Propaganda, surveillance and cyberspace: consequences of online dirty tricks

In the 21st century, cyberspace has become an anarchic medium of defamatory, false information. Intelligence services are attempting to subvert and shape the perception of citizens around the world, in the absence of a sovereign liberal international arbiter that acts above all nations. Of late, intelligence services such as Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Russia’s GRU service and non-state groups such as CyberBerkut have been caught disseminating erroneous information on the Internet. As a means of protecting democracy from hostile states and non-state groups, Western intelligence services have chosen to wield propaganda and surveillance measures.

Leaked documents have revealed GCHQ’s propaganda aims of altering the outcome of online polls, setting up fake aliases to communicate with the world, and leaking confidential information to the press and blogs. The latter manoeuver is ironically symmetrical with Russia’s alleged ploy of warping perception in America’s 2016 presidential election. Moreover, the FBI’s fake terrorist propaganda website that was a part of a scheme to monitor and encourage US citizens to fight in Syria. Betwixt in the multitudes of fractured realities is the individual citizen, who is burdened with the task of deciphering truths, half-truths and outrageous lies from one another.

Amidst the confusion, are citizens capable of seeing through the schemes of nefarious actors online? Will society descend into what Walter Lippmann has described as a phantom public that is devoid of lucid thought and the confidence to endure the modern cyber terrain? This research sets out to explore the ramifications of modern propaganda and surveillance measures in society. Specifically, this research endeavours to appropriate the concept of Ontological (in) Security (OIS) in order to assess how states and citizens react to online dirty tricks campaigns. I argue that state attempts to manage a Realist information environment with dirty tricks can lead to creating additional issues that produce OIS both domestically and abroad.