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Stealing From the Spooks is now a monograph

In September I posted a short piece on this blog called Stealing From the Spooks. The argument was simple. The United States Intelligence Community got burned, publicly and catastrophically, by its own mind-sets, and it responded by writing down how its analysts ought to think and then drilling it. Police departments have the same failure mode and, in wrongful convictions and unsolved cases, the same body count. So why in the world has policing not stolen the cure?

The post got more reaction than anything I have written on the subject. Analysts wrote to say they had been fighting that fight alone in their squad rooms for years. A couple of prosecutors wrote to say they had never once seen a written hypothesis matrix in a case file and would pay money for one. One detective wrote to tell me I was full of it, which is fair, and then asked where he could read more. That last question did not have a good answer. The blog post was a sketch. So I wrote the book.

Stealing From the Spooks: Structured Analytic Techniques for Law Enforcement Crime Analysis is a sixty page monograph, free, and you can download it here: ConstantinPoindexterAuthor.com. There is no paywall and no email form. Print it, hand it to your lieutenant, leave it on the prosecutor’s desk.

Where the ideas come from

Let me be clear about credit, because the title is a confession. The twelve techniques in the monograph are not mine. They come from a forty page unclassified document the US Government published in 2009, A Tradecraft Primer: Structured Analytic Techniques for Improving Intelligence Analysis, which in turn stands on Richards Heuer’s The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis. Heuer’s diagnosis is the whole foundation: analysts do not fail for lack of information, they fail because the human mind decides which facts to notice before conscious thought ever gets a vote (Heuer 1999; US Government 2009). Anyone who has watched a homicide squad lock onto a suspect in the first seventy two hours and then spend months bending every new fact to fit knows exactly what he was describing. The wrongful conviction literature calls it tunnel vision (Findley and Scott 2006). Heuer called it a mind-set. It is the same animal.

What is mine is the translation. The primer was written for people who track missile programs. I rebuilt it for the detective sergeant staring at a whiteboard full of string, the civilian crime analyst who can smell that the squad’s theory is running ahead of its evidence, the supervisor who signs charging recommendations, and the prosecutor who inherits whatever the investigation did or did not think about. Every chapter follows the same plan: what the primer says, what it looks like in a case file, how to run it with the people and hours a real unit actually has, and where it goes wrong.

What is in it

The primer sorts its techniques into three families, and the monograph keeps that order. The diagnostic techniques make the argument visible: the Key Assumptions Check, the Quality of Information Check, indicators, and Heuer’s Analysis of Competing Hypotheses. The contrarian techniques attack it on purpose: Devil’s Advocacy, Team A/Team B, High-Impact/Low-Probability analysis, and “What If?” analysis. The imaginative techniques go looking for the theories and futures nobody in the room has thought of yet: structured brainstorming, outside-in thinking, red teaming, and alternative futures.

Each one gets a worked example built for police work. A burglary series with an assumptions register that exposes two assumptions resting on nothing but habit. A shooting investigation with a source log that shows, in one column, that the whole theory is standing on a paid informant with secondhand knowledge and an identification run by a detective who already had a favorite. An arson matrix in which the squad’s two favorite facts, the unpaid rent and the increased insurance coverage, turn out to be consistent with every hypothesis on the board and therefore eliminate nobody. That last one is the lesson I most want a working detective to take away. A case is not built by piling up facts that fit. It is built by eliminating the explanations that do not.

The primer’s own showcase example, by the way, is a police case. During the 2002 Washington sniper shootings the working theory was a lone white male with military training in a white van. The primer breaks that sentence into its five assumptions and grades each one. The shooters were two Black males, one of them seventeen, in a blue Chevrolet Caprice that officers had run more than once during the spree. Nobody had written down that the investigation was assuming a van, so nobody recognized the Caprice as a contradiction of anything. You cannot notice the violation of an assumption you never admitted making. That sentence is the monograph in miniature.

The objection, and the answer

The pushback I hear most from investigators is legal, not analytical. “If we write down our doubts, the defense gets them.” The monograph spends a full chapter on that, because it is the objection that kills the practice before it starts. The short version: assume the defense will read every analytic product you write, and understand that this is a feature. Under Brady and Kyles the prosecution already owes the accused everything favorable that the police know, whether the prosecutor has heard about it or not. A dated matrix of considered and rejected hypotheses, a source log that recorded the informant’s motive on day one, a labeled devil’s advocate memo showing the department tried to break its own case before asking a jury to believe it: those are the things that survive cross examination. The cases that fall apart are the ones where the doubt existed, went unrecorded, and came out anyway, ten years later, in a habeas petition.

I also wrote a chapter the enthusiasts will not like, on the limits. The experimental evidence that these techniques make any individual analyst more accurate is thin, and the serious critics have a point (Chang et al. 2018; Dhami, Belton, and Mandel 2019). My answer is that accuracy is not the strongest argument for them in policing. Transparency is. A criminal case gets its accuracy from adversarial testing, and adversarial testing needs something written down to test. A theory that lives only inside the lead investigator’s head can be reviewed by no one.

For the chief who has read this far

The last part of the monograph is a program, not a sermon. A one page directive. A table of who owns what, with the civilian analyst as the owner of the method, deliberately, because the analyst is the person in the building least invested in the lead detective’s theory and least able to challenge it without standing. A ninety day rollout. A way to measure whether any of it is working that does not depend on the clearance rate. And a note for the nine officer department with no analyst, which can still do this with one sheet of paper and a devil’s advocate borrowed from the agency next door.

If a department adopts only three things from the whole document, they should be the assumptions register, the source log, and a devil’s advocate before charging. They are the cheapest. They catch the most.

The appendices hold blank worksheets for all of it and a supervisor’s checklist to run before a charging recommendation goes up. Photocopy them. That is what they are for.

