Tradecraft — Detect the Method, Not the Ideology
An open, reproducible tool that scores text for influence tradecraft — the recurring tells of permeation, manufactured belief, and cognitive steering — and shows its receipts.
The deterministic cue floor runs above, in your browser — nothing sent anywhere, no key needed. 16 lenses ship in the payload: 10 carry text cues and run here at the cue floor, 5 need a model to judge context and are listed rather than scored, and 1 (revolving_door) is a network lens with no text cues at all. It is the floor only: literal marker matching, on the same engine and the same taxonomy payload as The Instrument, which prints the ruler beside every reading. The full engine adds context verification to drop false positives, cloud/local/abliterated backends, and the network lenses. The code and the taxonomies ship open-source.
What it is
Influence operations leave fingerprints — not in what a text argues, but in how it operates. Tradecraft is a small, open tool that reads a passage, an essay, a transcript, or a public figure’s corpus and scores it against a library of method-markers: the gradualist ratchet, institutional permeation, manufactured consent, the captured-neutral move, the initiatory register of the mystery schools, AI-mediated cognitive steering.
It is built for the reporter, the researcher, and the curious reader who has not spent ten years learning to recognize these movements — and who needs to know, fast, what they are looking at.
The one rule, and the one ethic
- Method, not ideology. Every marker keys on how a text works, never on whose side it is on. The permeation lens fires the same on a Fabian tract and a Powell memo. That is what makes it both useful and non-factional.
- It flags; it does not convict. The tool never renders a verdict about a person. It surfaces which markers fired, how densely, and quotes the exact spans — and leaves the judgment to you. One tell is rhetoric. Many tells, firing together, densely, across a body of work — that is tradecraft. Either way: check the receipt.
The lenses
| Lens | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Institutional permeation | The gradualist capture-and-hold method — irreversibility framing, infiltration of existing institutions, concentrated-benefit/diffuse-cost, the captured-neutral move, deniability architecture, crisis-with-no-exit, grassroots costume. |
| Cognitive capture | AI-mediated steering of individual thought — personalized persuasion, latent autocomplete persuasion, sycophancy, engagement steering against stated will, companion capture. |
| Adept speech | The initiatory/esoteric register — apophatic framing, secret-knowledge claims, “the Work,” unnamed-authority deference, deliberate incompleteness, the initiatory address. |
| Legibility | Legibility as control, after Scott — standardize, register, make visible, manage to the metric. |
| Counterproductivity | Iatrogenesis, after Illich — the remedy produces the harm, radical monopoly, disabling professions, means become ends. |
| Distributed accountability | No one decides — diffuse agency, jurisdiction over truth, dissent recast as sin, unfalsifiable consensus. |
| Inevitability framing | Resistance is futile — there is no alternative, the right side of history, adapt or be left behind. |
| Costly signal | The signal economy — stakes named and paid, set against cost-dodges such as retroactive satire and deniability shields. |
| Militant mobilization | The register of mobilization toward extra-institutional violence — priming, licensing, glorifying or organizing it. Fires the same on insurrectionary-left, accelerationist-right and jihadist texts; a soft dual-use cue alone is not a finding. |
| Narrative management | The active record-shaping move — discredit the messenger, relabel the event, pin an outcome on anonymous sourcing, assert a contested characterization as settled, erase or alter the record. |
| Reference capture | Capture of an encyclopedia, catalog or standards body by whoever shows up organized — an editing bloc, a paid reputation industry, a state apparatus. |
| Rollback asymmetry | The ratchet read off the text — the forward click handled as routine administration, the un-click as unserious or procedurally impossible. |
| Sourcing asymmetry | One-sidedness inside a single document — whose sources are quoted, whose accusations go unanswered — and manufactured false balance on a settled finding. |
| Subculture register | The coined shibboleths of a camp’s true believers, with a marker for every camp. It reports which register a text speaks, never whether that register is good. |
| Network brokerage | A network lens — structural position in the entity graph: betweenness, hub degree, cross-group brokerage. |
| Revolving door | A network lens — career and funding circulation between monitor and monitored, government and industry. |
Sixteen lenses in all, carrying 107 markers: fourteen read prose and two read the entity graph. Five of the prose lenses need a model to judge context, and the cue floor above lists them rather than scoring them.
Each lens is a versioned, plain-text taxonomy. Anyone can read it, audit it, propose a new marker, or report a false positive. The grading is deterministic arithmetic you can re-run by hand.
A worked example
Run the institutional-permeation lens over a short passage:
“The work is patient. We permeate the institutions over decades, placing the right people, until the change is inevitable and cannot be reversed.”
The tool returns a profile, not a label:
lens: institutional_permeation tier: notable
markers: gradualism, permeation
receipts:
irreversibility-framing → "cannot be reversed"
indefinite-horizon → "permeate the institutions over decades"
infiltrate-existing-institutions → "placing the right people"
Two distinct markers, three sourced spans. You decide what it means — with the evidence in front of you.
