Speaker 1: Welcome to the Deep Dive, the knowledge shortcut that turns
massive stacks of historical files, congressional hearings, and a cutting
edge research into the essential insights you need fast. Today
we are opening a set of files that, well, they
confirm one of the most persistent and unsettling rumors of
the Cold War era. We're talking about the deep secret
relationship between US intelligence and the news media. And we're
going to track this story right up to the present day,
where the fight isn't about human spies and newsrooms anymore,
but something else entirely. It's about algorithmic warfare am squarely
at your perception. I want you to just think about
this for a second. Imagine you're a foreign correspondent operating
in say Beirut or Moscow or Tehran. Your ultimate professional
fear it's not necessarily being killed in a crossfire, it's
being mistakenly labeled a spy. That suspicion alone is a
death sentence in so many parts of the world. What
we're looking at today is the documented kind of frightening
reality that for two whole decades during the Cold War,
major US media organizations they didn't just passively tolerate intelligence contact.
They systematically cooperated with the CIA. It was an institutional
policy of collusion. That I mean. It fundamentally blurred the
lines between gathering news and gathering intelligence.
Speaker 2: And that systematic collusion is really the anchor for this
whole deep dive. Our goal here is to synthesize three
very different eras of these influence operations. We're going to
start with the institutional history in the nineteen fifties, the
documented arrangement between the fledgling CIA or even its predecessor
of the Central Intelligence Group, the CIG, and media titans
like Time Ink, the parent company of Time and Life magazines,
and the New York Times. This is basically Operation Mockingbird,
but confirmed by the records, not.
Speaker 1: Just a conspiracy theory anymore.
Speaker 2: Not at all. Then we jump forward to the high
stakes public accountability hearings of the nineteen nineties. This was
the moment of reckoning, a real debate over ethical boundaries,
and it featured powerful, just heart wrenching testimony from former
hostages about the real world danger when journalists get associated
with intelligence work. The whole debate centered on whether the
CIA could ever legally keep a waiver authority to use reporters.
Speaker 1: And then the third part.
Speaker 2: Finally we accelerate to the present. We connect this historical
legacy to the rise of what's now being called cognitive warfare.
This is where the target is no longer the editor
in the newsroom, but the very way you process information online.
We're talking about state actors leveraging digital platforms in AI
to fundamentally manipulate well the cognitive domain, and.
Speaker 1: The clarity of the evidence on that Cold War illusion
is genuinely startling. I mean, we are not discussing some
isolated instance of a journalist who occasionally reported back to
the agency. We have documentation revealing a structural operational arrangement
between time Ink and the CIA that was established in
the very first decade of the Cold War and lasted
well into the late nineteen sixties. This wasn't a rogue operation.
This was strategic policy executed at the highest levels of
both organizations.
Speaker 2: So when we really start to dissect the CIA's access
to these media empires, we see right away that the
relationship with time Ink wasn't just transactional, it was symbiotic.
It began around nineteen forty nine, not long after the
CIA was even formed, taking over from the CIG to
Central Intelligence Group. The key thing to remember is that
time Ink had this massive, irreplaceable global presence.
Speaker 1: The CIA was new, but time Inc. Was already everywhere.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and what time Ink offered the CIA was something
no amount of government funding could just create.
Speaker 1: Overnight, which was what exactly. The people on the ground.
Speaker 2: The unfiltered eyes and ears of experienced correspondence on the
ground in every single strategically important corner of the globe.
So the agency gained systematic, continuous access to time Inc's
most valuable assets, their foreign correspondence, their confidential dispatches, and
their massive research and photographic files.
Speaker 1: These were resources the fledgling CIA just desperately needed to
map the post war world and I guess track all
these rising threats quickly. Let's talk about the gold standard
of intelligence. They receive this fyi material for your information.
This wasn't the polished, vetted stuff that you or I
would read in Time magazine, not even close.
Speaker 2: The published articles were just the tip of the iceberg.
The real intelligence, the real value, came from the private reports,
the cables, the personal letters the correspondents were sending back
to their editors. This fyi material was pure raw intelligence.
We're talking spicy corridor gossip, unverified but highly illuminating background
on political.
Speaker 1: Crises, post mortems on major events.
