Russia launched a covert offensive in 2016 that took direct aim at American society.

The operation affected millions through an ambush few citizens saw coming.

No weapons of mass destruction were deployed. There were no fatalities. The soldiers didn’t carry firearms or wear uniforms; instead, they sported jeans and sweatshirts and wielded laptops and Ethernet connections. The only bombs they planted were political memes and disinformation designed to polarize the public.

The unit was the Internet Research Agency, a Saint Petersburg-based troll farm acting on behalf of the Kremlin to influence the 2016 presidential election through Facebook ads attacking Hillary Clinton.

Those posts were shared widely across social media, sowing division among Americans for the small price of about $100,000 in advertising costs — pennies to a superpower.

In “The Fourth Intelligence Revolution: The Future of Espionage and the Battle to Save America” (Henry Holt and Co., Oct. 28), former US senior intelligence officer Anthony Vinci argues the IRA’s effective campaign was just a glimpse of a new kind of battlefield in which everyday citizens are on the front lines.

“That social media post you write or even just ‘like’ is fodder for a foreign power’s disinformation campaign,” Vinci writes. “There’s a good chance the computer you use every day to stream movies or shop online has Chinese or Russian spyware on it.”

Vinci lays out how espionage evolved from the battlefields of World War II to the back channels of the Cold War to the post-9/11 hunt for terrorists — and now, to something far more personal.

The fourth revolution, he writes, has turned ordinary citizens into both targets and tools of intelligence work. Everything is fair game, from your beliefs and personal data to your genetic codes.

“The intelligence revolution is about a shift to a world in which all of us,” Vinci writes, “must be intelligence officers.” But many Americans are dangerously unprepared for the job,........

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