My first point to make is to explain a little of my history and to help other utilize my knowledge of things that they may not have ever been able to understand prior to reading this. I am an ex military intelligence analyst. I must first say i will not divulge any classified information, just give basic unclassified generalities that are easily found on the web; ie. FM 34-3, https://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.scip.org/resource/resmgr/White_Papers/Army-Intelligence-Analysis.pdf , or FM3-05-301, https://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-05-301.pdf . I was never trained in Psy-op functions but i do understand and had worked with people who were. as an analyst, i would basically be given a massive amount of papers/ journals/ reports/ images/ videos/ or other things to put together a pattern or puzzle. This is not an easy task, because as they say the devil is in the details. These Field Manuals or FMs are really focused on battle and military operations as a whole, but they can be useful in your own understanding in this political enviroment and to broaden your own understanding of the world, which is why i am providing these techniques.
The intelligence gathering operation is multi-functionary. It consists of multiple parts concerning human intelligence, geo-spacial intelligence, geo-political intelligence, and informational intelligence. each part is vital to get what we call a full spectrum intelligence. the human intelligence is mainly consistent with word of mouth/ here-say and non verbal comms. this truly is dealt with people. to get good intel/ information you must first look at the person, their non verbal comms, their agenda, their beliefs, and their stance on subjects. Then you take down their verbal comments/ questions to get a picture of what information they are trying to relay. a really good example of this type of intelligence is to look at the mainstream media talking heads. take many clips of them talking about a wide range of things and watch and listen carefully. i bet you can tell when they are lying, don't believe the information they are spewing, or genuinely are being honest. their tells are subtle. the best way to go about this is to find clips of things they are for and ones they are against, mute the clips and just watch the body language, then close your eyes and listen intently to the verbal language. Write your own personal thoughts and feelings down about the person and their attitude/ belief of what you had gathered. This is something you can do in person to person even better than over tv / web. of course, the next step will mean you will need to get the informational intelligence of this person/ event to get a better grasp of their agenda.
This brings me to my next point, informational intelligence. Informational intelligence is truly the paper pushing/ number crunching/ detail finding form of intelligence. If you are trying to determine an agenda of a person for example the intelligence gathering aspect will consists of their political affilation, childhood (if able), monetary gains/ losses, their life story (if able), their career/job, their personal life (if able), Their location (if able, or at least generally speaking), Their Goals (if able), and their Beliefs (if able). Most people who are in the public eye have all of these pieces of information, for the most part, provided somewhere either on the web or in public records. with this, i must say NEVER EVER utilize only 1 source, the more sources the better. Then, i suggest as i do, you read through all these documents carefully and start to put together a character profile, like you see in these mystery movies/ tv shows. you make connecting lines of why this person has done what they did or reacted the way they did. this part is putting together a psychological profile together. The more information you have the more that you can connect lines and almost always guess what that person will do in nearly any situation. this is for groups of people and nation states as well. once this is done, then you can have a very good idea of what truly happened or what is the truth you are researching, but its not enough.
The next step is to gather Geo-Spacial intelligence. The best way for this is to actually go to the location of the supposed event and make loads of notes of all the things around and that surround the area. This includes the basics and the out of the box ideas, of what could happen, be careful not to make things completely outlandish, but that being said we could always hypothesize, and write down those questions you have while being there. Get a map of the area. place aside all these notes you have made and then its time for the final intelligence to gather.
Geo-political intelligence, this does not always require a full understanding of the world and the politics of every country, but the more information you have the more dots can be connected and the better analysis you can make. lets suppose you only know about the united states of america, this is usable, but may paint an altered analysis of what is truth and what is incorrect information. for example, if you were researching to find collusion with russia and donald trump, and you only looked at the united states politically, you may have a belief that russia is an aggressive nation that is "evil" and near dictatorial; while in reality, Russia has issues, but most of their aggression is in response to the usa's/ nato's aggression against them and their interests. in my opinion on this, Putin is and has been very restraint on his aggression; its the nato's aggression that has been provocative. that is an aside, but to get a basic understanding of where the world's politics and nation's stances are will help you paint a more complete and less bias picture. make notes again.... i write this stuff down, you might not need too, but that might make you miss some important detail, a detail you missed because of your own personal bias.
Finally, the gathering is done and the analysis begins. to get the full spectrum information; you must first start connecting dots. take the information of the person/event and ask questions. who, what, when, where, how, and why. build your questions to more specific questions such as who did/ not do/say this. where exactly did this happen, who saw this, who should have seen this, when did this event occur, how was the political climate effected, why would this person say / do this, and why is this relevant. once you have a broad understanding of the person/ event you can connect the more detailed oriented dots; why is this being said here and now, is there an agenda that is being done, if so by who or what, why is this person the one putting forth this information, do they have an agenda, how does this affect the world/ population/ local area/ nation/ or even yourself. The final step is to put together your questions that have connected dots and to theorize what is the most rational outcome, no matter how outlandish nor how provocative that theory is.
In conclusion, The final step is once your analysis has been completed and you have reviewed it a few times over to be sure it is correct to the best of your ability and with the most amount of information available. you then have dissemination, or divulging the information. this part is critical for many reasons. #1 you should ask yourself, should i provide this information out to the general public or a select few people. Also, this includes utilizing dis-information. The reasons to use dis-information could be to keep enemy actors in the shadow or could also be to hold the information until the general population can and is willing to understand the information. Psy-Op core responsibilities involve the dissemination of intelligence/ information. my hope is for people to start taking part in their own analysis of information and start opening their mind to truth, for truth's sake. Also, see NDAA 2016 and this https://www.congress.gov/114/bills/hr5181/BILLS-114hr5181ih.pdf passed and signed into law december 2016. this gives the governement to use psy-op operations against the citizens of the usa. everyone, please get your facts together, and see what the government wants you to believe versus what is actually happening.