Covert Online Operations: How the Playbook Works, and What I Learned the Hard Way

First, a Quick Word on Tech Glitches

Many of you have written to say a link won’t open, a cart button doesn’t work, or a video suddenly started speaking Arabic. (That last one was YouTube’s auto-translate feature, not my video.) Our websites are fine. The problem usually sits somewhere between the platform, the app, and your phone, which are constantly being updated without most people noticing.

A few quick fixes: tap the three dots and choose “open in browser,” or try a different browser. Update and restart your phone. Check your spam and promotions folders for our emails. Use a computer if your phone keeps acting up. And if you want to reach us, use the contact forms or email on our own websites. Messages sent through Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok are where things tend to get lost.

Where Psychological Operations Come From: Tavistock

To understand what’s happening online right now, it helps to go back to the source. In The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, the late Dr. John Coleman (whose work influenced writers like David Icke) argues that London’s Tavistock Institute became one of the world’s most influential centers for studying how to shape mass human behavior, and that its methods were handed on to governments, intelligence agencies, and corporations.

Coleman traces the idea back to Wellington House, Britain’s World War I propaganda office, which worked to turn public opinion, including American opinion, in favor of the war. His core claim is that Tavistock studied how people behave under stress, fear, and repeated shock, and that a population under pressure becomes easier to steer. He argues that values can be shifted gradually so the change feels natural rather than imposed.

These are Coleman’s arguments, and you can weigh them for yourself. But his central message is one I can’t stress enough: if you understand the techniques, you can recognize when they’re being used on you and stop reacting on autopilot.

JTRIG: The Government’s Own Training Manual

This is where it stops being theory. JTRIG, the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group, is a unit inside GCHQ, Britain’s version of the NSA. Its documents were among those in the Snowden archive, and on February 24, 2014, Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept published one of them in full, titled “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.” transcend

According to that reporting, two of JTRIG’s core self-identified purposes were to inject false material onto the internet to destroy the reputation of its targets, and to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism toward outcomes it considered desirable. Earlier reporting with NBC News covered the monitoring of YouTube and Blogger and the use of “honey traps,” luring people into compromising situations using sex. The targets weren’t limited to terrorists: many of these techniques were discussed as alternatives to traditional law enforcement against people suspected, but not charged or convicted, of ordinary crimes, or against “hacktivists” who use online protest for political ends. New Snowden Doc Reveals How GCHQ/NSA Use The Internet To ‘Manipulate, Deceive And Destroy Reputations’ +2

The slides themselves read like a playbook: infiltration operations, ruse operations, false flag operations, false rescue operations, disruption operations, sting operations. One slide, “Identifying and Exploiting Fracture Points,” maps out what pulls a group together and what pulls it apart, essentially a blueprint for breaking up communities from the inside. Another lays out “the four D’s”: deny, disrupt, degrade, deceive. And strikingly, the slides use magic tricks and playing cards as a recurring visual theme, which connects directly to what I’ve talked about in my technomancy video: working influence through technology.

The Psychology Behind It

In 2015, The Intercept published another JTRIG document. It was a 42-page report from 2011 titled “Behavioral Science Support for JTRIG’s Effects and Online Humint Operations,” authored by a psychologist, Mandeep K. Dhami. Throughout the report, JTRIG’s reliance on behavioral science research is emphasized as critical to its operations, including detailed discussions of how to foster “obedience” and “conformity.” truthdigThe Intercept

The techniques will sound familiar from any persuasion textbook, turned into an operating manual. Social validation shows the target that everyone else is doing it. Foot-in-the-door gets a small yes first, then escalates. Reciprocity and liking build a friendship so the target feels they owe you. Scarcity and secrecy make something feel exclusive or urgent. Creating stress keeps people off balance, because people under pressure are easier to steer. And sense-making feeds people story fragments, repeats them until they become expectations, then swaps real information for false.

You don’t have to take anyone’s theory on faith here. These are the government’s own documents, leaked and published.

The Internet of Behaviors: The Same Goal, Automated

JTRIG shows how agents manipulate people one conversation at a time. The Internet of Behaviors is the same goal running at scale. The term was coined back in 2012 by University of Helsinki psychology professor Göte Nyman, and it went mainstream when Gartner listed it first among its top strategic technology trends for 2021 in October 2020. istartgartner

In Gartner’s own words, the IoB captures the “digital dust” of people’s daily lives, combining technologies like facial recognition, location tracking, and big data and connecting the resulting data to behavioral events such as cash purchases or device usage. Organizations use this data to influence human behavior. Their example: monitoring pandemic health compliance by using computer vision to see whether employees wear masks, or thermal imaging to identify people with a fever. Gartner predicted that by 2023, 40 percent of people worldwide would likely have their individual activities tracked digitally this way. 2020 10 19 gartner identifies the top strategic technology trends for 2021 +2

My opinion: when I watch real people suddenly flip, turning on friends overnight and saying things with no filter and no sense of consequence, I believe this constant stream of influence through our phones and media plays a role. Especially when people only know each other through screens and never have a real phone call or sit across a table from one another. That’s part of why I try so hard to show you our real home and our real lives.