Reproducible by construction
The taxonomies are data, the grader is deterministic, every marker cites the gold example that defines it, and a local-model path means the tool can analyze the material that a moderated cloud API will not. The code, the lenses, and the research that seeds them are released together so anyone can reproduce a result or contribute a marker.
See it applied
The lenses do not only grade text you paste — the The Record runs them across the apparatus itself: click any node to see the method-markers that person’s own published words exhibit, each with the verbatim quote and a source. The Atlas is the map; this is the instrument that reads it.
The same claim, tested a second way and against an outside framework: The Rosetta puts all 102 markers beside DISARM’s 71 influence-operations techniques and reports what does not line up.
“Method, not ideology” — checked
17 of 17 markers fire across more than one actor family; permeation fires across 11 families that agree on nothing. None appears against a single family, but 1 appears against only 2: institutional_ip_editing.
What this is not. A hand-assembled record, not a random sample of institutions. A marker firing across families here shows the marker CAN travel; it does not measure how often it does in the world. The actor taxonomy is this project's own -- declared in tradecraft/leaderboard/data/actors.json and enforced on load, so it is at least a closed one -- and every event is dated and one click from its source.
| marker | families | records | who ran it |
|---|---|---|---|
permeation | 11 | 23 | state_leninist · ideological_bloc · internal_clique · revolutionary_vanguard · progressive_left · religious_right · state · commercial_pr · hindu_nationalist · technocratic · theocratic |
discretionary_rule_elasticity | 9 | 16 | state · state_leninist · commercial_pr · theocratic · ideological_bloc · internal_clique · revolutionary_vanguard · technocratic · trust_safety |
gradualism | 9 | 15 | state_leninist · technocratic · progressive_left · state · commercial_pr · hindu_nationalist · religious_right · revolutionary_vanguard · theocratic |
authority_override_ratchet | 9 | 14 | commercial_pr · state_leninist · technocratic · hindu_nationalist · internal_clique · revolutionary_vanguard · state · theocratic · trust_safety |
captured_neutral | 8 | 19 | commercial_pr · trust_safety · technocratic · ideological_bloc · religious_right · revolutionary_vanguard · state · state_leninist |
deniability_architecture | 8 | 15 | state · ideological_bloc · progressive_left · theocratic · trust_safety · commercial_pr · state_leninist · technocratic |
state_moderation_coordination | 7 | 14 | state · trust_safety · state_leninist · commercial_pr · hindu_nationalist · technocratic · theocratic |
manufactured_consent | 7 | 12 | state · commercial_pr · revolutionary_vanguard · state_leninist · technocratic · theocratic · trust_safety |
asymmetric_enforcement | 6 | 7 | state_leninist · hindu_nationalist · progressive_left · religious_right · revolutionary_vanguard · theocratic |
front_costume | 6 | 7 | commercial_pr · religious_right · state · state_leninist · theocratic · trust_safety |
offwiki_coordination | 5 | 7 | commercial_pr · ideological_bloc · hindu_nationalist · internal_clique · religious_right |
concentrated_benefit_diffuse_cost | 4 | 12 | commercial_pr · religious_right · technocratic · theocratic |
gov_industry_crossing | 4 | 10 | commercial_pr · state · technocratic · theocratic |
crisis_no_exit | 3 | 6 | state · revolutionary_vanguard · state_leninist |
pseudonymous_enforcement | 3 | 5 | internal_clique · state · state_leninist |
paid_covert_editing | 3 | 4 | commercial_pr · state · state_leninist |
institutional_ip_editing | 2 | 3 | state · commercial_pr |
Rows in grey appear against a single actor family. This corpus shows nothing about those either way, and they are listed rather than dropped — a table that showed only the travelling markers would be the assertion again with a chart attached. 0 of 17 are in that state.
The actor families, and one worked example per family for the two commonest markers
commercial_prCommercial public relations, and the industries buying it, operating on a target institution.hindu_nationalistHindu-nationalist movement organisations and their diaspora arms.ideological_blocAn organised ideological coalition operating across several institutions at once.internal_cliqueAn unaccountable in-group operating inside an institution it does not own or answer to.progressive_leftMovement organisations of the progressive left acting on an institution.religious_rightMovement organisations of the religious right acting on an institution.revolutionary_vanguardA self-appointed vanguard leading a movement it holds incapable of leading itself.stateA state acting through its own organs — ministries, agencies, regulators, security services.state_leninistA Leninist party-state and the transmission belts it runs through unions, fronts and diaspora organisations.technocraticExpert and standards bodies governing through procedure, delegated rulemaking and definitional control.theocraticA clerical authority exercising state or quasi-state power.trust_safetyPlatform trust-and-safety functions and the government or NGO referral channels feeding them.
