Today’s episode of “The Convergence” podcast features our conversation with Mr. Doowan Lee, CEO, VAST-OSINT and Board Advisor, Zignal Labs, originally published last October. Mr. Lee is a National Security expert in influence intelligence, disinformation analysis, data analytics, network visualization, and great power competition. Before joining Zignal Labs, Mr. Lee served as a professor and principal investigator at the Naval Postgraduate School, where he executed federally funded projects on collaborative information systems, network analysis, and disinformation analysis. His article entitled The United States Isn’t Doomed to Lose the Information Wars explores Russian and Chinese disinformation campaigns and was featured in Foreign Policy last fall.
The following bullet points highlight key insights from our interview with Mr. Lee:
Our adversaries see disinformation as just an effective tool that provides strategic and global reach. We see it as irregular warfare when it is anything but irregular.
Disinformation, or the historical term propaganda, has been around forever. COVID-19 has accentuated this threat vector or surface.
The Chinese government outlined their national information operations policy in "The Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere” (also known as Document #9):
- Nations talking about the spread of open societies are attempting to undermine the CCP.
- The CCP will maintain positive control of all media.
- The CCP will professionalize information operations.
This policy resulted in the development of the “Great Firewall,” the “Golden Shield" project, and the PLA’s Strategic Support Forces.
The CCP and the Kremlin are increasing their coordination on national security activities and, in some cases, are increasing their collaboration. This resulted in a joint statement that stated the two governments would
