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Hello everyone, this is Tom Uren and I'm here with the Gruck as per usual. G'day Gruck, how are you? G'day Tom, I'm good and yourself? I'm well. This week's Between Two Nerds is brought to you by Resourcely, a company that enables developers to quickly deploy secure and compliant cloud resources. So once upon a time, Gruck, I went to a conference about...
I guess I call them information operations. So manipulating the information environment. And the actual title of the conference was The Missing Eye in Dime. And so dime refers to different instruments of state power, diplomatic, informational, military and economic.
And the point of this conference was that for Western democracies, there's not a lot of focus on the information domain. And you pointed out in our before podcast chat, this piece of possible news, or it may just be propaganda, either way,
It was the Ukrainian chief of defense intelligence, Kirill Budanov, talking about this vast Russian information and psychological operation that was going to be held against Ukraine. So you found something notable. Right. So the bare bones of the plan that he described was, first of all, sowing seeds of doubts about decision-making in Ukraine from the government, and then predictability
projecting that onto the army as being poorly managed or not used effectively or something like that.
And then following that up with a defeat, some sort of military defeat that could then be used to reinforce the narrative and lend legitimacy to these seeds that they'd sown of doubt earlier. So this was a multi-month operation with the government, the army, and this military operation as well as part of the whole thing.
So what I found interesting was, first of all, the primacy of the information part of this whole thing, that the military victory was not a goal in and of itself, but rather a supporting factor in this overall operation. So primacy and information, but also just the scope and the scale. And I think that people don't think about information operations at this sort of size, where you would have
several months of pre-planning and work just to set things up to then use a military operation as like the final part to sort of prove this narrative that you've put up. Like to me, that seems far beyond trolling on Twitter and Reddit or leaving mean comments.
And I think people don't think about that scope, like just the scale that's possible for a nation state when it decides we are going to do an information operation. Right, right. Like I said, the whole point of the conference I was going to is that Western democracies don't really think about these things. There's no one thinking, you know, what's the narrative that we're going to push out on the whole world using our state-backed
Yeah. Well, how can we use all of the elements of state power to push a narrative? How are we going to wheel together all of these different bits of government and create
a specific narrative to achieve some overall objective. It's going to involve diplomacy to set things up. It's going to be using our national media to push out certain things to prime the pump. Then it's going to be using the military over here to achieve something that plays into it. It's going to be using the intelligence forces to spread rumors. There's
There's nothing that big. I don't think you could organize it at all, really. Yeah, yeah. I've always thought that Western democracies outsource the informational component basically to Hollywood. And I guess I would call that, or other people have called that soft power.
The sort of cultural appeal. So this particular example with Budanov, we don't actually know if this information operation exists, right? So perhaps this is just Budanov making stuff up.
Maybe it does exist and it's still ongoing. Yeah. Or maybe it's three different operations that he has lumped together. Maybe he's completely misrepresenting something, but. But the point is the scale. Exactly. I think that, yeah, it's the, it's credible and plausible that the Russians would attempt something like this. Right. Whether they actually are, whether it's something they could achieve, you know, whatever. Yeah.
That's besides the point. The point is that this is a thing that they could plausibly put together as a plan and attempt to implement. They could try to do something like this. I guess from a narrow mechanical point of view, a couple of weeks ago, we talked about those Taurus missile leaks, and it was a very clear link between...
state media and what officials were saying. So it's clear that there's a very direct, if we want this kind of message to be sent out, we'll do it. I was also thinking about China. And so they've got, what's it called? CGTN, China Global Television Network. And it's an English language state media that broadcasts around the world.
the purpose of CGTN is to tell China's story well. So it's, I guess that's soft power, but it's directed soft power. Like, yeah, it's,
Well, soft power is really all-encompassing. Like over here in Thailand, they view food as soft power. There's this fascinating thing where basically a little over 20 years ago, the Thais realized that Thai food is one of the things that is good about the country. So they set up this whole government thing where like if you're a Thai person anywhere in the world and you want to set up a restaurant...
they will help you. They will help fund it. They've got people who have preset menus that they can give you with recipe books. You can pick expensive, medium, or cheap, where you want to be on the scale, and they've got all this stuff. They will help you get set up. They'll help you get ingredients. They'll
They invest, they've got design, they will help you get all of the stuff up. And as a result, there are more Thai restaurants in New York than anything else. And more Thai restaurants in DC than any other.
It's genius. It's one of the few things that they've done really well. And it's amazing. Like they sat down and they said, Thai food is a strength. How can we do this? And they just went out and they promoted people making Thai restaurants everywhere in the world. The story I heard is that the dish Pad Thai was actually created for this purpose. And that's why I presume that's why it's called Pad Thai rather than Pad Siu, which is the other dish, which is very similar.
