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Technical know-how is necessary but not sufficient for executing an effective digital information operations campaign. A spy service would ideally possess a subtle sociological and political understanding of their target, and of its media environment.
An ex-FBI agent once told me that key to solving cases was understanding that people were "sublimated in their cultures"--that they were operating in a kind of cognitive matrix that might be very different than yours, and that you, too, were saturated in an encompassing culture.
This isn& #39;t only a problem for intelligence services, of course, but it& #39;s an acute problem when you& #39;re trying to *influence* another country& #39;s domestic politics or foreign policy. Inhabiting the deep culture of your target is hard.
This opens up all kinds of interpretive difficulties when we& #39;re trying to judge the ultimate purpose of an electoral influence campaign. Is it straightforwardly in service of a particular candidate? Is there some kind of double or triple game at play?
Did the intelligence service *want* to get caught, even while retaining deniability, to show how vulnerable the target country is? What are the sociological "hop points" from disinformation campaign "x" to foreign policy goal "y"?
Alternatively: does that spy service have a superficial understanding of the society of the targeted country, because of their own circumscribed access to information, ideological indoctrination, and communal/national biases?
These options aren& #39;t necessarily mutually exclusive, but I think the latter aspect doesn& #39;t get enough attention. We search for ultimate objectives and motives while discounting deficiencies in the author service& #39;s own understanding of their target.
Anyhow: yet again, this is a long-winded way for me to underline my belief that all espionage, including cyber-espionage, is ultimately an exercise in the humanities.
