When I first got engaged by the SCL Group in the summer of 2013, they were looking at modernizing a lot of their activities and work, particularly as they related to what was happening in the defence community, which was an expansion of research into the proliferation of ideas online and social media, because that was fast becoming one of the primary recruitment tools of extremist organizations and terrorist organizations. The company had a deficit in technical expertise, and it wanted to expand that, so when I came on board, it was in part to look at the operations of the company and figure out how it could modernize its tactics and use technology to improve that.
When I started, you could call it a blank slate in the sense that the technological infrastructure was not yet there. It was not a blank slate in the sense that the company had several decades of experience working in information operations around the world, so part of the role, at least initially when I was invited to join the company, was to look at existing tactics and techniques in information operations and see how we could import that into cyberspace.