Thomas Rid on 'Active Measures,' Part 2
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 30 April 2020
⏱️ 53 minutes
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Summary
In this episode of Lawfare's Arbiters of Truth miniseries on disinformation, Quinta Jurecic and Alina Polyakova spoke with Thomas Rid about his new book, "Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare." Yesterday’s episode of the Lawfare Podcast featured a conversation between Thomas and Jack Goldsmith about the book, focusing on the early history of disinformation through the 1980s. Today, Alina and Quinta follow up with a discussion with Thomas on disinformation in the digital age, along with some questions about what it’s like to interview former KGB and Stasi officials about their influence campaigns.
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| 1:08.0 | The main vector for disinformation operations were journalists. That was there |
| 1:15.8 | were the gatekeepers and yeah, to convince a journalist that a story is, you know, |
| 1:19.7 | newsworthy and for example, that a forgery is credible enough to be covered as real. |
| 1:27.3 | So that meant that some of these operations really required craftsmanship and |
| 1:33.3 | exquisite planning and preparations. Sometimes they had to, you know, maintain |
| 1:38.2 | friendly relationships with with journalists in order to surface this material in a more effective way. |
| 1:45.8 | One of the fascinating questions I think is whether that has changed as the result |
| 1:50.3 | of the internet. And I would say that arguably the answer is a little bit but not completely. |
| 1:59.0 | I'm Quintia Jurassic and this is the Lafayr podcast, April 30th, 2020. |
| 2:07.1 | Today we're bringing you another episode of our Arbiter's of Truth mini series on disinformation. |
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