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 — fourteen lenses, nothing sent anywhere, no key needed. It is the floor only: literal marker matching. The full engine adds context verification to drop false positives, cloud/local/abliterated backends, and the network lenses (revolving_door has no text cues and is not in the browser build). 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. |
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
12 of 17 markers fire across more than one actor family, and the two commonest fire across 8 families that agree on nothing. 5 markers appear against a single family, where this corpus shows nothing either way.
What this is not. A hand-assembled ledger, 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 row is one click from its receipt.
| marker | families | records | who ran it |
|---|---|---|---|
permeation | 8 | 20 | ideological_bloc · state_leninist · commercial_pr · progressive_left · state · hindu_nationalist · religious_right · revolutionary_vanguard |
gradualism | 8 | 15 | progressive_left · state_leninist · technocratic · commercial_pr · hindu_nationalist · ideological_bloc · religious_right · revolutionary_vanguard |
discretionary_rule_elasticity | 7 | 12 | state_leninist · commercial_pr · internal_clique · trust_safety · ideological_bloc · technocratic · theocratic |
authority_override_ratchet | 7 | 11 | commercial_pr · state_leninist · internal_clique · revolutionary_vanguard · state · theocratic · trust_safety |
captured_neutral | 4 | 19 | commercial_pr · trust_safety · technocratic · state |
manufactured_consent | 4 | 13 | state · commercial_pr · state_leninist · technocratic |
state_moderation_coordination | 4 | 11 | state · trust_safety · state_leninist · technocratic |
deniability_architecture | 4 | 10 | state · commercial_pr · trust_safety · state_leninist |
front_costume | 4 | 8 | commercial_pr · ideological_bloc · state_leninist · trust_safety |
crisis_no_exit | 3 | 5 | state · technocratic · revolutionary_vanguard |
gov_industry_crossing | 2 | 7 | commercial_pr · technocratic |
offwiki_coordination | 2 | 4 | ideological_bloc · internal_clique |
concentrated_benefit_diffuse_cost | 1 | 9 | commercial_pr |
pseudonymous_enforcement | 1 | 3 | internal_clique |
asymmetric_enforcement | 1 | 1 | progressive_left |
institutional_ip_editing | 1 | 1 | state |
paid_covert_editing | 1 | 1 | 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. 5 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 — 8 families
- Public relations industry (Bernays) commercial_pr captor Propaganda (1928): those who manipulate 'the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country'; 'we are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, larg receipt
- Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) hindu_nationalist captor ~83,000 shakhas by 2025 - daily local branches for ideological formation; permeation as a generationally-compounding mass-membership drill receipt
- US higher education (elite universities) ideological_bloc captured A 2016 Econ Journal Watch study (Langbert, Quain & Klein) of registered faculty at 40 leading US universities found 3,623 registered Democrats to 314 Republicans across five fields, an overall 11.5:1 ratio; History reached 33.5:1, Journalis receipt
- New Left (long march through the institutions) progressive_left captor Rudi Dutschke coined 'der lange Marsch durch die Institutionen' (~1967) - capture existing institutions from within rather than storm them receipt
- Seven Mountains Mandate religious_right captor seven 'mountains' - family, religion, education, media, arts, business, government - reframed by Wallnau (2013) as spheres to be taken top-down receipt
- Leninist democratic centralism revolutionary_vanguard captor Comintern's 1920 conditions of admission require affiliating parties to 'remove all reformists and centrists from all posts of any responsibility in the labour movement (party organisations, editorial boards, trades unions, parliamentary fa receipt
- Third Reich (LTI - Nazi German) state captor Klemperer's core LTI thesis: 'words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all' - capture worked below conscious notice, one l receipt
- Chinese Communist Party (discourse power) state_leninist captor 'telling China's story well, communicating China's voice well' (Xi, Aug 19 2013 National Propaganda and Ideology Work Conference) - external propaganda reframed as a whole-society drive to raise 'international discourse power' receipt
gradualism — 8 families
- Scientific publishing (big-five oligopoly) commercial_pr captured the shift to 'open access' moved the charge from subscribing readers to publishing authors via article-processing charges; the big-five's revenue persisted through the model change rather than falling receipt
- Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) hindu_nationalist captor the stated goal 'not to win an election but to slowly create a disciplined and self-aware society that could sustain itself across generations' receipt
- Muslim Brotherhood ideological_bloc captor The exhibit describes the work as a staged 'long-term plan which we approved and adopted ... in the year (1987),' asks the Shura brothers to picture 'the Islam Movement in North America in ten years,' and calls for a mechanism to carry out receipt
- New Left (long march through the institutions) progressive_left captor Gramsci, Prison Notebooks: the shift from 'war of manoeuvre' (a direct and violent assault on the state) to 'war of position' - 'the gradual winning of tactical strongholds' inside civil society. receipt
- Seven Mountains Mandate religious_right captor Wallnau (2013) reframed the seven spheres as 'mountains' to be taken top-down through dominion - transformation as inevitabilist theology receipt
- The Jacobins (1793 Terror) revolutionary_vanguard captor the Terror escalated one way - the Law of 22 Prairial (June 1794) stripped the accused of defense counsel and witnesses and reduced verdicts to acquittal or death - until it broke at Thermidor (Robespierre's own fall) receipt
- Leninist democratic centralism state_leninist captor debate is free until a decision is reached, after which it is binding on all - in practice the discussion phase shrinks and the binding phase grows receipt
- US higher education (elite universities) technocratic captured Federal data analyzed by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting with the American Institutes for Research found US colleges collectively added 517,636 administrators and professional employees from 1987 to 2011-12 -- an increase receipt