Why I bother

I spent years inside the community that invented this discipline, and I carried a badge before that. I have sat in both rooms. The analytic cadre at Langley and the detective squad in a county building are closer cousins than either would admit: incomplete information, people who lie, a hierarchy in which the senior person’s theory becomes everyone’s theory, and a long record of confident error traced afterward to assumptions nobody wrote down. One of those communities got humiliated badly enough to fix it. The other is still running investigations with the analytic rigor of a bar argument.

The framework is public, it is free, and it is forty pages long. There is no excuse left for not using it. I put sixty more pages around it so there would be even less.

A Spanish edition, Robándoles a los Espías, is ready as well and will be posted separately on the author’s law firm blog for colleagues in the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and the rest of the hemisphere.

~ C. Constantin Poindexter Salcedo, MA en Inteligencia, Certificado de Posgrado en Contrainteligencia, JD, certificación OSINT CISA/NCISS, Diplomado Negociación Estratégica de Harvard, Certificación BFFOC del DoD/DoS

References

  • Chang, Welton, Elissabeth Berdini, David R. Mandel, and Philip E. Tetlock. 2018. “Restructuring Structured Analytic Techniques in Intelligence.” Intelligence and National Security 33 (3): 337-356.
  • Dhami, Mandeep K., Ian K. Belton, and David R. Mandel. 2019. “The ‘Analysis of Competing Hypotheses’ in Intelligence Analysis.” Applied Cognitive Psychology 33 (6): 1080-1090.
  • Findley, Keith A., and Michael S. Scott. 2006. “The Multiple Dimensions of Tunnel Vision in Criminal Cases.” Wisconsin Law Review 2006 (2): 291-397.
  • Heuer, Richards J., Jr. 1999. The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis. Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, Center for the Study of Intelligence.
  • US Government. 2009. A Tradecraft Primer: Structured Analytic Techniques for Improving Intelligence Analysis. March 2009.
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Disinformation as “Insurgency”, an American Constitutional View

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I read with a great deal of interest Jacob Ware’s article “To fight disinformation, treat it as an insurgency” that appeared recently in The Strategist, an Australian Strategic Policy Institute publication. I have always held my own ideas about disinformation, more specifically “inoculation” as a countermeasure and recommending instruction from a very young age much as grade schools do in the baltic states. Ware’s article tackles the subject matter as a ‘control social media’ issue. I do not disagree with the importance of media responsibility for moderation of certain types of content, Ware appropriately identifies “overlook[ing] the important role of digital consumers”, but doubles down on content control. The article suggests that social media companies, as central nodes in the information ecosystem, must be pressured into moderating content more aggressively as much as the importance of digital consumers themselves being hardened against manipulation (“inoculation” as I have written in previous scholarship”. Control, compelling in its framing, raises some not insignificant constitutional issues in the context of the United States, particularly with regard to the First Amendment’s protections of speech, association, and press.

Framing Disinformation as Insurgency: Strategic and Legal Ramifications
Ware’s analogy between insurgencies and disinformation campaigns conveys the existential threat that hostile narratives, particularly those that foreign actors pose to democratic stability. Comparing disinformation actors to terrorist insurgents invites the application of military-style containment and suppression tactics, perhaps even the “cyber-kinetic” removal of bad actors (i.e., content moderation and bans), the targeting of ideological hubs (e.g., online communities, networks, influencers, etc.), and critically, the enforcement of norms through government-backed initiatives.

In the U.S. legal context, much of this may be a non-starter. Insurgents and terrorists operate outside the protection of constitutional law, whereas digital speakers, however misinformed or malicious, are presumptively entitled to the protections of the First Amendment. The Constitution does not permit the government to silence unpopular, false or even offensive ideas unless they meet strict criteria for incitement, true threats, or defamation. This legal boundary sharply limits the government’s ability to treat digital speech as a national security threat without triggering robust judicial scrutiny, even if that information is objectively dangerous disinformation.

Section 230 and Platform Immunity: The Epicenter of the Debate
The article criticizes Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (1996), which shields internet platforms from liability for user-generated content. This statute is often viewed as the legal linchpin that enabled the growth of the modern internet, on the whole a pretty positive thing. Ware argues that these protections prevent platforms from being held accountable and serve as a digital safe haven for malign actors. From a policy standpoint, this critique doesn’t hold much merit. Critics across the political spectrum argue that Section 230 incentivizes platforms to prioritize engagement and profit over truth and social stability, however, repealing or modifying Section 230 would not directly authorize government censorship. It WOULD expose platforms to civil liability for failing to moderate. Any new federal statute that imposes content-based restrictions or penalties would need to meet all prongs of the constitutional free speech tests and modern U.S. jurisprudence. The courts have routinely ruled that platforms are private entities with their own First Amendment rights therefore even in the absence of Section 230, the government would not be able to compel social media companies to carry or remove specific content unless it satisfies narrow constitutional exceptions.

Free Speech: A Distinctly American Commitment
A central theme in the article is the frustration that American-style free speech doctrines allow dangerous ideas to circulate freely online. Ware writes from an Australian perspective. The article praises the European Union’s Digital Services Act and Australia’s eSafety initiatives as superlative regulatory models. Under those statutory regimes platforms face stiff penalties for failing to suppress harmful content. These approaches may appear pragmatic but they clearly represent a sharp divergence from U.S. legal culture.

The U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment prohibits government abridgement of speech, including offensive, deceptive, or politically inconvenient speech. In United States v. Alvarez (2012), the Supreme Court struck down a federal law criminalizing false claims about military honors, holding that even deliberate lies are constitutionally protected unless they cause specific, fixable harm. Further, in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the Court established that even advocacy of illegal action is protected unless it is directed to inciting imminent lawless action AND is likely to produce such action. So, even under the noble pretext of national defense, any proposal that seeks to directly regulate speech must reconcile with this robust jurisprudence. Foreign governments might be able to implement speech controls without constitutional constraints. We cannot. The U.S. must address disinformation through less intrusive, constitutionally sound means.

