How Spies Think: Ten Lessons in Intelligence

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One of my fears is for the upcoming generation who have never known anything else than the digital world, and their brains will have been subtly rewired to cope.” He sketches a predictive portrait of 2027 first as a dystopia of democratic dysfunction, and then another one in which the West has preserved the value of the internet while curbing its damaging tendencies; with a few tentative prescriptions to set us on the latter course. The Secret History of the Five Eyes: The untold story of the shadowy international spy network, R. Kerbaj (Blink Publishing, 2022)

But Omand is only half-done. He actually wrote the book, he says, because he was worried about the pernicious effect that social media seemed to be having on democratic discourse and institutions. Across five decades, intelligence, its uses and pervasion in public society have been shaped and altered by a wide array of world events and technological advances. With ten chapters, David delivers almost a dozen important lessons that anyone, not just analysts, can apply in today’s context. These range from critical thinking skills to varying up your approach when it comes to greater problem solving and considering every item of evidence available to you. Bullet-pointed summaries at the end of each chapter allow the reader to easily take in these insights.

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Another important lesson is that every fact should support proper explanation and every prediction should support valid data. There is no such proper explanation and valid data unless you go through the process.Essentially, Omand makes the case that ‘big tech’ knows more about us than we’ll even admit to ourselves – and that there are countless malign agents out there (political and commercial) that are queueing up to exploit that information. To part us from our money, to confuse us, to invert alternative realities with ‘deep fake’ technology, to influence world events or to just sew chaos. He coins the term WMCs “weapons of mass control”. Instead, author David Omand, who knows his topic, has written about techniques of value to people outside the intelligence community such as how to think like an analyst: how to gather and gauge evidence, and use it to make forecasts and strategic plans. As a general rule it is the explanatory hypothesis with the least evidence against it that is most likely to be the best one for us to adopt. The logic is that one strong contrary result can disconfirm a hypothesis. Apparently confirmatory evidence on the other hand can still be consistent with other hypotheses being true..." Prefer the explanation with the least evidence against it...this heuristic reduces the risk of confirmation bias As a leading director at the UK’s GCHQ, David Omand pursued a deep and involving career with intelligence. With his latest book, he’s sharing some of this experience with the public to excellent effect.

This kind of analysis is a team sport. Because so many of these biases are unconscious, you’re unlikely to be aware yourself of when you’re falling into the trap. But other people will see you,” Omand says. The data qualitatively analysed include several hundred case papers, interview transcripts ( n = 144) and detailed ethnographic fieldnotes relating to 44 homicide investigations across four police services. These were collected during a four-year ethnographic study of the use of forensic sciences and technologies (FSTs) in British homicide investigations.

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A Review of the FBI’s Progress in Responding to the Recommendations in the Office of the Inspector General Report on Robert Hanssen (2007) The Bayesian method of reasoning therefore involves adjusting our prior degree of belief in a hypothesis on receipt to form a posterior degree of belief in it...'