We are all collateral (Part I)

The great power dimension to information warfare

Emanuel Stoakes is a New Zealand based journalist who has written for The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times and many other publications. He is currently pursuing his Masters degree at the University of Canterbury, where his research focuses on the role that journalism can play in protecting democracies from information warfare.

“The ideal subject of a totalitarian state is not the convinced Nazi or Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.” 

- Hannah Arendt

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Near the end of his storied life, historian Eric Hobsbawm was asked by a journalist about his fears for the future. He replied that he was concerned that the new millennium held grave peril for the “cause of reason and progress and improvement,” set to be undermined by runaway economic forces, social tensions; the recrudescence of ideological fundamentalism and nationalism. 

It is perhaps a matter of high irony that events in the world which seem to herald a partial fulfilment of his prognosis can be linked to a re-litigation of an old dispute in which Hobsbawm had once been, as a long-time supporter of Communism, a noted partisan. 

What some are calling ’great power competition’ or even a ‘new cold war’ between status quo capitalist and revisionist-authoritarian powers is being conducted not only on geopolitical frontiers, but increasingly in the world of technology and immaterial informational space. And in a way that some analysts say may be even more dangerous than its previous iteration.

The chief antagonists of this  ‘new cold war’ (the United states and its allies vs. Russia, China and others) are not only using information warfare to undermine the other, but competing to gain an edge in the

strategic nexus between data, new economies, emerging technology and social influence. 

“Information is now the world’s most consequential and contested geopolitical resource,” according to a 2019 Harvard paper on the new geopolitics of information. And it is one that cannot be disentangled from the great power struggle that is now in its early - that is to say, not fully realised - stages. 

Data is being collected as a strategic commodity on a constant basis, gathering highly personalised information that is being used to track users of online content, understand their interests, develop psychological profiles, collect biodata and precision target the vectors for elite decision-making. 

Attempts to instrumentalise democratic processes through the targeted collection of data on demographic groups that can swing votes, as seen during the 2016 US election interference campaign by Russia, through the online manipulations of, inter alia, alt-right sentiments, racism, disaffection and polarisation, look set to be a mere foretaste of far worse to come. As the authors of the Harvard paper suggest, “Russian influence campaigns are, however, only prototypes of the sophisticated and insidious influence operations states will soon be able to deploy.” 

It is predicted that soon threat actors will be able to “effectively run mass influence campaigns on auto-pilot, to micro-target those individuals and groups most vulnerable to manipulation, to continuously improve their tactics and messages based on real-time digital feedback, and to cheaply and quickly computer-generate fake audio and visual material.” 

And all of this will be made possible by the continuous collection of data. Indeed, data may become so central to globalised capitalism that author and academic Viktor Mayer-Schönberger has predicted that “big data” will become the “organising principle” of the world economy. 

Who cares?

Why should New Zealanders care about any of this? Because smaller democratic states have a stake in retaining some of the existing norms that would be eroded by the emerging rival vision of international relations, norms and values that are being propagated by Russia and China, not only at the level of diplomatic discourse, but operational, data-driven information warfare. 

Russia, which has openly described its war in Ukraine as part of a struggle for a new global order, has demonstrated contempt for the autonomy of its neighbour and used wartime tactics that exceed those of the US in Iraq. Analysis suggests that China is likewise seeking to reshape the norms of the world order, albeit in less overt ways, but certainly in an illiberal direction. 

 Moreover, a cold-war style great power competition, mediated through both information warfare and other coercive influence campaigns, can be expected to involve a struggle over 'battleground' states in important strategic locations, just as was the case in the 'old cold war.' 

Aotearoa New Zealand has been judged to hold a unique strategic position in the 'Indo-Pacific' region, one that is of particular interest to Beijing. And it can be expected that the United States would like to have more influence here. 

To retain Aotearoa’s current level of strategic autonomy, and to protect its democracy, we’re going to have to grapple with some of the issues associated with this titan-fight and work out how to engage intelligently with the raft of issues it throws up. 

Sudden shocks to our interests and society may occur unexpectedly. The invasion of Taiwan by China, a scenario that some are predicting will happen this decade, would very likely be an inflection point, after which the logic of escalation may mean that the strategic calculus of either side changes rapidly and states relatively under-exposed to cyber-enabled information warfare, such as ourselves, suddenly find themselves saturated with it. 

The weaponisation of information is a technique of power that can cause literally unmeasurable harm. 

Once released into the digital public sphere, like a virus, disinformation operations and other ‘infowar’ campaigns can take on an unquantifiable life of their own, spreading through platforms as fast as bots or real users can share their message.

A warning from history

Examples from the past are instructive; the damage wrought by covid disinformation serves as a particularly apposite case study. But for an even more sobering example of how information warfare can help set horrors in motion, one can turn to Indonesia in the mid 1960s, during the ‘old cold war.’

According to the testimony of former Czech state security operative Ladislav Bittman, Indonesia’s government was targeted with disinformation suggesting that a US filmmaker in the country, William Palmer, was a CIA operative. The circulation of these manufactured claims led to attacks on US offices in 1965 and demands the man be expelled from the country. Palmer’s home was attacked.

Then, the Czechs decided to up the ante. Using the ‘active measures’ practice that had become a staple of Soviet bloc information warfare, they forged a document alleged to be from the British Ambassador to Indonesia, suggesting that the UK, with American support, intended to invade Indonesia from Malaysia. 

