Global Security and Intelligence Studies Volume 5, Number 1, Spring / Summer 2020 | Page 26

Global Security and Intelligence Studies
of effort to reach one person as it
does five million (Shallcross 2017).
Conversely, the simplicity by which
information is shared has led to increased
accessibility by those on
the receiving end.
• Attribution in this arena is increasingly
difficult. Social personas can
create profiles that appear to be
legitimate, but in reality are fake.
Websites can also be created by unknown
sources to relay disinformation.
Furthermore, the narratives do
not necessarily have to be untrue.
For example, they can be attached
to already-established movements
within a democratic society. The impact
of this is twofold: first, it gives
artificial credibility and visibility to
otherwise illegitimate groups. Second,
if the deception is detected, it
can have the opposite effect of discrediting
legitimate groups by tainting
them with foreign interference.
• There is an ever-growing information
environment. Information
overload can lead to mass confusion
and the subsequent disengagement
of society, making information manipulation
by the aggressor easier
and more normalized. The “velocity
of human interaction and the
velocity of information is at an alltime
high,” leading to somewhat of
a truth crisis (Banach 2018). Even if
there is an overall awareness of deception
by the public and the individuals
that comprise it, the limitations
of System 2 to handle so much
information means that corrections
and fact checking almost never fully
undo the damage done (Kagan,
Bugayova, and Cafarella 2019).
2) Cyber Espionage
While there is no agreed upon definition
at the moment, the 2013 Tallinn
manual defines cyber espionage as “an
act undertaken clandestinely or under
false pretenses that uses cyber capabilities
to gather (or attempt to gather)
information with the intention of communicating
it to the opposing party”
(Schmitt). These hacking operations are
typically carried out by nation states,
but are increasingly taken up by nonstate
actors. Conversely, “hacktivism”
blends hacking and activism for a political
or social cause, and state and local
governments are increasingly finding
themselves targets (Bergal 2017). This
form of digital disobedience, however
altruistic the intent, is highly disruptive
and regarded as harassment.
While there are a variety of ways
hacked information can be used to influence
targets, one tactic is hack and
leak operations. This involves two stages:
the first “focuses on intrusion (unauthorized
access to networks), while the
second concentrates on influence (the
use of digital technologies to shift public
debate) (Shires 2019). The intrusion
into specific digital systems and networks
constitutes cyber espionage—the
theft of information in cyberspace, usually
classified as compromising material.
On the other hand, the leak of said
stolen information into the public arena
has intended psychological effects.
This is perhaps especially so when the
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