Affecting the Cognitive Dimension of the Information Envionment through Cyber-Enabled Information Operations
Abstract:
Defininginformation operations as activities designed to convey specificcontent to tar-get audiences for influencingthe emotions, motives, objective reasoning, attitudes, understanding, beliefs, or behavior of those audiences in ways that advance the interests of the conductor of such operations, this paper explores some of the impacts of cyber-enabled information operations on the thinking minds and feeling hearts of target audiences. The main lesson is that concepts of operation, tactics, techniques, and procedures for information operations developed in an era of static content and analog delivery mechanisms will no longer sufficto understand how the target of an information operation will construct meaning from content or make inferences about intent or agency. Because the space of possible constructions and inferences is much larger in a cy-ber-enabled information environment, the job of the information operations planner will be much more complex in this world than in an analog world.
AUTHORS
Stanford University
Colonel Brad Boyd, U.S. Army, is the Director of the Joint Warfare National Mission Initiative at the Defense Department's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. Prior to this Brad served as the Director of the Chief of Staff of the Army's Coordination Group and as the Commander of the Army's Global Response Force. Brad has seen service in the Western Pacific, Asia, the Middle East, South America, and Europe. Brad's education includes a BA in Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine and a Masters in International Relations from Cambridge.
Stanford University
Dr. Herbert Lin is senior research scholar for cyber policy and security at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and Hank J. Holland Fellow in Cyber Policy and Security at the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford University. His research interests relate broadly to policy-related dimensions of cybersecurity and cyberspace, and he is particularly interested in the use of offensive operations in cyberspace as instruments of national policy and in the security dimensions of information warfare and influence operations on national security. He received his doctorate in physics from MIT.
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Journal of Information Warfare
The definitive publication for the best and latest research and analysis on information warfare, information operations, and cyber crime. Available in traditional hard copy or online.
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