Truthful statements come with straightforward denials. Thus, we tend to hear, "No, I did not do it," or just "No" from a truthful person who has been wrongfully accused.
Deceptive statements, by contrast, tend to take a more winding path. Often, they sidestep accusations with what sound like denials but, on closer scrutiny, turn out to be evasions Thus, the response that takes the form, "I would NEVER do that," is not denying a specific allegation but instead issuing a statement about habitual practices. In other words, the recovering alcoholic who witnessed a liquor store robbery late at night but had gotten into the habit of avoiding bars and old haunts by "never" going out at night may well say, "I NEVER go out at night" in reply to a question about being anywhere near the liquor store last Tuesday at the time of the midnight holdup. To the untrained ear, this statement may be taken as a denial. He must not have been there, so let's look for another witness.
What does such a deceptive denial accomplish? It spares the person making it from issuing an outright lie. Unless challenged and pressed for a more specific denial ("Yes, sir, I understand that you don't usually go out at night. I am asking specifically, were you at or near this specific location on Tuesday night, specifically any time between 11:00 pm Tuesday and 1:00 am Wednesday morning?"), the person gets away without telling an actual lie. After all, it is true that he normally does not go out at night. Last Tuesday was the one night he deviated from his normal pattern. This irregularity may so bother the individual, that his desire to conceal it overrides his fidelity to the truth. And so he deceives with his quasi-denial, even though he has no complicity in the liquor store robbery, and even though he did not take a drink from that bottle of bourbon he bought, after all. He was nonetheless deceptive in his response.
What does this have to do with deception from the view of deceivers and detectors of deception? Both recognize the same tactic. Consequently, they pay closer attention to word selection in the context of denials. Scientific content analysis and the Reid and Wicklander-Zulawski techniques of uncovering deception make entire disciplines and careers out of spotting such telltale nuances.
Deniability relies on arranging of conditions to insulate an executive or organization, to keep either from being placed into the position of having to tell an outright lie in order to get out of trouble. This is why the top executive's fingerprints seldom appear on anything volatile or controversial. Instead, the executive uses go-betweens who double as expendable flak-catchers. They do the dirty work behind the scenes and absorb the blame if the situation explodes in controversy, leaving their executive masters maneuvering room to make straightforward denials and to distance themselves from renegade underlings. If the executives cannot make straightforward denials in such circumstances, then either they are themselves too involved in directing the activity in question, or their deniability mechanisms have failed.
Consider now a more topical case on the public stage: President Obama's response to the accusatory question of whether he had leaked national security information in furtherance of his re-election campaign. Did he make an outright denial? No. He said the suggestion was "offensive" and “that’s not how we operate.” (Quotes and context are at http://news.yahoo.com/obama-hits-back-offensive-leak-allegations-170532289.html)
Isn't that interesting?
-- Nick Catrantzos
Monday, June 25, 2012
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Secret Service, Meet KGB
Few things generate overreaction as much as the applied forces of media and political attention during an election year. Although the focus on this situation has now shifted off the front page, there are signs that one institutional reaction to the Secret Service faux pas in Columbia may be setting a bad example for security and management in general.
What form is that reaction taking that is so objectionable? According to one report that apparently raised no public eyebrows, the solution to keeping Secret Service jump teams from distracting themselves indiscreetly with coin-operated consorts when on advance travel in preparation for presidential visits abroad is to commission a new set of government employees to watch them. (Details at http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/02/politics/secret-service/) Secret Service team, meet your new zampolit, a KGB-assigned political officer there to watch and report. (For history on this position, which even pre-dated the KGB when introduced into the Soviet military, see http://www.mvep.org/zampolit.htm )
In other words, rather than address a management problem through proper training and supervision, political panjandrums prefer to saddle Secret Service agents with a hated sentinel whose only ultimate effect will be to carry out painstaking and pain-giving witch hunts over real or embroidered distractions. The hated sentinel only has two achievable alternatives. Either become a permanent, traveling hemorrhoid, or go through the motions and feed the new bureaucracy with satisfying but innocuous reports, thereby ingratiating oneself with the people one is supposed to watch. Regardless of which alternative the watcher ultimately selects, the net result is to create an environment of deception.
