“Amygdala Hacking” UFO Enthusiasts: a NATO Information Operations Report
What follows is a brief summary of a NATO report that describes military-sponsored information operations including “amygdala hacking” related to the UFO subject, among others, against domestic, non-combatant populations.
Rebecca Goolsby, Ph.D. is a Program Officer with the Office of Naval Research’s Human and Bioengineering Systems team known as Division 341. She is a computational social scientist, self-described “cyber-anthropologist,” and received her formal training in anthropology. Goolsby has been with the Navy for 21 years and she currently oversees a considerable portfolio of research projects involving, among other things, the “new information environment, social behavior . . . [and] strategic communication in information conflicts.” Since 2015, Goolsby has served as US Navy Lead for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, “Community of Interest in Human Aspects of Military Operating Environment[s].”
In 2017, Goolsby was appointed as the US Lead for NATO Research Technology Group 298 where she chaired a panel of PhDs and defense leaders from the UK, Estonia, and Australia to prepare a report for NATO entitled: Information Technology for Crisis and Disaster Response (STO-TR-HRM-248).
Goolsby’s NATO Report examines the history and growing sophistication of botnets, influence operations, and information warfare with specific reference to Russia’s 2014 cyber influence campaign during Russia’s invasion of Crimea in Ukraine. The Report initially observes that today’s information environment has introduced an immense uptick in the number of actors capable of creating, transmitting, and receiving information on a mass scale, in real-time.
Modern information platforms (Twitter), Goolsby notes, have dramatically transformed social relationships, including the relationship between civil authorities and citizens. Anonymity of the Internet has allowed for the deliberate manipulation of information by actors who steer the curious and the easily misinformed into group memberships they do not understand. This new information environment is 90% sociology and 10% technology.
Goolsby, early on in the Report, takes the troubling position that the military should not only be permitted to conduct social media information operations against adversarial and neutral audiences, but against civilian populations as well. She states, in relevant part, that “the use of civilian infrastructure is essential to the delivery of online information operations . . . [and is] unlikely to be geographically bound and may run through neutral or allied countries as well as the domestic jurisdiction . . .” Ultimately, Goolsby justifies domestic-facing information operations because it can “create[e a] ‘soft’ effect . . . [that] can preclude ‘hard’ effect[s], involving destruction and loss of life — potentially allowing military objectives to be achieved with less suffering.”
Among other social media manipulation techniques Goolsby discusses is the “amygdala hack” which takes advantage of cognitive or psychological vulnerabilities certain people have. Amygdala hacking is a psychological manipulation tactic that renders an individual so inflamed and emotional that they can no longer access critical reasoning centers of the brain, making it difficult to absorb new information.
People interested and active in controversial subjects such as UFOs, ethnic pride, and abortion, Goolsby explains, are particularly susceptible to amygdala hacking.
Goolsby also notes that artificial methods can be utilized to promote disinformation or viewpoints through “[b]logs, videos, and other content . . . making disinformation seem more real or compelling.” Among these are sophisticated strategies involving use of a “central ‘feeder’ bot that can be followed by peripheral or ‘child’ bots, with messages from the ‘mother’ or ‘feeder’ [and] disseminat[ed] through retweets by the ‘children.’” These manipulation efforts result in “discourse suppression . . . [in which] the tweets of legitimate, human voices [can be displaced] with information that is intended to distort the conversation, change the subject, or introduce noise and uncertainty.”
The Report concludes that even “experienced, everyday users of Twitter could not appreciate and understand the technical and social maneuvers being practiced by the adversary or predict their possible outcomes.”
The full NATO report can be found here.