Counterinsurgency in a Civilian Space: Policing Thought and Risking Overreach
Ware’s counterinsurgency metaphor extends beyond moderation into behavioral engineering, winning the “hearts and minds” of digital citizens. This vision includes public education, civilian fact-checking brigades, and a sort of civic hygiene campaign against harmful content. Although such measures may be effective as psychological operations (PSYOPs), the distinction between persuasion and indoctrination must be carefully managed in a free society.

There is legitimate concern that state-sponsored resilience campaigns could slip into propaganda or viewpoint discrimination, especially when political actors define what constitutes “disinformation.” The inconvenient truth is that the label of “misinformation” has been applied inconsistently, sometimes suppressing legitimate dissent or valid minority viewpoints. The First Amendment’s commitment to a “marketplace of ideas theory” assumes that truth ultimately prevails in open debate, not through coercive narrative management.

There is another danger. Using the tools of counterinsurgency, even rhetorically, raises alarms about militarizing civil discourse and legitimizing authoritarian measures under the guise of “national security.” In Boumediene v. Bush (2008), the Court warned against extending military logic to civilian legal systems. Applying wartime strategy to cultural or political disputes in the civilian cyber domain risks undermining the very liberal values the state claims to protect.

An Appropriate Role for Government
Despite consitutional guardrails, the federal government is not powerless. Several constitutionally sound measures remain available. These approaches avoid entangling the government in the perilous business of adjudicating truth while still defending the information ecosystem.:

Transparency Requirements – Congress can require social media companies to disclose their moderation policies, algorithmic preferences, and foreign funding sources without dictating content outcomes.

Education Initiatives – Civics education and media literacy programs are constitutionally permissible and could help inoculate the public against disinformation without coercion.

Voluntary Partnerships – The government can engage with platforms voluntarily, offering intelligence or warnings about malign foreign influence without mandating suppression.

Targeting Foreign Actors – The government can lawfully sanction, indict, or expel foreign individuals and entities engaged in coordinated disinformation campaigns under laws governing espionage, foreign lobbying, or election interference.

Ware’s comparison of disinformation to insurgency is strategically evocative, but its prescriptive implications clash with foundational American principles. The First Amendment might seem inconvenient, but it was designed to prevent precisely the kind of overreach that counterinsurgency measures invite. Democracies do not defeat authoritarianism by adopting its tools of censorship and narrative control. If the United States is to confront the threats of disinformation effectively, it must do so in a way that affirms rather than undermines what makes us distinctively American. Educating, not censoring; persuading, not suppressing; and building durable civic institutions capable of withstanding the torrent of falsehoods without succumbing to the lure of government-controlled truth are imperative. Freedom remains the best antidote to tyranny ONLY if we remain vigilant in its defense.

~ C. Constantin Poindexter,

  • Master of Arts in Intelligence
  • Graduate Certificate in Counterintelligence
  • Undergraduate Certificate in Counterintelligence
  • Former I.C. Cleared Contractor
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The DNI Report: What is Missing?

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It should come as no surprise in the current polarized political climate that certain threats to U.S. national security are omitted, some overly emphasized and others included but not give a more thorough review. Ironically (or perhaps not so ironically) the omissions and lack of more comprehensive address of certain threat are those very ones that are exacerbated by current Administration policies. The current DNI [unclassified version] contains no surprises, however there are some perils that decidedly lack the attention that they deserve. I’ll be brief.

The weaponization of artificial intelligence against the U.S. population poses and existential threat to the nation that we are not appropriately prepared for. The assessment identifies China’s AI capabilities in surveillance and disinformation, but underestimates the dangers posed by AI-generated disinformation and psychological operations targeting U.S. elections, civil cohesion, and trust in institutions. Synthetic media (deepfakes) at scale are unaddressed and present a very real menace. FIEs that excel in producing these fakes could fabricate major geopolitical incidents and/or falsely incriminate U.S. leaders. This is a “real-world crisis” scenario. Further, in our rush to load up our own AI capability, models trained on U.S. data pose an exposure to having them turned back against us in warfare, negotiation, or economic manipulation contexts. The DNI offers no significant discussion of how adversaries might use advanced LLMs and multi-modal AI to undermine decision-making at every level of our communities, from individual voters and first responders to senior policymakers.

There is a significant danger of the collapse of U.S. domestic infrastructure due to political paralysis and sabotage. The DNI identifies cyber threats to infrastructure (e.g., water, healthcare) however the report understates the systemic vulnerability of U.S. infrastructure to non-digital threats such as aged and neglected critical systems (e.g., bridges, power grids, water systems), and insider sabotage by ideologically motivated actors. White supremacist factionists and extremists like Timothy McVeigh come immediately to mind. Political paralysis and corruption that prevent modernization or resiliency efforts are the final ugly nail in the proverbial coffin. The loss of national security expertise as a result of wholesale firings/layoffs and the sidelining of individuals with decades of tradecraft and professional expertise based on party adherence are a very real threat. The assessment fails to meaningfully consider how polarization and our legislature’s unwillingness to work together are making the U.S. increasingly incapable of protecting or restoring its critical infrastructure after an attack or natural disaster. Don’t think for a moment that Chinese, Russian, Iranian and North Korean FIEs are failing to perceive these vulnerabilities that they can exploit.

Espionage, subversion and other nefarious covert operations against the U.S. and its interests via foreign investment and big-corporate influence are absent. There is really no excuse to omit identification and discussion of how “big money” has affected national security at every level, as even for a layperson is occurring in plain view. China’s cyber espionage and technology theft are addressed in depth, but why are foreign ownership of and influence in U.S. strategic sectors, including agriculture, pharmaceuticals, real estate near sensitive military sites and AI startups left alone? The use of shell corporations and fronting arrangements to embed operatives and proxies within sensitive sectors and policy circles is a serious threat as well. Strategic acquisition of distressed U.S. companies post-COVID by entities linked to FIEs are a mechanism and vehicles for subversion, espionage and sabotage. A brief look at our own history since the end of WWII reveals how these methods are effective and insidious, perhaps presenting a greater danger than cyber-attacks because they provide our adversaries to deep access, deniability and strategic gain that will serve them well for decades. Fragmenting and ‘bull in a china shop’ cancellation of funding paired with broken inter-agency oversight are extremely problematic.

