Mindfuck Page 5
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IN LATE 2011, I broke the news to Nick Clegg’s team that I thought the party was in deep trouble. I explained that the data showed that Lib Dem voters were ideological, they were stubborn, and they hated compromise. But the party had become the antithesis of these attributes when it joined a coalition government with the Tories. The party was composed of uncompromising supporters, and yet it was operating in a government birthed out of compromising its principles. This type of compromise was a betrayal of Lib Dem voters’ ideals, and it was bound to drive people out of the party.
I put together slides and gave a presentation to Lib Dem leaders in an old wood-paneled committee room at Parliament. They’d been called together to hear an interim update on what I was finding and were excited to hear about what all this new technology was discovering. But their smiles quickly evaporated, as it was all very doom-and-gloom, describing in detail the tactical deficiencies in the party’s strategy. I created one slide showing that both Labour and the Tories had extensive data coverage of the voting population, meaning that they had quite a bit of data recorded for each voter, whereas the Lib Dems covered less than 2 percent of it. The report was damning and embarrassing, and no one wanted anything to do with it—or, ultimately, with me. It’s fair to note here that I can be a bit blunt at times and have a tendency to piss people off. I’m a bit like Marmite, the salty brown yeast extract British people smear on toast. People either love it or hate it, but no one is ever blasé about Marmite. Suffice it to say that the party stalwarts were not keen on having some random Canadian who looks like an intern sashaying in and telling them they’re doing everything wrong.
The one Lib Dem who listened was the chief whip, Alistair Carmichael. Carmichael is as Scottish as they come, hailing from Islay, the southernmost island of the Inner Hebrides. A native Scot who grew up speaking Gaelic in school, Carmichael talks with a Highlander brogue mixed with a more “proper” Edinburgh accent he picked up in his early years as a crown prosecutor. He is chatty and warm, and when I visited his office, he always invited me to join him in a tipple of whisky from his well-stocked cabinet. As a government whip, he was a hardened political machinator whose easy manner belied a profound understanding of the levers of power. His position as chief whip meant he’d seen and heard everything, so I turned to him for advice on how to move beyond the impasse I was experiencing in the party. I always felt like I could speak frankly to Carmichael, which he, as a man who did not have a fear of speaking his mind, respected. And he tried, unfortunately to little avail, to persuade the party staff to heed what I was saying.
All of this was beyond frustrating. I was showing them data, supplemented by peer-reviewed literature. I was showing them science. And they were responding by calling me pessimistic, problematic, not a team player. The last straw came when someone leaked my slides, apparently in an attempt to embarrass me. It backfired when a journalist wrote approvingly of my arguments, noting that the Lib Dems suffered from “the great leafletting problem” and were far behind the Tories and Labour in data collection and research. When you spend so much time researching voters and going out and meeting them, you grow more and more connected to them. I felt like my work was not just about winning an election; it was also about understanding what the lives of people were really like. It was about expressing and reiterating to those in power what it was like to be trapped by poverty, ignorance, or conformity.
Two years later, in 2014, the Liberal Democrats lost 310 council seats and all but one of their twelve seats in the European Parliament. The coup de grâce then came in May 2015, when the party was eviscerated, losing forty-nine of its fifty-seven seats in Parliament. With only eight Lib Dem MPs being reelected, their entire parliamentary caucus could have comfortably fit into a Mazda Bongo camper van.
CHAPTER 3
WE FIGHT TERROR IN PRADA
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London’s Mayfair neighborhood is a place of exceptional wealth and power, with an unabashed legacy of empire. Walking down its old streets, one can see dozens of blue circular plaques dotting the buildings, commemorating the famous playwrights, authors, politicians, and architects who once inhabited this place. Sitting in Mayfair’s southeastern corner, not far from 10 Downing Street, is St. James’s Square, which is lined with grand old Georgian row houses. On the square’s north end sits Chatham House, the location of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. On the east end sits the headquarters of British Petroleum, or BP, one of the largest oil companies in the world, and Norfolk House, which during World War II served as the offices for U.S. general Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. Several private clubs dot the square, including the colonial-era East India Club and the Army and Navy Club. At the center of the square is a small garden encircled by sections of decorative iron fencing. And standing in the middle of the park is an equestrian statue of William III looking out toward the buildings. The center garden is surrounded by shrubbery and tidily groomed flower beds. St. James’s Square is a living monument to the global dominance of British colonialism.