Speaker 2: And crucially private guidance for editors writing local stories that
had nuance only available to people on the inside.
Speaker 1: So okay, this is where the historian and make us fascinated.
Why would gossip and background speculation be considered priceless intelligence
that sounds so informal?
Speaker 2: Well, because it provided context, motive, personality assessments. It's the
human layer that hard military intelligence so often misses. For
young intelligence organization trying to understand closes societies like the
entire Soviet bloc, where press censorship was absolute. This material
was revolutionary.
Speaker 1: So they were getting a picture they couldn't get anywhere else.
Speaker 2: Nowhere else. In fact, experienced CIA officers admitted openly that
many US journalists were and I'm quoting here, presenting a
more accurate and informed picture of conditions in Eastern Europe
than the agency's own spy networks. Wow, it was faster,
it was broader, and often more insightful because journalists had
access to circles that diplomats or traditional spies just couldn't touch.
Speaker 1: And that dependency is why they formalized this.
Speaker 2: That's exactly why this is why the CIA formalized this
system with major publishers. It was a necessity for them.
Speaker 1: And we know this wasn't just a one off thing
with Time Inc. Because the structure was well, it was
basically copied elsewhere.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, the evidence we have suggest the arrangement between the
CIA and the New York Times was almost identical to
the one with Time Inc. And that tells you this
was a common CIA policy of systemic press engagement, established
right when the agency was transitioning from the CIG to
the CIA in the late nineteen forties. It was viewed
as a necessary, if a controversial, tool for intelligence collection
in a rapidly changing world.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's move from the written word to the
visual because the CIA's intense interest in the Life magazine
photo archive that gives us a really fascinating look into
their collection methods. Before we had sophisticated spyplanes or satellites,
this was basically photographic intelligence gathering using a commercial library.
Speaker 2: It was a crucial partnership. The CIA was intensely interested
in the Life magazine photo archive, which had what fourteen
years worth of images going all the way back to
nineteen thirty six. They were essentially backfilling their strategic intelligence
databases using commercial photography. This was before the U two flights,
before high resolution spy satellites. Their main visual intelligence was
often what they could manually pull from sources like life.
Speaker 1: And we have some incredible specific on the operational scale
of this. This wasn't a one off request. We're talking
about CIA officers making weekly visits to the archives for
almost two decades.
Speaker 2: Correct. The sheer volume is what really shows how systematic
this was. Yeah, when they started reviewing the historical files
back in nineteen forty nine, CIA officers were copying an
average of three to five hundred photographs per week, per week,
per week. I mean, just think about that logistical operation.
And even after they finished that big historical review, they
kept going. They continued to pull an average of eighty
nine photos per week from the current.
Speaker 1: Files, every single week, year after year, year after year.
So what were they looking for? Was it just you know,
war photos or something more tactical.
Speaker 2: The material fell into two really critical buckets. About three
quarters of it was classified as geographic.
Speaker 1: Okay, what does that mean?
Speaker 2: Coastline mapping of Europe, detailed topography of sensitive areas like Iran,
or infrastructure details. This was hard foundational intelligence, the kind
of stuff you use for mapping and visualizing targets for
future military or intelligence planning.
Speaker 1: And the other quarter.
Speaker 2: That remaining quarter focused almost exclusively on identifying and tracking
personalities from behind the Iron Curtain, key leaders, potential assets,
targets within the Soviet sphere of influence.
Speaker 1: So you have this top secret, critical operation for national security,
but the human element inside time inc soughw it very
very differently. The photo overseer a woman named Susie Eggleston.
She didn't see this as some patriotic service to her.
It was a massive bureaucratic headache.
Speaker 2: It is the classic collision of espionage in publishing. Right.
Eggleston complained in nineteen fifty two that the CIA visits
were a huge nuisance. I mean, imagine you're the photo
editor for a global magazine like.
Speaker 1: Life, right. Your whole job is that library.
Speaker 2: Your most important asset is your image library. And every
single week the CIA takes hundreds of images out of
circulation for copying, even if it's just for a few days.
This handicapped the magazine's own editorial skit. She concluded, and
this is a quote. Possibly they are building up a
Peachey strategic file, but I take a dim view of
the whole thing at.
