Download or read book How to Lose the Information War written by Nina Jankowicz and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-06-11 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the start of the Trump era, the United States and the Western world has finally begun to wake up to the threat of online warfare and the attacks from Russia, who flood social media with disinformation, and circulate false and misleading information to fuel fake narratives and make the case for illegal warfare. The question no one seems to be able to answer is: what can the West do about it? Central and Eastern European states, including Ukraine and Poland, however, have been aware of the threat for years. Nina Jankowicz has advised these governments on the front lines of the information war. The lessons she learnt from that fight, and from her attempts to get US congress to act, make for essential reading. How to Lose the Information War takes the reader on a journey through five Western governments' responses to Russian information warfare tactics - all of which have failed. She journeys into the campaigns the Russian operatives run, and shows how we can better understand the motivations behind these attacks and how to beat them. Above all, this book shows what is at stake: the future of civil discourse and democracy, and the value of truth itself.
Download or read book How to Win an Information War written by Peter Pomerantsev and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2024-03-05 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of our leading experts on disinformation, this inventive biography of the rogue WWII propagandist Sefton Delmer confronts hard questions about the nature of information war: what if you can't fight lies with truth? Can a propaganda war ever be won? In the summer of 1941, Hitler ruled Europe from the Atlantic to the Black Sea. Britain was struggling to combat his powerful propaganda machine, crowing victory and smearing his enemies as liars and manipulators over his frequent radio speeches, blasted out on loudspeakers and into homes. British claims that Hitler was dangerous had little impact against this wave of disinformation. Except for the broadcasts of someone called Der Chef, a German who questioned Nazi doctrine. He had access to high-ranking German military secrets and spoke of internal rebellion. His listeners included German soldiers and citizens, as well as politicians in Washington DC who were debating getting into the war. And--most importantly--Der Chef was a fiction. He was a character created by the British propagandist Thomas Sefton Delmer, a unique weapon in the war. Then, as author Peter Pomerantsev seeks to tell Delmer's story, he is called into a wartime propaganda effort of his own: the US response to the invasion of Ukraine. In flashes forward to the present day, Pomerantsev weaves in what he's learning from Delmer as he seeks to fight against Vladimir Putin's tyranny and lies. This book is the story of Delmer and his modern investigator, as they each embark on their own quest to manipulate the passions of supporters and enemies, and to turn the tide of an information war, an extraordinary history that is informing the present before our eyes.
Download or read book This Is Not Propaganda written by Peter Pomerantsev and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn how the perception of truth has been weaponized in modern politics with this "insightful" account of propaganda in Russia and beyond during the age of disinformation (New York Times). When information is a weapon, every opinion is an act of war. We live in a world of influence operations run amok, where dark ads, psyops, hacks, bots, soft facts, ISIS, Putin, trolls, and Trump seek to shape our very reality. In this surreal atmosphere created to disorient us and undermine our sense of truth, we've lost not only our grip on peace and democracy -- but our very notion of what those words even mean. Peter Pomerantsev takes us to the front lines of the disinformation age, where he meets Twitter revolutionaries and pop-up populists, "behavioral change" salesmen, Jihadi fanboys, Identitarians, truth cops, and many others. Forty years after his dissident parents were pursued by the KGB, Pomerantsev finds the Kremlin re-emerging as a great propaganda power. His research takes him back to Russia -- but the answers he finds there are not what he expected. Blending reportage, family history, and intellectual adventure, This Is Not Propaganda explores how we can reimagine our politics and ourselves when reality seems to be coming apart.