Yeah. So pot just means like fried up. So like it's fried up Thai style. Yeah. It's Thai fried whatever. Yeah.
So I guess getting back to the point of what we were talking about before we were distracted by food, is that both Russia and China have this apparatus where they have state media that part of its purpose is to push out state messages. And they also don't believe that the West doesn't. Right. So when you say to them, like, the BBC is independent, like the New York Times and the Washington Post are not directed...
by the government. They just think that that's deep cover. They're like, yeah, you know, sure. And your diplomats are just here to like, you know...
Do cultural attaché work. Yeah, yeah. Actually, in Australia, there was a particularly rocky period with China, and a list of, air quotes, demands was sent from the embassy. And one of them was to get better media coverage of China-related issues in Australian media. So that kind of goes to your point there. Exactly. They can't grasp it. It's not directed. They can
They can see like, okay, there's not a direct link, but then they can't imagine that there isn't the back channel. Indirect link. Right. They've got to know where their bread is buttered. There isn't some sort of control. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So we've got on one side, Russia and China with those similar overarching ideas, like the state pushes out messages. The actual implementation is very different. So I've heard...
The Russian approach is as firehose of falsehood, where they just push out a whole lot of disinformation willy-nilly, and it feels like a kind of a spoiler move. Right. I think it plays into the sort of authoritarianism that they had in Russia, where Putin's aim, he wanted this politically apathetic regime.
population where you leave the politics to me and you can just live your life and do whatever you want. That was sort of the agreement. That doesn't work when you need to mobilize people for going to war. You can't get people fired up for going to war and being apathetic. But yeah, this firehose of falsehood approach is about, I think one of the famous ways of phrasing it is that it's not about making you believe something, it's about making you believe nothing. And sort of this goal is to just be like, look,
Out of all of these things, I know a bunch of them are false, but I don't know which ones. So I'm just not going to bother. It's too difficult trying to deal with that and figuring out what's true and what isn't. And projecting apathy like that
is pretty good if that's your goal. For them. Yeah. For them. Whereas the Chinese is much more about, why don't you love us? The beatings will continue until you love us. Yeah. Yeah. And in contrast, the Western approach is to, from a state point of view, to kind of assume that the market is going to take care of it and like,
For a long time, it basically relied on the soft power of the market economy providing good living for everyone. Now, there's sort of the blue jeans, Coca-Cola, rock music. The soft power was centered around like, this is the lifestyle you have under alphabetical setup. That stopped getting funded after the Cold War ended.
Like if they stop putting effort into pushing it out. Right. No, no. I'm talking here about like, you know, Radio Free Europe and things like that where they were actively promoting radio.
these elements of self-power. And they kept those things around, but without the act of promotion so much. Just the, here's a way of getting free, objective, good news, with the belief that truth has a Western liberal bias or something. Right. So the US military does have doctrine on information operations.
But it's very much narrower than the all, I don't know if it's all encompassing, but the state level ideas that you can sort of see in Russia and China. So the information operation doctrine looks at what you do within the scope of a battlefield. And that battlefield actually has a defined meaning in US doctrine. And it's not the whole world all the time. Those fools. Yeah.
But I was also thinking about an example I've talked about before, which is ASD tackling a cybercriminal who was stealing Australian COVID-19 relief payments.
So the brief summary is that ASD affected his malware and then also ruined his reputation by doing stuff on criminal forums. And I'm sure no one thought about it as an information operation, but that's essentially what it was, right? Yeah, absolutely. The scope of thinking is very, very much narrower. And it's...
If we do this technical thing and these other, I don't know if it was forum posts or something like that. These are the second order effects that we can rely on to achieve our objective based on. Yeah. And it's step A, step B, step C, step D.
And eventually Step D is it appears on Australian TV documentary and Tom talks about it on Between Two Nodes. Like that's a- He's bringing it up. That's right. The insult to injury podcast. And that is, I guess I would call the logic of victory there is very clear.
I think you're onto something there. And I think it's also objectively measurable. Like you can say, when we do these things, the number of complaints...
will go up, the number of customers will go down, the amount of negative sentiment posting will increase compared to whatever. There's things you can look at and you can say, objectively, these things have happened, which are a result of what we've done. And so we can show that we've achieved something. We've done a thing that has achieved goals that we've set out.
So there's ASD real world example. A while back, we talked about the UK's National Cyber Force, and they released what I think of as a white paper. And that, to me, also had that very narrow view. They talked about affecting the decision making of a small number of people.
Right. I think they specifically said that it was best for dealing with small targets, small groups. Yeah, that's right. And it was partly the justification was, I guess it's a philosophical one of...