Speaker 1: This point, a Peachey strategic file. She just saw it
as annoying, tedious work, no matter the national security rationale
behind it. Exactly so, to keep this whole arrangement going,
the CIA had to pull strings at the corporate level.
They couldn't just deal with the annoyed archivist.
Speaker 2: Oh, they absolutely needed high level reassurance. James M. Andrews,
who was the CIA's Assistant director for Intelligence Collection, he
personally intervened. He gave a tour of the CIA to
Bernard Barnes, Egleston's direct supervisor, just to impress upon him
the gravity of the mission. And then Andrews wrote directly
to Time Ink president roy E Larson, assuring him that
the life photographs were quote extremely valuable for a variety
of intelligence purposes and were directly serving national security.
Speaker 1: So this was a high level corporate to spymaster relationship.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, which just demonstrates how much the CIA valued this act.
Speaker 1: But despite all that high level management, we know the
arrangement sparked some really serious internal dissent among the senior
editorial staff. The patriotic consensus wasn't, you know, absolute.
Speaker 2: No, it wasn't, and the dissent was powerful, even though
it was kept internal and strictly confidential. He kept to consider.
Manfred Gottfried, a senior editor at Time, Inc. He did
not mince words. He argued fiercely, saying, CIA is still
the top us spy ring. As long as we pretend
to be honest journalists, we had not to be mixed
up in it. He questioned the entire premise. He pointed
out the irony that Congress would never allow the CIA
to tap a US news organization's communication wires. Yet here
the organization was just willingly handing over its confidential files.
Speaker 1: So did that internal critique actually have any effect?
Speaker 2: It did. It had a limited but really important effect.
Henry LUs, the powerful founder of Time, Inc. He partially
conceded to the concerns of his senior editors. He ended
the practice of sharing the foreign dispatches directly with the CIA.
Speaker 1: Okay, so that's a big deal, it is.
Speaker 2: But other collaborations, and crucially the photo archive access that
continued for several more years. It just shows how difficult
it was to sever such a valuable intelligence stream.
Speaker 1: What stands out most to me about this whole period
is the almost fanatical commitment to secrecy, even more intense
than the agency's oone. And this leads us to this
unwritten code that kept this whole thing secret even after
all the intelligence abuses were exposed in the nineteen seventies
by the Church Committee.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that enduring secrecy. It boils down to multiple layers
of loyalty. Senior staff were loyal to each other, and
they preferred resolving internal disputes privately, not as they'd say,
airing their grievances in print. They were loyal to this
abstract concept of national security, and critically, they felt a
responsibility to protect their government sources, you know, the people
sharing sensitive confidential information with responsible journalists under the expectation
of discretion.
Speaker 1: And this commitment to secrecy is just beautifully illustrated by
the security classification details. This is my favorite part.
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate mic drop detail, isn't it. When the
CIA proposed lowering the security classification of the copied photos
from confidential to restricted, which would have made them much
easier for the agency to share with the other government departments.
Time Inc. President roy E Larson flatly refused.
Speaker 1: Wait, so, let me get this straight. The private media
company was more concerned about protecting the idea of secrecy
than the intelligence agency was about easily sharing its own
gathered data.
Speaker 2: That's it. That shows you where the true loyalty lay.
Speaker 1: Unbelievable.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, Time Inc. Insisted on keeping the higher confidential classification,
specifically to ensure that the existence of their relationship with
the CIA would never be discovered publicly. They prioritized keeping
the operational collaboration secret even more highly than the CIA
prioritized the easy dissemination of the intelligence they gathered. This
just reveals the immense institutional pressure and cultural imperative to
protect the arrangement at all costs during that period.
Speaker 1: So that deep systematic collusion, you know, the one relying
on internal loyalty and discretion. It eventually crumbled under the
weight of post Vietnam and Watergate public accountability. The revelations
from the Church Committee investigations in the nineteen seventies, which
exposed these widespread domestic intelligence abuses. They forced Congress to
look very closely at the ethical lines between the CIA
and civilian society, and this all came to a head
in nineteen ninety six with the Senate hearing that was
specifically focused on the CIA's use of journalists, clergy and
Peace Corps personnel.