Do better.

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The Peril of Pentagon Orders Russian Cyber Defense ‘Stand Down’

cyber, cyber operations, cyber threat, espionage, counterespionage, counterintelligence, russia

It if doesn’t frighten you, it should. “The Trump administration has ordered the United States to end offensive cyber operations targeting Russia, . . . (US News, Mar. 2025) Russia, or more particularly the Russian FIE poses a grave threat to U.S. national security. Threats posed by this state-actor and its state-supported proxies are grave both in terms of capability and intent. Russia has consistently demonstrated its capacity to execute sophisticated cyber operations targeting governments, corporations, critical infrastructure and individuals. The perils are multi-dimensional, including espionage, cyber warfare (or “war in the grey”), information operations, subversion, ransoming and economic disruption. Examples of Russia’s malign and nefarious cyber activity are plethora however recently the U.S. and Ukraine seem to enjoy the brunt of Putin’s ire. Here are some points to consider:

1. State-Sponsored Cyber Warfare

  • Russia’s GRU Unit 74455, a/k/a “Sandworm” conducts offensive cyber operations, often targeting critical infrastructure the U.S., its allies and shared economic interests.
  • The 2017 NotPetya attack caused over $10 billion in global damages, hitting Maersk, FedEx, and other major commercial concerns. This agent was designed for penetration of a particular type of accounting software used in Ukraine. While not specifically targeting the U.S., the global fallout of NotPetya getting into the wild is instructive. In financial terms, it was among the greatest events of “collateral damage during war” ever recorded.
  • Russian hackers have targeted Ukraine’s energy sector repeatedly. They have demonstrated a clear ability to take down critical infrastructure. Evidence of Russian FIS’s penetration of U.S. utilities, likely in search of weakness to exploit or to leave ‘back doors’ for future exploitation, has also been detected. Notably, Dragonfly 2.0, a Russian state-sponsored hacking group (also known as Energetic Bear), successfully infiltrated U.S. energy sector systems, including nuclear power plants.

2. Cyber Espionage

  • Groups like APT29 (Cozy Bear) and APT28 (Fancy Bear), linked to Russian FIE have hacked into government agencies. They have repeatedly compromised U.S. official networks. The SolarWinds penetration in 2020 is instructive.
  • Ongoing efforts to steal classified or proprietary information from defense, aerospace, and technology sectors save Russia billions in research and development. From 2020 to 2021, Russian hackers compromised multiple U.S. defense contractors that provide support to the Department of Defense (DoD), U.S. Air Force, and Navy APT28 “Fuzy Bear” stole information related to weapon systems (including fighter jets and missile defense technologies, communications and surveillance systems, naval and space-based defense projects.

3. Election Interference & Disinformation

  • Russia has weaponized social media. Troll farms such as the Internet Research Agency and more rescently AI-home-cooked content spread disinformation and misinformation to masssive audiences.
  • Russian cyber actors hacked the DNC and Clinton campaign, leaking emails via WikiLeaks in efforts to subvert the U.S. political process.
  • Operation Project Lakhta was ordered directly by Vladimir Putin. This was a “hacking and disinformation campaign” to damage Clinton’s presidential campaign.
  • The Justice Department seized thirty-two internet domains used in Russian government-directed foreign malign influence campaigns (“Doppelganger”).

4. Ransomware & Financial Cybercrime

  • Russia harbors cybercriminal groups like Conti, REvil, and LockBit, which launch ransomware attacks on U.S. hospitals, businesses, and municipal corporations.
  • Many ransomware gangs operate with tacit Kremlin approval—as long as they don’t target Russian entities. For instance, REvil’s malware is designed to avoid systems using languages from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), which includes Russia. This evidences a deliberate effort to steer clear of Russian entities.

5. Potential for Cyber Escalation

  • Russia has declared NATO and the West and its “main enemy”. The risk of cyber retaliation is real. Russia has the capability to conduct supply chain attacks, disrupt banking systems, and interfere with military communications.
  • In 2020, Russian state-sponsored cyber actors compromised the software company SolarWinds, embedding malicious code into its Orion network management software. This supply chain attack affected approximately 18,000 organizations, including multiple U.S. government agencies and private sector companies. This was a surveillance mechanism which allowed Russia to monitor internal communications and exfiltrate sensitive data from the software users.
  • In 2008 Russia deployed specialty malware (“Agent.btz“) which penetrated the U.S. Department of Defense’s classified and unclassified networks. The breach, considered one of the most severe against U.S. military computers, led to the establishment of U.S. Cyber Command to bolster cyber defenses.

Conclusion

The Russian cyber threat is persistent, evolving, and highly strategic. The West has cyber defenses and deterrence strategies in place (like sanctions and counter-hacking operations) however the current Administration’s order to terminate much of that effort cripple U.S. national security.

Quick to react to reporting of the DoD’s posturing, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) tweeted, “CISA’s mission is to defend against all cyber threats to U.S. Critical Infrastructure, including from Russia. There has been no change in our posture. Any reporting to the contrary is fake and undermines our national security.” Comforting however the words of a confidential source within CISA present a different picture. “A recent memo at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) set out new priorities for the agency, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security and monitors cyber threats against US critical infrastructure. The new directive set out priorities that included China and protecting local systems. It did not mention Russia, . . . analysts at the agency were verbally informed that they were not to follow or report on Russian threats, even though this had previously been a main focus for the agency.” (Guardian, Mar. 2025)

Russia is one of our most aggressive cyber adversaries as well as being recongnized by most nations as a ‘cyber threat pariah’ (i.e., most vocally by NATO, the EU and the U.N.). Given the President’s position on Russia, it’s impossible to say that U.S. continues to harden critical infrastructure, surveil Russian FIE cyber efforts and accomplish effective countermeasures. Russia’s offensive cyber capabilities will remain a major security challenge for the foreseeable future. The question is, are we willing to handicap our efforts to meet our adversaries with robust cyber capability or simply turn our heads away.

