Transcripts For CSPAN Elections And Cyber Threats 20170919

Cyber security. This is about an hour and a half. Ok. Good evening, everyone. They keep are coming out to the forum. Tonight we have a great group of guests at the Kennedy School to talk about the digital threat to democracy. It is more often called the threat to the digital democracy. Leading experts in a very complicated field. Theyucky big rate were able to come appear. The systems that underpin that, and importantly, the electoral system of democratic governance, which is what was under attack in 2016 and earlier. Who will talk little bit about that. I would like to briefly introduce myself. Cambridge about six weeks now. In a past life, i was the department i was in charge of all things cyber at the pentagon. This is an issue that really resonates very strongly in my heart and in my gut. In the last year i was there at the obama and it Administration Come i saw a lot of bad things unfolding and the bad guys going after our democracy. It felt bad. Once i was out, i thought to myself, i am going back to the Kennedy School. There is still a role for people outside of government in trying to address this issue because it still is an issue. My deepest fear is that all the bad guys around the world saw what happened in 2016, that i guys were going after our arecratic system and they rubbing their hands together getting ready to go back after the u. S. You to a introduce cast of characters here. All of them are doing something about this. Not only great thinkers and strategic thinkers, but they are literally doing press go practical things to address the issue. I would like to start right here with marlee mccue. Marlee is interesting because not only is she a journalist for politico, she has been in info an advisor to several governments around the world who deal with this issue in a personal way. She just got back from some of the Baltic States and will talk about that. He is a former special agent from the fbi where he was working on cyber issues. He knows how this works operationally and was also a an army ranger also an army ranger and knows how to keep people safe. Then we had heather adkins, who is the director of Information Security at google. Pioneer in the field of Cyber Security. Heather was the first person at a half years ago, working on Cyber Security. She has seen a lot over the years in the way things have evolved and knows how to run Cyber Security operations and about the technical and information side of things. Mook, a star in his own way and very popular around the Kennedy School. A colts. He was Hillary Clintons Campaign Manager. Hardest working guys. We will tell you a little better about that story later. He is a real, live, republican. He is a real republican. He is not a republican in name only. s Campaign Romney manager. The story about why he is willing to work with robbie is something we will talk more about. He is a great guy and effective guy. He is helping in the project we have started to navigate the complicated politics of all this. Last but certainly not least is. Ebbie plunkett if you want to talk about someone who has been the bad guys go after your network debbie was responsible for all the Cyber Security for the National Surety agency. It goes without saying that if youre a bad guy, you are doing everything you can to get into the nationals surety agent he. If i said never i would be lying. Anyone who really knows cyber says you never say never. This is a very complicated issue. Some technology and politics, some bad guys and understanding the ways that bad actors, the russians, the chinese, the iranians, the way they act. Then it is a little bit of the private sector, too. This is a really complicated mix. If it were just the technology issue, it would be complicated enough. It is the reason we have all these people here. I will start with the politics with robbie and matt. Then we will talk about how to defend digital democracy. We will talk about the russians in particular and some of the things they have been doing recently and finish with heather, talking about the perspective from google, the role of the private sector, and open up to questions from you all. Lets start with robbie. You are fresh off the clinton campaign. A little painful. There are a lot of things you can do when you have been the Campaign Manager for a big Campaign Like that. Some of it involves making lots of money and others go to a Deserted Island and pretend the whole thing never happened. Decided to work with me, matt on a project to defend digital democracy. Talk to us about that. Mr mook you are fantastic people to work with. I was very upset about what happened. I was concerned about two things. Was reallympaign vulnerable to these kinds of attacks. I did not see anybody in particular talking about what we were going to do to help the campaign. It was important to me to fill that gap. Second of all, i was really concerned about how partisan issue is becoming because i had known that in 2000, both parties had been attacked. Matt and i linked up through a common friend. We were talking about this. First of all, i learned that romneys campaign had been attacked in 2012. Matt really understood what a problem this was. We also had alignment on this issue that it could not become democratic or republican, or we would be inviting foreign powers to attack. That is not ok. I want to underscore what has been great about the you have given us to do this project is we are about getting practical things done. Want to know that we made some campaigns more secure and that we have done more to help. We are professionals. Keep the bad guys out of our campaign. I was talking to my friends about this issue and how much it was really bugging me. Ive been buried in the pentagon for the last seven years. They said that is Hillary Clintons campaign monitor. Manager. Then there was not roads who also thought this was an important issue. Tell us about your thought process. Why did you want to get involved . Mr. Rhoades i want to thank the Kennedy School for hosting us. Robbie stole my thunder. This did happen to the Romney Campaign in 2012, it just did not get as much publicity because it was not done in a public way. In 2011, we were notified by the government that our campaign had been hacked by the chinese. What it did and how it impacted our campaign was, we had use to use vital, precious, primary dollars, money that we wanted to use to win New Hampshire and to upgrade our security, our Cyber Security. It had a direct impact. That was money that we did not it to use when we needed it is a bipartisan issue. It is a challenge to conservatives as well. Matt, your campaign was hacked. Robbies was hacked as well. We will not spend a lot of the when you think about the future, what is one of the things you worry most about . Im excited. What i worry the most, from a notaign standpoint, i do worry about the president ial campaigns in 2020. That is not to say that they are not targets. I worry about the next barack obama or george w. Bush, two candidates you can see coming from a mile away and having some hacker decide that they want to change the course of history by hacking into some rising stars and misconstruing something or targeting someone close to them and having that candidate stop on the launching pad. That is what worries me. Of that, from an election standpoint, i really worry about some secretary of states getting hacked on election night. We are in a very polarized world right now. Whether a