Reading: Required & Recommended

Background reading for those wanting to get up to speed.

When I find a new area I want to get into I start reading. Since I spend time trying to explain my thinking to others, I’ve always done some sort of curation. I have formerly used and got quite fed up with Scribd, SlideShare, and Wordpress for that. This is a rundown of what’s active now.

Attention Conservation Notice: I am a data/document packrat, but since it’s all neatly labeled and indexed I can plausibly deny being a hoarder. I cross link like I’m doing citations for an academic paper, so you won’t be able to escape it. The books and documents match the two tracks of my career, “operations technical” and “operations psychological”. What is truly required involves just one paper, an easy weekend reading task.

Systems:

These days I’m employing the following:

• BookWyrm holds my books that influenced me and/or are recent reads.

• DocumentCloud holds PDFs I’ve collected and it makes transcripts of audio/video.

• Open Semantic Search is a self hosted search engine with advanced features.

• Dropbox holds PDFs because the SaaS players are each pitiful in their own way.

Books:

There are three tradecraft books that are just clearly above all the rest. Everybody who’s in a leadership role OUGHT to read the first analysis book (it’s free), given how much layered deception you will face. The other two require a significant amount of background to appreciate, so those are for your specialists in those areas.

• Psychology of Intelligence Analysis is the CIA’s bible for group analytics and Structured Analytical Techniques for Intelligence Analysis is an update.

• Attribution of Advanced Persistent Threats is for spotting “operations technical”.

• Information Operations Recognition: From Nonlinear Analysis to Decision-Making is for spotting “operations psychological”.

And among the historical works there are three authors that stand above the rest in terms of illuminating our path forward. It’s hard to pick any one of them for a READ FIRST recommendation, pursuing this is a personal choice for you. That being said, I strongly urge you to pick at least ONE of them. There will be a quiz and I don’t think it’s gonna be “left of boom”.

• Dmitry Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse and The Five Stages of Collapse are the observations of a Russia who moved to the U.S. as a teen

• Barbara F. Walter’s How Civil Wars Start is VITAL reading on civil conflict, grounded in research that has not yet penetrated to the media’s coverage of America’s overall condition.

• The Insurgent’s Dilemma is a broad survey of insurgency and counter-insurgency by David H. Ucko, which I have only half completed, but it’s full of compelling observations based on very detailed research.

Papers:

There are three services for handling PDFs, but as a reader you’re only ever going to encounter one of them in the context of required reading.

DocumentCloud is a journalist’s tool, a place where people pile up things they want to link to stories. Mine has supporting documents for my enormous MAGA Meltdown Maltego graph, I did some automated transcripts of Donbass Devushka’s podcast for a researcher, and there are other non-public collections. I could put required reading in there, but there might be copyright issues, and it’s just not a typical use case for the platform.

Open Semantic Search is a potent tool for understanding large sets of documents, I have about a dozen instances of it, each aimed at a certain subset of my overall document cache. I just looked and that directory tree contains 747,000+ items. Much of that comes from larger documents, like the FBI-302s from the Muller investigation, which have been “burst” into single pages in order to ease searching and improve access time. OSS lacks any sense of a security model, so I hide these behind Cloudflare Access.

So for the moment, there’s just a single Dropbox link for a thing called HCAT – short for Hacker Cultural Attache Training, a working group from several years ago. There were people who needed to understand Anonymous, image boards, the hacker/troll “scene”, and various right wing phenomena. These are the select supporting documents from that time, and I keep needing to reference it, so the folder has remained.

This is from the README.txt in the HCAT folder:

#Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky & Co. do amazing work on conspiracy theories.

RecursiveFury.pdf <== READ FIRST

BeyondMisinformation.pdf

Debunking.pdf

# Conspiracy theorists mindset papers.

LanguageOfConspiracy.pdf

# Jose A. Del Real on reporting on conspiracy theories.

CoveringConspiracyTheories.pdf

# hate speech recognition

EightHateSpeechTropes.pdf

# influential thinking on Memetics.

Giesea-MimeticWarfare.pdf

TheArtOfMemetics.pdf

# new thinking on how agents should be recruited.

MICE-to-RASCLS-agent-recruiting.pdf

# Leak of GRU (Russia's CIA) “operations psychological” material.

AquariumLeaks-EN-Web-1.pdf

Gap Analysis:

There are many more books on my Tradecraft, Past & Future, and MAGA World shelves than I mentioned here. They were all good, with the sole exception of the muddled mess that is Craig Unger’s American Kompromat.

There are just sixteen PDFs in the HCAT folder. There are 584 in the grab bag folder on my desktop. Some of it might qualify for a second tier reading list, but I have nowhere to put it. I wish I had a Document Management System, but if I have to support ONE MORE COMPLEX FOSS SYSTEM this scene WILL come to pass.

I looked in the grab bag, and now there are twenty PDFs in HCAT. Sorry about that.

Conclusion:

So there you have it. One fifteen page paper on conspiracy theories. Everyone I’ve ever given it to has commented on how applicable it is in today’s environment. The analysis book, which is 214 pages of plain English, is good if you’re participating in or leading teams, even if they aren’t explicitly producing finished intel. If you can wade through all four books in the historical section you’ll experience fewer surprises as things progress, it’s ground truth that will keep you from spinning your wheels on things that will never end the way you want.

I could go on for another twenty pages, pointing out material that’s influenced me since I entered the field in 2009. I hope that those who do the reading find themselves on a secure foothold, where they can then pivot to other areas of interest.