IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2023 - 13

Book Review
Social Engineering: How Crowdmasters,
Phreaks, Hackers, and Trolls
Created a New Form of Manipulative
Communication-Robert W. Gehl and
Sean T. Lawson (Cambridge, MA, USA:
MIT Press, 2022, 344 pp.)
Reviewed by Nathaniel Knopf
Keck School of Medicine
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA 90033 USA
 Spend enough time online and you will inevitably
come across a political debate. Within these
debates, you can count on accusations that some
participants are actually bots. Though the profiles
appear to belong to ordinary people, the accusation
is they may actually be fake profiles created to
spread propaganda and mislead people.
The accusation is difficult to prove, but the suspicion
is based on real events. Back in 2016, acting on
behalf of the Russian government, the Russia-based
Internet Research Agency (IRA) attempted to interfere
in the U.S. Presidential election. Actors at the IRA
managed fake social media accounts which, backed
up by an army of autonomous bots, posed as Americans
espousing pro-Trump and anti-Clinton views.
This was not the only online interference in that
election cycle. The English firm Cambridge Analytica
used deceptive means to gather Facebook data on 87
million Americans without their knowledge and then
used this data to create psychological " profiles. " Working
with the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2023.3240232
Date of current version: 7 March 2023.
March 2023
then created " psychologically targeted " ads meant to
sway potential voters. It is hard to say how effective
either operation was in influencing public opinion.
The events themselves, however, are well established.
In Social Engineering, authors Gehl and Lawson frame
these operations as examples of " masspersonal social
engineering, " their framework for manipulative online
communication with roots in social engineering.
Masspersonal social engineering has four essential
ingredients: 1) " trashing, " which amounts to snooping
on one's target to gather data; 2) " pretexting, " taking
on a new identity to gain credibility; 3) " bullshitting, "
a mix of appearing informed, disregarding the truth,
and being friendly in order to get on the target's good
side; and 4) " penetration, " ultimately getting the target
to do or think something they otherwise would not.
To define this framework, the authors draw from
two schools of social engineering. First, the mass
social engineers of the 20th century who made use
of newspapers, radio, and television to create what is
now public relations. Second, the interpersonal social
engineers of phone and computer hacking who exploit
human weaknesses to break into computer systems
and buildings. The authors then tackle each of the four
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2023

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