What Happened to Me

For anyone who doesn’t know: Sabrina Wallace became widely known online for her theories about emerging technology and the human body being connected to networks. Around 2022, her videos were being pushed everywhere. People I knew kept sending them to me, and if you searched her name on various platforms and sorted by “most recent,” you’d see the same kinds of comments over and over, often from anonymous accounts, repeating variations of “you have to watch Sabrina.”

My husband Tivon is an electrical engineer, and we’ve researched this field together for about fifteen years. We’re IEEE members and wrote Forbidden Tech in 2017. So when her videos came along, I recognized the same white papers we’d been reading. We became friends, only ever through Telegram messages, for about nine months. Then I cut off contact. This October marks two years since then, and those two years brought a steady stream of attacks on me, my family, and our business, with many people going along with it.

Now her circle has had another major breakup, and many people are saying they were wrong and feel foolish. I want to say clearly: I have love and respect for everyone who got swept up, just as I did. I don’t hold anger. I apologize for anything I said while I was under the pressure of that period, and I forgive those who came after me. I’m sharing this because I was where some of you are right now, and I want to help.

How Technical Jargon Gets Used to Persuade

I personally believe a lot of the technology Sabrina talks about is possible. That isn’t the issue. The issue is the method.

Her “tech metric PDF,” presented as her proof, isn’t a single research paper. It’s a compilation of screenshots and excerpts from unrelated sources: engineering standards, a few academic papers, a government spectrum ruling. Her claim is that these documents prove people are secretly and involuntarily tethered to a hidden network through their own bodies. But when you check the actual sources, several say something different:

• The body-area sensor research describes devices a person chooses to wear or have implanted, like a heart monitor or glucose sensor.

• The graphene antenna research states in its own words that there’s no working proof yet.

• The 6G and space-network papers are written as forward-looking concepts, not descriptions of what’s running today.

• The DARPA program cited requires a soldier to voluntarily wear an EEG headset. It doesn’t read anyone from a distance.

There’s a name for this pattern: the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. Someone fires at the side of a barn, then paints a target around wherever the bullets landed. You start with the conclusion, gather scattered real fragments that seem to fit, and leave out whatever doesn’t. Research papers are dense and hard to read if you don’t work in the field, which is exactly what makes this approach persuasive. And in my experience, when qualified engineers pointed out that a paper didn’t say what she claimed, the response was to attack them rather than engage the point.

Setting the Record Straight

Our products do not contain microchips or nanotechnology. Our orgonite is a handmade artisan craft: shungite, brass, quartz crystal, steel, and resin, mixed and left to cure. Everything we use is listed on our website. You could break a pendant open and see for yourself. You’d need a DARPA lab in your backyard to do what was claimed.

We are not being sued, and we never have been. The rumor traces back to a 2015-era reblog on my blog of another site’s story about a free-energy inventor. That original site later shut down, leaving my reblog as one of the only copies online. Years later, someone in an unrelated patent dispute in Ohio listed my blog link in their court filing. That’s all it was: a link to my blog post in someone else’s case, thousands of miles away.

We have a return and refund policy. If you bought something from us and don’t like it, you can return it. Throwing it in the bin because someone told you to only means you lose the money you could have gotten back.

Why Hopelessness Is the Point

Here’s my read, based on what I’ve watched for two years. The message in this kind of content is always the same: the technology is already everywhere, there’s nowhere to run, nothing you do will make a difference. And anyone offering anything practical, whether EMF awareness, grounding, or taking better care of your household, gets treated as the enemy.

I don’t believe that. Education is step one. Step two is taking responsibility for yourself and your family and doing your own research. Not everything works for everyone, and I don’t endorse everything out there. But fear with no way forward isn’t information. It’s a tactic.

Eyes open, hands dirty.

— Hope

Sources and Further Reading

• Glenn Greenwald, “How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations,” The Intercept, Feb. 24, 2014: https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/

• Glenn Greenwald & Andrew Fishman, “Controversial GCHQ Unit Engaged in Domestic Law Enforcement, Online Propaganda, Psychology Research,” The Intercept, June 22, 2015: https://theintercept.com/2015/06/22/controversial-gchq-unit-domestic-law-enforcement-propaganda/

• “Psychologist’s Work for GCHQ Deception Unit Inflames Debate Among Peers,” The Intercept, Aug. 7, 2015: https://theintercept.com/2015/08/07/psychologists-work-gchq-deception-unit-inflames-debate-among-peers/

• Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group overview and reference list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intelligence_Group

• Gartner, “Gartner Identifies the Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2021,” Oct. 19, 2020: https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2020-10-19-gartner-identifies-the-top-strategic-technology-trends-for-2021

• Dr. John Coleman, The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations: Shaping the Moral, Spiritual, Cultural, Political and Economic Decline of the United States of America

• Our 2019 JTRIG presentation with downloadable slides: [insert link]

• My full account, “The Sabrina Wallace Operation: Two Years of Harassment”: [insert HopeGirl Blog link]

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