Standing Up to Disinformation and Its Unprecedented Threats
The enduring curse of the internet era may turn out to be the flood of misinformation and disinformation that deludes citizens, weakens institutions and creates a framework for violence. It might not be possible to stop the spread of harmful, hurtful lies, innuendoes and half-truths, but government agencies and military services can at least strive to clear out the smoke, discern the truth, educate the public and act on factual information.
The Difference Between Misinformation and Disinformation
In broad terms, misinformation is a mistake. According to Cyber Risk GmbH, a risk management and compliance company based in Switzerland, misinformation is “false or inaccurate information that is spread without the intent to mislead. This happens when people share information that they believe to be true at the time they share it, but it isn’t.”
A current example is the resident of Springfield, Ohio, whose cat went missing; she filed a police report, accusing her Haitian neighbors of stealing her pet and eating it. When the cat turned up, alive, in her basement, the woman apologized, but it was too late. The story had spread on Facebook and well beyond.
NATO’s definition of disinformation is “the deliberate creation and dissemination of false and/or manipulated information with the intent to deceive and/or mislead. Disinformation seeks to deepen divisions within and between allied nations and to undermine people’s confidence in elected governments.”
This is what happened with the Springfield cat story. The true explanation of the missing cat never went viral; it couldn’t match the visceral reaction to the original claim.
Disinformation is created, spread and amplified by those who believe they can gain from the confusion and doubt it creates. In the example above, it is aimed at the broadest possible audience, the American public.
Often, however, disinformation is promoted by nation-states, whether to protect their interests or to harm adversaries.
The story of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 is one such example. In July 2017, MH17 was en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it was shot down over eastern Ukraine. At first, Russia claimed Russian separatist forces in Ukraine shot down a Ukrainian transport plane. Then it blamed Ukrainian forces for shooting it down.
Janes, a global open-source intelligence company specializing in military, national security, aerospace and transport topics, tackled the question of what kind of missile could reach MH17 and zeroed in on the SA-11 Gadfly (the Russian Buk missile).
“But the real key was the social media posts immediately following where [the Russian separatists] took credit for it,” said Samuel Gordy, president of Janes US. “They quickly took them down when they realized they killed a bunch of innocent people.”
More recently, in mid-February 2022, just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Russian Lt. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, head of the Department of Information and Mass Communication of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, had been calling Russian troop movements just “military exercises” and said they were withdrawing to their assigned bases.
“There were photos of the troops and equipment,” Gordy said. “We geolocated them, using satellite imagery where the railroad tracks were, where the buildings were, and showed the equipment was actually moving toward the Ukrainian border.”
The Role of Open-Source Intelligence
Open-source information is just what it sounds like—publicly available information, often on the internet or for sale by commercial companies providing specialized data such as satellite imagery. In this way, over the past couple of decades, much information that was once classified, such as satellite imagery, has become public.
Over the past several years, Janes has remade itself from the definitive public source of information on warfare and transportation systems into an open-source intelligence company. It is the cleansing of the open data, connecting new data to existing information, analyzing it and drawing conclusions from the process that make it open-source intelligence (OSINT).
“A lot of open-source reporting is the quick collection and output of information —someone aiming to be first, so no fact-checking,” Gordy said. “That’s not how we operate. We’re not looking to be the first to report; we’re looking to be accurate. Over half of our employees sit in data research and analysis. That’s the distinction from someone just scraping the internet.”
The company has several thousand vetted sources it draws from, including social media and data from the Internet of Things (IoT). “When you talk about the data explosion in terabytes and beyond, a lot of that is IoT,” he said.
Human-machine teaming with expert oversight ensures that the duplicates, errors and chaff are discarded. “We bring [the qualified data] into our analytical environment, and even as we do that, it’s beginning to build connections and surround it with metadata,” he said.
“We set our own priority framework that guides how we do business and the countries and subjects we prioritize,” Gordy said. The company gathers political, military, economic, social, information and infrastructure data and insight for 197 countries, according to the Janes website.
For example, he said, the company includes the United States when it looks at Chinese and Russian investments being made around the world.
“We look for asymmetric investing—where are the Chinese investing in port facilities, storage facilities, mining, etc.,” he said. “There was a case a few months ago where a Scandinavian country put out a solicitation for improving a port; two of the three bidders had ties to China.”
Coping With and Combatting Disinformation
Janes conducts research and analysis to screen out disinformation. One example is the Project 22160 Corvette, a new patrol ship for the Russian navy.
“Three are commissioned and operational, and another four are being built,” Gordy said. “Both the shipyard and the navy claimed a 30-knot top speed.”
However, Janes looked at the ship’s power plant and analyzed the exhaust from its trials to conclude the actual top speed is 22 knots. This is an important difference because “you want to establish the capability of an individual weapons system, of the unit using that system and of the country that has the system,” he explained. “That’s what anyone in military intelligence wants to understand.”
The Corvette’s capabilities come into play in a number of ways,” Gordy said. “Does the U.S. military have something with the capability to handle it? Do their own assets go 30 knots? It might drive U.S. improvement in something in the R&D [research and development]/acquisition area. Then there’s the deployment area—the Mediterranean, etc.—how to counter it.”
Identifying this as disinformation is important; Janes concluded this was disinformation based on who was providing the information.
“Should the source of this information have known what the right information is? For obvious reasons, the shipyard and Russian navy have reason to deceive, but they are official sources and ones we want to continue to use. Still, we must consider the source and understand the biases so we can pass along all the relevant information to our analysts," Gordy said.
The same considerations apply to the Russian war on Ukraine. “There are a host of people putting out information on Ukraine, [including] patriotic Ukrainians and patriotic Russians. They’re useful sources to gather, but we make sure the analytical teams are aware of the bias of those sources,” he said. “What we don’t do is publish on the basis of a single source.”
Building and Using Tools To Counter Disinformation
Janes’ approach to using data is a graph database that allows all the connections among data points to be made.
“That was a big change for us,” Gordy said. “Four years ago … when Janes went from a publishing company to an OSINT company, the question was: How do we achieve this? One lever was taking all the existing Janes information and bringing in this graph database, so that instead of having multiple databases, we started building out connections between all the data using AI [artificial intelligence] and humans.”
Janes’ client base has changed accordingly. Gordy said, originally, most of the company’s clients were libraries and researchers. But by shifting to OSINT, the company’s clients “are looking to influence the operational mission, J-1 through J-9. All of those entities are, first, their own platforms, their own databases,” he explained. “They might be classified or unclassified, so it becomes a key question, how to bring something like Janes into that environment and make it useful.”
The Janes graph database is a very effective way to store information and build links into it within the Janes data model. “Every entity we’re reporting has a Janes unique ID, unique both to that equipment and to Janes,” he said. “Clients can ingest the database into their processes. We have clients who download the database multiple times a day, ingest it and include it on their platform. The client then ends up with a mix of Janes data fully embedded within their classified data.”
Conclusion
There is a term, countering malign influence, to describe the fight against disinformation, “how we counter primarily disinformation of a potential adversary,” Gordy said. “There are elements of the government—the State Department, USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development), as well as the military—looking to counterinfluence what’s going on. Then there are the special operations forces, the civil affairs organizations within the services and combatant commands.”
As The Economist noted in a recent article, “Encouragingly, technology is as much a force for good as it is for evil.” While society and government may never succeed in stopping the creation and spread of disinformation, persistence in finding it, identifying its origins and providing the truth in its place—using tools such as Janes and its ferociously vetted database and its analysts’ stringent conclusions—demonstrate that we are not doomed to drown in a sea of lies.
For more information: janes.com