Download or read book Information Wars written by Richard Stengel and published by Atlantic Monthly Press. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “well-told” insider account of the State Department’s twenty-first-century struggle to defend America against malicious propaganda and disinformation (The Washington Post). Disinformation is nothing new. When Satan told Eve nothing would happen if she bit the apple, that was disinformation. But today, social media has made disinformation even more pervasive and pernicious. In a disturbing turn of events, authoritarian governments are increasingly using it to create their own false narratives, and democracies are proving not to be very good at fighting it. During the final three years of the Obama administration, Richard Stengel, former editor of Time, was an Under Secretary of State on the front lines of this new global information war—tasked with unpacking, disproving, and combating both ISIS’s messaging and Russian disinformation. Then, during the 2016 election, Stengel watched as Donald Trump used disinformation himself. In fact, Stengel quickly came to see how all three had used the same playbook: ISIS sought to make Islam great again; Putin tried to make Russia great again; and we know the rest. In Information Wars, Stengel moves through Russia and Ukraine, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and introduces characters from Putin to Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Mohamed bin Salman, to show how disinformation is impacting our global society. He illustrates how ISIS terrorized the world using social media, and how the Russians launched a tsunami of disinformation around the annexation of Crimea—a scheme that would became a model for future endeavors. An urgent book for our times, now with a new preface from the author, Information Wars challenges us to combat this ever-growing threat to democracy. “[A] refreshingly frank account . . . revealing.” —Kirkus Reviews “This sobering book is indeed needed to help individuals better understand how information can be massaged to produce any sort of message desired.” —Library Journal
Download or read book Information Warfare and Security written by Dorothy Elizabeth Robling Denning and published by Addison-Wesley Professional. This book was released on 1999 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What individuals, corporations, and governments need to know about information-related attacks and defenses! Every day, we hear reports of hackers who have penetrated computer networks, vandalized Web pages, and accessed sensitive information. We hear how they have tampered with medical records, disrupted emergency 911 systems, and siphoned money from bank accounts. Could information terrorists, using nothing more than a personal computer, cause planes to crash, widespread power blackouts, or financial chaos? Such real and imaginary scenarios, and our defense against them, are the stuff of information warfare-operations that target or exploit information media to win some objective over an adversary. Dorothy E. Denning, a pioneer in computer security, provides in this book a framework for understanding and dealing with information-based threats: computer break-ins, fraud, sabotage, espionage, piracy, identity theft, invasions of privacy, and electronic warfare. She describes these attacks with astonishing, real examples, as in her analysis of information warfare operations during the Gulf War. Then, offering sound advice for security practices and policies, she explains countermeasures that are both possible and necessary. You will find in this book: A comprehensive and coherent treatment of offensive and defensive information warfare, identifying the key actors, targets, methods, technologies, outcomes, policies, and laws; A theory of information warfare that explains and integrates within a single framework operations involving diverse actors and media; An accurate picture of the threats, illuminated by actual incidents; A description of information warfare technologies and their limitations, particularly the limitations of defensive technologies. Whatever your interest or role in the emerging field of information warfare, this book will give you the background you need to make informed judgments about potential threats and our defenses against them. 0201433036B04062001
Download or read book Propaganda and Information Warfare in the Twenty First Century written by Scot Macdonald and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-12-05 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to analyze how the technology to alter images and rapidly distribute them can be used for propaganda and to support deception operations. In the past, propagandists and those seeking to conduct deception operations used crude methods to alter images of real people, events and objects, which could usually be detected relatively easily. Today, however, computers allow propagandists to create any imaginable image, still or moving, with appropriate accompanying audio. Furthermore, it is becoming extremely difficult to detect that an image has been manipulated, and the Internet, television and global media make it possible to disseminate altered images around the world almost instantaneously. Given that the United States is the sole superpower, few, if any, adversaries will attempt to fight the US military conventionally on the battlefield. Therefore, adversaries will use propaganda and deception, especially altered images, in an attempt to level the battlefield or to win a war against the United States without even having to fight militarily. Propaganda and Information Warfare in the 21st Century will be of great interest to students of information war, propaganda, public diplomacy and security studies in general.