South of BP, on the east end of the square, there is a building, several stories high, that dates to 1770. It’s built of smooth gray sandstone, with flaxen brick and a pair of stone Ionic pillars that flank the entrance. A red Royal Mail postbox stands outside. This, in early 2013, was the headquarters of the SCL Group. Originally known as Strategic Communication Laboratories, the firm was led by Nigel Oakes and had existed in various forms since 1990. SCL was cleared by the British government to access “Secret”-level information, and its board included Thatcher-era former cabinet ministers and retired military commanders, as well as professors and foreign politicians. The firm worked primarily for militaries, conducting psychological and influence operations around the world, such as jihadist recruitment mitigation in Pakistan, combatant disarmament and demobilization in South Sudan, and counternarcotics and counter–human trafficking operations in Latin America.
I heard about them in the spring of 2013, a few months after I left the Liberal Democrats, when a party adviser I kept in touch with called to tell me about an opening. He said he thought of me because this firm was looking for “data people for some behavior research project” involving the military. It never occurred to me to work on defense projects, but after two failures with political parties, in both Canada and Britain, I was ready to try something new.
Walking in through the front door, I entered a lobby with checked black-and-white marble floors, a crystal chandelier, and ornate plaster fringes on the cream-colored walls. The offices have kept many of the original details of the building, with several rooms centered around a marble fireplace. Tightly woven green carpets with tiny red-and-white circular frills lined the floors. I was then shown to a small room where I was told to wait for a man named Alexander Nix, who was one of the directors of the SCL Group. I remember it being exceptionally hot, as if the heating had been left on high even though it was late spring. (I learned later that the heat was intentional—a way to mess with people before a meeting.) I sat in that tiny sweatbox of a room for about ten minutes, until a man entered. The first thing I noticed was his impeccably tailored Savile Row suit, over a shirt embroidered with his initials. His eyes were sapphire, in striking contrast to his pale, paperlike skin.
It was the perfect setting for my introduction to Alexander Nix, who was born into the British upper classes and schooled at Eton, an institution where the royals send their children and whose uniform still includes collars and tails. Most English aristocrats have an air of camp to them, and in this tradition, Nix did not disappoint. His accent was as rich as they come. He wore black-rimmed glasses, and his floppy strawberry-blond hair had a deliberately casual little flip to it. He invited me to sit down amid piles of paper and boxes—detritus from a recently finished project, he told me. They planned to move soon to a larger office.
It didn
’t take long before Nix was describing the ins and outs of SCL’s business. He got me to sign an NDA and proceeded to tell me that most of the firm’s work was for military and intelligence agencies, on projects that governments couldn’t officially undertake themselves. “We win hearts and minds over there…you know, however that needs to happen.” He pointed to a framed photo of a rally in what appeared to be a country somewhere in Africa.
When I asked for details, he produced a few reports. As I flipped through them, he started to explain TAA, or target audience analysis. This is the first step in an information operations project, he said—analysis and segmentation. But as I skimmed the reports, I couldn’t believe how crude the methodology was—and I wasn’t shy about saying so.
“This could be done so much better,” I told him. As I’d soon learn, Nix could lose his temper in the moment it took to register a challenge to his inborn sense of superiority. For now, he merely bristled.
“We,” he said, “are the best firm at doing this.”
“Sure,” I said, “but you could be doing a lot better job of targeting. It looks like the army is literally dumping leaflets out of a plane. If the army has laser-guided missiles, why are you doing this with propaganda?” It was a harsh response—especially in a potential job interview—and Nix was taken aback. I’m the one who does the talking, he seemed to be thinking. The conversation ended abruptly, and as I headed out, I thought, What a massive waste of time.
But it wasn’t. Nix called soon after to ask if I’d be willing to talk some more, to explain what I thought SCL was doing wrong and how they might fix it.
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THE WORLD OF PSYCHOLOGICAL warfare of which SCL was a part has been around for as long as humans have waged war. In the sixth century B.C., Persians of the Achaemenid, knowing that Egyptians worshipped the cat god Bastet, drew images of cats on their shields so the Egyptians would be reluctant to take aim at them in battle. Rather than simply destroy and pillage enemy cities, Alexander the Great used positive psychological tactics, leaving troops behind to spread Greek culture and assimilate the defeated into his vast empire. During the Middle Ages, Tamerlane and Genghis Khan used terror as a psychological weapon, decapitating foes and parading their severed heads around on pikes. And in Russia, Ivan the Terrible cowed the masses into submission by setting up giant frying pans on Red Square and roasting his enemies alive. During World War II, the British perfected the art of misdirecting the enemy by staging fake invasions, using dummy tanks, and even planting fake battle plans on a corpse dressed as a dead soldier in the fantastically named Operation Mincemeat. The well-designed use of information—and disinformation—is one of the most effective ways of gaining tactical advantage on the battlefield.