Speaker 2: And the stakes in nineteen ninety six were just dramatically
raised by the living cost of that past collusion, and
it was all demonstrated through the testimony of one man,
Terry Anderson. Anderson was the Associated Pressed euro chief in
the Middle East, a very high profile figure who spent
six agonizing years as a hostage from nineteen eighty five
to nineteen ninety one, held by fundamentalist Sheites in Lebanon.
Speaker 1: Anderson's testimony was just devastating because it personalized the threat completely.
He recounted how his cats didn't just suspect you as
a spy, they operated under the absolute assumption that he
was one. He was interrogated repeatedly, constantly pressed to reveal
the name of the CIA agent within the AP that
you report to.
Speaker 2: His experience was absolutely critical to the policy debate. Anderson
argued that the mere suspicion that journalists are spies is
already a global occupational hazard.
Speaker 1: But any official US policy that provides a formal exception
to a ban on using journalists, and no matter how
narrow it is, it just validates that paranoia.
Speaker 2: Exactly, it validates it and actively endangers the lives of
every single non governmental American working in hostile territory. He
advocated for a clear, absolute, public blanket ban on using
journalists to cover or recruiting journalists as intelligence assets period.
Speaker 1: He was basically arguing that giving the CIA an official loophole,
even for the most extreme circumstances, effectively hands propaganda to
those who want to kidnap or execute Americans abroad.
Speaker 2: Yes, the point was that perception is reality and hostile zones.
Anderson insisted that the agency's public insistence on keeping a
formal exception to a rule. It's supposedly accepted that using
journalists in dangers lives was creating immediate harm just by
reinforcing this narrative of espionage, he asked Congress. He said,
just because we can conceive of a scenario where speed
limits must be broken for an emergency, do we legislate
a formal exception for speeding for all citizens. No, the
law has to stand absolute, even if it might be
occasionally broken in an extreme emergency.
Speaker 1: Okay, So let's pivot to the government's stance, which was
articulated by the CIA director at the time, John Deutsch.
He affirmed that the general policy was a ban, that
the entire debate really hinged on his insistence on retaining
this waiver authority. The director's option.
Speaker 2: Deutsch's policy was essentially, we ban it, but we need
an emergency escape clause. The Director of Central Intelligence, the DCI,
must retain the waiver authority for truly exceptional circumstances that
involve an extreme threat to the nation.
Speaker 1: And he gave examples right he did.
Speaker 2: He cited finding American hostages or deterring the use of
a weapon of mass destruction in a densely populated urban
area as scenarios where rapid unconventional action might be necessary.
Speaker 1: And his rationale for keeping this ultimate power in the
DCI's office rather than say, elevating it to the president,
and that was purely about operational efficiency and chain of command,
wasn't it it was?
Speaker 2: Deutsch argued very strongly against involving the White House in
day to day operational decisions, even these rare ones. He
felt the DCI should be trusted with operational command. His
ultimate accountability, he argued, was that the President could fire
him if he made a poor judgment call.
Speaker 1: But he did offer some oversight.
Speaker 2: He did. He agreed that if a waiver were used,
the decision would involve immediate notification of the Congressional oversight committees,
setting a goal of about forty eight hours to inform
the chairman in ranking members.
Speaker 1: And this whole question of who holds the waiver power,
the DCI or the President that became the focal point
for the Congressional pushback. I'm thinking specifically of Senator Arline
Inspector and previous legislative efforts like the House's Richardson Amendment
that's right.
Speaker 2: The push from Congress, which was fueled by this intense
testimony from the press and clergy, was either for an
absolute legally enshrined prohibition or at the very minimum, elevating
the exception authority to the president. They felt that if
a situation truly constituted an extreme threat to the nation,
it deserved the highest level of executive approval possible, not
just a director's signature.
Speaker 1: And the House had already passed a bill on this right.
Speaker 2: The House had yeah, they passed a bill supporting the
need for this legislative solution by an overwhelming margin of
four hundred and seventeen to six. This wasn't a partisan debate,
it was a constitutional one about checks and balances on
executive intelligence power.
Speaker 1: So the press and clergy response was just absolute, and
it was rooted in this idea that their work requires
unimpeachable trust. Mortimer B. Zuckerman of US News and World Report,
he made a powerful case based on the constitutional integrity
of the press.