If you're going to deceive people, you want to deceive the smallest amount of people for the smallest amount of time from the principle of a democratic society. So again, we've got that principles-based. It's also pragmatic, I think, in a way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that reflects the same kind of thinking as that Australian operation and also US doctrine, which is more...
and more specifically information operations. But that's kind of the same thing. I think it's essentially the same thing that the cyber force, the UK cyber force was talking about as well. Yeah, I agree. And I think it is this fundamental national responsibility
difference in approach. As we said with the dime earlier on, you've got your diplomacy, information, military, and economic. In the West, information is sort of, it's not a tool of government so much. The idea of the government going out there, manipulating the information environment,
for our own benefit is terrifying. I don't think anyone wants to have the government in control of the media. You described that contrast between Western democracies and authoritarian states, that lack of, is it control on the information domain as a weakness?
Yeah. So I think that the failure of the West to address the information domain as a tool of government is a weakness. And I'm not suggesting that there needs to be state-owned media pushing the government's narrative, but I do think that there needs to be some state-level appreciation of narrative
better control of when information is being used against the West. We don't have a way of dealing with that. Even now, it's like, well, we're expecting partnerships between academia and the social media companies and private companies doing research and all that. They're going to help secure our elections from disinformation. It's like, yeah, they should. You kind of wonder like,
Shouldn't there be like a counter disinformation thing run by like the people who do information operations and know about how it works and who have access to secret classified intelligence about what's being planned? Things like that. I mean, I think the space just gets tremendously difficult because, you
I guess there's like this continuum of like absolutely no interest in the information domain to total control of the information domain. And the total control is associated with authoritarianism and the,
Total lack of interest is associated with a free society. So it's just very uncomfortable to swing that dial. And the reliance on academics and civil society is this, I don't even know if it's a happy medium, but it's a place that people are comfortable. I'm not even sure, not everyone's comfortable. I don't think they think about it because it's just not a thing that comes up.
Whereas if there was a government department in charge of information, then it would come up all the time because it would be a thing that people are worried about. Even if they were completely transparent, no one would believe it. Even if they were like, our role is basically to provide information to civil society to act on it. We don't actually do anything ourselves. If it was some sort of, we launder classified intelligence to prepare people for what's coming.
No one would believe that that was the extent of their scope. They do that, but they also tell them what stories to suppress. They're doing censorship. Part of the difficulty here is
Like for me, I'm thinking a lot about how the British ran their information operations during World War II. Right. And that was a completely different information environment. Like there's just sort of a lot less sources overall anyway. But then there was the BBC, which was very much the government's spokespiece. Like it was like that. And then there was this idea of information war as being anything else that wasn't officially from the government.
but was involved. And they could do all sorts of wild and crazy stuff because they were anonymous and denied and black propaganda wasn't actually linked to what the state was doing. And so they could do completely crazy stuff. And I look at all that stuff and the things that they were doing was amazing and cool and we should be doing that again.
Right. But, you know, that was during a war with an existential threat. Yes, exactly. You know, things are not that bad yet. But it was pretty cool stuff. Was that voluntary on the part of the BBC in the sense that when you feel like you're in that kind of war, people in those positions do whatever they think is justifiable? Right.
Yeah. There was a lot more, like there was official state censorship. Right. Yeah. So there's the, you don't put out things that are bad overall. So there was some oversight there. But yeah, most of it was just what is good for us. And everyone sort of had the idea of like, what are the things that are going to help us? And that's, you know, you big up your victories, you downplay the defeats, just sort of regular things that you would expect any side to do. Right. Yeah.
But of course there was, you know, there was tight integration as well where like there were the French BBC broadcasts. So that's BBC in French.
And then they would have the SOE messages at the end, which would be like, Aunt Emily has a long net. Aunt Emily has a long net. Right, right. It's the special operations executive. Yeah. And there were two aspects of that that were very important. One was that if you've got some guy that shows up in your village and says, hi, I'm with the British, I'm here to help.
Let's go kill some Germans and blow some stuff up. You're probably going to be like, yeah, whatever, dude. You're some random guy. But then if he can get the BBC to broadcast the sentence that you came up with, this is a guy who's linked into some real power. Oh, did they actually do that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what would happen was when you talk to people and be like, we're arranging for a plane drop of supplies.
We need two sentences from you. One is it's cancelled. Another one is it's go. Right. And so they wouldn't come up with them themselves. They'd have their French collaborators come up with them. Because then when it showed up, it would be the sort of proof positive that here is a representative of the British. Like even the BBC will, you know. Yeah, yeah. Well, this brings me back to the point that we're not at war. And so...
