Masspersonal Social Engineering: Manipulative Communication at the Intersections of Cyber and Information Operations

Speakers: Dr. Robert Gehl (Louisiana Tech University) and Dr. Sean Lawson (University of Utah & Marine Corps University)

Date: 18 February 2021

Speaker Session Summary

SMA hosted a speaker session, presented by Dr. Sean Lawson (University of Utah & Marine Corps University) and Dr. Robert Gehl (Louisiana Tech University), as a part of its SMA IIJO Speaker Series. Dr. Lawson presented their material, and both Dr. Lawson and Dr. Gehl participated in the audience Q&A.

Dr. Lawson began the presentation by listing the three ways that Russia interfered in the 2016 US presidential election: 1) by hacking the Democratic National Convention (DNC); 2) by leaking sensitive emails to news sources and third-party sites, including Wiki Leaks; and 3) by amplifying information to manipulate individual’s thoughts and actions. Dr. Lawson emphasized that even some domestic actors in the US may have used disinformation practices, including Cambridge Analytica, which was accused of releasing information designed to create voter suppression among minority groups.

Dr. Lawson then defined what he believed is be the best term for using information to influence an audience: social engineering. He broadly defined social engineering as getting a group of people to act in a way that it would not normally. He then highlighted three pioneers of social engineering who laid the foundation for present day misinformation campaigns: Ivy Lee, Edward Bernays, and Doris Fleischman. He stated that these early practitioners of social engineering mostly operated through newspapers, radio, and movies. However, social engineering is now a mixture of interpersonal actions and masspersonal social engineering, which relies on the use of social media.

Masspersonal social engineering does have human components, such as hackers, but it also relies heavily on online bots and trolls to spread information. Dr. Lawson stated that as social engineering has evolved along with technological advances, it has continued to use the same basic strategies, which are 1) trashing, 2) pretexting, 3) bullshitting, and 4) penetrating.

Dr. Lawson began discussing these four strategies by explaining trashing, which is the practice of examining an individual’s or company’s old, discarded emails. The Russian hacking organization, Fancy Bear, was trashing when it went through 2016 presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s old emails. Dr. Lawson then explained pretexting, which is executed in order to make a target act without thinking. Russia has used pretexting on a massive scale since 2016 by putting out content that supports both conservative and progressive world views to generate a reaction from a target audience. Dr. Lawson then discussed what he believed to be the core practice of social engineering— bullshitting—which uses a mixture of deception, accuracy, and friendliness to help create and control an online community. Bots and trolls frequently use a mixture of false and true information to create this community while encouraging emotional reactions. Lastly, he spoke about penetration, which is how many times a piece of propaganda or misinformation is viewed across multiple platforms.

Dr. Lawson finished his presentation by acknowledging that while his presentation focused on Russian interference in the 2016 US election, other nation states, including Iran, and non-state actors have increased their social engineering practices.

Speaker Session Recording

Note: We are aware that many government IT providers have blocked access to YouTube from government machines during the pandemic in response to bandwidth limitations. We recommend viewing the recording on YouTube from a non-government computer or listening to the audio file (below), if you are in this position.

Download Briefing Materials

Robert W. Gehl is a Fulbright scholar and award-winning author whose research focuses on contemporary communication technologies. He received his PhD in Cultural Studies from George Mason University in 2010. After spending a decade at the University of Utah, he took up the F Jay Endowed Research Chair of Communication at Louisiana Tech University. He has published over two dozens articles in journals such as New Media & Society, Communication Theory, Social Media + Society, and Media, Culture and Society. His books include Reverse Engineering Social Media, which won the Nancy Baym Book Award from the Association of Internet Researchers, and Weaving the Dark Web, published by MIT in 2018. He also has published a co-edited collection of essays, Socialbots and Their Friends. He teaches courses on digital ethnography, the history of cultural studies, the communication technology/society relationship, and basic Web design.

Sean Lawson is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah, Non-Resident Fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Creativity at the Marine Corps University. In the 2019-2020 academic year, he served as an Adjunct Scholar at the Modern War Institute at West Point. He is author, most recently, of the book, Cybersecurity Discourse in the United States: Cyber-Doom Rhetoric and Beyond (Routledge, 2020). He is also the author of Nonlinear Science and Warfare: Chaos, Complexity, and the U.S. Military in the Information Age. He is co-author (with Marouf Hasian and Megan McFarlane) of The Rhetorical Invention of America’s National Security State. He is currently finishing up a book with Robert W. Gehl titled, Social Engineering: How Crowdmasters, Phreaks, Hackers, and Trolls Created a New Form of Manipulative Communication, which is under contract with MIT Press and expected to be published in 2021.

His research focuses on the relationships among science, technology, and security. In particular, he focuses on the intersections of national security and military thought with new media, information, and communication technologies (ICTs).

His most recent book, Cybersecurity Discourse in the United States, explores the use of cyber-doom rhetoric in the U.S. public policy debate about cybersecurity. Cyber-doom rhetoric relies on the use of various tactics, such as hypothetical doom scenarios, to raise fear of catastrophic cyber attacks on infrastructure and motivate a response. Dr. Lawson traces the use of such rhetoric, assesses how realistic it is, and the implications it has for our ability to respond effectively to cybersecurity challenges.

His first book, Nonlinear Science and Warfare, traced the use of chaos theory, complexity theory, and network science in the development of theories of information-age warfare. This included a focus on the theory and strategy of network-centric warfare in the U.S. military, as well as theories about fourth-generation warfare and global counterinsurgency.

In addition to his academic work on these subjects, Dr. Lawson is a contributor to Forbes.com, CTOVision.com, and ThirtyK.com.

At the University of Utah, Dr. Lawson teaches courses on new media, ICTs, and society. Undergraduate courses include “Communication Technology and Culture,” “Information Technology and Global Conflict,” “Introduction to Web Design,” “International Communication,” “Drones and Society,” “Innovation with Drones,” “Introduction to Qualitative Research Methods,” and “Privacy and Surveillance.” He also teaches graduate seminars in technology studies and science communication. He has taught “Science and Technology in Western Culture” for the State University of New York’s Empire State College.

Dr. Sean Lawson serves on the Academic Review Committee for the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Center of Excellence (CCDCOE) International Conference on Cyber Conflict. He is an editor for Routledge Studies in Conflict, Security and Technology. He has served as an instructor in the course “Operational Planning for Counterterrorism” offered by the NATO Centre of Excellence Defence Against Terrorism. He has presented his research to the Joint Staff’s Strategic Multilayer Assessment and was interviewed for its Assessment of the Future of Global Competition & Conflict. He has also presented his work on cybersecurity discourse at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Dr. Lawson received his Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2008. Before beginning his Ph.D., he worked as an Associate National Security Analyst with DynCorp Systems & Solutions, LLC in Alexandria, VA. He has an MA in Arab Studies from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and a BA in History from California State University, Stanislaus. As an undergraduate, he interned in the Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Project at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California.

This speaker session supported SMA’s Integrating Information in Joint Operations (IIJO) project. For additional speaker sessions and project publications, please visit the IIJO project page.