Speaker 2: Zuckerman argued that untainted journalism is itself a precious national resource,
and it does more long term good for the country
than any short term intelligence gained from compromising a reporter.
And he brought up the case of Nick Daniloff, who
was the Moscow bureau chief for US News. He was
falsely accused and arrested by the KGB in nineteen eighty six.
And crucially, Daniloff was unwittingly involved in an intelligence drop.
He had no idea he was being used.
Speaker 1: And the implication there is if even unwitting involvement taints
the entire profession, how can any official policy that supports
witting involvement ever be justified precisely.
Speaker 2: Zuckerman contended that the damage caused by the mere perception
of a link spreads across the entire profession, endangering all
journalists working overseas. The independence of the press, he argued,
had to be protected by an absolute legal line.
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, you had Ted Copple of ABC News, with his
deep history of reporting from high conflict zones, and he
took a different, almost cynical path to the exact same
conclusion Bannett. Absolutely, even if you know the ban will
be broken.
Speaker 2: Copple was intensely pressed. He stated that foreign governments and
intelligence agencies worldwide already assume American journalists are working for
the CIA. He just acknowledged that reality. He also acknowledged
that US intelligence agencies have historically circumvented laws when they
perceived a dire national interest, and he assumed they would
continue to do so in truly extreme emergencies.
Speaker 1: So his argument was essentially, don't validate the necessary evil.
Let the law stand as absolute, even if you suspect
it might be violated in a crisis.
Speaker 2: Yes, Copple's core point was this, if the CIA must,
on occasion use the role of an American journalist to
conceal one of its operatives, it will do so regardless
of what is decided by Congress. But if they do,
they should be acting in the full knowledge that they
are endangering a free press and breaking at US law.
Legislating an exception to him just sanctions the danger's behavior,
where as an absolute ban preserves the legal and moral
high ground that journalists need when they're defending their independence
to skeptical foreign powers.
Speaker 1: And the piece core and the clergy were similarly unified.
They argued not from a constitutional position, but from one
of trust and physical risk management.
Speaker 2: Yeah leaders representing the National Association of Evangelicals, mari Andal Sisters,
and Church Role Service they all emphasized that the roughly
fifty thousand Americans working abroad in ministry and relief rely
entirely on absolute, unquestioned trust. Any waiver, any loophole just
destroys that confidence and jeopardizes personnel in politically sensitive areas.
Speaker 1: And the most poignant example of that tangible cost came
from Senator Paul Coverdelle, who was a former director of
the Peace Corps.
Speaker 2: Coverdell was crystal clear the Peace Corps was founded on
a strict ethical separation. They maintained a ten year in
eligibility rule for anyone with recent intelligence activity, and he
recalled opening a program in Bolivia where a volunteer was
tragically lost simply because she was mistaken for an agent
of the DEA. It just highlights the brutal reality mistake
and identity is a life or death matter.
Speaker 1: So their policy is absolute.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, the Peace Corps policy remains there shall not be
any contact whatsoever between anyone in the intelligence community and
any Peace Corps volunteer or trainee. That absolute line is
a non negotiable insurance policy for their lives.
Speaker 1: So the nineteen ninety six debate really shows this massive
shift in consciousness. We're moving from the silent, institutionalized loyalty
of the nineteen fifties toward an insistence on public, legally
defined separation, all to protect American lives and the integrity
of non governmental work abroad.
Speaker 2: And that great fight of the nineteen nineties was all
about protecting the body of the journalist, drawing a clear
line in the sand to prevent physical risk and reputational harm.
Today the battlefield has shifted entirely. The fight is about
protecting the mind and judgment of the audience itself.
Speaker 1: So if the strategic goal remains the same controlling narratives
and influencing decision makers, just like the CIA wanted those
time ink dispatches, the method is now algorithmic. We've transitioned
from recruiting human spies to deploying automated systems, and the
resulting phenomenon is what military strategists are now calling cognitive
warfare or CW.
Speaker 2: Cognitive warfare is the modern operational threat. It's defined explicitly
as the application of information science and cognitive science to enhance,
or more often, to degrade the decision making process and
the resulting behavior of target populations that could be political leaders,
military personnel, or just civilian society. It targets the cognitive domain,
that intangible space where individuals form thoughts, process information, and
ultimately decide how to act.
