The Information State and the War for Truth

Episode Forty: The Information State and the War for Truth

In this focused discussion, Lee Smith sits down with writer Jacob Siegel to examine what information warfare actually is and how it has evolved from a tool of foreign conflict into a defining force within American political life. Drawing from his new book The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control, Siegel explains how modern information warfare extends beyond propaganda to include the struggle for narrative control, the manipulation of communications systems, and the targeting of decision-making itself.

The conversation traces how efforts to combat foreign disinformation gradually expanded into the regulation of domestic speech, blurring the line between legitimate national security concerns and the policing of American political expression. Smith and Siegel also explore the deeper philosophical roots of information control, the danger it poses to national sovereignty, and what it would take to recover a public sphere that protects both truth and liberty.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:04

To the inspector force of American ingenuity. To the sacred inheritance of freedom we must protect. This is our legacy. Join investigative journalist, Lee Smith, on Root, Rights, and Reason. Powered by America's future.

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Hi, I'm Lee Smith. Welcome and thanks for joining us for this new episode of Roots, Rights, and Reason. This week we're discussing information warfare and how it's shaping our ability to one, understand the world and our country, and two, to take action to protect our families, communities, and our country. Information warfare refers to the use and management of information to gain an advantage over an opponent. It includes a wide range of activities such as spreading false information, hacking systems, disrupting communications, and manipulating public opinion. The goal is not necessarily to destroy physical targets, but to weaken an opponent's decision-making, trust, and social cohesion. One key feature of information warfare is that it often targets both governments and civilians. For example, during conflicts or political tensions, a country might try to influence the population of another country by spreading misleading narratives online. This can create confusion, fear, or division, making it harder, therefore, for that society to respond effectively. Social media platforms have made this type of warfare much easier because information, whether true or false, can spread rapidly to millions of people within minutes. Closely connected to information warfare is propaganda, which is the deliberate use of information to influence people's beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors. It has been used for centuries, long before the digital age. Governments, organizations, and even individuals have used propaganda to gain support, justify actions, or discredit opponents. Propaganda is often one of the main tools used within information warfare campaigns. While information warfare includes technical actions like cyber attacks and data breaches, propaganda focuses on influencing human perception and behavior. It can take many forms. For instance, white propaganda is designed to promote the decency and virtue of one's own cause. For instance, social media posts paid for by the Chinese government to promote tourism in China are designed to paint the Chinese Communist Party in a positive light and to deflect attention away from its brutal human rights record and hostility to its Asian neighbors. Black propaganda, on the other hand, is deliberately deceptive and designed to vilify opponents. For instance, calling America the enemy of Islam is how Islamic extremists deploy black propaganda against the United States. Information warfare is evidence that power is no longer limited to physical force, but also includes the ability to control narratives and influence minds. Thus, the big question before us is what happens when these strategies and techniques are brought home? And one side of the American political spectrum deploys them against American citizens. Today we're speaking with Jacob Siegel, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer and a writer at Tablet Magazine. Jake is author of what many reviewers are already calling the most important book of the year: The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control. Jacob Siegel, author of the book Everyone is talking about the Information State. Thanks so much for being here with us today on Roots, Rights, and Reason. Just want to start off with a very uh basic and fundamental idea, fundamental to your book and what we've been seeing the last few years. What exactly is information warfare?

SPEAKER_01 4:06

Lee, it's always good to be with you. Uh, information warfare, in addition to being, you know, the kind of pervasive medium that's all around us in society right now, specifically refers to a few different things. One is a war over narrative control. So one aspect of information warfare is about controlling flows of information that present a particular picture of the world or of an ongoing event to some specific population who is the target of that form of information warfare. That's one dimension. But information warfare is an extraordinarily broad, capacious category. And it also includes things like cyber warfare, which refers to attacks on the physical infrastructure that controls communications. And as I detail in this book, the information state, one of the problems with information warfare as it applies to U.S. military doctrine is that it's so broad, no one could ever be sure exactly what it referred to at any given time. But in the form that we're dealing with it now, inside the U.S. in the domestic situation, I think the critical aspect of it is this fight to control both narratives and also the means to disseminate and manipulate those narratives, meaning control over the communications infrastructure through which the narratives are distributed.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

Fascinating. So you're saying that I mean you were in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Um, and you're saying at the time that uh our armed services didn't really have a very good grasp of what it meant when it talked about information warfare.

