In 1993, while testifying before the U.S. Senate Intelligence community then nominee to head the Central Intelligence Agency R. James Woolsey said regarding threats faced by the United States that, “Yes, we have slain a large dragon… But we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. And in many ways, the dragon was easier to keep track of.” (Juel 1993) Woolsey was speaking about the position the U.S. found itself in after the close of the Cold War, where the adversarial relationship between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was seemingly much easier to quantify than the laundry list of potential threats that were on the horizon. Woolsey would go onto identify  was the threats posed by a wide range phenomenon from “metastasizing ethic conflict” to “the development of weapons of mass destruction”. (Juel 1993) It was becoming clear to Woolsey that the end 20^th Century was going to mark a shift from the singular focus of the nation state or spy vs. spy orientation that had consumed the pursuit of international security since the end of the Second World War. The number of threats that have come to challenge the international order have multiplied exponentially since then. The rapid expansion of communications, dual use, and warfighting technologies have shifted who and by what means threats can be posed to systems at an international level. These developments while not entirely diminishing the role of geography in conflict, have certainly caused threat actors to be less encumbered by it. It is in this light that both state and non-state actors are now leveraging new-found means of influence on the global order that challenges both the notions of who is considered a threat and those of traditional state territorial sovereignty.

This notion of non-conventional warfare and small actors possessing outsized means to convey destruction up an enemy has been expanding since the beginning of the industrial age. In 1920, Mario Buda ushered in a new era with what became the first car bomb. (Goodwin 2008 )This device allowed individuals to project an outsized amount of  force through a low cost means relative to a group’s position within a given society. Today one need not be in the same temporal space as the individual or entity that which you want to attack. To this end, scholars Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum posit that “ While it is not literally yet the case, every individual, every group, every company, and every state will soon have the potential to threaten the security of or have his, her, or its security threatened by every other individual, group, company or state. We are thus in a moment unlike any other in the history of the world.” (Wittes and Blum 2016 , 9)What does it mean then when these threats involve not bombs or bullets but information?

The first significant salvo in this new age of information warfare came not from a nation state intelligence service but from the website Wikileaks.  Wikileaks was founded in order to serve as a distributed platform for sharing leaked documents and for what its organizers have deemed “the analysis and publication of large datasets of censored or otherwise restricted official materials involving war, spying and corruption.” (Wikileaks 2015 ) While Wikileaks was not the first such site on the internet to publish sensitive and classified documents, it would become the mostly widely known. (Greenburg 2012 , 102) In 2010, Ethan Zukerman of the Berkman Center at MIT noted that by November of that year Wikileaks had gone through “three phases since its founding in 2006”. (Zittrain and Sauter 2010) Zukerman marked the first phase with the group’s release of documents pertaining to Kenyon government corruption and the second phase was entered into with the release of a video that was shot from the nose camera of an apache helicopter dubbed “collateral murder” for its depiction of U.S. forces in Iraq killing a journalist in the spring of 2010 (Zittrain and Sauter 2010). Wikileaks would become known to millions around the world for the first time with its “third phase” and the release a portion of more than two hundred thousand secret U.S. diplomatic cables. (Zittrain and Sauter 2010). In 2016, Wikileaks entered what could be considered a fourth phases in 2016 when it worked with the hacker Guccifer 2.0, which is widely believed to be a nom de guerre of the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff (GRU) to release documents stolen from the Democratic National Committee.

The cables released by Wikileaks were surreptitiously obtained by U.S. Army Private Chelsea (Bradly) Manning and given to Wikileaks through its founder Julian Assange. Manning was able to obtain the documents while working as a unit level intelligence analyst in Afghanistan. Wikileaks partnered with traditional media organizations to report on and provide context to the documents. (Zittrain and Sauter 2010) The documents that were reported on illuminated the private thoughts of U.S. Diplomatic personnel around the globe. The content of the cables ranged from illuminatory and embarrassing to dangerous and destabilizing. Wikileaks has been credited, at least in part; with helping spur on an uprising in Tunisia that led to the ouster of President Ben Ali and his family after decades of rule when the endemic corruption of the regime was made transparent in with the communications of the Ambassador to Tunisia and the State Department. (Dickinson 2011 ) The revolution in Tunisia would help to spur on what would become the Arab Spring and touched off the fall of the governments in Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia, protests in Bahrain; and the wide ranging Syrian Civil War. The release of the cables and their after effects represented a remarkable turn of events where a U.S. soldier passed classified information pertaining to more than a dozen nations along to an itinerant Australian webmaster turned hacker; who in turn made much of the information available to some of the largest media organizations in the world. (Zittrain and Sauter 2010) Seemingly all at once, the power of a nation state intelligence service was in the hands of a small organization with relatively limited resources. Moreover, neither Manning nor Assange would ever step foot into any of the affected countries and instead were able to leverage the power of information to shift opinions and sow chaos without regard for borders. 