Speaker 1: This sounds far more sophisticated than simply dropping leaflets or
releasing standard propaganda. It feels like an attack on trust itself.
Speaker 2: That's the key distinction. Its highly focused, personalized psychological manipulation.
The strategic goal and this ECHOSANSU is winning without fighting.
It's to gain a positional advantage dominate perceptions and shape
the adversary's will to act without ever needing a physical conflict.
Speaker 1: So influencing minds has always been part of warfare, but
the technology of itailable today.
Speaker 2: It exponentially enhances the reach and efficacy of these activities, and.
Speaker 1: This brings us to the accelerators artificial intelligence and global
digital platforms.
Speaker 2: These technologies are the transformative forces enabling mass disruption AI.
In advanced computational methods. They facilitate hyper specific, micro targeting
and deep analysis of psychological profiles that are derived from
massive data sets. This allows for the automation of influence
campaigns on a scale and at a speed that was
just unimaginable in the Cold War era. They are used
to quote, assess access, and affect the cognitive space of
millions of people simultaneously.
Speaker 1: And the most disrupt development here seems to be generative AI,
which raises some I don't know existential questions about the
very concept of objective truth.
Speaker 2: It really does. Generative AI, specifically large language models LMS
and deep fake technology. It allows state actors to create
mass disruption using low cost but incredibly impactful influence operations.
The technology makes it increasingly difficult, if not impots, to
reliably distinguish between real and manufactured media.
Speaker 1: And we've seen this in the wild right we have.
Speaker 2: For instance, so twenty twenty two pro Chinese influence operation
was found to be using video content featuring hyperrealistic AI
generated fictitious newscasters. The barrier to entry for producing high
quality targeted disinformation has completely collapsed, and that fundamentally alters
the strategic environment.
Speaker 1: So let's examine how our major adversaries, Russia and China
are structuring their approach to dominate this cognitive space. They
don't just see this as a tactic for them, it's
a doctrine.
Speaker 2: China explicitly incorporates these concepts into its three warfarees doctrine.
That's one public opinion warfare, two psychological warfare, and three
legal warfare. Chinese analysts are focused on intelligentized warfare, meaning
warfare heavily reliant on smart technologies, and they openly discussed
the struggle for brain control. Brain control for them, public
opinion warfare is controlling the global media narrative about China.
It's an institutional attack on how the world perceives their
intentions and their actions.
Speaker 1: So when China talks about brain control, They're not really
discussing science fiction. They're talking about using automated systems to
flood media platforms with customized, realistic disinformation to erode trust
and manipulate policymakers.
Speaker 2: Precisely, they view the cognitive domain as the central battleground
where political will and societal resilience are broken down long
before any kinetic conflict even begins.
Speaker 1: And Russia's methods, which are built on this long history
of active measures, also heavily emphasize information confrontation.
Speaker 2: Russia's doctrine of new generation warfare is completely dominated by
information and psychological operations. Influential Russian military authors stress the
role of non military means, things like military, economic and
IT measures, in combination with efficient psychological information campaigns. They
argue that these non kinetic methods can actually exceed the
power of conventional weapons and their effectiveness.
Speaker 1: And crucially, Russia's cognitive warfare is multimodal. It's not just
limited to spamming social media.
Speaker 2: That is a key analytical distinction. Russia's efforts use every
possible platform for information transmission social media, yes, but also
specialized conferences, official diplomatic channels and influential individuals, and furthermore,
their cognitive operations often pair physical actions like military exercises,
cyber attacks, or even minor acts of sabotage with psychological
campaigns to shape adversaries decision making and weaken their collective
will to act.
Speaker 1: The physical action is just a stage for the psychological
message you got it. So this brings us back to
the question of the US government. If the goal is
still clandestine influence, the modern parallel isn't the CIA recruiting
a journalist, it's running large scale automated influence operations across
global platforms.
Speaker 2: That is the modern continuum of influence. US government agencies
today they address the threat from adversaries using terms like
for norm align, influence, or influence operations, but the core
activity shaping foreign narratives without attribution remains relevant for them
as well. And the crucial data point here is the
November twenty twenty two Meta report that detailed a pro
US influence operation linked to the US military itself.
