Persuasion Campaigns and Influence Ops

Persuasion campaigns and influence ops are the key operational aspects of the SMiSC initiative.  The term persuasion campaign lends itself to an extended effort to change someone's (a large group, probably) mind, while the sibling term influence op speaks to a single/very few focused efforts. That is, a persuasion campaign could be what our friends in the marketing field call a marketing campaign, and an influence op could be a commercial or a series of commercials.  To extend the marketing analogy: the idea is the brand.

To me, the TA 1 technologies are intended to be early versions of a complex campaign/operation system, with the abilities to manually or automatically construct, launch, oversee, and evaluate either a campaign or an operation.  When such a system is deployed, one can imagine the existence of a console similar to the screen shown in the now-pulled chinese military hacking video clip.  However, the SMiSC consoles for campaigns and ops will probably be chock full of great ideas and catchy carrier mechanisms to project them.  Instead of an IP address combo box and an attack button, the SMiSC consoles could have much more devious features:

• List of ideas (all of which came through some bureaucracy of approvals) (brand! think brand!)


• List of carrier mechanisms in which to embed the idea (also approved) (think commercial!)


• A viewer for the combined idea and carrier


• A simulator preview mode (using TA 3 technologies, the idea and carrier would be inserted into the TA 2 system for immediate-mode efficacy modeling)


• The attack button could be in Chinese, too, just to make a new "tradition."


• The operator could specify constraints on the initial placement of the attack (but come on, these things are intended to spread like wildfire, so who'd be kidding whom?)


• The SMiSC console would really just be the GUI to the attack/injection system.

The attack/injection system itself will be covered in a forthcoming post.  What we do with it has already been covered.