This revelatory and dramatic history of disinformation traces the rise of secret organized deception operations from the interwar period to contemporary internet troll farms

We live in the age of disinformation--of organized deception. Spy agencies pour vast resources into hacking, leaking, and forging data, often with the goal of weakening the very foundation of liberal democracy: trust in facts. Thomas Rid, a renowned expert on technology and national security, was one of the first to sound the alarm. More than four months before the 2016 election, he warned that Russian military intelligence was carefully planning and timing a high-stakes political campaign to disrupt the democratic process. But as crafty as such so-called active measures have become, they are not new.

The story of modern disinformation begins with the post-Russian Revolution clash between communism and capitalism, which would come to define the Cold War. In Active Measures, Rid reveals startling intelligence and security secrets from materials written in more than ten languages across several nations, and from interviews with current and former operatives. He exposes the disturbing yet colorful history of professional, organized lying, revealing for the first time some of the century's most significant operations--many of them nearly beyond belief. A White Russian ploy backfires and brings down a New York police commissioner; a KGB-engineered, anti-Semitic hate campaign creeps back across the Iron Curtain; the CIA backs a fake publishing empire, run by a former Wehrmacht U-boat commander, that produces Germany's best jazz magazine. Rid tracks the rise of leaking, and shows how spies began to exploit emerging internet culture many years before WikiLeaks. Finally, he sheds new light on the 2016 election, especially the role of the infamous troll farm in St. Petersburg as well as a much more harmful attack that unfolded in the shadows.

Active Measures takes the reader on a guided tour deep into a vast hall of mirrors old and new, pointing to a future of engineered polarization, more active and less measured--but also offering the tools to cut through the deception.

As lives offline and online merge even more, it is easy to forget how we got here. Rise of the Machines reclaims the spectacular story of cybernetics, one of the twentieth century's pivotal ideas.

Springing from the mind of mathematician Norbert Wiener amid the devastation of World War II, the cybernetic vision underpinned a host of seductive myths about the future of machines. Cybernetics triggered blissful cults and military gizmos, the Whole Earth Catalog and the air force's foray into virtual space, as well as crypto-anarchists fighting for internet freedom.

In Rise of the Machines, Thomas Rid draws on unpublished sources--including interviews with hippies, anarchists, sleuths, and spies--to offer an unparalleled perspective into our anxious embrace of technology.

Cyber War Will Not Take Place cuts through the hype and takes a fresh look at cyber security. Thomas Rid argues that the focus on war and winning distracts from the real challenge of cyberspace: non-violent confrontation that may rival or even replace violence in surprising ways.

The threat consists of three different vectors: espionage, sabotage, and subversion. The author traces the most significant hacks and attacks, exploring the full spectrum of case studies from the shadowy world of computer espionage and weaponised code. With a mix of technical detail and rigorous political analysis, the book explores some key questions: What are cyber weapons? How have they changed the meaning of violence? How likely and how dangerous is crowd-sourced subversive activity? Why has there never been a lethal cyber attack against a country's critical infrastructure? How serious is the threat of pure cyber espionage, of exfiltrating data without infiltrating humans first? And who is most vulnerable: which countries, industries, individuals?

War 2.0: Irregular Warfare in the Information Age argues that two intimately connected grassroots trends--the rise of insurgencies and the rise of the web--are putting modern armies under huge pressure to adapt new forms of counterinsurgency to new forms of social war.

After the U.S. military--transformed into a lean, lethal, computerized force--faltered in Iraq after 2003, a robust insurgency arose. Counterinsurgency became a social form of war--indeed, the U.S. Army calls it armed social work--in which the local population was the center of gravity and public opinion at home the critical vulnerability.

War 2.0 traces the contrasting ways in which insurgents and counterinsurgents have adapted irregular conflict to novel media platforms. It examines the public affairs policies of the U.S. land forces, the British Army, and the Israel Defense Forces. Then, it compares the media-related counterinsurgency methods of these conventional armies with the methods devised by their irregular adversaries, showing how such organizations as al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Hezbollah use the web, not merely to advertise their political agenda and influence public opinion, but to mobilize a following and put violent ideas into action.

This is the first academic analysis of the role of embedded media in the 2003 Iraq War, providing a concise history of US military public affairs management since Vietnam.

In late summer 2002, the Pentagon considered giving the press an inside view of the upcoming invasion of Iraq. The decision was surprising, and the innovative embedded media program itself received intense coverage in the media. Its critics argued that the program was simply a new and sophisticated form of propaganda. Their implicit assumption was that the Pentagon had become better at its news management and had learned to co-opt the media.

This new book tests this assumption, introducing a model of organizational learning and redraws the US military's cumbersome learning curve in public affairs from Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, the Persian Gulf, Somalia, the Balkans to Afghanistan, examining whether past lessons were implemented in Iraq in 2003. Thomas Rid argues that while the US armed forces have improved their press operations, America's military is still one step behind fast-learning and media-savvy global terrorist organizations.

War and Media Operations will be of great interest to students of the Iraq War, media and war, propaganda, political communications and military studies in general.

This textbook offers an accessible introduction to counterinsurgency operations, a key aspect of modern warfare.

Featuring essays by some of the world's leading experts on unconventional conflict, both scholars and practitioners, the book discusses how modern regular armed forces react, and should react, to irregular warfare. The volume is divided into three main sections:

• Doctrinal Origins: analysing the intellectual and historical roots of modern Western theory and practice
• Operational Aspects: examining the specific role of various military services in counterinsurgency, but also special forces, intelligence, and local security forces
• Challenges: looking at wider issues, such as governance, culture, ethics, civil-military cooperation, information operations, and time.

Understanding Counterinsurgency is the first comprehensive textbook on counterinsurgency, and will be essential reading for all students of small wars, counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, strategic studies and security studies, both in graduate and undergraduate courses as well as in professional military schools.