Speaker 1: And this is where we see the echoes of the
nineteen fifties collusion, but with modern tools, a US linked
operation using the exact same coordinated inauthentic behavior methods that
we routinely criticize Russia and China for using.
Speaker 2: Yes, metafound links the individuals associated with the US military
who created fake accounts on over seven Internet services, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube,
and even Russian platforms like v contact day. The campaign
was highly targeted, primarily focused on Central Asia and the
Middle East, including countries critical to US strategy like Iran, Afghanistan,
and Russia.
Speaker 1: And what was the content of these fake campaigns? What
were they trying to push?
Speaker 2: They employed coordinated memes, fake personas, and carefully curated content
posting primarily in Arabic, Farsi and Russian, the message to
emphasize cooperation with the US and often sharply criticize the
governments of Iran, China, and Russia.
Speaker 1: So this campaign was a clear example of the US
military using these sophisticated influence operations coordinated inauthentic behavior to
shape foreign narratives digitally exactly now.
Speaker 2: Meta noted the overall impact was low because the networks
were small, but the existence of a US linked operation
using fake accounts mirrors the historical desire to control foreign narratives.
It's just being executed through clandestine digital systems now instead
of relying on compromise journalists.
Speaker 1: So the infrastructure of influence has shifted from the publisher's
annex where the CIA reviewed photos, to the algorithmic feed
where fake newscasters just appear. The fundamental operational principle controlling
the narrative without being discovered, that remains the driving force.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. The Cold War desire to influence global opinion required
secrecy protected by a confidential stamp. The modern imperative requires
anonymity protected by VPNs, fake personas, and bought networks designed
for coordinated inauthentic behavior. The threat today is not just
what information you are receiving, but who controls the architecture
of your perception. So, to synthesize this long journey, we've
been on the thread connecting the CIA harvesting intelligence from
time making the nineteen fifties and modern state actors using
deep fakes. Is this consistent strategic effort to influence perception
and control narratives for military or political gain. The nineteen
fifties relied on the loyalty and discretion of elite journalists
to build what they called a priceless intelligence.
Speaker 1: Resource, and that historical collusion, even when it was hidden,
had devastating real world consequences. It risked the lives of
every honest journalist, missionary, and aid worker abroad, as we
saw so powerfully illustrated by Terry Anderson's painful six Years
of Captivity. The resulting nineteen ninety six policy debate really
centered on whether to protect the constitutional integrity of the
press with an absolute legal ban, or whether to permit
a high level exception for extreme national security.
Speaker 2: Today, the focus has entirely shifted away from regulating the
u actions of individual human spies toward grappling with cognitive warfare,
a challenge that exploits the very architecture of our digital lives.
Global powers like China and Russia are investing heavily and
algorithmic tools to target our decision making processes, leveraging AI,
deep fakes and vast social media platforms, creating a systemic
information vulnerability.
Speaker 1: The ethical dimensions for democracy are just staggering. The historical
infiltration was a betrayal of specific organizations and individuals, but
the modern cognitive attack it threatens the entire mechanism of
public discourse. The irony is profound in the nineteen fifties,
the greatest fear was that your government was secretly lined
to you by embedding spies in the media. Today, the
fears that adversarial state actors and perhaps even domestic entities,
as that meta report suggests, are using automated, untraceable methods
to manipulate how you think, regardless of who the nominal
source even is. The rise of cheap, hyperrealistic AI generated
media means the integrity of our shared information of vironment
is under constant, mass scale assault. When the Chinese talk
about brain control, they're highlighting our unique vulnerability, our reliance
on citizens being able to verify basic truth claims. So
I want you to consider this profound evolution. We've gone
from the systemic but discrete infiltration of a few elite
newsrooms in the nineteen fifties that risk individual lives to
state sponsored entities using AI and automated systems today to
manipulate your fundamental cognitive processes and perceptions online. So here's
the question for you. Which threat, in your view, poses
a greater long term danger to the integrity of public
information and the functioning of democracy and why is it?
The secret betrayal of press integrity? By human spies, or
is it the overt systemic attack on truth itself by algorithms.
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