The truth and erode our ability to fight, creating a set of it that no narrative or use source can be trusted at all. Some of the ttts in this space wont necessarily come as as a surprise to you but we talked about intrusion and u. S. Government networks and medical organizations, hack and leak operations related to compromise or embarrassing situations, Cyber Attacks against our eroding infrastructure, the targeting of u. S. Persons or elected officials by social media and disinformation, suppression of voter turnout by spreading misinformation regarding polling and voting, manipulation of media through the injection of false stories, and news reporting. And then subsequent application of the disinformation to shape of the discourse. Shape Public Discourse. There are a few overarching similarities regarding the manner in which our two principal adversaries, china and russia, execute these objectives. Both countries use a whole of government approach. And use sophisticated and aggressive efforts to advance their national priorities. However, there are clear differences in the space as well. China and russia very and extent of their aggressiveness and risk tolerance. We see russia is willing to conduct more brazen and disruptive influence operations because of how it perceives its conflict with the west. In some ways, however, china contains its maligned foreign influence operations to its strategic goals of developing a modern National Economy and building its geopolitical prestige to be respected as an equal, if not superior arrival rival and its size to that of the trend. To put it simply, in the space, russia wants to watch us tear ourselves apart, while it seems china, on the other hand, would rather manage our gradual economic decline over the course of generations. So what do we do in this space . The director established the fitf in october of 2017 to bring together the fbis National Security and traditional criminal investigative expertise under one umbrella, to identify and counteract maligned foreign influence, targeting u. S. Institutions and values. At the time we were primarily focused on the russian maligned foreign influence operations. However, the fitf scope has expanded since then to address other global adversaries. China, iran, north korea. Our structure, the fitf structure, bears some resemblance to the Fbis Joint Terrorism Task force, which exists at fbi headquarters in very large fashion but also in all 56 of our field offices. However, while we do work sidebyside with detailed these from various federal agencies in the fitf, our internal structure is a little bit different. The fitf combines personal from across the fbi, including special agents come intelligence, analysts and other professional staff from the fbis counterintelligence, the cyber, counterterrorism, and criminal divisions. Our multidivision task force has the authority to mandate to bridge all fbi programs and equities to combat this threat. In addition to investigative operations in broad intelligence sharing across our state and local partners, the fitf also works hard to build strong partnerships with the private sectors and academia. The fitf Management Team meets irregularly with social media and tech companies. When appropriate, the fbi provides actionable intelligence to social Media Companies to help them fight abuse of their platforms by foreign actors. Our work in this area, one thing that is very important to us, particularly on the cyber side of things is that attribution is key. We do not run around chasing content in addition to having a host of first mac issues. That approach would be inefficient and ineffective First Amendment issues but we dont focus on what the actors say. We spent our time concentrating on who they are, attribution is key. When were able to identify and track foreign actors as a established and use the infrastructure amateur the online presence, the fitf works with social be compass to illuminate and disrupt our adversaries activities. Including at times through actions taken entirely by the companies themselves. To voluntarily remove accounts that violate their terms of service agreements. I have run out of time so i would just say that our adversaries are actively engaged to influence Public Opinion and our electoral processes. It is our responsibility to take the threat seriously, evolve our methods of destruction, and maintain our fierce determination and focus. Thank you for giving them time to speak to you today. [applause] ive already didnt traduced you. Yes, thank you so much. Ive already introduced you. My name is Madeline Mortelmans and of the principal director of the Cyber Policy Office in the office of the secretary of defense. We are responsible for developing guidance and providing advice to the secretary of defense about what the department of defense must be capable of in and through cyberspace. Please to be a to talk about dods role in defending elections is specifically in support of an complementary to our federal government partners and fbi encountering for influence at the department of Homeland Security in sporting elections infrastructure security, so state and local partners. From my viewpoint in the dod state we quickly talk about supported and supporting here in the context of defending elections, the department of defenses and salute in a supporting role, those what it was important for me, for you care for my colleague from the fbi first. So in that what you jump right in and try to get to the just pick the National Defense strategy concludes that for the past decade to offset a military superiority, our adversaries are increasingly using actions below the use of force to undermine our National Security and national interest. Nowhere is this more true than through cyberspace we see adversaries using coordinated, longterm campaigns of malicious cyber activity to harm the United States, our allies and partners, and undermine international order. Their objective is within is to win without war, and the in the event of conflict to leverage the capabilities prior to hostilities and in order to achieve strategic advantage. China, russia, iran and north korea are using and will continue to use cyber to steal information and to prepare to disrupt Critical National infrastructure. But dods interest is not limited to those military operations. Our adversary is also seeking to influence our citizens and undermine Democratic Institutions in order to achieve that strategic advantage that will allow them to win for their national interests. The Intelligence Community assessed they are capable of and they seek to interfere in our voting process, the infrastructure that we use, or to covertly influence our citizens in order to