In devising an informational weapon, it’s helpful to think of the basic aspects of any weapon system: the payload, delivery system, and targeting system. For a missile, the payload is an explosive, the delivery system is a rocket-propelled fuselage, and the targeting system is a satellite or a heat-seeking laser. With informational weapons, the same components are present. But there is one key difference: The force you are using is non-kinetic. In other words, you don’t blow stuff up. In informational combat, the payload is often a story—a rumor deployed to trick a general or a cultural narrative intended to pacify a village. And just as the military invests in chemistry to inform bomb building, it also tries to research what kinds of narratives will yield the biggest impact.
Historically, U.S. leaders have undervalued information operations, thanks to a robust advantage in missiles, tanks, bombers, ships, and guns. The United States has undertaken some information operations, though mostly of the age-old paper-leafletting variety. In the Korean War, U.S. troops used loudspeakers to blare propaganda, while aircraft scattered leaflets across enemy lines. During the Vietnam War, specialized PSYOPS battalions planned similar propaganda blitzes, aiming to win as many of the “hearts and minds” as possible. But bolstered by an unmatched defense budget, the American military has become a gang of boys with toys, where force amplification is physical and kinetic.
Tanks and bunker busters are useless against viral propaganda and Web-fueled radicalization. ISIS doesn’t just launch missiles; it also launches narratives. Russia compensates for its aging military equipment with “hybrid approaches” of attack, beginning with the ideological manipulation of target populations. Terror groups use social media to recruit new members, who then use guns and bombs to achieve their ends. These threats are no less dangerous for being nonconventional, and Western powers have struggled to respond. You can’t shoot a missile at the Internet, and traditional American military culture, dominated by straight white men who like to give and take orders, is hostile to the kind of nonconformist recruit who might introduce more nuanced, tech-enhanced counterattacks.
The U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has tried to grapple with these new realities of terror and conflict. Among the stated goals of past DARPA-run programs—with names like Narrative Networks and Social Media in Strategic Communications—has been to “attempt to track ideas and concepts to analyze patterns and cultural narratives” and “develop quantitative analytic tools to study narratives and their effects on human behavior in security contexts.” The U.S. military also ran a program called the Human Social Culture Behavior Modeling Program, which aimed to create “tools for sociocultural analysis and forecasting to users in the field.” In other words, the point of many of these programs is to gain total informational asymmetry against threats—to have so much data that we would be able to completely overwhelm and dominate the information space surrounding our targets. This was the lucrative niche Nix had his eye on to win new contracts for SCL.
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NIX INITIALLY OFFERED ME a three-month contract to do, essentially, whatever I wanted. “I’m not even going to create a job description,” he said. “Because, frankly, I don’t know what I would put in it.” After all the agonies of dealing with the LPC and the Lib Dems, it was incredibly enticing to be given free rein. So in June 2013, I started working with SCL.
Like most people, I had never paid much attention to military strategy, save for the occasional midnight binge watch of the History Channel. With such a daunting learning curve, I needed to quickly get up to speed on the firm’s current projects. The problem? No one would answer my questions. In fact, my new colleagues couldn’t close their laptops fast enough. “Why do you need to know?” they’d say, or “I need to check on whether I can talk to you about that.” The secrecy was going to make it difficult to figure out how to do whatever I was supposed to be doing. When I complained about this to Nix, he elaborately rolled his eyes and simply handed me the keys to a cabinet in his office. Inside I found binders of old reports.
The documents described projects SCL had undertaken for its old clients, which included the British Ministry of Defence and the U.S. government. It was working in Eastern Europe for NATO on counter–Russian propaganda initiatives. One was for a counter-narcotics program in a Latin American country, where a military client spread disinformation to turn local coca farmers against drug lords. Others detailed PSYOPS programs in Mexico and Kenya. As Nix had said before, these were projects that government agencies did not want to officially undertake themselves. Rather, they would hire contractors to enter the region as a “market research firm” or under some kind of faux-business cover.
One report that caught my eye described a Ministry of Defence project for using information operations to influence different target groups in Pakistan. The report captured information about regional leaders and influencers and made suggestions for cultural touch points and possible motivators for each target audience. But the methodology was full of holes. SCL had attempted to do polling in regions using live enumerators, but the maps of rural areas they had used were incomplete, and response rates were low from people ske
ptical of these newcomers asking for their opinions. This produced data too incomplete or biased to be reliable. The MOD had paid some ludicrously huge sum for this, when they’d have gotten better information if they’d just hired a few locals to go into villages and ask questions.
The second problem was the way the military had chosen to disseminate its propaganda. In some projects, they had created leaflets, then dropped them all over a region. More goddamn leaflets? The British Army was just like the Lib Dems. And why, exactly, when there were expanding mobile phone networks throughout the country? Indeed, it was interesting how connected some of these countries were, even amid conflict. Regions without landline telephones or broadcast TV were building cell towers. I couldn’t understand why Western powers were ignoring this development.