Download or read book The World Information War written by Timothy Clack and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-10 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book outlines the threats from information warfare faced by the West and analyses the ways it can defend itself. Existing on a spectrum from communication to indoctrination, information can be used to undermine trust, amplify emotional resonance, and reformulate identities. The West is currently experiencing an information war, and major setbacks have included: ‘fake news’; disinformation campaigns; the manipulation of users of social media; the dissonance of hybrid warfare; and even accusations of ‘state capture’. Nevertheless, the West has begun to comprehend the reality of what is happening, and it is now in a position defend itself. In this volume, scholars, information practitioners, and military professionals define this new war and analyse its shape, scope, and direction. Collectively, they indicate how media policies, including social media, represent a form of information strategy, how information has become the ‘centre of gravity’ of operations, and why the further exploitation of data (by scale and content) by adversaries can be anticipated. For the West, being first with the truth, being skilled in cyber defence, and demonstrating virtuosity in information management are central to resilience and success. This book will be of much interest to students of strategic studies, information warfare, propaganda studies, cyber-security, and International Relations.
Download or read book Threatcasting written by Brian David Johnson and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-06-01 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Impending technological advances will widen an adversary’s attack plane over the next decade. Visualizing what the future will hold, and what new threat vectors could emerge, is a task that traditional planning mechanisms struggle to accomplish given the wide range of potential issues. Understanding and preparing for the future operating environment is the basis of an analytical method known as Threatcasting. It is a method that gives researchers a structured way to envision and plan for risks ten years in the future. Threatcasting uses input from social science, technical research, cultural history, economics, trends, expert interviews, and even a little science fiction to recognize future threats and design potential futures. During this human-centric process, participants brainstorm what actions can be taken to identify, track, disrupt, mitigate, and recover from the possible threats. Specifically, groups explore how to transform the future they desire into reality while avoiding an undesired future. The Threatcasting method also exposes what events could happen that indicate the progression toward an increasingly possible threat landscape. This book begins with an overview of the Threatcasting method with examples and case studies to enhance the academic foundation. Along with end-of-chapter exercises to enhance the reader’s understanding of the concepts, there is also a full project where the reader can conduct a mock Threatcasting on the topic of “the next biological public health crisis.” The second half of the book is designed as a practitioner’s handbook. It has three separate chapters (based on the general size of the Threatcasting group) that walk the reader through how to apply the knowledge from Part I to conduct an actual Threatcasting activity. This book will be useful for a wide audience (from student to practitioner) and will hopefully promote new dialogues across communities and novel developments in the area.
Download or read book Winning at War written by Christian P. Potholm and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2010 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the independent variables that determine success in war? Drawing on 40 years of studying and teaching war, political scientist Christian P. Potholm presents a 'template of Mars, ' seven variables that have served as predictors of military success over time and across cultures. In Winning at War, Potholm explains these variables--technology, sustained ruthlessness, discipline, receptivity to innovation, protection of military capital from civilians and rulers, will, and the belief that there will always be another war--and provides case studies of their implementation, from ancient battles to today.
Download or read book On War written by Carl von Clausewitz and published by . This book was released on 1908 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Democracies at War written by Dan Reiter and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do democracies win wars? This is a critical question in the study of international relations, as a traditional view--expressed most famously by Alexis de Tocqueville--has been that democracies are inferior in crafting foreign policy and fighting wars. In Democracies at War, the first major study of its kind, Dan Reiter and Allan Stam come to a very different conclusion. Democracies tend to win the wars they fight--specifically, about eighty percent of the time. Complementing their wide-ranging case-study analysis, the authors apply innovative statistical tests and new hypotheses. In unusually clear prose, they pinpoint two reasons for democracies' success at war. First, as elected leaders understand that losing a war can spell domestic political backlash, democracies start only those wars they are likely to win. Secondly, the emphasis on individuality within democratic societies means that their soldiers fight with greater initiative and superior leadership. Surprisingly, Reiter and Stam find that it is neither economic muscle nor bandwagoning between democratic powers that enables democracies to win wars. They also show that, given societal consent, democracies are willing to initiate wars of empire or genocide. On the whole, they find, democracies' dependence on public consent makes for more, rather than less, effective foreign policy. Taking a fresh approach to a question that has long merited such a study, this book yields crucial insights on security policy, the causes of war, and the interplay between domestic politics and international relations.
