(Nina Jankowitz official picture)
It’s a new world, all right. Our panel of Fire Ring experts and hacks was naturally energized by a bunch of stuff. We are at swirl in the latest lunacy, some of it bringing up old mysteries in the swirl of a more recent one reaching its expiration date, and others so old most of the participants are gone now.
A pal writing a book about Pearl Harbor had called in to report finding documents still sealed from an event more than 80 years ago. That set things off, since our group was briefly energized weeks ago when reports about the windshield of President Kennedy’s limo used that day in Dallas, the one with the hole in it that would have provided essential evidence of something, had been ‘disappeared’ within days of the assassination. After the car had been washed.
But that is old news. Now we appear to reside in a world where ‘news’ no longer comports information with anything except the direction of an assortment of ‘stories.’ Even the name for it, good and bad is the same.
That is where Nina Jankowicz appears briefly in the bright white light. You may already have forgotten the name, and possibly recall only the screen-capture image from the minor ‘news’ in which she appeared. In one memorable exchange in Congress, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said she was ‘a renowned disinformation expert’ who was named chief of the DHS Disinformation Management Office. The word on the street is that she was pleased her appointment lasted longer than CNN+, but is currently unavailable for comment.
And that is the nature of the discussion we are having. It certainly includes free speech, but in a new world in which “truth” itself no longer exists. Ukraine was at the heart of it for a moment, but that crisis was useful as an example of what has been done to older traditions of propaganda and journalism in the digital age. We wanted to look at it before our watchdog Attorney returns from Covid sequestration tomorrow and starts listening to us again. In order to not listen.
The world is more complex. Some of us used to do ‘Information Operations’ in support of special military and diplomatic activities. It was interesting, but at the end of the working day there was a vault door to shut it in. With the technical changes since, the door to that vault are wide open and everything the old classified system used to collect or attack is can now be had as what the Old Salts would call ‘Open Source’ intelligence. Want the codeword to use later? OSINT. You are welcome, of course, except that term has changed as well and become ‘misinformation.”
Now, our devices, personal or public, can collect comprehensive data profiles that once required all sorts of legal paperwork and budget justification for sustained operations. Now, it is all cash and carry. Even the government intel organizations are buying it.
So, everything in the business has changed. But that development also requires a note on Info Ops tradecraft. Nina got torpedoed in her recent job by her own faulty tradecraft. She had recorded some TikTok videos that were relatively clever- depends on taste- about an increasingly relevant industry. The problem was that they were immediately used by First Amendment opponents of the Ministry of Truth to maintain that Nina was an idiot.
Our observation was that standards of tradecraft need some updating, and some of the old means of keeping a low profile are anathema to the nature of today’s environment. One of the associates recently served on a murder one trial in which a guilty verdict was based on the location of the defendant’s phone. So there are some issues about the nature of ‘information’ and ‘truth’ that are happening now and there are people already in jail about them.
DeMille had done some homework on the topic. “Nina has an interesting resume, like the Secretary said. She had a double-major in Russian and political science at Bryn Mawr and did an overseas semester at Herzen State Pedagogical University in St. Petersburg. Then she worked an assortment of jobs in the information community, but went back to academics to become a Fulbright Fellow in Kyiv after Ukraine’s change in regimes. She did some TikTok videos, too.”
One of the cell phones went off with one of those irritating ring tones. There was news. Our attorney reported she was up at Dulles, back from sequestration in Lisbon. She wanted a ride, since she was short on the cab fare required to get down to The Farm.
Splash was a little worked up. He wanted to examine one of the firms where Nina had worked. “It was called StopFake. It was founded by Kyiv University people to expose Russian disinformation after the government changed in 2014. There were a lot of Ukrainians that felt that way, too, since Stalin had run the starvation program to eliminate the Ukrainian Kulak farmers that killed about twelve million people. That is why some Ukrainians might have thought the Germans were an alternative to the Russians after that happened. Some of the people affected are still around, or at least their kids are. So, things are a little confused about the specifics of which narrative is being bandied about by both sides in the conflict.”
“Was Nina part of that?”
“Sort of. It depends on whose narrative is being supported by which stream of information. She worked with the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry while she was at StopFake, which was publicly supported. Then she came back here and did a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson Center and a supervisor for Russian and Belarus programs at the National Democratic Institute.”
Loma got up to see if he could find the keys to the F150 truck. Rocket was interested in getting off the property for a while, but if he rode with Loma up to the airport, Amanda would have to ride in the middle on the way back unless he stretched out in the bed of the truck. “She wrote books, too, didn’t she?”
“Yeah. One was about the future of conflict and the other was “How to be a Woman Online.”
“Did she know that the first book was going to be part of the second one?”
“The nature of conflict has changed. Everything is part of something else and it is all happening at the same time.”
“Wonder what she is going to do now for a job?”
There was general laughter at that one, since we all had a pretty good idea of what that was going to be.
Copyright 2022 Vic Socotra
Note: Photos are US Government or used in low-resolution for identification purposes under fair use and are not used for commercial or misinformation purposes.
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