documentation/ADMIN_HOWTO_set_up_a_disinformation_deployment.md

ADMIN_HOWTO: set up a disinformation deployment

You’re going to need:

• People ** Leads ** Specialists ** Team to keep the engines running

• Processes ** Data ingests ** Starting investigations ** Ending investigations ** All the human stuff

• Technology ** Storage ** Communications ** Search and analysis tools

• Culture ** Empowerment - and not just as a shiny buzzword ** Code of conduct (if we’re not embedding into a team that already has one)

• Data ** Feeds in ** Feeds out

Things to do when you start

• Find 2 people to work with you as leads. Nobody leads a full-on deployment on their own, and everyone has to sleep, or step away, or handle a screaming child/cat/partner/self sometimes. Also Covid - you might get sick too, and should always have a good succession plan: all links and passwords to critical stuff should be with 3 people etc.
• Create a google account, and start a googledrive with it. Add two folders: one for admins, one for the team. If you think you’re going to have multiple subteams, add a folder for the team captains. You’re not doing this to enforce hierarchy: you’re doing this to limit the number of people who have to see each piece of PII or sensitive material (this is disinformation work - work as though your team will get breached).
• In the admin folder, start a readme. Make sure every admin has the contact details of all the other admins, and any key people on the team.
• Create a slack for the team. Create a private channel for the admins, and a private channel for the team captains (if you have team captains).
• You’ve got someone who’s asked you to do this, yes? Or a set of organisations or people who can do something with the end products of this deployment? Talk to them about what they want you to do, the formats they want (or can handle) outputs in, any restrictions on how you can work with them/ what areas to cover/ which areas or topics they want to focus on. This will steer your planning.
• Start setting up the technologies you need for the deployment. At a minimum, you’ll need a way to get results to their users, and a way to store artifacts and information about narratives and incidents. On a small deployment, these could be slack channels.
• Your team will want to tell you about interesting articles etc; create a place to put these, or links to these (again, this might be a slack channel; it might also be a google folder or googledoc).
• Write (or import) advice notes for the team. Hopefully soon CogSecCollab will have a set of these up and available to anyone.