 Propaganda, deception, and information operations have existed within the scope of warfare since ancient times when soldiers would weave outsized tales of deeds done to project their own glory or that of their masters. To spread information in such a manner, you have to be in close proximately to the audience that you wish to reach. Innovations such as the telegraph, radio, and television all were force multipliers in the dissemination of information; both factual and not, which extended the range of your message. The new information landscape is quite different and as P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking state “There’s no historical analogue to the speed and totality with which social media platforms have conquered the planet. The telegraph was pondered for at least two generations, while the internet gestated for decades in U.S. government labs. Beyond science fiction and the grand predictions of a few sociologists, social media was something that simply wasn’t until suddenly it was.” (Singer and Brooking 2018, 219 ) Prior to social media and other distributed information platforms not only did one have to be in close proximately to the intended receiver; of the press, radio, or television service to see it widely broadcast. Each of these traditional platforms, even if independent of a centralized authority; occupy a physical space that can be attacked and taken off-line. It is not to say that older methods of inciting violence and discord were not effective. Radio was utilized to spread a genocidal message as the ruling Hutus urged the deaths of Tutsis with crude instruments as “It took only machetes to massacre most of the eight hundred thousand Tutsis and moderate Hutus during the hundred days’ genocide in Rwanda.” (Wittes and Blum 2016 , 20 ) In order to control that radio broadcast your message had to be in-line with that of the ruling establishment. Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook played a prominent role during the Tunisian and Egyptian legs of the Arab Spring by bypassing those forces of censorship so that anyone with an account could contribute to the narrative. (Singer and Brooking 2018, 85).

 Citizens were able to coordinate protest activities and present a narrative to the outside world that ran counter to one of government control. In Tunisia, protesters were able to capture images of state violence and use social networks to share those images helping to add additional full to the protests (Singer and Brooking 2018, 85 ). That act of fomenting anger regarding the conduct of security forces along with the Wikileaks revelations were able to work synergistically in the toppling of President Bin Ali.

The successful use of new information platforms by the Arab Spring protesters would not go unnoticed. Soon governments and other armed non-nation state actors would seize upon social media to spread their message as well. ISIS was one such organization that would rise to prominence as an offshoot of the terrorist organization Al Qaeda. In an attempt to spread its message of Islamic fundamentalism brought violent attacks to western countries and interests starting in the mid 1990’s. The September 11, 2001 attacks on New York City and the Pentagon were its most prominent acts of terror and were perhaps the most immediately viewed pieces of “propaganda of the deed” in history. Al Qaeda was able to achieve this through “grabbing audience attention through shock and awe before, exploiting television’s appetite for LIVE eye-witness news- as- entertainment and its hunger for competition between rival broadcast organizations”. (Bolt 2012 , 261 ) Prior to that moment, Al Qaeda’s propaganda aimed at western audiences was limited to the grainy videos it would release to western media organizations or to what the media would choose to cover in the aftermath of their previous violent acts. Never before was it in real time on a stage with so many viewers.

ISIS would learn from Al Qaeda and move to transform its communications strategy in way that would cause media and security scholar Neville Bolt to remark that “Propaganda of the Deed has made a radical shift with potentially dramatic consequences. It has become a central operating concept in insurgent strategy. This does not limit POTD to a kinetic, military effect. Nor does it simply define it as symbolic…” (Bolt 2012 , 163 ) ISIS utilized western and regional social media platforms to disseminate highly produced videos depicting beheadings that were widely described as “slick”. (Singer and Brooking 2018, 150) They would rely upon very nature of social media to spread their message. Platforms that were designed as digital marketing engines were pre-calibrated by ISIS with fake accounts and hashtags to spread their acts of terror gaining further traction through traditional media outlets. (Singer and Brooking 2018, 153 ) It is notable that ISIS only not used social media spread their message to recruits and enemies alike but that ISIS “was the first terror group to hold both physical and digital territory”. (Singer and Brooking 2018, 152) ISIS would go on to dub this effort as the “cyber caliphate” or “information jihad” that was designed to persist even after their grip on physical territory ceased. (Singer and Brooking 2018, 54) In many ways fighting the pitched battle against ISIS in the physical territory it would come to hold posed less of a governance challenge. In the light of threats from non-state actors and others acting outside of the traditional pathways of warfare, coordination was necessary between nation states and the social media platforms themselves. For years, Twitter, Youtube, and other platforms had done little to curb the activity of terrorist organizations on their platforms until the rise of ISIS made the problem too big to ignore. (Singer and Brooking 2018, 235 ) Companies were driven to come together to find a solution to curb terrorist propaganda acting in the stead of governments in order to police their user base that stretches into the billions of people from countries around the globe. (Singer and Brooking 2018, 237 )

Nation States are increasingly taking note of the success of non-state actors in spreading disinformation and propaganda via social media amplification while integrating information operations into their overall security strategy. U.S. Marine General James Mattis summed up the nature of this new landscape with the statement that “The most important six inches of the battlefield is between your ears”. (Brown 2019 ) Countries such as China and Russia are deft employing this new ‘hybrid’ warfare. China has already unleashed a strategy that has been dubbed the “three warfares” employing public opinion, psychological warfare, and legal warfare recognizing that the ability to “win without fighting” is of equal importance to the deployment of traditional military forces. (Thomas 2012, 12) The People’s Liberation Army has explicitly recognized that “using micro-blogs, forums, blogs, cell phones, and other such platforms, adopting animated cartoons, videos, pictures, poems, and songs” in order to guide public opinion in both non-war and wartime situations. (Thomas 2012) These efforts are being directed at both domestic and international audiences through censorship and using traditional media outlets amplified through social media platforms. (Thomas 2012, 13 )