If the newly embedded zampolit becomes a conscientious chronicler of Secret Service movements, the watched start hiding even innocuous activities from the watcher – particularly if they have reason to fear being maligned. If, instead, the watcher goes native and merely goes through the motions of reporting, then watcher turns deceiver. Either way, at least some energy that should be focused on protecting the president ultimately gets diverted into pro forma exercises that recall the kind of reports that KGB political officers would routinely turn in on everything from submarine commanders to research scientists that they were assigned to monitor. And for every report, there must also exist an audience, someone to read it, assess it, file it, and make judgments on it that will affect careers. In time, this means that advancement of Secret Service agents will come to depend, in some measure, on image management. Some of this may be appropriate for any position of responsibility. If, however, this criterion becomes dispositive or unduly magnified to an inordinate extent, protective details of the future will be chosen for how innocuous their members appear to the assigned watcher instead of how effective they are at keeping a traveling president alive.
With any luck, the introduction of the KGB zampolit into a traveling Secret Service team will vanish as quietly as it was conceived, escaping notice as media attention turns to another act in the political circus of this election year. Otherwise, a permanently embedded distraction will likely undermine Secret Service jump teams much more than under controlled libidos. As Hippocrates observed long ago, there are some remedies that are worse than the disease.
-- Nick Catrantzos
What form is that reaction taking that is so objectionable? According to one report that apparently raised no public eyebrows, the solution to keeping Secret Service jump teams from distracting themselves indiscreetly with coin-operated consorts when on advance travel in preparation for presidential visits abroad is to commission a new set of government employees to watch them. (Details at http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/02/politics/secret-service/) Secret Service team, meet your new zampolit, a KGB-assigned political officer there to watch and report. (For history on this position, which even pre-dated the KGB when introduced into the Soviet military, see http://www.mvep.org/zampolit.htm )
In other words, rather than address a management problem through proper training and supervision, political panjandrums prefer to saddle Secret Service agents with a hated sentinel whose only ultimate effect will be to carry out painstaking and pain-giving witch hunts over real or embroidered distractions. The hated sentinel only has two achievable alternatives. Either become a permanent, traveling hemorrhoid, or go through the motions and feed the new bureaucracy with satisfying but innocuous reports, thereby ingratiating oneself with the people one is supposed to watch. Regardless of which alternative the watcher ultimately selects, the net result is to create an environment of deception.
If the newly embedded zampolit becomes a conscientious chronicler of Secret Service movements, the watched start hiding even innocuous activities from the watcher – particularly if they have reason to fear being maligned. If, instead, the watcher goes native and merely goes through the motions of reporting, then watcher turns deceiver. Either way, at least some energy that should be focused on protecting the president ultimately gets diverted into pro forma exercises that recall the kind of reports that KGB political officers would routinely turn in on everything from submarine commanders to research scientists that they were assigned to monitor. And for every report, there must also exist an audience, someone to read it, assess it, file it, and make judgments on it that will affect careers. In time, this means that advancement of Secret Service agents will come to depend, in some measure, on image management. Some of this may be appropriate for any position of responsibility. If, however, this criterion becomes dispositive or unduly magnified to an inordinate extent, protective details of the future will be chosen for how innocuous their members appear to the assigned watcher instead of how effective they are at keeping a traveling president alive.
With any luck, the introduction of the KGB zampolit into a traveling Secret Service team will vanish as quietly as it was conceived, escaping notice as media attention turns to another act in the political circus of this election year. Otherwise, a permanently embedded distraction will likely undermine Secret Service jump teams much more than under controlled libidos. As Hippocrates observed long ago, there are some remedies that are worse than the disease.
-- Nick Catrantzos
Sunday, June 3, 2012
Understand Cover, Understand Infiltrators
Whence this quote? "To learn how to find, one must first know how to hide." (Answer at the end.)
In the same vein, to expose infiltrators, one must first understand what they do to conceal their hostile intent and how they penetrate one's defenses to make themselves into insiders. One of their best tools is something well-conceived and meticulously inculcated: cover.
What is cover, and how well do defenders understand it? It is much more than the puerile conception of dressing and acting like one's targets. Nothing better gives away the amateur's grasp of cover than the image of a fledgling cop or case officer applying for an undercover assignment by dressing like a scruffy vagrant whose guiding objective is to look outlandishly different from a professional wearing a service uniform or the uniform of convention (a business suit). Such amateurs may eventually be schooled. But they may equally harden their yokel's belief that cover is just a game of dress-up for people who never managed to take acting classes in school.
Cover is multi-layered and can be very sophisticated. There is official cover and non-official cover. There is cover for status and cover for action. There is natural cover and cover within a cover. Cover can be part of a carefully prepared and fully backstopped legend. Good cover takes time to develop, internalize, and put to use. Sound application includes setting traps to detect when one's cover is being questioned, doubted, or blown by the target or by the opposition. Cover and plausibility are eternally conjoined.
