War by Other Means

ACTIVE MEASURES: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare

BY THOMAS RID

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 528 pp., $30

S NOVEMBER’S PRESIDENTIAL contest looms, reminders of Russia’s hacking of the 2016 election pepper every news cycle, with warnings of more to come. The number of countries running disinformation campaigns has more than doubled to 70 over the past two years, abetted by “black PR” firms that slander and deceive for hire. Yet as high anxiety over digital disinformation swells, the United States—and open societies everywhere—risk deeper damage by seeing what’s happening today as something entirely new under the sun. As Thomas Rid, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, writes in his engrossing new book, “This sense of novelty is a fallacy, a trap. The election interference of 2016 and the renewed crisis of the