Download or read book The New Face of War written by Bruce D. Berkowitz and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-05-11 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As American and coalition troops fight the first battles of this new century -- from Afghanistan to Yemen to the Philippines to Iraq -- they do so in ways never before seen. Until recently, information war was but one piece of a puzzle, more than a sideshow in war but far less than the sum total of the game. Today, however, we find information war revolutionizing combat, from top to bottom. Gone are the advantages of fortified positions -- nothing is impregnable any longer. Gone is the reason to create an overwhelming mass of troops -- now, troop concentrations merely present easier targets. Instead, stealth, swarming, and "zapping" (precision strikes on individuals or equipment) are the order of the day, based on superior information and lightning-fast decision-making. In many ways, modern warfare is information warfare. Bruce Berkowitz's explanation of how information war revolutionized combat and what it means for our soldiers could not be better timed. As Western forces wage war against terrorists and their supporters, in actions large and small, on several continents, The New Face of War explains how they fight and how they will win or lose. There are four key dynamics to the new warfare: asymmetric threats, in which even the strongest armies may suffer from at least one Achilles' heel; information-technology competition, in which advantages in computers and communications are crucial; the race of decision cycles, in which the first opponent to process and react to information effectively is almost certain to win; and network organization, in which fluid arrays of combat forces can spontaneously organize in multiple ways to fight any given opponent at any time. America's use of networked, elite ground forces, in combination with precision-guided bombing from manned and unmanned flyers, turned Afghanistan from a Soviet graveyard into a lopsided field of American victory. Yet we are not invulnerable, and the same technology that we used in Kuwait in 1991 is now available to anyone with a credit card and access to the Internet. Al Qaeda is adept in the new model of war, and has searched long and hard for weaknesses in our defenses. Will we be able to stay ahead of its thinking? In Iraq, Saddam's army is in no position to defeat its enemies -- but could it defend Baghdad? As the world anxiously considers these and other questions of modern war, Bruce Berkowitz offers many answers and a framework for understanding combat that will never again resemble the days of massive marches on fortress-like positions. The New Face of War is a crucial guidebook for reading the headlines from across our troubled planet.
Download or read book Winning the War written by John B. Alexander, Ph.D. and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-second century historians will note that a new World War began on 9/11/2001. In reality, it began much earlier. Competing value systems and the lust for natural resources will precipitate an inevitable clash of civilizations. Currently, we face elusive foes-foes who play by other rules-and in fact, we are already engaged in brutal, truly asymmetric conflict with varied forms of fighting; terrorism is but an isolated part. The increasing number of polymorphic hostilities requires revolutionary and unconventional responses. Special operations are the norm. Nanoscale, biological, and digital technologies have transformed how we fight future wars. Tactical lasers that zap pinpoint targets at twenty kilometers are being developed, as is the millimeter-wave Active Denial System that causes intense pain to those exposed. The "Mother of all Bombs" has been dropped, as have thermobaric weapons that destroy caves and bunkers. Robots roam the battlefield while exotic sensors catalogue nearly every facet of our lives. Paralyzing electrical shock weapons are in the hands of police. Even phasers on stun are closer than you think. Winning the War details the technologies and concepts necessary to ultimately determine the outcome of this global conflict. Via realistic scenarios from recovering tourists kidnapped by terrorists, to bringing down drug cartels in the Amazon, and even preventing Armageddon in the Middle East, Winning the War provides an insider's view into how these futuristic weapons will be used and into the complexities of modern warfare. Bold and controversial measures are prescribed, including the essential nature of absolute domination of space. Winning the War makes clear that drastic and innovative actions will be necessary to ensure our national survival.