SPEAKER_01 5:56

I'm saying actually it's even deeper than that because this confusion over information warfare goes back to the 1990s, to the original explosion of the doctrine of information warfare and the enthusiasm for information warfare, which really, in the modern context, starts with the Gulf War. It starts with the Gulf War because that war demonstrates this overawing, awesome power of U.S. high technology to sink precision targeting, long-range strikes, and communications. So the Gulf War is the first war that features universal GPS systems on the Allied side, right? And this is an extraordinary leap forward in warfare. It means that for the U.S. and its allies, you know where you are and where your friendly forces are on the battlefield at every moment of the war. And you know, I can tell you, having used the even more advanced versions of these systems in Iraq, we called it Blue Force Tracker. I forget what it was called in Afghanistan, but it, I mean, it's really an extraordinary advantage to have over an enemy. The Gulf War is where that first appeared. And the Gulf War also, as you'll recall, featured these live news streams, right? Media was invited in to broadcast the opening of the war. So it was this combination of tremendous technological mastery and advantage on both the sort of hard power side in terms of GPS systems and targeting, and also on the soft power side with narrative control. Uh, and this led to an explosion in enthusiasm for information warfare. Because, you know, the the Gulf War was this kind of paradigmatic victory, and it seemed to suggest that with the Cold War receding in the background, you know, this this was after the fall of the Soviet Union, with the Cold War receding, here was the opportunity to transition from Cold War doctrine to a whole new military doctrine, lighter, more high-tech. And that was the promise. But from the very beginning, military officers and analysts were starting to notice that when people spoke about information warfare, um, you know, it was like the the people describing an elephant and everybody uh touching it, a blind blind man describing an elephant. One guy describes the trunk because that's what he felt, another guy describes the ear, etc. And information warfare was a bit like that. It was so broad, no one could be sure exactly what it meant at any given time.

SPEAKER_00 8:35

It's fascinating because uh a lot I'm including uh including myself. I'll speak for myself. It's not always easy to distinguish between uh information warfare and what we've called propaganda, which has been a feature of warfare and uh national conflict since the beginning of times. And but you're saying it's much, much larger than that.

SPEAKER_01 8:56

Aaron Powell Yeah, I think the the crucial difference is that information warfare is a technological phase change. So propaganda also has a mass media uh aspect that we saw starting with the First World War. But information warfare, unlike propaganda, is not just about the distribution and control of specific messages in support of one's own side, delegitimizing the other side. That's the sort of classic uh propaganda approach. Information warfare targets decision making specifically, not just public opinion. So if propaganda was an effort to sway public opinion, uh information warfare in itself conception, and I think also as it evolved over time, is much more about targeting the sort of the capacity to execute decision making.

SPEAKER_00 9:51

Well, one of the things that you were saying uh before about uh with the first Gulf War, about how it gave military leadership, uh it let them know where everyone is. I mean, that in itself is a huge revolution in and warfare, right? I mean, you read the accounts, whether it's Caesar, whether it's Napoleon, you know, the the the real uh the real uh uh great leaders, they understood generally where their forces were, but the ability to know where everyone is at all times, I mean that's that's profound change right there. Do our adversaries now have that same capacity?

SPEAKER_01 10:27

Not to the same degree we do, but our let's say our near-peer adversaries, let's talk about, for instance, China, Russia, uh Iran is a live example right now. They have some versions of the same things uh we're talking about GPS location systems, but uh obviously uh China has more than either Iran or Russia. Iran has very few at this point. Uh but but what that ends up meaning, if everybody has it, is now it becomes a contest over who can jam the other, who can jam the adversary system, who has more satellites, who controls the satellites. So the GPS system itself is uh less of an asymmetrical advantage for the US. But the ability to impact the pipeline that delivers the GPS data now becomes more crucial. And the U.S. has the advantage there, to be sure, but this is where the Chinese, for instance, have been trying to close the gap in recent decades. Aaron Powell How do they do that with satellites?

SPEAKER_00 11:34

Or what kind of defense do you have for satellites? If that's presumably one of the first things you want to target, how do you defend that?

SPEAKER_01 11:41

Aaron Powell How do you defend over attack defend against attacks on your own satellites? Yes, uh counter jamming measures, uh the the there's a whole field of electronic warfare, uh E-Lint, as some of it is called. I've I've lost I've been out of the Army for a while. I've lost track of some of the acronyms at this point, but you know, there is EWO electronic warfare, uh, or no, the EWO is the electronic warfare officer. Sorry. There is a whole field dedicated to jamming and counter-jamming. And so that's definitely part of it. But another part of it is uh just the ability to mass the largest satellite infrastructure in the first place and to have the most uh transmission means to rebroadcast signals on the ground.

SPEAKER_00 12:30

One of the things that you're uh again, everyone is talking about the book and the lead up to publication, uh published March 24th, The Information State. One of the so many people are talking about it. And I think that one of the reasons why it's so resonant right now with a broad reading public is because people have perceived that information warfare has come home to the United States. And again, we started to see this with Russia Gate, we've seen it with a whole bunch of different things. How did that happen? How did information warfare come home so that American political sides are deploying it against American citizens?