Oh my God, you're going on and on about these little details. Well, what I think is interesting is that Russia and China, to an extent, I think do feel that they are in an ideological conflict. And so we're kind of at different stages and we also feel different imperatives. So the Western democracies are
We don't think we should control the information domain and we're not at war. Right. Whereas on the other side, the authoritarian states think that they should control the information domain and they feel that they're in some sort of at least ideological conflict, if not war. Right. Well, like the Russians believe that there is this sort of concerted effort against them, that there's this active conflict that's ongoing.
And yeah, everything just proves that even like if you can't find evidence, it just proves that they are really good at hiding. Right. I think it's part of the dynamic of this is why we need to band together to unite against a common enemy. We need to create that enemy to...
Yeah. And you need to suffer some adversity because when we need to decide between guns and butter, we're in a war. We can't afford butter right now. We need the guns. You're just going to have to give it up for a little bit while we invest in the things that are critical for our national survival. You have a very good point, I think, in that they can support doing those things because they do believe that they're in a conflict.
Like, it makes sense that when you're under threat, you need to have more control and stuff. And in the West, we don't think that we're in a conflict. And so, I sort of wonder, maybe that is the weakness. Not that we need to sort of believe that we're in conflict, but that we need to acknowledge that other people do and are treating it as such. Because otherwise, it's sort of like you're walking along and there's a guy with his boxing gear on. Right. You're just like, hey, how's it going? And you get smacked in the face, right? Yeah.
So some sort of recognition of how other people are treating the interactions, I think, could be useful here. Right, right. There've been a couple of disclosures. For example, one was that Chinese missiles are filled with water. Oh, yeah, yeah. Water, yeah. Another one, maybe it was a former head of the CIA, or maybe it was the current head of the CIA, spoke about how they'd rebuilt their spy network in China. Yeah.
Oh, okay. And I was wondering about the purpose of those disclosures. One was like a foreign policy article written by either the head or the former head of the CIA. Yeah. And also I was thinking about Vault Typhoon as well and this Rand guy,
told me that one of the things that is destabilizing is if one side or another thinks they have a magic weapon that they can deploy that will guarantee them victory. And so in the context of Vault Typhoon, which is compromising US critical infrastructure, talking about it very publicly makes it clear that there is no magic weapon. Yeah, we see you. We've got that.
And all these presumably deliberate disclosures. That's an information operation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're not as good as you think you are, and we know what you're doing. And we also have sources in your military or in senior government. Whether that's true or not, who knows? Right. Sometimes there's sort of like these wheels within wheels. So, for example, in the 80s,
there was a really, really good KGB agent that they could never catch. The dude's tradecraft was excellent. He was recruiting people left and right and like they couldn't get anything on him. They would just arrest him and plant stuff on him so they could expel him and ruin his career because they didn't want him to be around anymore. This guy's too good. You don't want him to get promoted and be in charge of stuff because he's like excellent at stuff. So like not
not suggesting that they would patent documents, but if they had a double agent that they were controlling with him, they would deliberately have the agent give him classified material that they shouldn't have access to and then arrest the dude at the guy's house or whatever just while he was like, what's this? You know, police. LAUGHTER
You know, you're a catch. Huh? Police? Hands up. And that wasn't to stop him doing what he was doing now. It was to prevent him doing anything in the future. So to jeopardize his career by outing him and PNGing him early on.
And that was the point. Not the- PNG? Not the arrest. Yeah. It was to persona non grata. Oh, okay. Right, right. To PNG, right? To kick him out. You're no longer welcome in the country, right? And when you do that, that screws the people's careers because they can't go-
undercover to other countries anymore. And that can really, if you get promoted by the number of foreign deployments you have where you recruit agents and things, if you can't do those anymore, that could ruin you. So that was kind of the goal. And it wasn't the arrest or the thing itself, it was the career impact that they were having. I wonder if the leaking about the water in the missiles was sort of about the leak itself
Like there's sort of layers of operations going on with the, you know, first of all, we see you. So you're like, you're not as clever as you think you are. And then there's the, we know your stuff isn't any good. So, you know, don't even try and rattle that saber. And also the guy who we don't really like because he's really good at his job, you know, we're going to implicate him in something and now you're going to have to fire him. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's not even, the story doesn't even need to be true.
Like from a Xi Jinping perspective, if you see that in US media, it's going to sow some doubt. It could be true. Yeah. And the obvious question is, from Xi's point of view, I found corruption in the PLA. Is this evidence of more corruption? Right. And it's an excellent spoiler move as well, because if you think that he's planning on invading Taiwan and you want him to not believe that his military is going to do anything
the job well things like corruption stories are absolutely what you want them to be worried about yeah exactly as you're suggesting yeah and they've also got that element of truth in that there have been a lot of corrupt goings on with the pla well i guess maybe the lesson here is that western information operations aren't that bad after all perhaps oh well thanks a lot tom thanks great