It was an audacious provocation and it heightened tensions spectacularly within Jakarta’s ruling elites. In this atmosphere of suspicion, intrigue and rising anti-American sentiment, senior members of Indonesia’s Communist Party (PKI), which was in coalition with President Sukarno, launched an attack on their main political opponents, the Indonesian army, killing six top generals in a kind of small scale coup d’état. 

In response, the Army initiated a massive campaign of violence, ostensibly designed to target the PKI and its supporters, but which rapidly became a systematic campaign of murder, in which ordinary citizens were encouraged to join in and viciously slaughter suspected or real members of Indonesia’s labour movement. The total death toll is unknown, but some estimates run to around half a million.

(NB: The Americans themselves then played a shameful role in the mass killings. The US, for example, tracked the bloodshed, did not intervene and even passed lists of targets on to the perpetrators to assist them in wiping out the country’s Communists. In his book, the “Jakarta Method,” author and journalist Vincent Bevins, argues that Washington subsequently adapted the Indonesia playbook and applied it across the developing world, by training and supporting right-wing armies and paramilitaries to crush leftist movements in locations where Communism was perceived to be a threat).

While Indonesia is an extreme example, in future scenarios, great power machinations and subversive information campaigns of the kind that caused such bloodshed will become potentially more likely and more brutally effective.

The digital risk society

How to think about the challenge of this diffuse and potentially uncontrollable risk? Someone arguably worth turning to here is the German Sociologist Ulrich Beck, who had much to say about the rising technological dangers that emerged during the former cold war. 

 

Beck and his academic collaborator Anthony Giddens coined the term ‘risk society’ to describe a society which is engaged with the future dangers it is likely to face, organises itself to contain those threats and balances these concerns against the capitalist imperatives of growth and increased productivity. 

Beck believed that society was entering into a period of ‘second modernity,’ one in which the technological achievements of modernity (electricity, industrialisation, the creation of mass transport systems and so on) have a ‘boomerang effect’ and come back to haunt societies that now have to contend with the threats that they create, such as those generated by nuclear power or the effects of climate change.  

Today we can add data collection, and the disruptive information warfare it feeds, to that list. Beck suggested that the pervasive threat environments of second modernity needed to be exposed to public awareness to empower citizens to rationally navigate its complexities and dangers. Professional media, Beck contended, is among the leading professions “in charge of defining risks,” with an implicit responsibility to “sound the social alarm” on both the issues at hand, and those ahead.¹

Beck’s thought is deeply relevant to the stresses societies experienced during the covid pandemic. As economic historian Adam Tooze wrote in 2020, in a “risk society, we become radically dependent on specialised scientific knowledge to define what is and what is not dangerous in advance of the dangers themselves,” consequently losing a part of our “cognitive sovereignty.” At times of such uncertainty, as the coronavirus experience demonstrated, distrust, confusion and conspiracy theory are easily exploitable phenomena that can be weaponised through misinformation, disinformation and misguided ‘influencers’ in those parts of the information environment in spaces not filled by quality, ethical journalism. 

Indeed, Tooze has argued that the covid crisis itself, and particularly its social and economic impacts, should be seen as a "trial run,” a “wake up call"  for future shocks- which may be more catastrophically exploitable. 

Facts matter in the fightback

Here I nail my colours to the mast and contend that the enlightenment values that Hobsbawm feared would be lost in the growing noise of information chaos and ideological reaction, are in serious need of creative bolstering.

Facts matter; truth is at the heart of the response to the evolving risk society we inhabit, one in which the digital public sphere is a space of contention between responsible actors and those that intentionally magnify public harms.

The word ‘truth’ here should be qualified. Perhaps more specifically I mean the idea that certain standards of factuality can be brought to bear on events in the world through the application of intellectually honest inquiry which can form the basis for rational moral action,  not only in responding to global risk but to hold power to account - even if it is only to expose lies and crimes that have occurred with impunity.

Rational moral action depends on the ability to access truthful information to inform decision-making; ideally, so does democracy. Resistance to the abuse of information in democratic spaces requires a return to the belief that facts can be interposed between agents of power and their victims so that the former can be non-violently held to account by the latter; moreover, that society can rationally organise itself in its own interest to mitigate the dangers they face.

The costs of inaction will grow more dear with time; if reasonable standards of factuality decline in social standing, the space it vacates could be opportunistically seized by dangerous demagogues. 

The sleep of reason brings forth monsters. 

A more ‘truthless’ world is one that is in greater thrall than ever to the caprices of autocratic bullies (and corporate elites). It invites extra-territorial repression, cases like the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khahshoggi - but with the higher chance of a silent aftermath.

 Where autocracies succeed in diminishing public faith in truth, well-resourced falsifiers can enter into the vacated space; lies spread ever more undeterred. 

If, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, falsehoods carry the day, then, as Yale’s Timothy Snyder has observed, all that’s left is money, power - and spectacle. “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom,” he wrote in his book ‘On Tyranny’ (2018).  “If nothing is true, then no one can criticise power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.”

Luckily, good quality journalism still exists, in our era of denatured ‘reporting’ and partisan news. And the media have a major, perhaps decisive, role to play on the side of facts and in the cause of progress to avert Hobsbawm’s nightmare. The media are perhaps the most important democratic institution vis a vis the information warfare threat - and there’s plenty to think about in terms of how smaller democratic states, such as Aotearoa, can make use of its values and freedoms to protect itself through collaborative journalistic practices. 

More on that in Part 2

1.  Cottle, S. (1998) ‘Ulrich Beck, `Risk Society’ and the Media: A Catastrophic View?’, European Journal of Communication, 13(1), pp. 5–32. doi: 10.1177/0267323198013001001