More specific coverage would be nice
I would appreciate this article more if it did less rambling and provided more context. I understand a limited amount of information might be available in the original documents, but the article's laundry-list of superficially-described techniques doesn't help me speculate about how well these tools could be used against activists, terrorists, military targets, industrial targets, etc.
It doesn't help me empathize with the victim. Specific example: what are the long-term psychological attacks? In what way are they trying to influence the target? I could imagine such a tool having mostly evil uses: activists are often strange people with an uphill credibility battle under incredible stress, who nevertheless have something critical they need to express, and if they aren't like that you can pick out some activists who are, and you can use metadata to pick important Paul Revere-like ones. I can begin to speculate based on the sentence fragments you've delivered, but it feels totally silly without more detail. Maybe they're not targeting Occupy. Maybe they're using psychological attacks against Palestinian diplomats to undermine peace talks.
I'd also like to understand for what the tools are typically used. Perhaps you can infer how often a certain tool is used, or against what kind of person, from the information you have. For example, with "honey trap," are they targeting business executives with two exwives and three mistresses, or are they targeting bullied teenagers and college students in computer science programs with horrible gender balance? To me, "honey trap" means an extremely attractive chinese woman in the hotel bar, and reminds me of the advice "don't engage with the surveillance." That's not the attack you described which suggests a different target.
"Is any of this new?" might not actually mean the article is old news. It might mean you've not provided enough context on practical uses, details about the methods, and informed inference about the agency's habits to stop readers from summarizing it as "ya ya, we saw all the movies. spiez gonna spy." There should be more to the story than that.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
