From “Active Measures” to AI Infiltrators What classic influence instruments still matter, and what has changed since the Cold War? What can we learn from history? Who are the agents of influence, serving as mouthpieces for Russia and its autocratic allies? Why is it important not to overlook offline influence operations, and how do they impact the online world?
Pat Mächler has a M.Sc. in Computer Science, but occupies themselves with other scientific topics such as epidemiology deep down to Google scholar searches for meta reviews and studies. Partially just out of training, part of simple curiosity. Pat was also active in ramping up the data analytics in the Swiss contact tracing against COVID-19 in Basel-Stadt in 2020 and 2021. Pat has in the past fostered the international cooperation among pirate parties, such as co-founding and actively supporting the international umbrella organizations Pirate Parties International and Pirates Without Borders.
Philippe Burger, aka “Pipo”, is the Vice President of the Swiss Pirate Party. He has been campaigning for freedom and security in the information age for many years. He is Co-Vice President of the Pirate Party Switzerland, President of the Pirate Party Zurich and host of the weekly format http://cyberstammtisch.ch
PD Dr. Anna Veronika Wendland (Uni Marburg / Herder-Institute) is a historian of Eastern Europe and technology with a focus on security studies. For her research projects on nuclear working environments and reactor safety in Eastern and Western Europe, she worked for several years as a long-term observer of human-machine relations in nuclear power plants in Eastern Europe and Germany. She is a frequent contact person for questions of nuclear safety in Ukraine in politics and the media.
Dietmar Pichler is a freelance media literacy trainer and disinformation analyst from Vienna, Austria. He is Vice President of the Vienna-based NGO “Vienna Goes Europe” and founder of the initiative “Disinfo Resilience Network”, which aims to connect experts from different fields to analyze, expose and uncover disinformation and propaganda activities. His work focuses on foreign interference by autocratic regimes, in particular the Russian Federation. Since 2011, he has regularly traveled to Ukraine to monitor Russian propaganda targeting Western societies, especially since the annexation of Crimea and the covert invasion of Donbass in 2014. In 2024, he published the policy paper “Disinformation and Foreign Interference: A Challenge for the EU and …
Stephen Douglas is a Cultural Archaeologist whose nom de guerre is Decoding Trolls. Stephen worked as an OSCE diplomat monitoring Russia’s violations of its Minsk ceasefire obligations in eastern Ukraine between 2015 and 2022. During a spell working a bridge (2015-2018) connecting Russia-occupied Luhansk and the rest of Ukraine, Stephen discovered Russia was using Disinfolklore (stories that affect our emotions in negatively manipulative ways) to transform the identities of those subjected to this hyper-modern form of cognitive warfare / War Magic. In February 2023, Stephen started writing publicly about his discovery of Disinfolklore. At Disinfolklore.net, Stephen publishes regularly on how to combat Russian, MAGA, and other forms of subtle brainwashing …
Alexander Kohler is responsible for foreign and security policy at the Pirate Party Germany. Organizing the yearly Pirate Security Conference in Munich. Doing Research on Hybrid warfare, especially Information warfare. He works on resilience issues and is a cybersecurity consultant.
Sara “Beau” Hjalmarsson is a polymath, entrepreneur and martial artist with a degree in counterterrorism security and intelligence from Edith Co- wan University in Perth, West Australia.During the COVID pandemic, Sara worked as an anti-money-laundering professional at financial institutions in Sweden and Malta. More recently, Sara has been writing a book about violence and practical self-defense.
Theresa Fallon is the founder and director of the Centre for Russia Europe Asia Studies (CREAS) in Brussels. She is concurrently a member of the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific, a Nonresident Senior Fellow of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Adjunct Professor at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, a member of the CEPS Task Force on AI and Cybersecurity, a member of the Loisach Group on transatlantic relations, and a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. Theresa’s current research is on EU-Asia relations, maritime security, global governance, China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and great power competition. She has testified …
Dr. Benjamin Tallis joined DGAP in September 2022. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Alfred von Oppenheim Center for European Future Affairs and leads the project “Aktionswerkstatt Zeitenwende”. Previously, he served the EU on security missions in Ukraine and the Balkans and worked as a policy officer at the European Competence Center for Civilian Crisis Management in Berlin. He spent five years at the Institute of International Relations Prague (IIR), where he directed the Center for European Security, advised numerous European governments, edited the journal New Perspectives, and organized the 2017 Prague Insecurity Conference. He then worked at the Institute for Peace Research and Security …
