Editor’s note: When possible, the Information Professionals Association (IPA) tries to highlight the work and public activities of our members. Dr. Rand Waltzman, IPA Board Member and Deputy Chief Technology Officer at the RAND Corporation, tackles the problem of deepfakes and disinformation, and how to counter them, in a recent Financial Times commentary, “We cannot...Read More

Information Professionals Association (IPA) Member Thomas Kent, an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University and Senior Fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, shares his forthcoming book, “Striking Back: Overt and Covert Options to Combat Russian Disinformation.” The book will be available on Amazon.com starting September 29, 2020, but is available for pre-order now.  A few words...Read More

Editor’s Note: In late July, Mark Pomerleau, a reporter for C4ISRNET (an online publication that is part of Defense News), published a special multimedia series on “Information Warfare: How the Digital World is Changing How DoD Fights.” Articles covered how the Department of Defense is reorganizing for information warfare (IW), and included interviews with leaders...Read More

The State Department’s Global Engagement Center released a report August 5, 2020 on the “Pillars of Russia’s Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem.” The release is part of an effort across the Department of State and entire U.S. Government to help our allies and partners understand and counter this threat from Russia.  The Global Engagement Center, which...Read More

Editor’s note: We have known about the threat of deepfakes for years so it’s not surprising we would have developed an ability to detect them when they are produced by less sophisticated actors.  The threat posed by sophisticated actors continues to be real and we must marshal national-level resources to fight them. This report is...Read More

Interest in research on information and influence to help the federal government is not limited to commercially-offered solutions and operational capabilities. The Department of Defense Basic Research Office is soliciting for multidisciplinary fundamental research to better understand future information warfare and the tracking and prediction of attempts at social manipulation. The Broad Agency Announcement (BAA)...Read More

Editor’s Note: Dr. Paul Lieber, Information Professionals Association (IPA) Advisor and Chief Scientist at COLSA Corporation, shares his perspectives here on how data and social science can best be joined to tackle modern information problems, including the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Lieber has advocated for aggressively finding and using new approaches to information operations (IO)/information warfare...Read More

Editor’s Note: As the Department of Defense adopts a new focus on information warfare and Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) frameworks, industry is examining its role in supporting systems that are data dependent and highly connected.  An article in C4ISRNET captures some of the industry deliberation over how to provide “warfighters with the...Read More

Editor’s Note: While the June 16 coordinated attack against the Twitter accounts of current Presidential candidate Joe Biden, former President Barack Obama, Kanye and Kim Kardashian West, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Mike Bloomberg, and other public figures produced little tangible damage (most Tweeters sniffed out the Bitcoin fundraising hoax immediately and Twitter responded...Read More

Editor’s Note: On Wednesday, July 22 at 1400 EDT (1100 PDT), the Naval Postgraduate School’s DOD Information Operations Center for Research (IOCR) will host a Political Warfare Project Panel. The DoD’s IOCR at the Naval Postgraduate School brings together top experts on operations in the information environment to discuss strategy and policy issues relating to...Read More