democrat or republican came out on the short end of the stick of a hack on election night, even if that secretary of state was able to verify the results with hard validates, in no oneized ballots, would believe the results and it would create absolute chaos. That is what these hackers and outside entities are trying to do the most. We are trying to create chaos and get something for the media to cover. They are trying to get guys like robbie and i to hate each other so much and not be able to sit next to each other at events at this. That is what scares me the most. We have been talking about this project that some of us are working on. Tell us a little bit about that. Are trying to get a group outside of government working on an issue like this. We are trying to be really practical and outcome oriented. I think it is very easy to put out blank paper and say this is what the government should do. What we have been trying to do is focus on all the resources that exist in the private sector. I think they are beleaguered to help with this problem and get those connected to the campaign. We are trying to create a playbook. Campaign through not toic things to do get completely secure, but to get pretty close. To put that in language where matt can understand it. [laughter] mr. Mook it is a very practical issue. Secure your campaign. You have no framework for understanding what that even means. Is theer thing i learned private sector has done a lot of organizing to better share information about threats out there. We want to bring some of those best practices into the political space so that parties can take advantage of it. Mr. Rhoades these campaigns are not all president ial campaigns. They are a bunch of young people who come together. They bring laptops from home. Told you need to create a secure system. It is a ripe target for anyone to hack into. We are all counting on you, debbie. Again,nted to mention the fact that you see these two guys sitting next to each other and working on this together, it is a pretty rare thing nowadays. It is not easy for either of them. They are taking a lot of personal risk putting themselves out there right now. You are 20 about Cyber Security, maybe the russians or they get a lot of flak for this. They have been doing a good job. Thank you guys. Debbie, i got to know her and seizure in real life action. She is one of the people i would say is a handful. I most admire for everything she has done. When you are in charge of defending nsas networks, that is a hard job. We called her up and said we have this funny project. What do you think . She did not think twice. She says i am there. She has been working really hard since then. We are going to try to give practical advice. She is working with dimitri from crowd strike. From your perspective, some of the things that campaigns due to raise the bar on their security. Ms. Plunkett thank you for the opportunity to be here. Personally, i really felt like it hit at the core. I want to know that our democracy is protected and hour electoraltal our process is secure. For the campaign, the weakest link, not just an campaigns but at large our people. The first thing i think we have is to have a soundtrack of Camp Training for personnel as they come into a campaign. It does not need to be complicated but it does need to be frequent, to frequently remind those who doubt do not them of things they should and should not do. The very first is addressed the human factor. Next, if the campaign really needs to think hard about what they need to protect. What comes to mind our donor plans. Strategies and matt and robbie can talk about what is most important better than i can. Things that need to be protected need to be protected in an appropriate way. Using the cloud for security and Virtual Private Networks as needed to make sure that you are able to protect those assets that need the most protection. Authentication and management. Have strong passwords. You need to raise the opportunity, increase those security of the infrastructure at large. Change the landscape and make it more difficult for someone to get in. That is great. We have been talking about the cybertart pure security angle. There have been things going on the last several years that are about more than severus security. You have been looking at some of the election processes themselves. What are some of the things that you are concerned about that we should keep an eye out for . Ms. Plunkett the elections are. Argely run by states different states have different procedures. Some are more into security than others. To some extent, that is an advantage from a security perspective because you do not have one method across all states. The flipside is that, at some point, most all of the state , istion data is networked put on some type of Electronic Device or electronic means. And of concern because one to get spare, you have the potential for alterations, destruction, anything that might change the thelts and more importantly results. That is the biggest concern i can think of. We have heard the political perspective, a little about the technical perspective. I teach on these issues, i think that the think about policy, politics, technology, but also the threat. She literally just got back from estonia. You can tell she is a pretty brave person because when you go out there and advise people about how to protect themselves or mitigate the rusk risk, usually the russians go right after you. Some really good stories about that. She writes for political. , she saidis year hacking the u. S. Voting systems would be uncomplicated. Sometimes security is the best form of complexity. Complexity is the best form of security. On one hand it made me want to pull my hair out, on the other hand it is easy to figure out. It is simpler than hacking Voting Machines to hack people. What did you mean by that . Inthe weak link is people any of these systems. When you are thinking about the side, hacking and leaks is one separate issue but when you are talking about information it is different and that is not really something you can cyber secure or find a great firewall for. In this last election there was a tension in the way information moved in and it is owned, no matter where it is generated from. And very much the goal of the kremlin toward the United States writ large is when you have information as a tremendous tool socialos moving across media which is an accelerated means for moving information like that of us as ever seen before. Information at viral speed and terms of what it can do and when you have information on social media fact by powerful data sets and you have campaigns coming out like the Trump Campaign content about how much they have targeted towards people, whether not they did that is a different story. It is possible to sculpt these different landscapes with information. After the election they very were d americans heavily to keep them from voting but specifically they were running Voter Suppression campaigns to keep people from voting that they believed were not going to be helpful to their ultimate outcome. And, the technology they were it isnot something developed by private companies, anybody can buy it. Different Technology Tools to monitor and track theymation warfare is what bought from guys, american engineers, whatever. I am fine with the lithuanian information guys having that but i am not fine with the russians having it. I am not timeless some guys sitting somewhere who brought it up the shelf having it. Understanding