Espionage and propaganda are two pillars of traditional information operations. Espionage ferrets out small amounts of valuable data (for example, to determine whether a particular country has a nuclear weapons program). Propaganda broadcasts messages to alter another nation's perceptions and hence decisions. Both operate at the national – that is, wholesale – level, even if the minds they would steal from or change are those of discrete individuals.

Exploiting cyberspace enables information operations at the retail level. Unique information can be gathered person by person from a large number of individuals, and messages can be tailored to every listener. Such conquest involves a mix of friendly and hostile approaches. The friendly part is inducing people to reveal information or get them to listen to your story. The hostile part is stealing information from others or using such information to coerce others.

This chapter discusses conquest at the retail level. Following some scaffolding, it examines how the necessary information is acquired and then used. The section on information acquisition is divided into surveillance in real space, surveillance in cyberspace, the transfer of information from the local to the global level, and privacy issues. The section on information exploitation discusses how such data can be amalgamated and exploited, but ultimately what such data are worth.

Information Trunks and Leaves

Although the sizeable U. S. and Soviet intelligence systems built during the Cold War collected reams of data, they (or at least ours) did so to inform ourselves about a few key facts: what were the other side's intentions, what weapons did they possess, what were their force deployment policies, and who their spies were.