SPEAKER_01 13:11

It happened under the pretext of fighting disinformation. So this is the sort of tragic irony of the counter-disinformation campaign. Foreign disinformation targeting the U.S. is a very real thing. Um, it was happening in 2016. It was happening before 2016, it's happening now. However, the efforts to fight foreign disinformation were used to justify what was really an attack on legitimate political speech inside the US and on the candidacy of Donald Trump in particular. And in the course of that, the category of disinformation became so broad, was purposefully broadened and turned into this sort of amorphous entity so that actual Russian-directed attacks on the US, propaganda attacks, let's say, actual Russian-directed propaganda campaigns that could be traced back to Russian sources, were lumped into the same category as constitutionally protected speech acts made by American citizens that seemed to echo or parallel the sentiments in those Russian-directed attacks. That was the first step. Once that happened, and once the national security establishment, or some large part of it in the U.S. and the political establishment under President Obama decided that Russian disinformation was the grave existential threat facing the U.S. And uh essentially, you know, doctored the U.S. intelligence system through things like the ICA, the intelligence community assessment, uh, doctored those to create the false impression that Donald Trump was elected through collusion with Vladimir Putin. Once they did that, they broadened the category of disinformation to include domestic political speech, constitutionally protected domestic political speech made by American citizens. That was the first step. And when that happened, they then had this large arsenal of informational, electronic informational tools at their disposal because those were the same tools that they were using to fight ISIS messaging, al-Qaeda messaging overseas. And as soon as the sort of category blurring occurred, where domestic speech from American citizens was placed in the same category as speech by foreign actors, by terrorists, by adversary states, et cetera, once that happened, then these tools of information warfare started to be first uh you know incrementally and then quite rapidly and wholesale introduced into this new campaign of domestic policing of uh domestic extremism.

SPEAKER_00 16:10

Where I mean, what I I think we have we acknowledge, right, and this is this is part of your book, I mean, there are real attacks on our there are real uh information warfare attacks on the United States by hostile actors, by Russia, by different Islamist groups, by China, by Iran. So that's that's right. I mean, we we that's really happening, and that continues to happen. What does the what does this war that you talk about in the information state, what is this war against American, I don't know, the uh American citizens, American speech, American society, what does it look like? Where are we now?

SPEAKER_01 16:46

Well, so what it looks like, uh first and and foremost, from the perspective of my book, is the culmination of a long process. And you know, I trace this process all the way back to the 17th century and the invention of binary mathematics and the the idea from philosophers like Gottfried Leibniz that there could be a mathematical perfection of truth in human argumentation. You know, what Leibniz Leibniz was a brilliant philosopher, I don't want to blame him for all of our current troubles, but uh but Leibniz had the idea, which was a very positive outlook at the time, and which was actually tied in in fascinating ways to his spiritual philosophy. Leibniz had the idea that, you know, God had created the universe through a certain uh sort of minimal number of procedures of truth theorems. And we, in our religious devotion to God, could deduce those truth theorems, and that binary mathematics was part of that. Binary, of course, is the underlying code of the entire digital universe, of all digital computers. They run on binary, and Leibniz wanted to rectify our reasonings through uh, you know, submitting human arguments to mathematical formulas, and he saw binary at the very core of that. So that's the sort of deep origin. But then what happens through the progressive movement in the US in particular is there's a view that develops if only the central technocratic administrative authorities can control the information, right? If only they can deliver the correct information to the public and withhold the incorrect information, incorrect information meaning anything that runs counter to their own agenda, that this will invariably produce the proper social outcomes. Those are the outcomes that the experts have have already determined are best for society. That idea is a very deep idea, and it's still with us. And disinformation sort of turns this idea around because what it does is it says, you know, the claims about disinformation said the American political system is under attack, right? And it created this existential emergency that justified these extraordinary power grabs and justified turning tools of the war on terror around on American citizens. But behind these panicked claims about disinformation lay that progressive view of informational control being at the very heart of uh producing good societies, of progress itself. Only by controlling information could the experts be allowed to uh calibrate the machinery of society to lead it into the, you know, into a brighter future. So where are we now, you asked? I think that I think that Donald Trump has uh you know, very early in his administration really successfully attacked the governmental side of what was a massive, massive system of public-private uh coordination in terms of this informational control. And he did that by you know gutting agencies that had maybe once served a legitimate purpose, like the Global Engagement Center, um CISA under the Department of Homeland Security, that may have technically served a legitimate purpose but had been co-opted into these partisan forms of informational warfare. And I think that was a real, meaningful step towards releasing the social media platforms that are now effectively the public arena, releasing them from this kind of opaque control through this unofficial, unaccountable public-private system. And that was that's real progress. However, um, because we have not yet gotten to the point where we're we're really dealing with the the real existential crisis that the internet itself presents to national sovereignty and to the ability for a nation state to protect its own borders, because the internet as it's currently constructed um really threatens that, threatens the sovereignty of the US. Because we haven't addressed that, we've gotten into this confusing situation where on Elon Musk's Twitter, for example, the proliferation of insane propaganda has been confused with free speech. But of course, the founders of the United States understood free speech to be connected to the exercise of rights within a bounded, delimited nation state, within a bounded, delimited republic. Right? They didn't mean for free rights to be extended to Bangladeshis at the same time it was extended to America.

