This has been an open secret in national security circles but the average person on the street has no idea what a grey zone conflict is, what it looks like, or why it matters. Geopolitic strategies are increasingly executed as grey zone warfare, and some hybrid warfare, because the costs and risks of traditional overt warfare have become unacceptably high.
> Use of the term grey-zone is widespread in national security circles, but there is no universal agreement on the definition of grey-zone, or even whether it is a useful term, with views about the term ranging from "faddish" or "vague", to "useful" or "brilliant"
It goes on to say:
> Grey zone warfare generally means a middle, unclear space that exists between direct conflict and peace in international relations.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey-zone_(international_relat...
The ADL head (Greenblatt) noted they had a major issue with young people seeing footage from the front lines negatively impacting perception of Israel, this is in a leaked voice memo from early 2024. Ban legislation followed within a month.
(1) https://x.com/wikileaks/status/1852851603365036222
The Chinese government invested a lot for decades in R&D around population-scale behavioral manipulation, including running a lot of experiments on their own population. It was an impressive research effort; other countries invest in this too but the Chinese commitment to mastery of it was next level. Not an issue.
These capabilities and techniques can make populations wired into it dance like predictable puppets in aggregate but they don’t work that effectively over generic undifferentiated communication channels because humans are too chaotic. It requires tight real-time feedback, control, and instrumentation of the information channels with sufficient critical mass population-wise to matter. Those kinds of tight feedback and control loops under direct control of government systems for constructive manipulation aren’t really a thing at most social media companies. You can spam propaganda but that is qualitatively inferior.
Divestiture of TikTok removes the access and control the Chinese government needs to effect outcomes with TikTok beyond typical propaganda and influence operations.
Most countries desire this capability but the technical implementation and requirement of sufficiently tight control of the channel has been a formidable barrier. China outright banned any vehicle that had the potential to allow foreign governments to do the same in their own country.
All of this has been known and discussed in national security settings for decades. The difficulty of implementation in the real world made it mostly a hypothetical risk at any non-trivial scale until TikTok.
The most insidious aspect is that sophisticated operational analytics has made it such that the manipulation may seem completely unrelated to the desired population-scale effect, it is not propaganda in a conventional sense. Done well, the individual never perceives it but the aggregate effect reliably emerges. The extent to which humans can be analytically manipulated in very indirect ways at scale is both fascinating and scary.
(Many years ago I used to work on problems related to population-scale operational behavioral analysis. China was on the cutting edge of this research even back then. None of the experimental theory is new, but apparently the tech finally caught up.)
If you control the "last mile" infrastructure, you have a pretty good idea what's going on. If you control the mobile network, you can track everyone, and flash their baseband processor if you like.
(see also: concerns about Huawei equipment in our internet infrastructure)
The documents that Snowden released confirmed that this kind of thing was going on. To be honest, I don't think that really surprised anyone in the security community.
We just don't want China to have the same power to monitor our citizens as we have ourselves.
Could you please give some source on that info?
a backdoor: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/replicant-developers-fin...
a patent for doing it in "civilian" applications: https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2013114317A1/en
sure, the NSA will respect that
Look at the backlash against the US government trying to clamp down on Covid misinformation with a national emergency declaration [1]. There’s exactly zero reason to expect the CCP has an incentive to behave differently, especially when there’s effectively no way for companies to push back in China.
And no that doesn’t excuse the nonsense some US administrations get up to. Like undermining the effectiveness of the Chinese covid vaccine [2].
There is already evidence of pressure being applied to ByteDance by the CCP for data on Hong Kong citizens [3].
So it would be silly to think that: 1) data for different TikTok users is more or less difficult for the CCP to access based on their specific locations (technically or practically) And 2) the CCP has more respect for foreigners than Western governments do.
———
1 - https://hms.harvard.edu/news/whats-stake-us-supreme-court-ca...
2 - https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covi...
3 - https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-china-bytedance-user-data-...
AOC published a video talking about how she (and some other representatives) believed that the arguments that were presented to them were just as vague, nonspecific and theoretical as these online arguments I keep reading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey-zone_(international_relat...
“Aggressively weaponized”: These conflicts rely on information as a primary weapon because it is more cost-effective and impactful than traditional warfare.
“National security circles”: This term commonly refers to the U.S. security establishment, including its agencies and defense systems.
Pro-Russian, right-wing candidate (Calin Georgescu) with zero funding becomes leading candidate overnight. Turns out there's coordinate campaigns to push him on social media channels, like TikTok, where tens of thousands of accounts were opened a couple of weeks prior to polls opening. All pushing Calin.
i hate that nationalism is becoming another hyper-polarized topic - now we get people who are ridiculously jingoistic/anti-cosmopolitan and other people who reject fully the notion that a government’s first responsibility is to its own citizens. both are radical views that are no way to govern a well-functioning republic.
"Manipulation Playbook: The 20 Indicators of Reality Control"
That has been happening since time immemorial.
What is actually the issue is that for the first time ever in the post-WW2 Pax Americana era, media is being weaponized by a powerful non-American state (China).
America does through Facebook, Mysterious Twitter X, Reddit, CNN, Fox News, PBS, et al. what China does through TikTok. If anything, other countries should also seriously consider banning foreign media and realize insofar as future geopolitics that Pax Americana is ending.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_i...