permeation — 11 families
- World Health Organization commercial_pr captured 2025 A study in BMJ Global Health finds that of the US $5.5 billion the Gates Foundation gave WHO between 2000 and 2024, almost 60% (US $3.2 billion) went to polio and more than half to vaccine projects, while health systems got 0.7%; the Founda receipt
- Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) hindu_nationalist captor 2025-03 The RSS runs 83,129 daily shakhas by March 2025, up from 44,982 in March 2014 — the daily drill through which it works on 'character-building'. receipt
- Muslim Brotherhood ideological_bloc captor 1991-05-22 Mohamed Akram writes 'An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America': the goal approved in 1987 is 'Enablement of Islam in North America'; settlement is a 'Civilization-Jihadist Process' of 'eliminat receipt
- Propaganda Due (P2 Masonic lodge) internal_clique captor 1981-03-17 Searches ordered by Milan prosecutors at Licio Gelli's premises in Castiglion Fibocchi turn up the membership list of the lodge Propaganda 2: 962 people, each holding a high-level post in public administration, politics or business. Parliam receipt
- Fabian Society progressive_left captor 1889-12 Fabian Essays in Socialism is published (preface dated London, December 1889). In it Hubert Bland records that some Fabians 'base high hopes upon what they call "the permeation" of the Liberal party' and calls 'this permeation of the Radica receipt
- Seven Mountains Mandate religious_right captor 1975 Campus Crusade for Christ founder Bill Bright proposes the idea later called the Seven Mountains Mandate, with Youth With A Mission's Loren Cunningham: Christians to 'take dominion' over seven areas of culture — religion, family, education, receipt
- Communist International (Comintern) revolutionary_vanguard captor 1920 The Second Congress adopts the conditions of admission. Condition 9: every member party must 'systematically and persistently develop communist activities within the trades unions, workers' and works councils, the consumer co-operatives and receipt
- US higher education (elite universities) state captured 2026-02-23 Education Department Section 117 foreign gift and contract data, as of 23 February 2026, showed Qatar as the largest source by dollar amount (about $8.8 billion over about 1,300 transactions) and Harvard as the largest recipient (about $4.5 receipt
- CCP United Front Work Department state_leninist captor 2018-08-24 The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission publishes a staff report on China's overseas United Front work: the UFWD co-opts and neutralises sources of opposition to the Party, directs 'overseas Chinese work' to co-opt ethnic Chi receipt
- Horizon Institute for Public Service technocratic captor 2022 From its 2022 cohort onward Horizon places 'fully-funded' emerging-technology fellows, trained before placement and paid through philanthropic support, in congressional offices (e.g. Sen. Martin Heinrich, Sen. Todd Young), executive-branch receipt
- Al-Mustafa International University theocratic captor 2020-12-08 OFAC designates Iran's Al-Mustafa International University, which claims branches in over 50 countries, as a recruiting ground for the IRGC-Qods Force. Treasury says the IRGC-QF uses its foreign student body as 'an international recruitment receipt
discretionary_rule_elasticity — 9 families
- EU AI Office (Code of Practice) commercial_pr captured 2025-01-09 Corporate Europe Observatory publishes 'Bias baked in' on the AI Act's standards: the JTC21 chair, Sebastian Hallensleben, says 'many stakeholders prefer standards that focus on best practice rather than enforceable requirements', and a non receipt
- US higher education (elite universities) ideological_bloc captured 2020-02-03 Reason reported that eight UC Berkeley life-sciences departments used a diversity rubric as the first cut in faculty hiring: in one search a pool of 894 candidates was narrowed to 214 solely on their diversity statements, scored on a 15-poi receipt
- Reddit internal_clique captured 2026-01-04 Researchers publish 'The Gray Area: Characterizing Moderator Disagreement on Reddit', analysing 4.3 million moderation log entries over five years from 24 subreddits: one in seven moderation cases is disputed among the moderators themselves receipt
- Shining Path (PCP-SL) revolutionary_vanguard captor 2003-08-28 Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission finds that the PCP-SL turned peasants into a 'mass that had to submit to the will of the party'. It classed the rural groups most connected to markets and institutions as 'class enemies' and decree receipt
- Fujimori government (Peru, 1992-2000) state captor 1992-12-31 1,117 employees of the dissolved Congress are dismissed under the post-coup 'reorganization and streamlining' of its personnel, run by a commission created by decree law. Decree 25640 had made the action for amparo inadmissible against its receipt
- Chinese Communist Party (discourse power) state_leninist captor 2021-06 At a Politburo study session in June 2021, Xi Jinping called on Party cadres and state-controlled media to 'accelerate the construction of a Chinese discourse and Chinese narrative system' — a term China Media Project describes as aimed at receipt
- US AI Safety Institute (NIST / CAISI) technocratic captured 2025-06 Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick re-establishes the AI Safety Institute as CAISI. NIST's page for the centre now describes its job as being 'industry’s primary point of contact within the U.S. government', establishing 'voluntary agreement receipt
- Islamic Republic of Iran (clerical governance) theocratic captor 2004 Before the 2004 parliamentary elections the Guardian Council vetoes a bill that would have required it to reinstate disqualified candidates unless their exclusion could be supported by legal documentation; election and Interior Ministry off receipt
- Twitter / X (2020-2022) trust_safety captured 2022-12-15 The Free Press (Bari Weiss, Abigail Shrier, Michael Shellenberger, Nellie Bowles) publishes 'Twitter's Secret Blacklists' from the released files: teams of employees 'tasked with suppressing the visibility of accounts or subjects deemed und receipt