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Pause and Reflect, . . . How do we get to fascism?

Reflect

Pause and reflect as this can happen here. The following passage from our esteemed colleague Wayne Michael Hall highlights a critical lesson. “Still, people didn’t believe it could get too bad; Germany was highly educated, and a cultural epicenter after all, home to Goeth, Schiller, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Rilke and Hegel, among other great minds. It wasn’t until the night of the broke glass, Kristallnacht, when Goebbles and Hitler turned their nazi stormtroopers loose to murder, plunder, imprison and destroy Jews and their property that the nazi state’s bureaucracies, occupied by the wrong people and focused in the wrong direction, allowed the beast loose and with it came ferocity and savagery on a scale rarely seen. Then, the alternatives for the oppressed, primarily Germany’s Jews, became quite limited, particularly for people with little money. Soon the only alternative became to “go with the flow” and hope for the best. Their collective wills acquiesced because they saw no other alternatives. This too, would pass, they thought. The giant nazi nation-state run by powerful bureaucracies, brought home to the Jews of Germany and to homosexuals, communist, mentally disabled people, gypsies or anyone deemed non-Aryan what the the beast turned loose could be capable of doing to humanity; as the destroyer of alternatives and a destroyer of hope and, ultimately, mankind. By the time the German people fully understood the bureaucracy’s evil ways, it was too late to do anything. All of the feasible alternatives had been closed off by the nazi bureaucracy which had seeped into every nook and cranny of society. The beast’s masters at work in the bureaucracies faced no punishment and did not take responsibility for their actions, until they lost the war. Even then, most of them did not feel the pangs of guilt for the crimes that they conducted, even those people going to the gallows at the Nuremburg Trials except for one person, . . . Albert Speer. The beast had gone mad and the result was World War II; fifty million dead, including six million Jews murdered in death camps, hundreds of concentration camps, disrupted and dislocated people all over the world, and misery and pain to innocent men, women and children. Visit Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C, sometime to get an education in what the beast is capable of doing.” (Hall, 2018)

The lesson is self-explanatory however I will leave you with these thoughts, thoughts that I perceive as prescient and instructive.

The Illusion of Immunity in Advanced Societies

Germany’s cultural and intellectual milestones were perceived as a safeguard against barbarity, yet they failed to prevent the descent into Nazism. In 2025, similarly advanced societies may assume they are immune to tyranny due to their democratic traditions, legal frameworks, or cultural sophistication. The frightening fact is that full faith in those qualities foments complacency, making it easier for authoritarian tendencies to take root. The erosion of civil liberties, normalization of hate speech, and consolidation of power under populist leaders are illustrative.

Bureaucracies as Tools of Oppression

The Nazi state weaponized its bureaucracies to enforce policies of exclusion and extermination, embedding discrimination into every level of German government and society. Politicized bureaucracies, misused A.I. and social media, or systems designed to exclude marginalized groups can and will serve as instruments of oppression. Discriminatory immigration policies, surveillance abuse, or gerrymandering to entrench power are clear examples.

The Role of Scapegoating and Polarization

The Nazis targeted Jews, LGBTQ+ individuals, Romani people, mentally handicapped and others, creating the perception of “enemies within: to consolidate power and distract from economic or political failings. Statements like “enemy of the people”, is characteristic. Political leaders may use similar tactics, scapegoating minority groups or political opponents to inflame their base and distract from systemic issues like economic inequality, inlusion, civil rights abuses or climate crises.

The Destroyer of Hope and Alternatives

The lack of viable options for Germany’s oppressed populations made resistance seem futile, forcing many to surrender or flee. Systemic disenfranchisement, disinformation, the restriction of voting rights or peaceful demonstration similarly erode hope and stifle dissent, leaving vulnerable populations without alternatives.

The Danger of Inaction and the Cost of Ignorance

Germans as a whole underestimated the threat of Nazism until it was too late. Apathy and denial allowed Hitler to consolidate power unchallenged. Right now, democracies face homogeneous risks if citizens fail to recognize or act against the encroachment of authoritarianism, misinformation and disinformation campaigns driven by unregulated social media platforms, and restrictions on civil freedoms. In the presence of silence and inaction, harmful ideologies to take root and flourish.

What should we observe? What must we see to stop authoritarianism in its tracks? Leaders who consolidate power and any cost, undermine judicial independence, attack the free press, appoint unqualified cronies to senstive judicial, defense and intelligence positions, threaten member of their own political parties with banishment should they dare to “take sides” against the “leader”. These actions echo the bureaucratic centralization and propaganda tactics used by the Nazis. Surveillance tools, artificial intelligence, and digital platforms can be weaponized to track “the enemy withing”, spread disinformation and deepen societal divisions. THESE are the tools of modern bureaucracies of mass control. Efforts to restrict voting rights, limit freedom of assembly, limiting the free press by threatining the revocation of FCC licenses, lawsuits against or flagrant harassment of newspapers, and discriminatioin against specific groups will appear to be incremental but snowball into systemic oppression. The inability to address global crises like climate change, pandemics, commerical trade controversies or geopolitical conflicts can lead to mass displacement, economic collapse, and extremism, mirroring the chaos of the interwar period that fueled the rise of the Nazis.

