Coordinating & Planning
The fog of infowar is thick on the front lines.
The notion of coordinating contains an implicit problem you probably don't have at this point – a budget and a crew to direct. I have had this periodically since 2009, what I'd refer to as company sized units, and a bit of money in Paypal, or Bitcoin, or Monero. I have to estimate a bit here, as the ratio seems to be holding – about a third of the now 66 subscribers are people I at least recognize. Among the known, I think less than half of you have experience running things like this, but almost all of you have at least been adjacent to such operations.
When I say company sized unit, I don't mean an infantry company, with three platoons of three or four squads each – the WWII force structure total would be 108 men. These are specialty companies, the size of an infantry squad, nine to twelve total, but I guess they get the label “company” because they have an “officer” of similar capability to the sort of person who would lead an infantry company. There is almost always at least one “NCO”, someone probably less likely to plan and network up the food chain, but who keeps things moving day to day, and who has peer relationships with other groups. There are always at least a couple worker bees, and unlike military units there's a 20%/80% rule – where one out of the five are doing four fifths of the work.
That's a big wad of intro, but it's hard to discuss coordinating and planning without having some sense of context.
Attention Conservation Notice:
Much of what I know, I learned by doing, and in general that means by “doing it wrong and taking casualties as a result”. Another schwack of tradecraft I picked up from reading, which is good, but it’s better when shaped by someone more experienced, and I’ve not always had that. So … if you read this, keep in mind that my reading queue is calculated to cover my “known unknowns”. I no doubt have some “unknown unknowns”, which is why I slap so many '“your mileage may vary” stickers all over this stuff.
Campaigning:
I came into this work via my concern for our environment and energy security. I got involved in Progressive political campaigns – House, Senate, and Gubernatorial level. There was a lot of advocacy – climate, health, immigration, LGBT issues. There were NGOs involved, and each candidate had a campaign manager. Irregulars seldom work in a vacuum, although they're often shielded from the particulars by the officer. This isn't a “cut out” in the sense that the intel sector would use the word, but grassroots groups get a LOT of infiltration attention. The candidates and issues are too important to be exposed to such things.
I have a LOT of history in this area. Some tremendous successes, twice thwarting DNC attempts to replace Senate candidates after we did the work to create an opening. But the combination of my own deep origin stuff, dealing with Lyme disease and its sequelae, and not understanding the enormous resources that get aimed at grassroots leaders led to … difficulties. This June, just sixteen short years after catching Lyme, I finally got my brain out of hock. Being fully awake for the first time in a very long time, I took a look around me at what was going on, and then quickly and forcefully cut ties with all the things from that grassroots world.
“The scene is unclean” - an endless truism for anything to do with hackers, but last summer was truly the sum of all derp.
I could write a book about this stuff. No, really, I actually have a literary agent, and I'm waiting to see how 2024 shakes out. I think the market for that story is going to increase, but as I've been saying since 2017 – “We're gonna fight”. This week’s edge of violence vibe in Congress makes me even more certain of that. There are a lot of good people I met along the way and I don't plan on throwing them under that bus for my share of a few hundred book sales.
Interdiction:
Breaking down an operation from the inside is something I've seen far too much of, but it's not a practice I engage in personally. Much of the work I do would be useful to someone in that role, but it just doesn't sit well with me. I grew up in a town of seven hundred people. I'm on the autism spectrum. I'm involved in sense making. Falsehood in general doesn't sit well with me.
The dishonesty in which I do engage – that which protects me and those around me, is passive in nature. If you're not some jackass cyberstalker type seeking to upset me, you probably wouldn't notice. As an example, a few years ago I spent some time complaining about life in Berkeley. I had been there twice, once in 1997 and again in 2017. Some local color scavenged from Twitter and Google Street View is more than enough to send some OCD nutter on a wild goose chase.
There's a broader sort of disinformation that trips up influence operations, but this has to be running in a plausible fashion during the information gathering that precedes the IO. If you are not in a position to know when Coordinating and Planning has begun, a constant smoke screen is the only method available. Recall those 80% that do only 20% of the work? Those are the information sources that leak enough operational details to make out what's up with a grassroots group.
How one does this with nation state campaigns is an area where I need to do more reading. I suspect this involves systems access that someone, coming up through the ranks as I did, could only dream of having.
Conclusion:
As I look at the ten phase flow chart, Coordinating and Planning is the one that seems most opaque to me. One can accomplish the first three phases without leaving much of a trail, but this is an internal function. You either have some visibility into where it's happening, or maybe you have a LOT of experience and know which actors are going to move in a given situation, so you can deduce their moves and timing.
I’ve suggested along the way that we need some real world exercises. There are some problems with this:
Can’t point out real targets of my own, assuming such things even exist.
Pointing out other public activity invites me being dragged into things.
Case studies might be OK, but that’s time and energy I can’t spare.
Case studies would be filtering things through my eyes.
Not knowing most of you, I know not what you say you need.
Not knowing most of you, I don’t have my own read on what you need.
So there are some of the concerns. I could make a paid “members only” area, but that still invites the “80% joyriders concealing infil” problem. Hrm …
I guess you guys are going to … plonk yourselves down in the midst of some problem YOU choose, and then try to work both backward and forward from your vantage point. I will endeavor to get my head around transferring things that would contribute to that process.