Especially worthy of notice today.
- Operation Glowing Symphony successfully disrupted ISIS inspiration.
- Cyber Command's ability to collect outstrips its ability to handle the data collected.
- A tax enforcer comes to the Kremlin, and people see far more surveillance in the offing.
- India close to requiring social media to identify senders of messages.
Operation Glowing Symphony a success, and reviews tell a familiar story.
Operation Glowing Symphony, as US Cyber Command's campaign against ISIS in cyberspace was called, has been reckoned a success, the Washington Times reports. Conducted by Joint Task Force Ares ("JTF Ares," as it's commonly called) Glowing Symphony went after ISIS media operations and its online presence generally, with a view to degrading the Caliphate's ability to conduct the sort of inspiration and command-and-control it was accustomed to employing.
The targeting is interesting in that Glowing Symphony seems, from the documents released so far, to have worked to disrupt influence operations as opposed, say, to developing target indicators for US Central Command to use in kinetic operations. This should serve Cyber Command well as it prepares to secure the 2020 US elections, since election disruption has been, and can be expected to continue to be, fundamentally an influence operation as opposed to conventional hacking that aimed at directly manipulating results.
The familiar lesson that emerged from Glowing Symphony is that ability to collect information outstrips ability to analyze or otherwise use it. Fifth Domain says that the operators were surprised by the sheer quantity of data they were able to gather, and that data handling and storage are now matters of close interest to Cyber Command.
The taxman sees pretty much everything...
Mikhail Mishustin, Russian President Putin's new Prime Minister, came to his current office after a career spent running Russian tax enforcement, a job that requires the ability to arrange and organize insight into many areas people would rather keep obscured. Foreign Policy calls him a rock star of techno-authoritarianism, and suggests that the Russian surveillance state is in for a heavy dose of...more surveillance.
India prepares regulations to require social media to determine who's sending the messages.
Changes to the countries intermediate liability rules that will be submitted to that country's high court would effectively require social media and instant messaging services to disclose, TechCrunch reports, who originated messages that were deemed offensive or dangerous. The change is aimed at controlling the viral spread of memes the government considers dangerous.