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Involuntary Addiction Treatment Works

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The article in the Sunday edition, “Addiction Treatment Can Work Even When It’s Not Voluntary”, provides a well-supported argument for mandatory addiction treatment. To date, the sparse peer-reviewed work conducted on compulsory treatment has been antagonistic to the idea. “Given the potential for human rights abuses within compulsory treatment settings, non-compulsory treatment modalities should be prioritized by policymakers seeking to reduce drug-related harms.” (“The Effectiveness of Compulsory Drug Treatment”, A Kamarulzaman, et al., Dec. 2015) Newer evidence shared by Satel and Sabet in their article contradicts the cited work. Further, it fails to contemplate nearly a century of history of involuntary commitments for a multitude of reasons. The theory that drug addiction is a disease and that those who suffer from addiction should not face the danger of “consequences” has unfortunately taken hold. As a community we began to accept responsibility for the negative personal choices of our fellow Americans, viewing challenges such as the drug scourge as our failure as a society rather than bad personal choices. Decriminalization of very dangerous narcotics is the most recent manifestation of this. Addiction researchers should broaden their focus to include case studies of mental health wholly unrelated to drugs. Severe mental illness, referred to before it became an insensitive and politically incorrect term (“crazy”), would be a good start. There is a corollary, an issue which forms part of our public discourse on almost a daily basis, . . . gun violence.

Before the notorious mafia murders during prohibition and post-prohibition, any adult citizen could walk into a gun store and legally purchase any type of firearm available. It was very rare to hear of a mass shooting, children murdered by their classmates or any other horrific act with a firearm outside of the criminal underworld. Passage of the NFA in 1938, the GCA in 1968, and various state gun control regimes emerged however the increase in gun violence continued to grow. The commonsense observation, immediately applicable to the compulsory treatment question, is that we used to “lock up crazy.” Simplistically, an individual walking down the street arguing with an imaginary person in the 1940s or 1950s would likely have found him or herself the guest of a psychiatric institution. Within the context of the gun violence question, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter Adam Lanza may have been deprived of the opportunity to commit his heinous act.

Before the 1960s cultural revolution and posterior changes in public opinion about personal responsibility for one’s behavior, involuntary commitment was prevalent. Advances in pharmaceutical science from the 1950s forward supported the theory that a “pill” was the magical bullet, further eroding the view that involuntary commitment was a necessary evil. The courts likewise offered little help to the supporters of commitment. The 1975 case of O’Connor v. Donaldson is instructive. It represented a change in the justifying criteria for commitment from a broader test to that of almost exclusively one of the dangers that an individual presents to society. Writing for Psychiatry (Edgemont Journal), Doctors Megan Testa and Sara West wrote, “Through interviews of mothers of individuals with mental illness, Copeland learned that current civil commitment criteria force relatives to watch their loved ones go through progressive stages of psychiatric decompensation before they can get them any help at all.” (“Civil Commitment in the United States”, Megan Testa, MD and Sara G. West, MD, Oct 2010, Psychiatry) The court-imposed restrictions on involuntary commitment exacerbated the problem.

The curtailment of involuntary treatments, whether it be for drug addiction or mental illness, has impaired our ability as a society to address some of the gravest challenges to our safety as well as the happiness and well-being of those addicts and mentally ill. Authors Sally Satel and Kevin Sabet’s article on mandated treatment is prescient and the involuntary commitment question merits renewed attention.

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The Challenge of Spying on China

spy, spies, espionage, counterespionage, intelligence, counterintelligence,carlyle poindexter, constantin poindexter

The WSJ article on Wednesday (Challenge of Spying on China) is a sad reminder of the United States Intelligence Community’s apparent failure to accomplish any broad covert or clandestine penetration of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in recent history. The lack of HUMINT human intelligence sources (HUMINT) with meaningful access and placement deprives us of insight into Chinese decision making, immediate strategic threat intelligence and perhaps more importantly, gravely impairs U.S. offensive counterintelligence operations.

Moving beyond the obvious difficulties with HUMINT operations within the PRC, reminiscent of the Cold War hostile operational environments, the Intelligence Community is overdue for a paradigm shift in human asset recruitment methodology. For the better part of the last century, the United States Intelligence Community relied on a steady flow of “walk-ins”, volunteers from opposing foreign intelligence services or governments that offered their countries’ secrets. Intelligence officers enjoyed a large degree of success based on a fairly global perception that Americans were the “good guys”, representatives of the land of fairness, equality and justice, qualities that stood in stark contrast to the ruthless and despotic republics from whence they came. Unfortunately, the mystique has faded leaving outsiders to wonder if the values that we promote to the world are nothing more than a hypocritical farce. Mass diffusion of the “Big Lie” throwing fair elections into question, an attempted coup d’etat by an outgoing president, and military involvement under highly questionable intelligence assessments erode the view once held that the United States is the “shining beacon to the oppressed”.

Chinese citizens enjoy a better standard of living than at any time in China’s history. China can rightfully boast that it is a world power and its population can justifiably be proud of its progress. Personal financial success and pride in country promote loyalty. That there is no broad internal rejection of onerous mass surveillance, social credit controls and ethnic cleansing as is the case with the Uyghurs, is a testament to the PRC’s ability to deny facts, deceive its population and prevent the import of non-PRC approved “truths” about freedom and justice within China. The Chinese cultural tendency to identify with the collective rather than the individual is likewise amplified by the PRC’s massive social control machine, with opposing or antagonistic perspectives effectively blocked by the Great Firewall or simply drowned out of public discourse by the volumes of Party-approved propaganda. The PRC’s strategy has created an environment that is more resistant to traditional intelligence recruitment techniques such as economic coercion, ideology exploitation and ego-stroking. Chinese intelligence service recruiters lean on the cultural affinity of ethnically Chinese living in the United States to turn them into spies, coerce them by alluding to what might become of their families living in China or deploy the time-tested technique of guanxi to achieve intelligence asset recruitments. United States intelligence officers do not enjoy a parallel or equivalent.

FBI Director Wray stated, “We’ve now reached the point where the FBI is opening a new China-related counterintelligence case about every 10 hours.” The threat is grave and our twentieth-century countermeasures, techniques and tradecraft are not appropriate for what many in the Intelligence Community deem the greatest threat to United States national security. Retooling, reimagining the intelligence recruitment cycle and modernizing the way that we approach the recruitment of sources is imperative.

