Leaked slide deck from an internal GCHQ presentation prepared by the Joint Threat Intelligence Research Group. The ghouls are learning.
Well, always good to be reminded that the intelligence services are devastatingly stupid.
Give a fool an unlimited budget and no oversight, and they are guaranteed to fuck up the world.
Give a smart person an unlimited budget and no oversight and you’re likely to get similar results
There are no smart people. "Intelligence" is a measure of how thoroughly colonybrained you are. The more you are like the "right" kind of people, the smarter you are. That's why people think the CIA are smart, because they are an engine of empire.
"Intelligence" is a culturally bound descriptor, it means different things in different cultures.
Because the vast majority of what they do is dumb thuggery, not the fine manipulation they'd have you think they do. Go listen to the most recent season of Blowback. It's a wonderful review of just how bad at any kind of subtlety the CIA actually is.
They really aren't. They do okay at it, but mostly they pay third-parties and use classification to maintain the (very important, from their perspective) illusion that they are master manipulators. They're mostly a bunch of over-educated Ivies graduates playing James Bond. They aren't as incompetent as they were in the fifties, but a big part of that is that they've figured out how to distribute their operations so that they have disclaimability on their side. That, plus the power of the spy mystique is the real secret of their operations.
This is what they're teaching their interns?
2005 called, they want their third rate pop-sci marketing presentation back. I laughed hysterically when I saw Maslow's Heirachy of Needs.
I'm tempted to think this is a hangout it's so bad.
Goanna be a CIA wiccan casting spells on third world leftists
I've been going over it trying to infer what I'm assuming is some missing supplemental material but from what I can gather so far it looks like a fairly comprehensive guide to agitprop is buried in here somewhere.
I just skimmed it and I recognize a fair amount of the terms from social engineering stuff I’ve read. A lot of it seems like Meyers-Briggs corporate management mumbo jumbo, but at the same time those models are significantly more accurate in the aggregate. The scam stuff is definitely something that can be applied one-on-one, though
Basically mimic, adapt and then start going over internal tensions/whatever else to pull apart group
It’s not a complicated strategy. 4chan stumbled into it by chance decades ago
I hear if you post hard enough you start getting recruiter emails from ex-military finance regulators
So it looks like a key part of this is the assumption that ideology is superficial like a brand, and that real decision making is based purely on emotional considerations.
I can see this being effective on the right, where ideology is just a patch to wear (often literally), but completely missing the point when ideology is built on scientific examination of material conditions.
I like the picture of the tank doing a "solid snake with a cardboard box" maneuver.
Attention -> Perception -> Sensemaking -> Affect Sensemaking, huh? Gonna have to look that one up.
I googled “cyber magician” and all of the top hits are articles about this exact leak. Makes for a good headline, but we see how well it caught on. Also, I resent the fact that they call it magic when it’s more akin to cardistry smdh
