Active Measures — inside the history of disinformation
As election meddling thrives, Thomas Rid shows how political subterfuge is nothing new
https://www.ft.com/content/8fa8cc54-52fb-4781-8dff-c1abf781c1e2
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Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45892235-active-measures
This revelatory and dramatic history of disinformation traces the rise of secret organized deception operations from the interwar period to contemporary internet troll farms
We live in the age of disinformation–of organized deception. Spy agencies pour vast resources into hacking, leaking, and forging data, often with the goal of weakening the very foundation of liberal democracy: trust in facts. Thomas Rid, a renowned expert on technology and national security, was one of the first to sound the alarm. More than four months before the 2016 election, he warned that Russian military intelligence was "carefully planning and timing a high-stakes political campaign to disrupt the democratic process. But as crafty as such so-called active measures have become, they are not new.
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Zach Vorhies, The Face Of An Active Measure
https://www.yaacovapelbaum.com/2021/08/24/zach-vorhies-the-face-of-an-active-measure/
Zach Vorhies, the self-proclaimed Google whistleblower, has become the toast of conservative media and polite society. Since opportunistically ending his gig with YouTube, he’s been on a whirlwind tour with back-to-back interviews, pressing flesh and kissing babies. Somehow, he has managed to find time in his busy schedule to co-write a book entitled: “A Story of Big Tech Censorship and Bias and the Fight to Save Our Country and magically secure a distribution deal with Simon & Schuster.
I work in the AI software space and so I naturally got excited when I heard that Vorhies published some internal Google documents that proport to describe the innerworkings of their search AI. But alas, my excitement about getting freebees was short lived. Unlike real leaks like Vault 7, Vorhies delivered a nothing burger. His secret cache of internal Google documents shows evidence of fabrication and lacks any real technical value.