Wanted: An information agency 'on steroids'.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew
• Position: Technology Tomorrow

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper in a hearing looking into possible Russian interference into the presidential elections called for a "U.S. Information Agency on steroids" to counter foreign propaganda campaigns.

That statement might have caused the millennials to turn on their smartphones to look up exactly what he was talking about. The USIA was disbanded in 1999 at what was then believed to be the end of the Cold War. Its basic task to disseminate positive messages about the United States and its policies was left to the State Department's bureau of public diplomacy and public affairs. Its radio and TV enterprises were sent to the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

The Cold War was over, the reasoning went. Why should the government spend more than $1 billion per year to counter Communist propaganda after the Berlin Wall came tumbling down?

The answer came a short two years later when the new threat of radical Islam emerged, and the United States was caught woefully unprepared to push back at the extremists' messages. The bureau has been playing catch-up ever since and its leaders are occasionally hauled before Congress to testify about its efforts.

Hearings have revealed that it is understaffed and underfunded. That didn't help when the Islamic State, or ISIL, emerged and stepped up the extremists' game using social media for a variety of tasks, including recruitment.

Then Russia re-entered the picture in a big way in 2016 by unleashing on the American populace its so-called "firehose of falsehood," a term coined by two RAND Corp. writers: Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews.

Perhaps no organization in America has a deeper institutional knowledge of information wars, or has studied the topic more consistently, than RAND. The authors' recent 10-page paper, "The Russian 'Firehose of Falsehood' Propaganda Model: Why It Might Work and Options to Counter It," should be read by every American, for as they note, one of the best ways to counter a propaganda campaign is to recognize it in the first place.

While the authors studiously avoid any references to the recent election, the paper provides a great deal of insight on how a new, improved USIA on steroids might work and what it would be up against. The Russian propaganda enterprise is based on solid psychological research on how its intended recipients process untrue information and come to believe it as fact, the paper noted. It involves multiple methods to manipulate...