A Shadow Intelligence by Oliver Harris

Author:Oliver Harris [HARRIS, OLIVER]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2019-05-02T04:00:00+00:00

I clicked through to InformAsia, which had put a photo of the victim on its landing page.

THIRTY

I spent too much of the night browsing, until I started to believe the region’s entire internet had been gamed. Stories fuelling Russian resentment came up everywhere you looked.

Fired for speaking Russian. Statue removed. Beaten up on the way to school.

People in public services were being forced to speak Kazakh rather than Russian; a politician who resisted the new language laws had been assaulted at a rally. Alongside those kinds of stories was a low-level hum of outrage and titillation: mother shamed in Kazakh restaurant; teacher beats pupil; child crucified by Muslims. Meanwhile, on the same sites, the epidemic of homosexuality in the West got good coverage, as did Europe’s spiritual bankruptcy in general. NATO was heading for extinction, Russia ready to bring peace to the Middle East.

I logged in as Yuri Cherchesov, my Russian sailor, and clicked Like on pictures of ‘Kazakh militias’ targeting Russians in northern Kazakhstan. They posed with horse bows apparently looted from a museum. They urinated on a portrait of Putin from behind blurred pixels.

Vishinsky’s great insight: propaganda didn’t have to be believed to be effective. No more than pornography had to be believed to make you come. It just had to keep you staring, feed you fantasies.

Women’s tears, women’s shame, everywhere I looked.

There were various ways sophisticated cyber operations could enhance information warfare: devices and websites can both be infected so you get steered the right way, websites look real but aren’t, pages shoot up the rankings. I looked for the same phrases or links appearing simultaneously; big waves of people piling in to comment immediately, then repeating the process at regular intervals. I amassed fifty accounts, ten blogs and six websites that struck me as suspect or just heavily anti-West and sent them through to Evotec to see if they could get me anything: matches with previous cyber operations, source IPs, syntactic patterns to see how many people were producing this. Every major military power had units running social media now. NATO and US Central Command had poured millions into it in the last couple of years, but they were playing catch-up. The West couldn’t compete with the office blocks in Moscow and Shanghai filled with young men and women operating their distant personas. You used to be able to watch the syntax: the Chinese skipped plurals; Russian’s a phonetic language so spelling tended to be a weak point. But it was getting more sophisticated on all fronts. Bots came fleshed out, with face shots scraped from Picasa and Flickr. The software existed to create hundreds of these a minute, inserting them into comment threads and forums, interacting with people just like a human. But software couldn’t do everything.

I called Walker at 8 a.m. and talked information warfare. He said social media was monitored for Vectis by Piper Anderson, the PR company hiring them. Piper Anderson’s CEO, Lucy Piper, was on the ground in Kazakhstan, currently with a trade delegation.

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