On Monday, a news agency tied to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps published an AI-generated video that walked its audience through how and where to kill the first lady of the United States. It singled out her taste in fashion as the vulnerability to exploit, sketched a scenario for poisoning her, and traced her movements through Manhattan; it closed with a line addressed to her 20-year-old son: “Barron, wait for us.” The Secret Service confirmed it is aware of the video and is investigating, while noting that it has not identified a specific credible threat.

Reasonable people will want to know how frightened to be. As someone who spent a career on the other side of operations built exactly this way — and who, in 2010, as a member of Georgia’s parliament, was marked for assassination by Russian military intelligence, in a plot my own country’s counterintelligence service uncovered — my answer is precise: Be furious, not frightened. I know what that kind of threat does to a person and to everyone around him, and I know the fear it plants is not a byproduct of the operation. It is the operation.