the power that social media and other challenges have given to the spread of information and how that affects the core of marketing. There is no special way when you hear these Data Companies talk about their algorithms or whatever. It is basically based on psychology techniques. An convincing you you want idea is not that much different from convincing you want an idea. At the testimony [indiscernible] they mention the summer of 2015 as sort of the uptake and when we saw a russian Information Systems accelerating into the u. S. Information space. Chemical 2015, bizarre factory hoax that the russians sort of put on social media about some random technical factory in the south, they put up the story there was some leak , some terrible thing that happened. It was a test to see how you can create fear and panic. It is not just information, not just convincing about things, but how to vote on certain things. If you look at that through the landscape coming up to the election in the United States is the beginning of appointed Public Opinion you have in that base shiftedblican 35 points on their views on free trade, 20 points on their views about america to and on their views on Vladimir Putin, and about 20 points on their views on political leadership. Three issuesve that basically say it more isolated america, more in alignment with russia, more leading toward authoritarian tendencies and leaders on which there was a 2030 point shift in american Public Opinion in a time, when people come out and say yes, the russians filled the elections with information and happen to coincide with the Trump Campaign but it had no impact on the boat, that is proposition. False if you run Health Talking to senator congress there is his hangup where there is like cyber and other hand this other thing no one wants to look at. He even if it is not true that structure was not physically hacked, which i think we really dont know because doubling ones to look at it, tos because no one wants look at it. But this influencing what people think did happen, it is documented really well but we have yet to discuss in some articulate way or tell of americans in a clear sense the whole new star chamber idea. People like me, clint, the private sector really want to find solutions but we are not your government. [indiscernible] we dont have a Strategic Center yet and we are leaving our population vulnerable to attack by a foreign adversary. [laughter] differencening the between causation and correlation, like molly said we are hard on trying to help understand and everything and have a conference have a candid conversation. The fact that russia he acted to influence the election is a pretty wellestablished fact. There are objective intelligence reports that say that. Whether or not that is what tipped the scales is where my class i would say, you have to decide whether that is correlated or caused. Causationays showing is a difficult thing. So one thing to keep in mind, i think, because there are a lot of variables to use that may have impacted whether or not it was impacted. What is important is try to understand and clint, youve been working on this for along time, too, is the russian side they are going after. So you, like molly have been studying the russians in a lot of other bad guys in terms of what they are trying to accomplish. Talk us through that, ultimately, if it is the russians it could very well be the north koreans. Why are they doing this . What is their ultimate interest . Yes, i think the biggest thing, the first charlottesville nightmare protest we sought, whether the first lines they chanted was russia is our friend. I grew up in brazoria and we played war and the cornfields. That is how we ended up in the army. Wanted to kill communists, rocky four was all about this. Imagine in 1981, a group of men showing up at a protest and friend. Russia is our at the second charlottesville protest, there was a guy who had factory makinged girl bombs and was chanting about how syria has it right and that sort of thing. Rushs goal is two parts. One is the strategy is devolution. To break up all unions wherever there at. That goes from a local level. Of two primary adversaries to the russians the european and union. If they can break up those, that allows him to go oneonone with any country and then they have strength diplomatically in terms of information, military, even economically and oil reserves. Beyond that is to push their foreignpolicy view and they have already won. It is over, folks. They have one. In three years, the greatest influence campaign in history of mankind has just been pulled off. They now have influence over a global, but not nationalist agenda that stretches from russian through germany through france through the United States. They have influence over audience segments that agree with them. They are antiimmigration, antirefugee. Pronationalism, antiglobalist. This is a thing be saw earlier, democrat or republican, during the campaign that was the target of thing. It did not matter if you were marco rubio on one side or Hillary Clinton on the other. Didnt i think we need to understand as it is antidemocracy through in through. We might have hated the soviets when i was in the cordial playing war, but we believed in something. Cornfields playing war, but we believed in something. What does the russian regime in believing in . It is a country that is now controlling information. Wikileaks, which is a proxy essentially empty russian government that talks about transparency. It is promoting a country that has zero transparency. There is 100 internet surveillance. Vpn is the new legislative agenda of Vladimir Putin. What we need to understand as we nationalera that is security and a world of audiences. It is not defined by the borders of our country. We lost that in the United States at this point. There are audience segments that do not blame the system we have the country right now. They dont believe elections are true and they do not believe everyone should have the right to vote. They also do not believe we should unity and they are ok, if you look at the Public Opinion points, they are ok with democracy maybe being replaced with other things. They do not know what that is, but you know, examination for the strong points. When you look at it the things they advocate in believe and believe in are what we fight the cold war war. It was what we were founded on. We no longer have our values and longiggest problem in the term with his digital era is what does the United States united . F were not gerrymandering and this digital disinformation matchup really, really well. We lived in two countries right now. Some districts where republicans fight republicans for seats, other districts where democrats fight democrats for seats. All right. Just on cyber wars [laughter] clinton let me finish this comment is important. They look on cyber not just as influence on information, it is one bubble. And useogether shared the same information sources. Hacking is for masters. The russians mastered that in the Information Space and anyone with enough resources can mastered as well. It is a twopart failure of our government going into this election. We did not understand hacking had power and influence and we did not ever think it would happened was. To us. So i know were trying to segregate this out in cyber but there is no difference when 80 of your news comes from social media feeds anymore. We are in a bubble. Two bubbles. We are going to talk a little bit more of that just