Infowar Irregulars Bulletin v2.0
OK, hello, here we are again. A few years ago this Substack hosted the Inforwar Irregulars Bulletin, which was focused on online conflict tradecraft at the level of those filling what would be company grade officers and NCOs in an organized formation. There were often bits of context that would be useful to those further up the command hierarchy who were trying to implement new capabilities. This is a reboot after four years during which I became progressively less visible in public and instead spending time mentoring and supporting company grade officers.
Longtime readers who know my meandering path over the last fourteen years will find this post to be familiar ground, but since we’re expecting an influx of new people, a bit of an introduction is in order. This introductory post is a brief “where I came from and why you might want to listen to me”, an extremely abbreviated presentation of the contents of book I’m writing. Having seen so much conflict for so many years, I’m ready to write something similar in spirit to Afghanistan: The Bear Trap, by Pakistani ISI general Mohammed Yousaf, which recounts the political and pragmatic decisions behind the rise of the Taliban as a means to drive the Soviet Union out.
This Substack will NOT be a serialization of my book. Articles here will be in the range of 600 to 900 words, each focused on one particular skill set or recent episode, with links to concepts covered in prior articles. If you’re evaluating whether to come back, a look at my Tradecraft bookshelf on BookWyrm will give you a sense of the topics that interest me the most.
For those who want some personal background ...
I’m an Iowa farm boy, an older Gen-X with long since departed Depression baby parents, around 10th from the end of 72 grandchildren among my father’s eight siblings and my mother’s nine. I’ve raised chickens, geese, pigs, cows, and as an adult I’ve helped friends tend goats, sheep, donkeys, and llamas. I can operate 1930s vintage Farmall tractors, sickle mowers, and New Holland motor balers. I have extensive carnal knowledge of pitchforks, manure spreaders, and I know all of the swear words required to repair an apron chain when it separates halfway through a load in freezing weather.
I was adopted after spending six of my first nine months in a half body cast to correct hip dysplasia and I have an adult son who was diagnosed with sensory integration disorder in grade school. This means I’ve got a mix of environmental and genetic stuff that put me on the autism spectrum. I was raised Lutheran, got really sick of coercive evangelical behavior right after the turn of the century, and in the summer of 2004 I converted to Buddhism. That fall I held my nose and pulled a straight Democratic ticket for the first time. John Kerry reminded me of a small boat commander from my father’s generation, and I knew Bush’s religious basis for prosecuting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was a mistake.
My first career was a computer science education, a decade of enterprise LAN/WAN duties, in 1998 I switched to ISP/telco duties, and I completed the Cisco Certified Network & Design Professional ratings in 2000. I’ve run the transmission side of an international voice carrier, founded a pair of wireless ISPs, and designed IP switching cores for voice networks as an employee of Metaswitch. The voice carrier was destroyed in the 911 attack, our stuff at 60 Hudson and 111 8th Avenue was running, but the business office of a key partner was on the 105th floor of the north World Trade Center tower. One of those ISPs scored a $600,000 private placement a couple months later, when nobody was investing in anything.
I caught Lyme in the summer of 2007 and ninety days later I was laying on my mom’s couch, having abandoned a small engineering business I could no longer run and an apartment I could no longer afford. I was largely disabled, but it didn’t sit well with me. I started researching renewable ammonia production and led a team that scored a $100,000 USDA innovation grant. Eighteen months later I was up in front of 200 Ph.D.s and investors at the 2008 Ammonia Fuel Network conference, presenting on a renewable plant design for the Niagara Falls area that had been funded by Wilson Greatbatch, the inventor of the pacemaker. I realized opposing the fossil fuel industry was a fool’s errand, so I decided I’d change our government. Progressive Congress News was launched two days after the 2010 election and at its peak it reached 23% of all Congressional staff. PCN was a top five finalist among 700+ submissions to the Knight Foundation News Challenge in 2011.
If you’re counting, that’s twice in a period of four years, during which I was seriously ill, where I parachuted into previously unknown territory and immediately went right to the top of the heap. I’m not much for fluffing myself up, that’s just an observation of objective reality. Others often find it troubling when someone knows what’s happening long before they do.
Right in the middle of all that I helped Chet Uber launch Project VIGILANT, which is most known for catching Chelsea Manning, the source of the Cablegate material that put Wikileaks on the map. I wasn’t pleased with how it was handled and I quit in the final days of 2010. Me being me, I participated in Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, for better of worse I’m a member of the Anonymous class of 2011 – 2012, most noted for writing the white paper that got twenty House offices to call for investigations of HBGary, and for Andrew Breitbart dropping dead in the middle of a fight with @AnonyOps and I.
Note the pattern. No matter what “IT” might be I can’t help but be right in the middle. Trouble Magnet is the most profoundly useless of all superpowers, but this is my lot in life.
I started writing in earnest, in public, and at times for pay back in 2006. Through the years I’ve had an audience of 50,000 on a good day at DailyKos, the country’s largest Progressive blog, and I served as the voice of the House Progressive Caucus there in 2010 and 2011. I’ve written for House, Senate, and Gubernatorial candidates. Back in the teens I had a three year stint ghost writing a cryptocurrency column in Forbes.
So I’ve written as an activist, I can adapt to the voice of others in the context of state wide political races, I’ve done advocacy on a regional and national basis, and I’m no strange to seeking six figure sums invested in things I’ve initiated. I have a demonstrated sense of how to go about influencing things.
Russia uses the phrase “operations technical” to describe network intrusions. I’ve spent time every day this century defending against that sort of problem. While I don’t do the extraction phase, I have been in the business of evaluating the take from such activities since 2011. More than half of Attribution of Advanced Persistent Threats were things I was already used to doing.
What we call influence operations, the Russians refer to as “operations psychological”. My overt campaigning is one end of that spectrum, and at the other end I found everything in Information Operations Recognition: From Nonlinear Analysis to Decision-Making familiar, except the signal processing stuff in chapter 3.
If you’ve made it this far I expect you’ll come back at least a couple more times to see what’s happening here. I hope I can shed some light on things for you.