achieve an outcome. The department of defense has now determined as the president directions that helping to defend elections is an enduring mission. But we are part of a broader whole of government effort, an unprecedented level of course nation. And in that way the department of defense is playing a complementary and supporting role to our domestic partners. In this way we are looking to leverage our specific comparative advantage authorities to defend forward. Just as the department of defense projects power in the physical domain, land sea and air we seek to understand our adversaries activities come to shape the environment and to address threats for they reached the homeland we are seeking to do the same things in and through cyberspace in support of our election. Building on our activities in 2018 in defense of the 2010 midterm election, the department of defense is conducting complement activities in support of civilian led efforts, defending forward in order to generate insights come first generate insights about adversary intentions and activities. In this way we are collecting and analyzing data about foreign threats this can take any number of methodology. It includes things like identifying malware and networks, covert influence identities and to better understand whats happening outside of the United States. We do this with partners throughout the global environment. Second, we are enabling our domestic partners to better defend elections. This includes sharing those insights that we generate from outside of the United States with our domestic partners to enable the Network Defense activities. An example would be in 2018 we conducted what we call hunt forward operation, but in fact, partner Network Defense operations with our traditional allies and partners taking insight inside about our adversaries are using their malicious activities in other countries that can in turn be used to better defend our own networks. And finally, thirdly, when appropriate and authorized the department of defense will conduct military operations to degrade, disrupt, or defeat foreign interference or covert influence. This can take any number of forms, but it includes operations that would seek to put the stint in the gears of our adversaries attempting to accomplish their outcome. We can do this, for instance, through exposing their malware or the Network Threats indicators. To date, u. S. Cyber command has publicly exposed eight different examples of how adversaries are seeking to conduct malicious cyber activity against the United States, which enhances our overall defense. We can also take other operations that seek to slow them down. The National Guard bureau, also paired in their support are dhs and fbi and the state and local authorities, thank you. [applause] thank you madeleine and thank you david. So in listening to what we just heard, it was really, i want to highlight a couple things i heard david say, that this idea of mistrust of the government and these are correct actors, malicious actors attempting to do that, pushing consumers towards alternative news sources, selling and confusion about true narratives, destroying our ability to think clearly, clouding the truth, how does that happen . Step back for a minute and step away from elections and talked for a minute just about data and the world we live in. We are surrounded by sensors everywhere. Everything we do, were all carrying these around. Theyre embedded with sensors. We have bits, every environment in which we exist as sensors area i heard somebody maurice talk about a alexa, what are the news results . So we have sensors, we have health and fitness sensors, automobile sensors, theyre all connected to satellites so we are constantly physically tracked, so much data is being aggregated about us and i want to give you this example because it always gives a good perspective for the audience, this is from an actual Patent Application from walmart biometric data the of sensors in a walmart shopping cart handle these sensors would, the sensors would give heart rate, temperature, cart speed and location in your walmart shopping cart. Shout out thanks to my ia y at weisenburger for alerting me to this so in terms of how this intersex we know we have sensors that are recording us, everybodys got their fit bits on, their apples on. What happens is how these sensors are interacting with all these apps that we download and are using on our phones. We have numerous companies, private companies buying, selling, aggregating this data and its intimate data. Im not just talking about whos in this room right now which is being aggregated but really, data that can be used tomanipulate our choices. So if we think about that idea, clouding mistrust , theres part of that is foreign actors but part of that is our self and part of that is all of this content we create allows us to be so easily manipulated so just a screenshot here of facebook, advertising on facebook makes it easy to find the right people,capture their attention and get results that you can do that on any budget. How does that happen . Its effective because its use and sale of your data for microtargeting ads so we understand microtargeted advertising. Microtargeting enables an ad just tailored for you, that Technology Makes it costeffective enough that one person in this room would receive only that version of an ad. So the ability, this is right off of facebook and facebook isnt alone here, they just happen to be such a prominent user of your data. So audience insights, knowing your audience like never before. Aggregate information. Facebooks collecting information from all of our apps. So an example is some women or persons use apps to track their cycles. And some apps track womens cycles withoutletting them know. So what does that matter . How can that be used politically and why do i have a picture of where we are talking about period . That information is shared with facebook so what does that mean . Where does that take us . Lets think about something weve heard about in the news or at least women are aware of is taxes on eminent hygiene. Lets think about microtargeting for a minute. You are in a particular time in your cycle, you might feel more strongly about seeing which states tax your period and you might be more susceptible to content like this and this content can come, i mean, its the ability to manipulate you face on very intimate details about what you are doing, what you are experiencing, where you are so where not just talking your location, who your contacts are. Talking intimate information so we see politicians take advantage of this. We have one representative tweeting out about how he wanted to be charged by the house administrators