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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't only a problem for intelligence services, of course, but it's an acute problem when you're trying to *influence* another country'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'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't necessarily mutually exclusive, but I think the latter aspect doesn't get enough attention. We search for ultimate objectives and motives while discounting deficiencies in the author service'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.