Mastering cover means demonstrating the capacity to lead a double life, to take on a purposefully structured identity, and to arrange all one's actions to comport with that identity in the service of a mission. It is no undertaking for the impetuous, or the undisciplined, or the slow-witted.
A serious adversary bent on penetrating a target from the inside pays much more attention to developing the cover of his or her chosen infiltrator than most defenders ever pay to this subject. Superficial grasp of cover by attackers and defenders alike looks no further than appearances. Deep understanding of cover looks at appearances only as a preliminary move to a much bigger end game. An infiltrator with first-rate training and support lives the cover, defying casual exposure. This is why betting the institution’s survival on piercing the cover and spotting the malicious insider makes an inadequate defense. The better the cover, the more important it is to add multiple protective layers which have the effect of reducing the opportunity to strike – even if the adversary’s cover proves flawless. Such tactics are often called opportunity denial measures. This is where a No Dark Corners approach helps defenders offset their adversary's advantage in mastery of cover. (For details on the No Dark Corners approach, see Managing the Insider Threat: No Dark Corners, CRC Press, May 2012. Now available directly via CRC or Amazon.com.)
As for the answer to the first paragraph's question: The quote comes from the 1966 motion picture, Fahrenheit 451, based on Ray Bradbury's science fiction novel about a future where firemen ignite books as part of a larger regimentation of society and suppression of individual freedoms. The context? Training such enforcers to find banned books includes an experienced instructor advising rookies that they will improve their results if they learn to think like their opponents. So, too, is it with cover. The best – if not only – way to even begin to pierce through the cover of an able infiltrator is to start thinking like the opposition.
-- Nick Catrantzos
In the same vein, to expose infiltrators, one must first understand what they do to conceal their hostile intent and how they penetrate one's defenses to make themselves into insiders. One of their best tools is something well-conceived and meticulously inculcated: cover.
What is cover, and how well do defenders understand it? It is much more than the puerile conception of dressing and acting like one's targets. Nothing better gives away the amateur's grasp of cover than the image of a fledgling cop or case officer applying for an undercover assignment by dressing like a scruffy vagrant whose guiding objective is to look outlandishly different from a professional wearing a service uniform or the uniform of convention (a business suit). Such amateurs may eventually be schooled. But they may equally harden their yokel's belief that cover is just a game of dress-up for people who never managed to take acting classes in school.
Cover is multi-layered and can be very sophisticated. There is official cover and non-official cover. There is cover for status and cover for action. There is natural cover and cover within a cover. Cover can be part of a carefully prepared and fully backstopped legend. Good cover takes time to develop, internalize, and put to use. Sound application includes setting traps to detect when one's cover is being questioned, doubted, or blown by the target or by the opposition. Cover and plausibility are eternally conjoined.
Mastering cover means demonstrating the capacity to lead a double life, to take on a purposefully structured identity, and to arrange all one's actions to comport with that identity in the service of a mission. It is no undertaking for the impetuous, or the undisciplined, or the slow-witted.
A serious adversary bent on penetrating a target from the inside pays much more attention to developing the cover of his or her chosen infiltrator than most defenders ever pay to this subject. Superficial grasp of cover by attackers and defenders alike looks no further than appearances. Deep understanding of cover looks at appearances only as a preliminary move to a much bigger end game. An infiltrator with first-rate training and support lives the cover, defying casual exposure. This is why betting the institution’s survival on piercing the cover and spotting the malicious insider makes an inadequate defense. The better the cover, the more important it is to add multiple protective layers which have the effect of reducing the opportunity to strike – even if the adversary’s cover proves flawless. Such tactics are often called opportunity denial measures. This is where a No Dark Corners approach helps defenders offset their adversary's advantage in mastery of cover. (For details on the No Dark Corners approach, see Managing the Insider Threat: No Dark Corners, CRC Press, May 2012. Now available directly via CRC or Amazon.com.)
As for the answer to the first paragraph's question: The quote comes from the 1966 motion picture, Fahrenheit 451, based on Ray Bradbury's science fiction novel about a future where firemen ignite books as part of a larger regimentation of society and suppression of individual freedoms. The context? Training such enforcers to find banned books includes an experienced instructor advising rookies that they will improve their results if they learn to think like their opponents. So, too, is it with cover. The best – if not only – way to even begin to pierce through the cover of an able infiltrator is to start thinking like the opposition.
-- Nick Catrantzos
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