the u. S. Cards i would like to follow up, gerrymandering fax i would like to followup about gerrymandering. There will be stories about how divided will become, how divided, democrats only watch republicans lie watch in and they are always watching the twitterverse. The red come with a blue, totally separate from core of that was with americans have chosen this. Not the people ever been choosing but the piece were missing, this is being done to as by the wave of information moving by algorithms and show you what they think you want to see. By the targeting of misinformation through data and other means. That is the piece that really needs to be discussed. This is not just people choosing to see only what they want to see. And as the wave of the internet giving us information helping to create this. And, my former boss in 2012 russia wasement that the greatest National Security threat. He said it. Barack obama. He was right then. People did not necessarily a great end that he was right. He is right now. When we look at the reelection Election Results put that inle] perspective in the 2012 campaign on election day, barack obama was at 34 and mitt romney was at 45 . Agreeaid, i certainly with the point derek made. There are that derek made. There were outside entities. It got tos not why 58 . You can look at Hillary Clinton long before she hired this guy and she went on a book tour. Slip andee her unfazed slip and slip to just point to an outside foreign entity to try to explain why Hillary Clinton lost, i disagree. I was involved in the 2012 in 28 primary. Some of the popular issues you are talking about were burning quite brightly and quite hot all the way back in 2000 seven. The nomination in 2012 was not as easy as people thought it was. I want to put things in perspective and be bipartisan. Laughter] im going to go right back at you, dont worry. I dont care about donald trump or Hillary Clinton, ok . I work in the u. S. Government. Work over, under, in around politicians to get things done. So my point for you is that if you believe in this country and democracy, you have got to get out of the bubble. We dont have it right now, really. This is why digital is important. About how information is maneuvered and used in terms of influence. I was trained on this because i was working counterterrorism and this is what we did. We would do an assessment. I do not need anything to influence you, i can do with a laptop and microsoft. You mightve heard of it. I can do all of the analysis right there. It does not take any sort of trick to do it. Once you got the cord down, this is the key about influence, the data that is available to do influence now gives you a huge advantage. What those with resources want those with these errant modification, those without rule of law and limitations on their Intelligence Services, you can maneuver any audience you want. That can be a corporation, a marketing sort of organization, political campaign. The playbook is out there. Anywhere there is democracy was anow if i authoritarian regime going against a democracy i would use the same system on whatever social media or information platform was out there will stop so i guess i did not one to get into the republicandemocrat thing because my job is ultimately to go after things i think friend democracy whether it be terrorists or the russians most recently. This is not that advanced. Anyone can target in and influence way very simply. That is why think this is very important. How the russians are come the chinese are, how good there, they cant create this. They can make it worse. The place where russian influence operations are the most successful as when it is in the balkan states for example. Yes, there is a russian population slightly separate local. E yes, there are people new United States who hold populist buser who believe in white supremacy. You can inflame those. Give them a bigger but form. Make it worse. There are not good at creating these fives but they can use them effectively. But they can use them effectively. Were not talking specifically about hacking or information ops, but it is the two of them together. Typical of the hybrid warfare the russian jews. Not just information operations. The two together a potent. You hacking to a target, get some real influence, it use it and mix it with fake information and put it together for a more potent mix. One is you is you said the russians one. I am an old army guy like you. I am not sure im ever going to admit the russians one. I may use your words against you a little bit because you wrote earlier this year that Vladimir Putin lost in france but still has a chance in germany. France, briefly, what did the french do that was different than the u. S. Government in terms of reacting and again, just to underscore the point, this is not just a United States issue. This is a issue for democracies. We want to think about that. Not just the russians going after democracies. But france in particular is interesting and i know you worked on that so help us understand how it worked out better. It is two parts. Ill troll and structural. Lets talk cultural first. It is much harder to compromise a frenchman in an american. They just dont get upset, right . People have mistresses. No big. If you do not have a mistress it would be odd if you are running for office. Le pen shows up with Vladimir Putin at events. They dont try to hide it. They are not as effective by compromise. They dont get their information digitally as much as americans do. It is about half as much. They only absorb their news about half as much digitally harder to dohem influence. That is why the cold war you would have to set up a propaganda newspaper, set up payments,. The old school term for russia and soviet info operations. That is harder to do in eight european context. They also have the luxury of coming after our elections elections. For our structurally we do things very dumb compared to other countries. In terms of our elections, it is a much shorter run up. We run the elections every four years for four years. We are already talking about 2020. Like you mentioned before, we could up a candidate stand up right now and get knocked down the in 50 days by a hack. Ramp to sorthuge of set out their influence. The other thing is the difference between primaries and general elections. If you notice, they had a runoff. If you are russia, if you take off your top adversary most of his votes will go to whomever the replacement is and there is only a twoweek timeframe. It is difficult. The french also do a media blackout which is probably good for everyones diet in general, particularly in the u. S. Space. 