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Iran Cyber Operations Target Utility Infrastructure

cyber, cyber operations, espionage, counterespionage, counterintelligence, cyber defense, CISA, countermeasures, constantin poindexter

Per the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), “Since at least November 22, 2023, these IRGC-affiliated cyber actors have continued to compromise default credentials in Unitronics devices. The IRGC-affiliated cyber actors left a defacement image stating, “You have been hacked, down with Israel. Every piece of equipment ‘made in Israel’ is CyberAv3ngers legal target.” The victims span multiple U.S. states. The authoring agencies urge all organizations, especially critical infrastructure organizations, to apply the recommendations listed in the Mitigations section of this advisory to mitigate the risk of compromise from these IRGC-affiliated cyber actors.” (CISA, 12/01/2023)

The penetrations were aimed at critical utilities, in the extant case of U.S. water and water waste treatment infrastructure. Per CISA, “Beginning on November 22, 2023, IRGC cyber actors accessed multiple U.S.-based WWS facilities that operate Unitronics Vision Series PLCs with an HMI likely by compromising internet-accessible devices with default passwords. The targeted PLCs displayed the defacement message, “You have been hacked, down with Israel. Every equipment ‘made in Israel’ is Cyberav3ngers legal target.” The Water and Wastewater Systems Sector (Water Sector) underpins the health, safety, economy, and security of the nation. It is vulnerable to both cyber and physical threats.” The warning is instructive. The fallout from a successful compromise of public water systems can be severe. Andrew Farr warns, “The imagination can run wild with worst-case scenarios about what a threat actor could do to a water system, but Arceneaux explains that sophisticated actors could hack a system and manipulate pumps or chemical feeds without the utility even knowing they were in the system. They could also create a water hammer that could lead to cracked pipes or release untreated wastewater back into a source water body. What if that happens [to a water system] in a medium or a big city? Maybe it’s only for a few hours, but it could go on for a few days or weeks, depending on how extensive the damage is.” (Farr, WF&M, 04/11/2022) Darktrace reports the very real consequence of a successful water system compromise. “Earlier this month, cyber-criminals broke into the systems of a water treatment facility in Florida and altered the chemical levels of the water supply.” (Matthew Wainwright, Darktrace) If potable water delivered to consumers contains dangerous contaminants or improper balances of the “good” chemicals blended to the product (fluoride, chlorine, chloramine, etc.), it can cause negative health effects. Gastrointestinal illness, nervous system damage, reproductive system damage, and chronic diseases such as cancer are very real risks associated with the same.

CISA cyber defense model of the “brute force” methodology deployed by IRGC operatives may be viewed at MITRE.

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Strategic-Level Management, Smaller is Better

constantin poindexter, carlyle poindexter, research, Operation Bayonet, covert action, covert operation

I read an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal today, a book review of “Emperor of Rome”, by Mary Beard. While the piece focused on the untimely demise of many of the caesars, there was a short but instructive comment. “Emporer of Rome is spiced with striking comparisons. The Roman Empire functioned with about 95% fewer senior personnel than the Han Dynasty that ruled at the same time in China.” (Kyle Harper, WSJ, 10/22/2023) This small anecdote reads as if it had been a surprise finding, that a small Roman leadership circle was a Black Swan and that it bends preconceived notions about the necessity of large networks of government instrumentalities to manage an empire as large as Rome’s. It is a fallacy that large enterprises require the support of large bureaucracies. Quite to the contrary. In strategic-level management, smaller is better.

Organizational dynamics and bureaucracy are Geoffrey M. Bellman’s forté. In his work, The Consultant’s Calling, “he explains why an organization is only capable of performing to a certain level of mediocrity. Organizational structure is essential to conducting business in a modern complex society. Bellman relates that organizations are: large, awkward, and unwieldy. Usually, organizations don’t work very well because they don’t fit the human creatures who work in them. Organizations as we have built them are more mechanical than ‘organical’… we have built awkward hierarchical structures with boxes and lines connecting them. We have created structures modeled after machines–mechanistic, sharply defined, and inflexible–that force their moving human parts to act like machines too. Such organizations do not work very well … even when everything is finely in tune … there are significant difficulties.” (Bellman, 2001) The author’s commentary is prescient and instructive.

There is a ‘real world’ case study that illustrates well the concept of “smaller is better”. A master’s thesis authored by Alexander B. Calahan, COUNTERING TERRORISM: THE ISRAELI RESPONSE TO THE 1972 MUNICH OLYMPIC MASSACRE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF INDEPENDENT COVERT ACTION TEAMS (Calahan, 1995) provides an excellent argument. “The important aspect of operating within organizations and systems is that by its very nature, it incorporates a predetermined limitation of success. As long as the mission operates under the constraints dictated by the organization’s structure, policies, regulations and management philosophies, it will only obtain a finite predetermined level of success. Bureaucratic processes are rigid and restrict decentralized authority and the ability to work at a continued fast and fluid pace. Government agencies must live within regulations that do not allow interpretation or flexibility for unique circumstances. Bellman related that organizations are sharply defined and do not allow flexibility. Philip K. Howard, The Death of Common Sense (1995), further demonstrates how this is magnified in government agencies: Government acts like some extraterrestrial power, not an institution that exists to serve us….It almost never deals with real-life problems in a way that reflects an understanding of the situation….Our regulatory system has become an instruction manual. It tells us and the bureaucrats exactly what to do and how to do it. Detailed rule after detailed rule addresses every eventuality, or at least every situation lawmakers and bureaucrats can think of. Is it a coincidence that almost every encounter with government is an exercise in frustration? In the decades since World War II, we have constructed a system of regulatory law that basically outlaws common sense. Modern law, in an effort to be self-executing, has shut out our humanity….The motives were logical enough: Specific legal mandates would keep government in close check and provide crisp guidelines for private citizens. But it doesn’t work. Human activity can’t be regulated without judgment by humans. Government cannot accomplish anything when multiple procedures are required for almost every decision. Process is a defensive device; the more procedures, the less government can do. Which is more important: the process or the result?” The author and his cited references are correct. Large bureaucratic organizations cannot support a dynamic operation that must think and act “on the fly”.