SPEAKER_00 21:53

Or the British Crown or Precise in the War of 1812, right? It was very as you Say sharp that there were borders. The First Amendment, there we were the people of the First Amendment. This didn't apply to the Brits. This was one reason that we separated ourselves from the Brits. Right. So we're Jake. Um, how do we get out of this? How do we look how do we protect the fact that we're the people of the First Amendment? How do we protect how do we protect our speech? How do we protect our liberties while also defending against the kind of information warfare that intends to poison our polity, that wants to ruin us? What's the what's the kind of balance? What's the and I'm sorry to stick that on you with with with only a couple minutes left, but that's the big question.

SPEAKER_01 22:48

I'll give you some practical steps and then I'll give you one more sort of wild uh solution. The practical steps that could be taken immediately are um to essentially fence off domestic political speech on the internet from speech coming from the rest of the world. There are a few ways to do this. One uh positive step that Musk has taken on Twitter is to mark the country of origin for people speaking. You know, I think that's a good first step, but much more can be done to uh identify visibly uh members of the American nation. And I I don't mean, you know, through some kind of uh mark of the beast barcode or digital ID or something like that. What I mean is that um we need a way to essentially separate public speech online that's taking place between American citizens um from public speech that's taking place with audiences outside the US. I think that's technically very achievable. I think you know that that's something that can be done. At the same time, and related to that, we need to reintroduce a hard separation between the concept of foreign disinformation, which is a completely legitimate uh concern for national security agencies, and these egregiously uh exploitative uh concepts of misinformation and malinformation. The grouping together of foreign disinformation, again, a legitimate concern with these amorphous, expansive categories of misinformation and malinformation, which necessarily fall over American citizens also was a really terrible mistake. I mean, maybe that's the most charitable way to look at it as a mistake, or it was an act of essentially informational warfare. And then finally, the kind of wild solution is you know, I have argued for something like data rights for American citizens. And the reason why I make this argument is because I think that without economic penalties, the degree of you know, AI slop, the degree of online propaganda, there's very little friction to reduce it. But if you have something like data rights, where tech companies have to pay even fractions on fractions on fractions on pennies to the people, to the Americans who produced the content that gets sucked into their AI systems and their algorithms, if you force them to pay even these tiny annuities to people at scale that introduces a kind of friction that disincentivizes mass propaganda and AI slot. So that last one is harder to accomplish, but I think it's actually the most meaningful.

SPEAKER_00 25:46

It's very interesting because it kind of gets around all the different problems with the internet and publishers and stuff like that, right? The idea that when the internet was created, they wanted to make sure there wasn't going to be litigation all the time, that we're was slowing down the information super highway. That's a very interesting way around it. Let me ask, what kind of before I let you go, what kind of reception are you getting? Um, aside from the uh gloriously positive reviews, what are, I mean, for instance, our are are is anyone in the is anyone in the military saying, you know, finally someone's explained what information warfare is, and we're not, you know, we're not going to hand this out like a pamphlet, but it's very helpful. So yeah, what's the reception?

SPEAKER_01 26:25

You know, I'm hoping to get that kind of reception from people in the military. I've put it in the hands of uh some people I know at West Point and um have sort of sent it around through my own channels. My buddies who I served with are uh I don't know that they've read it, but they're very pleased that I'm a published author now.

SPEAKER_00 26:43

So they don't have to read the book, and you shouldn't be sending it out to them for free. They should be paying for their for their pals' book.

SPEAKER_01 26:50

So uh one of my best friends is a cop in Staten Island who I was with in Afghanistan, sent me a very nice note. So that was uh you know, I was happy to get that. But um, you know, I haven't I haven't seen the sort of broader impact in the military yet. The book's getting some great receptions, uh, great reception from uh general readers, but hopefully that'll come soon.

SPEAKER_00 27:13

Jacob Siegel, author of The Information Stake, congratulations and uh friend Jacob Siegel. Jake, thanks so much for being here with us today on Roots, Rights, and Reason. And thanks to all of you for watching. We'll see you in our next episode of Roots, Rights, and Reason.