Information wars: the fine art of mass manipulation in the digital age

Following the 2016 US election, the role of information in politics and society is under increasing scrutiny. Is information benign, a political weapon or the first casualty of the post-truth era? Historically, information was a standard tool and target of political subversion, but now as it forms the backbone of our economies, social lives and political anatomies, are we especially vulnerable to its exploitation and misuses?

In this video Academic Director, Associate Professor Matthew Sussex chairs and moderates a discussion between members of the NSC academic team who offer their perspectives on the uniqueness of contemporary information wars.

Professor Paul Cornish is the NSC’s inaugural Professorial Fellow in Cyber Security, guest lecturer and a principal investigator in our cyberspace research program. He is one of the world’s most eminent scholars working in the field of cyber security, having spent some ten years of his career in research posts at Chatham House, first as Senior Research Fellow in the early 1990s and latterly as Carrington Professor of International Security and Head of the International Security Programme (from 2005 until 2011). Professor Cornish also spent several years as Director of the Centre for Defence Studies at King’s College London. He is a member of the UK Chief of the Defence Staff’s Strategic Advisory Panel, a Fellow of Oxford University’s Global Cyber Security Capacity-Building Centre and a Senior Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute.

Professor Roger Bradbury leads the Strategy and Statecraft in Cyberspace research program at the National Security College. He is a complex systems scientist, trained originally as a zoologist, whose research interests lie in the modelling and simulation of the dynamics of coupled social and natural systems. In recent years he has worked in the Australian Intelligence Community on the strategic analysis of international science and technology issues. Professor Bradbury was the Chief Scientist in the Bureau of Resource Sciences in the 1990s and leader of the Marine Systems Group at the Australian Institute of Marine Science in the 1980s. He is particularly interested in cyberspace as a strategic domain.