The efforts of the Chinese government since the outbreak of COVID-19 has put the “three warfares” on stark display. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs began to assert on Twitter, Weibo and in traditional media that the United States Army was responsible for the creation of the virus. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian openly speculated on Twitter that the U.S. Military had brought the virus with them to the World Military Games that had occurred in Wuhan this past October. (Meyers 2020) Zhao went onto repost the testimony of the Director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control who surmised that some of the earliest Covid -19 deaths could have been mistaken for the flu. (Meyers 2020) Accompanying the video was a declaration by Zhao that “When did patient zero begin in US?” Mr. Zhao wrote on Twitter, first in English and separately in Chinese. “How many people are infected. What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your date! US owe us an explanation.” (Meyers 2020) These assertions were a largely transparent attempt at deflecting blame for the poor performance of public health officials at home and to blunt critics abroad. At the end of April, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs produced an animated video featuring the statue of liberty in Lego form depicting the many missteps to the U.S. response to the virus. Nearly all of the claims made in the video were in some way factual if not tinged with a pro-Chinese message.

Utilizing social media, a mixture of both false and factual information in a much less constrained style than a traditional rumor campaign or government communique, the Chinese government has engaged in a classic “active measures” disinformation campaign. Information security scholar Thomas Rid proposes a multi-pronged test to differentiate active measures from other information campaigns 1). The information produced is not spontaneous but stems from “the methodical output of large bureaucracies” 2). Active measures “always contain an element of disinformation” where in “the content may be forged, the sourcing doctored, the method of acquisition covert ”…3). “ An active measure is always directed towards an end, usually to weaken an adversary.” (Rid 2020 , 9 ) Rid goes on to posit that not all disinformation is false stating that “ Some of the most vicious and effective active measures in the history of covert action were designed to deliver entirely accurate information.” (Rid 2020 , 10 ) The current efforts of the Chinese government regarding COVID-19 meet every criteria of an active measures campaign with the carefully coordinated planting of rumors on social media and the desire to weaken the U.S. government’s arguments surrounding Chinese culpability where COVID-19 is concerned.

 Russia’s practice of hybrid warfare has also had a destabilizing effect on democracies. Regarding Russia’s invasion of Crimea, Professor Sean McFate stated “Think about how Russia was in Crimea. In older war tactics, when they would put their heel on another state, they’d send in the tanks. Now, in 2019, that’s not how they do it. They have military backup, but they use covert and clandestine means. They use special forces, they use mercenaries, they use proxies, they use propaganda—things that give them plausible deniability.” (Giovanni 2019 ) Even as pictures of troops with Russian equipment started to blanket Crimea, the Russian government would point to the lack of insignia the uniforms of the troops as proof that they were not Russian.

The efforts in Crimea would serve as a proving ground for what would come in the United States and elsewhere.  The Internet Research Agency (IRA), a contractor for Russian Intelligence was linked to disinformation efforts on Facebook and Twitter shortly after the invasion of Crimea. A public assessment conducted in January 2017 by member agencies of the United States Intelligence Community came to the conclusion that “Moscow’s influence campaign followed a Russian messaging strategy that blends covert intelligence operations—such as cyber activity—with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or “trolls.” (National Intelligence Council 2017 ).  According to the Mueller Report undertaken in the wake of the 2016 Presidential Election found that “In November 2017, a Facebook representative testified that Facebook had identified 470 IRA-controlled Facebook accounts that collectively made 80,000 posts between January 2015 and August 2017. Facebook estimated the IRA reached as many as 126 million persons through its Facebook accounts.” (Mueller 2019 ) While the number of people that IRA viewed the content is an important metric Russian state sponsored media duplicated the message. According to Russian propaganda expert Dariya Tsyrenzhapova, the Facebook pages of RT magnified the message of IRA. (Tsyrenzhapova and Wooley 2020) While effectiveness of propaganda is difficult due to “latency” and challenges formulating fiscal return on investment; Tsyrenzhapova expanded on the media diffusion theory of media scholars Jill Hopke and Bree McEwan. Tsyrenzhapova postulated that the amount of exposure to the Russian messages over a sustained period and how the messages played to preconceived notions helped to increase the reach Russian reach on social media substantially. (Tsyrenzhapova and Wooley 2020)

Information operations have help to serve as the cornerstone for the phenomenon of deterritorialization in international security, but it is by no means the only technique that make use of what have been called “technologies of mass enablement”. From drones to biological warfare it has never been easier for individuals to challenge the authority of the state (Mazzetti 2013 )nor conversely for states themselves to conceive of their sovereignty in such broad terms. Combine that with so much of today’s wars being fought by private entities supplement by state authority, that it is understandable sentiment when former intelligence officer Dewy Clarridge laments  “I think the Treaty of Westphalia is over”. (Mazzetti 2013 , 326)

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