48 hours before they do not use that. They also use tricks. Sites, putting out false information. That is taking up their time in capital. Ultimately, they were very wise to what would potentially happen in they did not get shook by it. They stayed with traditional media outlets. They went with newspapers, friends and families, they had actual discussions rather than facebook with family members. It is a different political the. Similar to what we will see in germany which is coming up in the next 10 days or so. [indiscernible] the fact that we only have [indiscernible] makes it easier for targets. And other things the french didnt specifically to defend against information attacks was when they found out they were under attack they went public with it. They said, look, here is the information that has been hacked. Heres what the russians, and they named them explicitly, were trying to do. Heres what they say coming is what the truth and then they let people understand what was going on. I think one of the things that takes out of that is a sophistication of understanding of what the russians were trying to do and they make hard decisions about public attribution of that. Is it something that has a mitigateseffect and potential impact . That is one of the things i think you can take from the french elections. The germans are thinking a lot about this too, right . They have an election coming up soon. Now we will turn to heather who after a long superinteresting conversation, were going to talk about the private sector aspect of this. You heard clinton and others talk about the private sector. Heather is not here to talk about all of the private sector nor to defend all of them but sectorle the private plays and all of this is really important. Our election infrastructure aggregates all of the things all of you already know about. Heather, tech to assess about the private talked with us about the private sector. You cant speak to everyone but it could just before google. What are some of the things you are doing in the aftermath of the recent elections to either get better or dress some of the things. Heather let me say i would not be alone in the private sector to say that i cannot believe i am here talking about this topic. Most of us who got into this field did so as scientists and not through any sort of political or economic perspective. Whatnk the reflection upon we have built is therefore not torobust as we would like it be. I am going to tie the comments molly endeavor made together. Havee physical space, you your five senses the tell you when youare danger and should feel fear. You do not have a sixth sense to tell you that online. There is no digital sense, there is no digital fear. This manifests itself was cyber issues and with info operations and if you think about it, the way we have to solve it is very similar. After you People Technology that allows them to sense what is going on in to make an educated decision with what to do. Google. Ky to work for weve hundreds of people who work on Cyber Security issues and we have built for ourselves incredibly robust infrastructure and one of the things we have started doing as of march was to start giving that to campaigns. Into election monitoring people and we call the protector election project. They are simple tools. They are free. They should help combat some of these problems such as, how do you as a Small Campaign without do you and how protect your email . If you are using gmail, we will help protect you. We will give you factor authentication. We will give you tools to help protect against fishing such as password alert. We will even protect the password site with project shield, which prevents denial of service attacks and use that in places like kenya netherlands to keep things on one for people. I think the other aspect where we really need that digital sense is for information. So recently, in april, we announced that we will start to the best of our ability to apply toactchecked label information that appears to be political in nature because this gives people the opportunity to learn about things themselves what the real fact might be. So in example we give is a claim that there are 27 million enslaved people in the world. We might believe that. We might not. And if you put that search query into google, we would try to also provide a place where you can do the Fact Checking for yourself and that label should actually trigger your digital sense to think, i wonder if i should check this fact. I think maybe i should. I will try to find information. I think that the human element, going back to whatever is said, is incredibly important here because we are trying to protect what 7 billion people on the planet . We need to educate them. Sometimes the best time to do that is in the moment when they are actually making that decision, that action, for themselves. This i know is a hard question but you saw facebook i think just last week, they came out and essentially admitted that in doing further analysis, they found that a lot of paid ads had been paid for by foreign government, the russians and are to go in. A lot of the internet is set up nowadays so that firms that are built to make a prevention make a profit but it can skew the way in which information flows. Is, how hard is that when you are working at a firm like google or facebook or twitter to match up what you know, is the right thing to do against what shareholders expect you to do and things that may be against what your commercial interests are in how difficult of a struggle is that for the senior people in google and other places . I would not dare to speak on their behalf a limit say the only reason you probably use google is because it is reliable, fast, and we provide you things that are relevant and interesting to you. So if we suddenly changed our egos to not do that, you might product and we might not make the kind of money we do. The open free web is incredibly important. To we believe that, we fight preserve that and try to make that the basis of what we do. We are no stranger to fraud on ads. With that actors in cyberspace try to use at Stuart Gulliver malware and make economic gain malware and make economic gain. We are no stranger to the idea you can make revenue alongside militias and 10. We tried to the best of our ability to use technology to solve these problems. We are not 100 perfect. There are no silver bullets in this game. We are still very much learning what types of technology and strategies work here. Are some very interesting ones and we have commissioned studies and we are trying hard to push those to the forefront. It has been i think interesting and kind of refreshing for me, just like you can see matt and robbie want to band together to do something about this. I think the sector has stepped up to the challenge to recognize in some way they have a role also for democracy in doing something that is important. It is not easy. Just like it is not easy for robbie to stare down the sector that thinks its crazy to even talk to robby mook. I think that is good. There is a long way for everyone to go. That is important. This is the point in the format which you have now a lot of information. You have a lot of questions. One of the best things about being in the form as you have really small people who can ask really interesting and in fact sometimes crazy questions to real experts. Heres the way we go. You often lineup. There is for microphones. Remember, when we say at skate west and if you have a general point at first, no more than two sentences followed by an interrogative that ends with a question mark. That is the general i give a question. Just a question for one or two people. That is all we have time for. This gentleman, go ahead. My name is [indiscernible] russian. [laughter] russian. Drags i was really go out on a limb. Usually you have [indiscernible] so everything we know that happens during the 2016 elections is that there was an attempt to collude in a Democratic Party in order to sideline the candidate Bernie Sanders by the friends and the family of the clinton family. So basically everything we know was revealed. Made public by someone. Just like now, i am surprised why all of this . It was the real issue actually. Democracy. Undermines it undermines democracy in the United States. Is it not an attempt to punish someone who brought this bad news. I dont