually bigger than the government proxy segment. It's quite the global business with Oxford University (UK) researchers believing that operations were run in at least 48 countries.

I'll leave the bulk of the article to your reading, but let me offer two final paragraphs in conclusion:

"But governments may find that outsourcing such shadowy work also carries risks, Mr. Graham Brookie, direct of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab said. For one, the firms are harder to control and might veer into undesired messages or tactics. For another, firms organized around deceit may just as likely to turn those energies toward their clients, bloating budgets and billing for work that never gets done.

As always, reader comments encouraged, but --- no resumes please.

The Creative Economy –leading edge PSYOP or a fad?

 

You often hear the expression “follow the money”. In case you are interested this goes all the way back to the movie All The President’s Men and meant you can figure out political corruption by analyzing money transfers.

 

Venture capitalists (VCs) are considered among the 21^st century’s major money sources. According to the July 12 NY Times (see: https://nyti.ms/3i5wgjj, which is a photo source), “The online influencer culture is starting to draw serioblogus interest from big venture capital firms. But the real money could be in digital tools, not the personalities.”

 

The VCs are creating an investment boom in the ‘so-called creator or influencer economy’.

The creator economy is named for social media ‘creators’ who are people that monetize their on line persona. I should point out the creators are generally young (under 30?) and digital natives – meaning they grew up with high speed technology.

 

The article continues “The creator economy, which provides digital tools to influencers and helps them run their businesses, is a huge, largely unexplored market.”  VCs have reportedly invested $2 billion into 50 creator-focused startups so far this year.

 

Two companies mentioned as provided tools are Dispo and Poparazzi.

Dispo is a photo staring ap which is considered a rival to Instagram.

Dispo as an invite-only picture sharing ap and you can learn more about it at:https://cnb.cx/3yR4z4A

 

Poparazzi (http://www.poparazzi.com/) is another tool mentioned and it is an app that mimics the concept of paparazzi because it is a photo sharing ap that encourages the network of friends to share photos among the group. The Apple App store features it here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/poparazzi/id1513680970 (also a photo source)

 

Another tool, Sub-stack (https://substack.com/) allows writers to set up paid subscriptions to newsletters. It also provides authods with an on line platform that can provide analytics, and design tools.

 

The TikTok platform is generally given credit for jump starting the creative economy and contines to be the most popular downloaded ap (see: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/tiktok-continues-to-hold-its-position-at-the-top-of-the-monthly-app-downlo/601414/, which is another photo source).

 

The implications for PSYOPers is that new tools can help turn anyone into an online personality. This means that the on-line influence playing field is continuing to level and that adversaries can be expected to mount effective influence campaigns with very limited budgets.

Iran Disinformation Points Way For Near Peers and Others

 

The NY Times June 30, 2021 On line edition ran an article: “Iran Disinformation Effort Went Small to Stay Under Big Tech’s Radar” (see: https://nyti.ms/2SXGrh, which is a photo source)

 

According to the article “Over several months, Iranian agents had infiltrated small WhatsApp groups, Telegram channels and messaging apps that Israeli activists used for intimate discussions among dozens to thousands of people.”

 

There are several ‘intelligence indicators’ in this small sentence. The first of which is that disinformation is not the exclusive domain of top level threats. Secondary and near peer adversaries are able to harness this cost effective influence weapon.

 

Secondly, even seemingly secure applications such as WhatsApp are subject to compromise.

If Iran can do this then certainly it is within the capabilities of others such as North Korea and a number of non-state terrorist actors such as ISIS.

 

The ability to send focus, point to point, messages is a critical tool because the combination of text and images will cause the recipient to pause at a minimum, if not accept the message as true, not so much because of its content, but because of its trusted delivery path.

This adds a new wrinkle to influence operations and further democratizes the cyber domain battlespace.

 

You can fin an in-depth summary of the Iranian Cross Platform Influence Operation at: https://bit.ly/3yu13No. 

 

Among the survey’s conclusion is: “The direct approach to Israeli citizens, made through internal protesters’ WhatsApp groups, represents a dangerous escalation of methods. Establishing a personal connection with unsuspecting citizens is a novel technique and is suspected to be merely the tip of the iceberg regarding methods of foreign intervention in Israeli democracy.”

The penetration of WhatsApp can also yield interesting intelligence as the interloper is now inside a trusted virtual perimeter. This threat was confirmed in the NY Times article cited below: “In these closed messaging groups, people tend to trust one another and share more freely because there is a feeling that they share the same politics, and that the app itself is secure and safe,” said Gonen Ben Itzhak, an Israeli lawyer who once worked for Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence agency. He was among dozens of Israelis who said the Iranian efforts had targeted them.

 

The App also provides top cover while websites can and are targets for government action. On June 22, 201 the NY Times ran an article, U.S. Seizes Iran-Linked Websites at Key Point in Nuclear Talks (see: https://nyti.ms/3qT3fvi, another photo source) which describes the US Justice Department actions after the recent Iranian election.

 

The message is clear for PSYOPers – be prepared on all fronts and don’t count seemingly less resource endowed enemies and adversaries out.