because he wanted to provide feminine hygiene items for his staffers and people visiting his office. Thats taking political use of this in an advertisement and yes, thats absurd that thats not considered a necessity for women. But it raises this question, when you are gettingmessaging , what is real . We heard from david porter about the selling of mistrust and part of that is this question of how do we determine what is real . We have so much information coming at us on social media. Our newsfeed, its even worse on your mobile phone. Research shows that youre going to scroll through your mobile feed much more quickly this question of what is real , and technology continues to advance and that takes us to deepfakes and theres an indian politician using deepfakes to win new voters and he didnt speak the language so you just use ai, link lipsynching technology and had his, had a deep fake of himself speaking in a language hedidnt speak. Weve seen these transects. Weve heard about the pelosi, weve heard about the obama, theres lots ofthis and its not just something thats coming in the future, its here , ready or not so how is the law handling this . Weve heard people mentionthe First Amendment so the question is is this protected speech . Are deepfakes, our disinformation or misinformation, are they protected speech . Is this protected content . Is this something we are going to say our First Amendment, no law shall abridge the freedom of speech. No lawshall abridge. Fortunately , employers, a little plug for the profession there, lawyers recognize that the First Amendment isnt in fact omnipotent. Its not that all speech must be protected so whats interesting is in the preinternet era, this was so much more clear. We knew that publishers were liable for content and individuals were liable for content that was defamation. If you saysomething about someone thats not true and it causes harm to their reputation they can sue you. We know that the First Amendment doesnt, and these court decisions, its hard to do this in a flash talk but hate speech is not protected, burning a cross on someones yard is not protected. Incitements to violence are not protected. Putting up pictures of positions who work at an abortion clinicwith crosshairs, thats not protected speech. So invasions of privacy are also recognized as a bar that we could protect our privacy when it was violated. If we had a reasonable expectation of privacy and content so remember this is important. Publishers were liable before the internet came along and something happened. And all of these platforms that are Interactive Computer Service providers had a shield now. And so if we think about that source, your information source, we heard a lot about Pay Attention to credible sourcing if you saw something in the New York Times you knew im reading this in the New York Times or the wall street journal and as a publisher, they would be liable for things they repeated so if there was defamation or hate speech or something that wasnt protected, the law had an enforcement mechanism to get rid of it and then along came something that has told of the real strength of the First Amendment and thats the Communications Decency act, section 230 of the Communications Decency act bars Interactive Computer Service providers, i. E. Facebook,google, twitter from liability for content posted by third parties. It destroyed liability as we knew it. It destroyed the ability to control speech as we knew it so we see this referred to in Court Opinions as this wild west that happens online. These are platforms where content is being posted and yet they are completely immune from liability. So its decouples the cda decoupled that historically recognized publisher liability from publishers, i. E. In this case Interactive Computer Services from online content. So as a litigator who has dealt for a long time with cda cases where people are victims of revenge porn or horrific other content, the cda means sorry, you can go to facebook. You can go to tumbler and say can you take down that salacious photo of this client who didnt authorize this to be there but its thirdparty content. Where not liable and you cant make us take it down so we saw the law come along and try to give us revenge porn but at the end of the day this is allowing invasions of piracy privacy and those deepfakes that i talked about. If a deepfakes is of someone isonline and it makes it appear they were doing something they are doing they have a recourse in the precda era. Prior to this. Whats interesting is the platforms are permitted to make money off this content and a lot of money is made up of misinformation. Its not just money thats made though, weve heard from how much we are being sorted by actors that are putting content out therethats not real. Quickly , we do have states as i mentioned of revenge porn and revenge porn laws, states are the ones who say we are going to pass laws to protect victims of revenge porn and we now see california andtexas trying to jump in and address this problem of deepfakes. Most states just passed laws that went into effect in october 2019 where theyre making a criminal offense if a person with an intent to injure a candidate or influence the results of an election creates a deepfake video to be distributed within 30 days ofan election and how did they define deepfake . Theyre trying to address something that will cover a wide net and it means its a video created with ai with the intent to deceive and appears to depict a real person performing an action that did not occur in reality. So we see states trying to jump in and fill this void and thats i think part of the conversation that i look forward to hearing from our panelists next but without further ado im really excited to introduce Anthony Robinson who is a professor at penn state and his work with that, im going to let you talk more about that and if you want to introduce maria so we can keep itmoving. [applause] thanks very much. I am associate professor of the department of State University and im happy to have this chance to talk to you today about mapping and the context of us elections. I want tonight Anthony Mckenna and governor rich and everybody else who helped organize this meeting and i think its an important gathering for us to consider so the next few minutes im going to talk to you about mapping mapping. Ive been working on research to understand how and why some maps go viral. Maps are central to Public Knowledge and engagement in our elections but not all maps are easy to verify and no matter what, maps or waste implications of our actual complex world. There arent any 100 percent truthful maps, this will come as nosurprise to you but public trust in what maps can do is