know. But basically my question to you set priorities this way . Why you do not care and do not see this is really your democracy under threat in this way . Why you try to attempt to shift this attention to someone who brings the bad news . Ok. Who do you think would be the best person to answer your question . Oh, i will take it. [laughter] were talking about shifting the bad news. Matt, what do you think . Matt and robbie . Ahead, robbie. Robbie you are a Bernie Sanders supporter . Drugs i dont care. Care. Ter] i dont [laughter] this is a point, maybe i did not make it as eloquently as i could. Complain about the chaos. Hillary clinton, you can go back and chart. Hillary clinton started to rise to astronomical levels where many voters, including by the time she got to run against Bernie Sanders in the primary, some democrat primary states had a majority of democrats to find her to be dishonest and untrustworthy. That is just a fact, all right . I have my personal opinions, i have shared some of them tonight. I just need to step back and have a sense of what is real. In go back and look at hillarys itbers over time it and started early. Well before robbie was even named Campaign Manager. Look, i disagree with the premise of your question for two reasons. One is the primary campaign, i think people dont understand that. It is run by the secretary of state. Except in states where Bernie Sanders one overwhelmingly. Those caucuses are run by the party and we only one two of them. I want and nevada. We work very hard to windows. Bernie sanders won overwhelmingly in every contest that was run by the party. Everybody else Everything Else was run by secretaries of state will stop second, one of the things that i was proudest of and that primary campaign was berniek that i did with sanderss team. I voted for Bernie Sanders three times. I am from vermont. So i actually voted for Bernie Sanders more than most people. And, in three separate elections by the way. [laughter] end i was prompt robbie and i was very proud of the work i did with Bernie Sanders team. An election in particular. His people are good people. So, i think there are people out there that are trying to make it seem like we were really far apart. We were really close together. I thought the platform we created was something to be proud of. And so for those two reasons i disagree with the premise of your question. I am greg you asked it. Glad you asked it. I am going to be voting in the next primary, too. Thank you for your question. Another thing i want to say, i am guilty of calling people bad guys all the time. Russians are amazingly only warm people. President putin and some of things he is done, there is a strand of bad guys in russia just like anywhere else. You. Ank we can talk after this, too. Yes sir. Neighbor. Thank you for bringing this to the public. Thank you for the really interesting discussion. I want to ask about a gap i heard in this talk. I mean, the focus started on practical things and you are putting together a playbook for campaigns. You know, which is security 101. Thathe whole other aspect was talked about, Information Warfare, influence operations, etc. , there does not seem to be at this point anything form that is anywhere close to you know, practical. I heard certain suggestions like facebook should make every political ad that it serves up available to the public so people know what is being done. I presume the same could be said for google, etc. Are you folks thinking about the same practical problems in that can you share at least preliminary ideas . i cantnt eric take credit for it but clint is working on something great called the hamilton project. I would like him to talk about that. Eric ihink there think there are two things. Thanks to the sponsor in this room. We started this thing called hamilton 68 which is alexander hamilton, the 68 federal list paper said we are vulnerable to foreign meddling based on the way we are structured and that sort of coercion whether it be financial or whatever it might ease so were been watching these influence campaigns over this 2. 5 year. To figure out, how do you inform the public. It was a neat old for us to understand what is the russian position. If we get the chance maybe we will go back to why i am particularly upset about the russians. If you understand what their influence narrative is you start with what theyre putting up. Our dashboard put that up. This is the statesponsored propaganda put out by russian news propaganda. The second part of these personas we watch for many years in the routinely promoting or amplifying. Those are social. Is itrt about social bias allows you to amplify your message to such an extent that you can change the way the media environment operates and cause Mainstream Media to react to the story. It gives you an out waited influence. I reference artillery because i came out of the army world. It allows you to take information and shouldnt like to gainlery barrage social media systems. The first part was awareness. Our dashboard, what we are trying to show as there are two parts to influence. The first thing you do is infiltrate the audience and you do that by mimicking them. Using the around the organic content to amplify divisions, religious, social issues, whatever device people up and get some fighting amongst each other. You will find that. What you have the audience bang attention to you that is when you start to influence. That is what we watched over couple years. Were working on other versions. The second part which google is already kind of doing, but i think it needs to go and be more expensive is nutrition labels for information. Essentially, do you know what you are considering . Because if you do, you know what to blame but your self. It is not about, isnt propaganda, opinion, or anything, is it a about how much fact is being put up. , when you raise an information like they did for products, you put it over 17 or 18 variables, you rate their information over a month. Mainstream media suites. You then get an icon on your facebook feed, twitter feed, whatever it may be one that comes up and says this has been rated by information Consumer Reports version number three as this much true, this much false. If you want this widget you can keep it on. We are not making you havent. You can opt in or opt out. It becomes like snopes essentially across all social forms where few choose to read you get itation and back, you have no one to blame but yourself. You are not suppressing free speech. Anyone can continue to write. You are not suppressing freedom of the press. We need to empower citizens to make sound choices about information. That is where my problem comes with russia. A hacked into thousands of americans. I have been targeted by a foreign government. Theyve stolen peoples information. They have shaped the information environment. You do not know what was stolen and you do not know how many americans, many of them are in the u. S. Government right now, have been hacked by foreign adversaries. They had a nato commander. They stole private data. Let me give you a parallel example. What if someone had broken into chairman of the joint chiefs Colin Powells house and stole files out of his house, took them to a newspaper and publish them during the cold war . We would be talking about armed conflict. But because it happened in cyber we say no big deal that you violated our privacy. That you attack our military Service Members with malware and place and embedded. That is my issue. Not