https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2005/09/psy-ops-propaganda-goes-mainstream.html
Slate article referenced in video. 1/2
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2005/09/psy-ops-propaganda-goes-mainstream.html
LONDON—Over the past 24 hours, seven people have checked into hospitals here with telltale symptoms. Rashes, vomiting, high temperature, and cramps: the classic signs of smallpox. Once thought wiped out, the disease is back and threatening a pandemic of epic proportions.
The government faces a dilemma: It needs people to stay home, but if the news breaks, mass panic might ensue as people flee the city, carrying the virus with them.
A shadowy media firm steps in to help orchestrate a sophisticated campaign of mass deception. Rather than alert the public to the smallpox threat, the company sets up a high-tech “ops center” to convince the public that an accident at a chemical plant threatens London. As the fictitious toxic cloud approaches the city, TV news outlets are provided graphic visuals charting the path of the invisible toxins. Londoners stay indoors, glued to the telly, convinced that even a short walk into the streets could be fatal.
This scenario may sound like a rejected plot twist from a mediocre Bond flick, but one company is dead set on making this fantasy come to life.
Strategic Communication Laboratories, a small U.K. firm specializing in “influence operations” made a very public debut this week with a glitzy exhibit occupying prime real estate at Defense Systems & Equipment International, or DSEi, the United Kingdom’s largest showcase for military technology. The main attraction was a full-scale mock-up of its ops center, running simulations ranging from natural disasters to political coups.
Just to the right of the ops center, a dark-suited man with a wireless microphone paces like a carnival barker, narrating the scenarios. Above him a screen flashes among scenes of disaster, while to his right, behind thick glass, workers sit attentively before banks of computer screens, busily scrolling through data. The play actors pause only to look up at a big board that flashes ominously between “hot spots” like North Korea and Congo.
While Londoners fret over fictitious toxins, the government works to contain the smallpox outbreak. The final result, according to SCL’s calculations, is that only thousands perish, rather than the 10 million originally projected. Another success.
Of course, the idea of deluding an entire city seems, well, a bit like propaganda.
“If your definition of propaganda is framing communications to do something that’s going to save lives, that’s fine,” says Mark Broughton, SCL’s public affairs director. “That’s not a word I would use for that.”
Then again, it’s hard to know exactly what else to call it. (Company literature describes SCL’s niche specialties as “psychological warfare,” “public diplomacy,” and “influence operations.”) The smallpox scenario plays out in excruciating detail how reporters would be tapped to receive disinformation, with TV and radio stations dedicated to around-the-clock coverage. Even the eventual disclosure is carefully scripted.
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In another doomsday scenario, the company assists a newly democratic country in South Asia as it struggles with corrupt politicians and a rising insurgency that threatens to bubble over into bloody revolution. SCL steps in to assist the benevolent king of “Manpurea” to temporarily seize power.
Oh, wait, that sounds a lot like Nepal, where the monarchy earlier this year ousted a corrupt government to stave off a rising Maoist movement. The problem is, the SCL scenario also sounds a lot like using a private company to help overthrow a democratically elected government. Another problem, at least in Nepal, is that the king now shows few signs of returning to democracy.
The company, which describes itself as the first private-sector provider of psychological operations, has been around since 1993. But its previous work was limited to civil operations, and it now wants to expand to military customers.
If SCL weren’t so earnest, it might actually seem to be mocking itself, or perhaps George Orwell. As the end of the smallpox scenario, dramatic music fades out to a taped message urging people to “embrace” strategic communications, which it describes as “the most powerful weapon in the world.” And the company Web page offers some decidedly creepy asides. “The [ops center] can override all national radio and TV broadcasts in time of crisis,” it says, alluding to work the company has done in an unspecified Asian country.
The government’s use of deception in the service of national security is not new. During World War II, for example, Allied forces conducted a massive misinformation campaign, called Operation Fortitude, designed to hide plans for the Normandy invasion. More recent efforts have met with controversy, however. In 2002, the Pentagon shuttered its brand new Office of Strategic Influence after public outcry over its purported plans to spread deceptive information to the foreign press.
Government deception may even be justified in some cases, according to Michael Schrage, a senior adviser to the security-studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “If you tell the population that there’s been a bio-warfare attack, hospital emergency rooms will be overwhelmed with people who sincerely believe they have all the symptoms and require immediate attention,” Schrage says.
The problem, he adds, is that in a democracy, a large-scale ruse would work just once.
The U.S. government has generally sought to limit disinformation; some agencies—such as the CIA—are explicitly prohibited by law from misleading domestic press. And while the CIA is fond of concealment, it takes pride in the belief that truth is necessary for an open government, a sentiment chiseled into the agency’s lobby.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MI7
There was public speculation in 2015 that Stephen Jolly, the UK's then Director of Defence Communications, an Under-Secretary of State or 2* official, at the Ministry of Defence, might be seeking to revive MI7.[8]
Jolly was making waves in military circles at the time by driving forward a "full spectrum" approach to Defence communications, encompassing public relations, media operations, information operations and psyops.[9] Defence commentators dubbed this "post-Afghan reset" of communications the "Rainbow in the Dark" doctrine.[10] It was an approach that entailed the most radical shake-up in British Defence communications in more than thirty years.[11][12]
Jolly was also instrumental in the creation of the Forster Review that led to reform of the D-Notice Committee in the same year. This unique combination of responsibilities positioned Jolly in the eyes of conspiracy theorists as an inheritor of the traditions of MI7.[13][14][15]
MI7 was a branch of the British War Office’s Directorate of Military Intelligence with responsibilities for press liaison and propaganda. The branch was originally established in the First World War and disbanded after the signing of the Armistice. The branch was re-formed at the start of the Second World War. The new MI7, while less significant than its predecessor, acted as a necessary liaison link between the War Office and the Ministry of Information and Political Warfare Executive.