OK, long. But one of the most important articles ever!-----A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century - Tablet Magazine

A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century - Tablet Magazine - BY JACOB SIEGEL 

• Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation

PROLOGUE: THE INFORMATION WAR
...In his last days in office, President Barack Obama made the decision to set the country on a new course. On Dec. 23, 2016, he signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which used the language of defending the homeland to launch an open-ended, offensive information war.
...Disinformation, a half-forgotten relic of the Cold War, was newly spoken of as an urgent, existential threat. 

Russia was said to have exploited the vulnerabilities of the open internet to bypass U.S. strategic defenses by infiltrating private citizens’ phones and laptops...

The point was echoed by Michael Lumpkin, who headed the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), the agency Obama designated to run the U.S. counter-disinformation campaign. 

Lumpkin singled out the Privacy Act of 1974, a post-Watergate law protecting U.S. citizens from having their data collected by the government, as antiquated.

“The 1974 act was created to make sure that we aren’t collecting data on U.S. citizens. Well, … by definition the World Wide Web is worldwide. There is no passport that goes with it. If it’s a Tunisian citizen in the United States or a U.S. citizen in Tunisia, I don’t have the ability to discern that … If I had more ability to work with that [personally identifiable information] and had access … I could do more targeting, more definitively, to make sure I could hit the right message to the right audience at the right time.”

The message from the U.S. defense establishment was clear: To win the information war—an existential conflict taking place in the borderless dimensions of cyberspace—the government needed to dispense with outdated legal distinctions between foreign terrorists and American citizens...