Download or read book Strategic Information Warfare written by Roger C. Molander and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 1996-02-28 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Future U.S. national security strategy is likely to be profoundly affected by the ongoing, rapid evolution of cyberspace--the global information infrastructure--and in particular by the growing dependence of the U.S. military and other national institutions and infrastructures on potentially vulnerable elements of the U.S. national information infrastructure. To examine these effects, the authors conducted a series of exercises employing a methodology known as the Day After ... in which participants are presented with an information warfare crisis scenario and asked to advise the president on possible responses. Participants included senior national security community members and representatives from security-related telecommunications and information-systems industries. The report synthesizes the exercise results and presents the instructions from the exercise materials in their entirety.
Download or read book When Books Went to War written by Molly Guptill Manning and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2014-12-02 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This New York Times bestselling account of books parachuted to soldiers during WWII is a “cultural history that does much to explain modern America” (USA Today). When America entered World War II in 1941, we faced an enemy that had banned and burned 100 million books. Outraged librarians launched a campaign to send free books to American troops, gathering 20 million hardcover donations. Two years later, the War Department and the publishing industry stepped in with an extraordinary program: 120 million specially printed paperbacks designed for troops to carry in their pockets and rucksacks in every theater of war. These small, lightweight Armed Services Editions were beloved by the troops and are still fondly remembered today. Soldiers read them while waiting to land at Normandy, in hellish trenches in the midst of battles in the Pacific, in field hospitals, and on long bombing flights. This pioneering project not only listed soldiers’ spirits, but also helped rescue The Great Gatsby from obscurity and made Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, into a national icon. “A thoroughly engaging, enlightening, and often uplifting account . . . I was enthralled and moved.” — Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried “Whether or not you’re a book lover, you’ll be moved.” — Entertainment Weekly
Download or read book Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible written by Peter Pomerantsev and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2014-11-11 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A journey into the glittering, surreal heart of 21st century Russia, where even dictatorship is a reality show Professional killers with the souls of artists, would-be theater directors turned Kremlin puppet-masters, suicidal supermodels, Hell's Angels who hallucinate themselves as holy warriors, and oligarch revolutionaries: welcome to the wild and bizarre heart of twenty-first-century Russia. It is a world erupting with new money and new power, changing so fast it breaks all sense of reality, home to a form of dictatorship-far subtler than twentieth-century strains-that is rapidly rising to challenge the West. When British producer Peter Pomerantsev plunges into the booming Russian TV industry, he gains access to every nook and corrupt cranny of the country. He is brought to smoky rooms for meetings with propaganda gurus running the nerve-center of the Russian media machine, and visits Siberian mafia-towns and the salons of the international super-rich in London and the US. As the Putin regime becomes more aggressive, Pomerantsev finds himself drawn further into the system. Dazzling yet piercingly insightful, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible is an unforgettable voyage into a country spinning from decadence into madness.
Download or read book Bombing to Win written by Robert A. Pape and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-11 with total page 547 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Iraq to Bosnia to North Korea, the first question in American foreign policy debates is increasingly: Can air power alone do the job? Robert A. Pape provides a systematic answer. Analyzing the results of over thirty air campaigns, including a detailed reconstruction of the Gulf War, he argues that the key to success is attacking the enemy's military strategy, not its economy, people, or leaders. Coercive air power can succeed, but not as cheaply as air enthusiasts would like to believe.Pape examines the air raids on Germany, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq as well as those of Israel versus Egypt, providing details of bombing and governmental decision making. His detailed narratives of the strategic effectiveness of bombing range from the classical cases of World War II to an extraordinary reconstruction of airpower use in the Gulf War, based on recently declassified documents. In this now-classic work of the theory and practice of airpower and its political effects, Robert A. Pape helps military strategists and policy makers judge the purpose of various air strategies, and helps general readers understand the policy debates.
