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Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare
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About Active Measures: The Secret History Of
Product Description This revelatory and dramatic history of disinformation traces the rise of secret organized deception operations from the interwar period to contemporary internet troll farmsWe 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. Review 50 Notable Books of Nonfiction, The Washington PostBest Books of the Year, New Statesman Best National Security Books, The Cipher Brief"Superb . . . Rid’s achievement in this book is that he places our crazy, upside-down politics in a coherent historical context . . . Rid provides the best narrative I’ve read anywhere of how the Russian disinformation campaign in 2016 was run . . . But the deeper value of Rid’s book is that it takes us to the beginnings of modern manipulation.” ―The Washington Post“Elegant . . . The natural impulse is to see Russia’s attack in 2016―and the one it is surely preparing for 2020―as a radically new feature of our hyperconnected world . . . Yet Rid’s book is devoted to persuading us that it is in line with decades of history. In rich detail, Rid walks us through a hundred years of political warfare, recounting the exploits powers both major and minor inflicted on one another via the disinformation units of their intelligence agencies. Some of the stories are hair-raising.” ―Jonathan Freedland, New York Review of Books“Active Measures is predominantly an exercise in clarity, shining a light on covert operations and exposing the lies previously reported as truth. But it is at its most chilling when describing the disorientating complexities of unsolved operations.” ―Helen Warrell, Financial Times"Mr. Rid pulls important insights out of this tangled history." ―The Economist“Thomas Rid helps remind us how we reached this morass, one with antecedents reaching back to Czarist Russia and the Bolshevik revolution. To be sure, the US can use all the help it can get . . . America remains mired in a cold civil war. Active Measures is another book for such troubled times.” ―Lloyd Green, The Guardian“If forewarned is forearmed, then this highly readabl