with the russian people. They have their version of democracy as well. But we are talking that crimes committed against america. We are talking up the foundations of our country and what we supposedly believe in. The revelation about Bernie Sanderss people find out how the party system actually works. Then another way we can up americans out is to give them a Civic Education because i do not know how a bill becomes a law. They do not understand these things. We can help provide them an education. My problem with the russian government, yet im going to address this point even if you try to cut me off ok. Remember we are here for my issue is with the Vladimir Putin regime. Essentially they not only launched an information attack, it is a form of warfare. It is winning through the force of politics rather than the politics of force. We need to understand the threats to our democratic government. Bags we got schooled in government here in cambridge, massachusetts. More about civics. It is about Information Warfare in shaping the next generation of leaders. Im so sorry. Normally i would give you a followup but there are a whole bunch of people waiting. Up in the green, go ahead. Hello. Thank you for coming in spending your time. My name is liz. I am a Cambridge Resident and an m. I. T. Alumni. My question is about legislation about information dissemination. Services like facebook and google. Half 1 billion, as much as programs like the hamilton dashboard or other ways to raise the truth of your news is nice. The headlights we saw last week about facebook selling hundreds of thousand dollars worth of ads to foreign adversaries or other troubling headlines over the summer about searching for, is the holocaust real, several of the top results are at about the holocaust not being real. All of this happening way faster than any one person or entity can regulate. How does our government start to create legislation or regulation for these american businesses that are propagating this around the world . Who do you think is the best to answer that question mark orple making policy representing the private sector. No one in specific post a ok. Other, wrote quickly, one sense of the question. Regulateu . Isinformation heather i think that is an interesting weshing. If we have trouble classifying what the problem is it will be very difficult to regulate. I should can see we have difficult classifying the problem even. I find that end you see this in the Cyber Security space, it is difficult to regulate something you cannot describe or see what the solution is to. Maybe it is a bit early to talk about regulation if we ever want to talk about it at all. If you do not trust your information sources, we will cease to be a useful information source to you. That is actually a better motivator for us to find technology and People Solutions to solve this problem versus regulation when we do not have any solution. Imagine a time when we had cars, the early 1900s. Had we regulated car safety before we invented the seatbelt or airbags or roll bars . Imagine what that car might look like. You might had to use a horse instead. I think we have to did about these things very thoroughly before we Start Talking about regulations. Rep. , what do you think the odds of legislation trying to regulate information, what are the odds of that present on the hill . [indiscernible] canthink the answer thanily come from stop the flow i think information whether it is true or not, water will find a way out. I think it is cultural. Were going to figure out a way to educate people. [indiscernible] i wonder potentially were going to go back. Be much more careful. Just dontying i solution. i think somehow we have to figure out as a culture [indiscernible i was going to plug myself a little bit but on thursday morning ill be testifying on these issues on what we do about russian Information Warfare. 9 30 a. M. It will be in the senate you can watch it online. It is applicant. Private sector, government, civil society, systems. Everybody has a role to play in what comes next. It is fluid and adaptive but we have to figure out how to put those leases together much faster than waiting to see if the market will bear a solution. So, yes. Quick, tell who you are, one sentence or two, then a question. My name is jonathan, law school, washington, d. C. , where the last year has been especially disappointing. I am addressing my question primarily to heather in molly but i would love a response from anyone. So, earlier what if you made the comment that it would be no harder for me to sell you idea that it would be to buy a new parish is. Research in psychology and neuroscience suggests on one hand peoples pliable. Views are it shows in presenting information in ways that are conducive to emotions involving anger, disgust, and fear can seriously alter their political inclinations. Another hand there seems to be a lot of information suggesting people are often intransitive. It can be difficult to change or understand their political intuitions. Oftentimes do basic communal or identitybased motivations. The problem seems to be a lot of the way that information affects peoples political intuitions i wonder if it can be out of the control of the people trying to structure the flow of information or its presentation. For example, ratings, belongs to a platform like google could probably be useful to many people but i suspect there is a considerable amount of people that that would confirm their antiestablishment intuition. How much of the broader underlying psychological context that this information plays into do you think can be effected by the information industry question mark how much might come down to surrounding cultural, social, educational structure . Is both and all of those things. It is emotional in confirmation bias component. You can use it for different things. The easiest thing is to radicalize people within their own set of use. To reinforce everything you believe continually until youre so cut off from alternative views like the red and blue bubbles on twitter that they never cross of her. You never see anything on the other side. The emotional factor is where views and i was working on this project and the Baltic States on russian language media and we were doing some analysis of russian state media propaganda targeting baltic russians versus the locally generated russian language content and if you put the two stories in front of i think my favorite focus group was a group of College Graduate student level kids working in journalism and media really wellinformed, smart. If you put two stories in front of them with no labels they would look at them and say, know this is the propaganda start but i like it. It is mark emotional, compelling, want to read it again. Yet the one, i dont care. I read the first paragraph and then flip my phone to the next thing. You can look at those in two ways. That is where the emotional comes in. There are sort of to peaceably get propaganda narrative which is why things are the way they are and you know, sort of answering the Big Questions of the world on the storytelling which is the specific vehicle of how you get people to read the narrative and that is where emotion is really important for sort of longer form efforts by confirmation bias is much easier to actually, part of our looking at heather actually, part of our looking at those commissioned a study looking at 14,000 people. I dont remember the reference off the top of my head but it was published early this year