BCC2025 Diary – Part 5

Day 3, Wednesday

CRA: The EU Cyber Resilience Act

Wednesday is all about the CRA and making the EU market resilient. Unfortunately, the inclement weather (and apocalyptic warnings) did seem to keep many people away.

Dan Cîmpean (DNSC) chaired a fireside chat with Luca Tagliareti (ECCC) and Apostolos Malatras (ENISA) about the CRA, the context, and the impacts.

Business Continuity, Resilient Society

Once at the second venue, participated in some roundtable discussions on Resilient by Design: Ensuring Business Continuity and Governing Cybersecurity: Choosing the Right Model for a Resilient Society (relevant to article 7 of NIS2). Followed by the event for which I’d specifically steeled myself for travelling to the other venue in the pouring rain to be able to attend.

Detection and Solutions For Mind Hacking…

“…the fast emerging major global Cyber Security Threat, which causes the destabilization of individuals, major organizations and entire Societies”

A roundtable chaired by Hardy Schloer – a man of impressive academic pedigree, originally (I believe) a clinical psychologist (thus ideally qualified for this subject) and who speaks in a quiet voice about really scary things! The last character I met with this attribute was Philip Zimmermann, inventor of PGP. Personally, I find that people who can terrify you without so much as raising their voice are worth listening to very carefully.

This is an area of study of incredible importance. Myself and Chris Kubecka have aleady highlighted this session as of critical importance. Ignore this at your peril; this is a new form of hybrid warfare, and we are currently undefended, unprepared and unaware.

“This session by Hardy Schloer is right up there with the very top sessions of BCC2025, and honestly made the travel worthwhile all by itself.”

Sophie Baskerville

So what is Weaponised Mind Hacking? “The deliberate use of psychological, cognitive, or technological techniques to manipulate, disrupt, or control the thoughts, emotions, or behaviors of individuals or entire populations for strategic, malicious, or adversarial objectives.” Quite a mouthful, let’s dig into it just a little.

We already know that putin & russia are behind manipulation of populations and social media, but with some linguistic analysis and network proximity analysis, it can be proven beyond reasonable doubt how much infludence russia has exercised, and is still exercising, and how.

Hardy has done impressive analysis work, and when you look at the timeline of social media mentions of very specific phrases and terms before the recent elections in the Republic of Moldova, for example, and the way in which those mentions peak just before the election – and then basically disappear entirely, the data speak for themselves.

Be under no illusions: a de facto state of (low-level) war exists between russia and its neighbours, both geographically close and distant. Their aim is to encourage division, to undermine the cohesion of societies, and to get far-right governments into power to undermine the EU, NATO/OTAN, and any other international organisation whose disruption can further their tactical or strategic goals.

I have a personal stake in this: in the UK, public opinion was significantly distorted by our own home-grown populists, but amplified by none-too-subtle russian support. That resulted in a very narrow win for the leave vote in the EU Referendum, and the consequences of that have been devastating – to the economy, to the UK’s standing and influence in the world, and through the increase in societal division, and the removal of opportunities across the EU for myself and my children – something I remain angry about.

Divide & disrupt; promoting anger and hate

I shall digress from Hardy’s presentation briefly. In 1930s Germany, the first targets were not Jewish people per se. They started with small minority groups which they could target without significant backlash.

Transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals, especially those associated with Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) in Berlin. The institute was a beacon of progressive research on sexuality and gender identity, providing support, advocacy, and even early gender-affirming surgeries. In 1933, Nazi students and SA members raided and burned its library and archives – destroying probably the world’s richest academic & research collections on human sexuality.

Homosexual men and women, particularly gay men, who were targeted under Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code. The Nazis expanded and enforced this law brutally; many were imprisoned, and tens of thousands were sent to concentration camps, where they were forced to wear the infamous rosa Winkel – the pink triangle.

Sex workers, people with disabilities, the Roma, and political dissidents, all of whom were subject to surveillance, violence, and “cleansing” policies before the Holocaust’s racial genocides escalated.

And we see that same basic pattern in the worst EU country for Human Rights: Hungary under viktor orbán. We see it in the UK. We see it in the USA. Divide & conquer, set group against group even where there has been no real friction in the past.

Trans people are nothing new: they were around in the 1930s and before. The fomented panic and hate are new now, but this is not the first time it has been used this way. And this is exactly the sort of thing that Mind Hacking can, and does, achieve.

Back to Hardy’s presentation…

Hardy describes “continuous consumption and internalizing of manipulative information” absorbed without analysis through online media, news media, and other sources.

This constant drip-drip of unchallenged ideas trains the way people react (without really thinking at all) on a variety of topics. And it brings to my mind one of my favourite quotations.

And this is exactly the effect: people become programmed to respond in the way the attackers desire. If that doesn’t scare you, then I don’t know what will.

His talk contained a huge amount of information, and I’ve got a metric sh*t-tonne of reading to do to even scratch the surface of the detail. But I will share just a couple more points.

Social Media lowers human brain activity

11 IQ points is huge. A quick comparison with the effects of leaded petrol is in order, I think.

For people born during the 1960s and early 1970s, at the peak of leaded petrol use, there are credible academic estimates reporting a 5.9 IQ point loss for the more exposed cohorts. For children with the highest exposures (well above average), the estimated loss might exceed 7 IQ points in some cases.

Those are significant effects, but this social media impact is significantly bigger.

Modern Countermeasures for Mind-Hacking

This is where the rubber hits the road: what can we DO about it?

Well, we need new countermeasures against this new weapon.

• Real-Time Linguistic Intelligence
  • To understand the effects of Human Language on Society
  • Detect & Report
• Detect, scale, track, and report Mind-Hacking Attacks to Intelligence, Counter-Intelligence, and Law Enforcement
  • Aound the clock, all the time
  • This does, of course, require those agencies to understand the concepts, and appreciate the risks. Personally I think that there are significant gaps here. Catching up is required.
• Understanding in real-time the correlation between asymmetric information propagation by adversarial actors and resulting changes in population behaviour allows governments to bring about transparency and to enable corrective policies, laws, and law enforcement actions.

Totalitarian Leader target messages

There is a need for complete transparency in publishing the results of the analyses above. People are currently distrustful of science and scientists; it must be published in detail, with independence from government itself, and with protection from government interference.

1. Content Creators must not be evaluators
2. Evaluators must not be part of any government
3. Governments’ rôle is to protect (1) & (2) but to DO neither
   

An apology

My apologies to Hardy for this fundamentally shallow summary of his detailed presentation. There was a lot of detail, and impressive examples of analysis tools. If, as societies and governments, we do not take this topic seriously, then further conflict is inevitable. But, I believe, if we approach it seriously, we can neutralise the effectiveness of this weapon and make it far, far harder & more expensive to deploy against us. This would make it too expensive for the hostile state actors to afford for general use.

That ends my BCC2025 diary. I look forward greatly to BCC2026, and to seeing more of Hardy Schloer’s work.