We’ve all heard a lot about “cyberwarfare” – about how states could attack their enemies through computer networks, damaging their infrastructure or stealing their secrets.
Walking through the headquarters of the 77th, the strange new reality of warfare was on display. Running from March 2011, another operation aimed for regime change in Zimbabwe by discrediting the Zanu PF party. A slide explained “this will hopefully lead to a long-running, large-scale, pioneering effects operation”. Operation Quito was a campaign, running some time after 2009, to prevent Argentina from taking over the Falkland Islands. Sometimes the operations focused on specific individuals and groups, sometimes the wider regimes or even general populations. They had operational targets across the globe: Iran, Africa, North Korea, Russia and the UK. “Underpass” was a way to change the outcome of online polls. “Gateway” gave the ability to “artificially increase traffic to a website”. “Clean Sweep” would impersonate Facebook wall posts for individuals or entire countries. Another, called “Burlesque”, spoofed SMS messages. A tool dubbed “Badger” allowed the mass delivery of email. JTRIG also boasted an arsenal of 200 info-weapons, ranging from in-development to fully operational. They could bombard someone’s phone with text messages or calls. They could change someone’s social media photos (“can take ‘paranoia’ to a whole new level”, a slide read.) They could use masquerade-type techniques – that is: placing “secret” information on a compromised computer. Those documents give us a glimpse of what these kinds of covert information campaigns could look like.Īccording to the slides, JTRIG was in the business of discrediting companies, by passing “confidential information to the press through blogs etc.”, and by posting negative information on internet forums.
WW2 ARMY SIZES BRIGADE SERIES
Almost all we know about it comes from a series of slides leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013. It is called the “Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group” – or JTRIG – an utterly unrevealing name, as it is common in the world of intelligence. GCHQ, for instance, also has a unit dedicated to fighting wars with information. I saw no evidence that the 77th do these kinds of operations themselves, but this more aggressive use of information is nothing new.
WW2 ARMY SIZES BRIGADE FULL
Some may have taken the army’s course in Defence Media Operations, and almost half were reservists from civvy street, with full time jobs in marketing or consumer research. Plucked from across the military, they were proficient in graphic design, social media advertising, and data analytics.
WW2 ARMY SIZES BRIGADE HOW TO
The men and women of the 77th knew how to set up cameras, record sound, edit videos. Over to one side, there was a suite full of large, electronic sketch pads and multi-screened desktops loaded with digital editing software.
“If everybody is thinking alike then somebody isn’t thinking,” was written in foot-high letters across a whiteboard in one of the main atriums of the base. They are the troops fighting Britain’s information wars.
It was the summer of 2017, and on this military base nestled among the hills of Berkshire, I was visiting a part of the British Army unlike any other. Through the hut, and under a row of floodlights, I walked towards a long line of drab, low-rise brick buildings. A Union flag twisted in a gust of wind, and soldiers strode in and out of a squat guard’s hut in the middle of the road. A barbed-wire fence stretched off far to either side.