Why Jenny Can’t Figure Out Which Of These Messages Is A Covert Information Operation

We view foreign interference in US and UK elections via social manipulation through the lens of usable security. Our goal is to provide advice on what interventions on the socio-technical election system are likely to work, and which are likely to fail. Strategies that the usable security literature indicates are likely to work are those that (1) avoid overloading the user's primary task; (2) help people understand negative consequences of their actions; and (3) support the long-term education of users with analytic reasoning skills and adequate background knowledge. Several of the responses to election interference proposed by governments and technology companies so far do not abide by these recommendations and are likely to be ineffective

Dynamic Agent Systems in the CoAX Binni 2002 Experiment

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.The goal of the international CoAX (Coalition Agents eXperiment) program was to demonstrate how agent systems could be used to provide agile and flexible command and control systems for coalition operations, and facilitate rapid integration of national C2 systems. The CoAX experiments modelled a coalition C4ISR system as a distributed, heterogeneous agent network using the DARPA CoABS (Control of Agent Based Systems) Grid infrastructure based on Java JINI technology. This paper outlines the CoAX Binni experiment which was held in October 2002 at the US Naval Warfare College, Newport RI. It describes the technology used in this experiment and the role of the ATTITUDE multi-agent architecture in the Australian component of the experiment. This involved logistics planning (and dynamic replanning) for a casualty evacuation from an Australian ship using BDI agents developed in the ATTITUDE architecture, and included interactions with Coalition medical and planning agents. Distributed agents were used to represent the various organisational entities involved in a simplified logistics model, and agent interactions with the Coalition C4ISR system were mediated by human operators using I-X Process Panels. This provided a semi-autonomous system, where human approval initiated further autonomous interactions between Coalition and Australian agents

Software Agents as Facilitators of Coherent Coalition Operations

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.Software agents can be viewed as semi-autonomous entities which help people cope with the complexities of working collaboratively in a distributed information environment. This paper describes the research that DERA is carrying out into Software Agents for use in Command Systems and the collaborative work with the 16 partners of an international Coalition Agents Experiment. Specifically, the paper aims to show that using software agent-based C2 frameworks is a useful way of dealing with the complexity of real-world problems such as supporting agile and robust Coalition operations and enabling interoperability between legacy or previously incompatible systems. In addition, Agent-enabled 'grids' can be used to rapidly integrate a wide variety of agents and infrastructures, with domain management services structuring agent relationships, limiting their behaviours and enforcing Coalition policies