and in particular we wanted to understand if people really lived in a bubble on want. Theres some information that suggests while there may be a bubble, they also look at information outside. So having the platforms be open, free, and being able to find a variety of news is very important. When you look at platforms like twitter where there is a voting component to it you are already seeing some of that. I am a twitter user and i followed both Hillary Clinton and i follow donald trump as well. Sides. At both i think actually a lot more people do that then you realize. Or admit to so i think it is important to recognize that what you pointed pointedthe studies you out are very important. It is also fun to realize it might not read the majority of people. Right . It might be a microcosm were still learning to understand how it works. I think your idea around creating these sort of platforms that allow us to put for our favorite news or news that you think is important is good. One of the changes we made to the autosuggest feature in google is to make it easier to give us feedback so we can do those adjustments in realtime. Ask thank you. Go ahead. My name is sara angel. Collegetudent at actually. My question goes to limitations on American Intelligence Services that foreign Intelligence Services may not have. I was wondering where limitations come from and whether it is from u. S. Domestic policy, international agreements, or some kind of a moral line we draw for ourselves. It will only go so far in spying on or seeing what other countries are doing and in what kind of information we collect and where we stop ourselves when we think were going to far. I am wondering where that limitation comes from and how that separates the u. S. From foreign Intelligence Services. Eric clint, do want to take that . Clint one is the law. The u. S. Omes in when government has overstepped generally. Those provisions are in there because we are not comfortable with it and part of that is influence in the u. S. Audience space. That has always been a challenge and one of the reasons the u. S. Sucks that influence. To not influence our domestic audiences. In a Digital World it is very hard to know where the domestic audience starts and the International Audience begins. I think the second sort of component of it and why we do not do it is the New York Times test witches, who will stand up, you know, when these programs defend in place and them . We have a good system for that. I dont mean to be facetious with that but you know ultimately inside Government Agencies there was a great idea. Hey, you know what we could do . In some egos, i am not doing that. And someone goes, i am not signing up for that. We know it is not in line with our audience. I have not seen it and i pray to god our country never goes and hacks 10,000 people overseas and him sell their information out on the internet. If we ever did Something Like that, think our country would hate ourselves for doing that. We saw that even with the Edward Snowden debate. We are very uncomfortable with it. It is two parts. One is legislation but the other part is, do we want to be signing up for violating peoples of the sea destructive Malware Attacks . We are not comfortable at that and i think that is a good thing. During the agency cold war, we doubled us that, that is part of the recent winners of honorable to this and missed it. This same time i hope we do not try to fumble the pattern of our adversaries. The u. S. Should maybe be the ones to counter this information. Two quick points. Recent Defense Authorization bill, there was a provision that granted no authority and several hundred Million Dollars for the United States to do more active informationtype campaigns which was the modification of existing laws. Second of all, you know, when i was in the department of defense working on cyber ups and info things, you do not want the department of Defense Joint coproduction type things that you know may end up in the New York Times. So by law, what we had to do even when trying to counter influence terrorist propaganda was thethat it department of defense providing you this information which on its face should mean it could be discounted by anyone trying to influence because you had to influence because you had explicitly say that so their ways and the law which essentially are provisions from the ca could do it but this is a very clumsy process. We dont live it very often and there is a general level risk aversion. Last question, then we will head out. The last one over here. My name is sophia. I am a student at hks. My question is on the benefit of Public Engagement on discussion on info war and digital security. I think it was molly that [indiscernible] i wonder if you observe the trend that if people are provided with some sort of information or are engaged in some sort of discussion. Thank you. Molly on the counter side of this it is actually really not good data. You are mentioning some of these programs being run. A lot of this is contracted out said the Defense Department does not have to but there name on it. 500 Million Dollar project for example the counter violence extremist narrative online which is as far as i can tell has been flushing on down the toilet, cant prove it. Kept one jihadi in the amount of time whatever krapp contractor is running that. The problem with this is the cousin of some of the psychological issues of this and other things, it is easy to use social media and online media to radicalize people for actions for political issues, local issues, whatever it might be. It is far more difficult to read reradicalize people with the central. It requires a much deeper understanding of the purpose of information, how it is affecting identity. Ions and i have yet to see a secret sauce version of the that brings us to the end of the evening. I always taught that the end of class, you try to summarize some key points. So here is what you can take away. First of all, it is the information age. It is not just the United States. They are struggling with how people synthesize information and it is extremely important for democracies around the world to figure out how you get to a state of ease with that and how much information can influence things. Second of all, i think you see there are a lot of different examples that trust is an important part of democracy. Guy, thet is a bad russian government and those who are actively trying to undermine our democracy, if they are able to erode trust in government or the democratic process, that is really important. We as a country can have something rebolstering that trust. People like matt and robbie up working on that. ,omething we did not talk about i think it is really important that we as a country and other democracies tend to signal that you cant do this to the United States. And that we push back, and it is a visible response, some form of deterrence that prevents or sways half of the bad guys from going for our democracies. ,ome of these are resilience when you see a country as too strong, and other things we didnt talk here about that are more aggressive. First of all, thank you all for coming. Thank you to all of our guests for being here. [applause] thank you all. Now you may exit stage left. Announcer later tonight, texas lawmakers survey the damage from hurricane harve. Hillary clinton talks about her book. First, we take you to new york city where President Trump spoke to a u. N. Meeting. We will start from with remarks from nikki haley. Good mornind