About Us

The Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tion Report

The Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tion Report (GIOR) was cre­at­ed in order to mon­i­tor the activ­i­ties of var­i­ous influ­ence oper­a­tions around the world.  Each day, a large vari­ety of news and oth­er sources are sift­ed in order to iden­ti­fy the most rel­e­vant devel­op­ments and which are pre­sent­ed in the form of post­ings ref­er­enc­ing the orig­i­nal source mate­r­i­al along with addi­tion­al com­men­tary and/or his­tor­i­cal back­ground. From time to time, we also con­duct our own inves­ti­ga­tions and post the results. The GIOR rep­re­sents nei­ther a polit­i­cal nor a reli­gious point of view and seeks only to present the best avail­able and reli­able infor­ma­tion on the threat posed to West­ern democ­ra­cies by the grow­ing net­works of glob­al influ­ence operations.

The Senior Editor

GIOR Senior Edi­tor Steven Mer­ley is an inves­tiga­tive researcher who since 1992 has spe­cial­ized in the inves­ti­ga­tion of polit­i­cal extrem­ism, begin­ning with the inves­ti­ga­tion of hate crimes and right-wing extrem­ist groups in the Unit­ed States.  His work as an Inves­tiga­tive Researcher with the Wall Street Jour­nal was used in a series of five arti­cles on the Euro­pean Mus­lim Broth­er­hood which appeared in the Jour­nal dur­ing 2004. Clients for his work have includ­ed NGOs, US think-tanks, and doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ers and he has authored numer­ous inves­tiga­tive reports. Mr. Mer­ley has giv­en pre­sen­ta­tions at Har­vard and at McGill Uni­ver­si­ty in Cana­da and spo­ken at events spon­sored by the US State Depart­ment and pri­vate­ly for Con­gres­sion­al staffers and US gov­ern­ment counter-ter­ror­ism spe­cial­ists. He has also spo­ken mul­ti­ple times at the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment and the UK Par­lia­ment and his June 2013 sem­i­nar at the British Par­lia­ment was the sub­ject of a UK mag­a­zine arti­cle writ­ten by the renowned British jour­nal­ist John Ware. Mr. Mer­ley has recent­ly expand­ed his work to include the entire gamut of glob­al influ­ence operations.