If you were a nation-state, how would you test a rival state's intelligence system? What if you fed them fake information, and then sat back and observed how quickly they reacted to it? You could measure your own effectiveness at disinformation at the same time you measured their response time. You'd also begin to understand how they react to different stimuli. Simply by forcing your adversary to react to non-existent issues would throw them off balance and create general malaise.
What if you made them question their tools? Got them to throw away perfectly good - maybe even best-of-breed - systems just because you were able to convince them they were no good, or had a bug?
Now, instead of moving forward, your rival is tied up replacing resources that work just fine - at a great cost in labor, cost, and time. All for nothing. They're operating at diminished capacity during the replacement, and may replaced something effective with something not-so-effective. And you've figured out what buttons to push to make them react, at virtually no cost.
Am I the only person who thinks this is a pretty efficient way to test an opponent's capabilities?
I think it would be hard to predict how much they would believe any specific piece of mis-information. You might fool them sometimes whereas other times they can tell what you are doing.
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