Calahan’s case study is an analysis of Operation Bayonet, an assassination mission in response to the massacre of Israeli Olympians and their coaches. The Mossad fielded two teams to accomplish the operation, one under strict headquarters control (“Lillehammer”) and the other (“Avner”) under none. The former was a disaster and the latter and ALMOST perfect success. The failed operation had many flaws but the most salient argument is the “micromanagement” one. Per Calahan, “However, the failure is more attributable to attempting to conduct an operation beyond the capabilities of the political bureaucracy. The officers in Lillehammer had more than adequate training and skills; however, the organization forced them to abandon proven tradecraft procedures to accomplish the assassination of Salameh under unreasonable tactical conditions. X allowed political pressure to dictate the pace of the operation beyond what he knew was reasonably necessary for success within the bureaucracy.” (Calahan, 1995)

The successful operation enjoyed an autonomy that ultimately achieved the operation’s objective. ” . . . Avner’s team was designed outside the political realm of the Mossad. Avner’s team would not institute shortcuts bowing to political influences that might jeopardize the success of the mission. Quality operations demand quality people involved and quality planning from the outset. The Mossad team members understood that they would operate in a covert capacity until the successful completion of the mission or the team was no longer able to operate intact due to injuries or deaths. They were to remain a cohesive unit. The unit learned and understood each others’ skill, abilities, and limitations, planning and operating accordingly.” (Calahan, 1995) Small, tight and capable teams with more “hands off” oversight was key.

“Walmart CEO Doug McMillon calls it “a villain.” Berkshire Hathaway vice chair Charlie Munger says its tentacles should be treated like “the cancers they so much resemble.” Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, agrees that bureaucracy is “a disease.” These leaders understand that bureaucracy saps initiative, inhibits risk taking, and crushes creativity. It’s a tax on human achievement.” (Hammel and Zanini, HBR, 2018) In the covert operation subject of Calahan’s case study, as in the private corporate sector, smaller is better. So did the Roman caesars manage the empire with a small leadership cadre by design, eschewing the idea that large bureaucracies were necessary to the state, or was their design utilitarian, i.e., keep your enemies close? Either way, the Emperor of Rome has apparently stumbled on one of the most important observations on successful management of a team, . . . a lesson for leadership when strategic planning.

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The Problem of Truth Decay

disinformation, truth, decay of truth, constantin poindexter, carlyle poindexter research masters

In a particularly timely and instructive work, Doug Irving of the RAND Corporation offers insight on how pernicious the “decay of truth” is to our security, and more to the point our adhesion to one another as Americans with common goals, hopes and dreams.

Writes Irving, “You could walk up to most Americans and ask them, ‘What are our national interests?’ and there would actually be a lot of agreement,” said Williams, the associate director of the International Security and Defense Policy Program at RAND. “Now, how do we achieve those national interests? There are lots of legitimate views about that—but Truth Decay makes it harder for people to have a reasoned debate. Partisanship and political self-interest get pushed to such an extreme that there is no middle ground where compromises, let alone consensus, can be achieved.” (RAND, 2023). The “middle ground” to which Irving refers is the foundation of a fair democratic system. Our democracy works when parties are able to share, discuss and at times fiercely debate differences of policy opinion. I stress here the word, “opinion”, because we observe currently a broad coalition of citizens that accept unqualified and un-vetted opinions as truths. “A new NPR/Ipsos poll finds that 64% of Americans believe, . . . that “voter fraud helped Joe Biden win the 2020 election” — a key pillar of the “Big Lie” that the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. (NPR, 2022). It is a FACT that voter fraud is almost non-existent, and that the few cases of voter fraud are so insignificant that they cannot affect the outcome of a national election. Voter fraud is a myth.

Per Irving, “The poll found that support for false claims about election fraud and the January 6th attack have been remarkably stable over time. For example, one-third of Trump voters say the attack on the Capitol was actually carried out by “opponents of Donald Trump, including antifa and government agents” — a baseless conspiracy theory that has been promoted by conservative media since the attack, even though it has been debunked.” (RAND, 2023) The lie continues to be frighteningly persistent, only on the right. I am not shooting down some of the very important (and valid) policy positions that the Republican coalition hold. In fact, I do agree with some of them. My problem is with the lies, the disinformation propagated by the right and their engagement in disinformation activities that would make Goebbels blush. The problem here is compounded by the observation of disinformation effectiveness among our adversaries. “China, Russia, and other adversaries already know this. They have weaponized disinformation—seeding the internet with rumors and conspiracy theories in the panicked early days of COVID-19, for example. That helped slow the response and almost certainly cost lives. But it also makes it harder to hold up American democracy as a model for the world.” (RAND, 2023)

Circling back to my point about vigorous debate, how an argument over policy points improves the health of our democracy, the debate must be based on a shared set of objective facts. One CANNOT engage in legitimate debate when one side lies, and lies almost all of the time. Further, the lies are reinforced by a group of conservative media that keep otherwise well-intentioned citizens inside of an information bubble that repeats falsehoods ad infinitum. Fox, OAN, Breitbart, the Daily News and others are the chief offenders, Fox, was most recently ordered to pay nearly $800 million for, . . . lying. What is the solution? How do we get back to caring about one another, or more to the point, caring about the health of our democracy? Irving offers some prescient advice.

“The U.S. Intelligence Community, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and other government agencies are already investing in efforts to swat down misinformation and disinformation before they take hold. Efforts to strengthen media literacy and civics education in school could also help strengthen the public against Truth Decay, especially on questions of national security.” (RAND, 2023) Irving and others are not the first to offer this partial solution. I would humbly add here that our youth, grade schoolers would be well-served by the inclusion of coursework on disinformation and its nefarious effects on all of us. The technique is called “inoculation”, work that much like a vaccine provides our kids with some basic defense mechanisms to internal and external attempts to subvert our system. Estonia includes media literacy work in their grade school curriculums, thus there is precedence. Further work on the RAND strategy might include the same.

I recommend a full read of Irving’s piece on RAND’s blog.

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