greater than ever. As an example, one of the reasons i think this is the case is millions of people are interacting with Navigation App and so our trust is reup to buy that. But the fact of the matter is election maps are messy, maps tell a story about data or cant what car drivers refer to as dramatic maps and election mapping is filled with pneumatic mapping, its not as simple as navigating from point a to point b so my work is exploring what happens when public trust might be misplaced in these maps that come out in iowa. For example, shortly before the 2016 election, they shared a hypothetical Electoral College math showing what might happen if only women were to vote and when i noticed this matter seemed to mirror the creation of hundreds of other maps and frequently coming with completely unknown sourcing, the example on the right was not created by this person on twitter but it was shared by somebody who has a sizable audience. Nate silvers initial map cost hundreds more to emerge in the days to follow. This is an example of 500 what if only blank voted maps i voted collected on twitter and there were hundreds more. One in particular that i went viral on its own and generated its own media nexus and multiple stories was this one and it took a fair bit of digging to figure out its creator who did actually post a little blog post on medium about after it went viral and claim credit for the work but it was not easy to understand where it came from. At penn state weve been exploring the Machine Learning techniques to take map images like that one and understand where they come from to know whether or not they are derived from previous sources or if they represent something new on the internet. The results show partial matches to the original viral as detected by the cloud vision platform. One variation asks the question i had which is where it does not come from . The others here appear to the accurate translation of the original into for other languages but its not hard to imagine an inaccurate translation and it would be tripolitrivially easy to change the text and message that the map conveyed. Leveraging reverse image search platforms to look at other viral maps such as this one, laura trump posted this one and i wanted to know about the map in the background and i made the assumption that someone in the white house borrow the underlying map from another source. Not only that yes, the underlying map was borrowed from another source but also it had already been used in previous meaning with a similar intent a couple years prior so its possible this more recent map was inspired by the predecessor mass. We also noticed what many in the media notice what was there were counties colored red that are supposed to be and this is a subtle thing most of the readers probably didnt notice but really small changes in math design and make huge changes in how they are interpreted. It would be easy to produce a map that shows different primary result, maps that show the wrong locations for polling places and for readers looking at a map its hard for them to tell when something is deliberately misleading but understand to visualize viral maps andtheir counterparts , g zhu is a postdoc and i helped a prototype of math reverse so that brings together results from google cloud vision to reverse image search and help us identify potential source material forviral maps. It also helps us look at the derivative stuff that happened downstream for viral mapping and youre welcome to try it out if you like, itsa Prototype Software mathreverse. Org. With the impeachment that we were able to build an overview which shows images for a given seed and we can review details about where and when those things were shared,when were they first indexed. . We can explore how they emerge over time and characterize the keywords that appear with them on different webpages were trying to attack this from multiple angles. But reflecting on this work id like to come back to a few of what are the most crucial points read first is that maps are always simplifying ourcomplex world and that a fundamental power of mapping, thats a good thing. We cant handle all the detail we are surrounded by all the time, we need to simplify it in second maps have been used for disinformation for a long time. Thats not dumping new. The difference today i would argue is that its easy for virtually anybody to create and share Something Like this and i argue thatspotentially a good thing as much as a bad thing. In the past maps were made by professionals shared by foreign media sources so when there was different this information or persuasion, at least we had an idea where it was coming from the Port Technology is something accessible to very few people compared to the total number of map readers. Today though its possible to quickly refute one map with another. In some cases this doesnt help and in other cases it can be helpful such as this example from thejapan earthquake. A graphic show the sea surface change was used as a proxy for radiation emissions and this was then debunked others who created a bit of a meme of their own as counter messaging. Hes recently as the past week a similar example and merged with the coronavirus outbreak, several sources shared a map that purported to show the places residents from wuhan had fled and this wasnt back end from several years ago that shows every Airline Route inthe world. The bbc others have published stories to explain that misleading that im curious to show how this in the discourse in the first place. That just the product of an underlying social chatter or is there a potential line so id like to conclude when thinking about new Research Directions and for those of you in the room who either fund work or support funding through legislation to consider some of these areas. What can we do to make sources and modifications of maps were obvious readers, i dont think we can stop them from being created and im not arguing for that but when we make will enable better tools to see whats underlying them. Can we identify organic information sharing versus more deliberate acts of misinformation and whats going to happen in the future as it becomeseasier for people to make their own interactive maps. Im dealing with static things and its more difficult to make something animated so in the second half of the session my colleague and i will talk about each of these issues in the broader context. [applause] amos maria molina, a on a Research Researcher at the research lab at penn state and i want to start by highlighting something and that is full news is not a new phenomenon but what is new is the source and the modality of false news so the reality is that Interactive Media will assist in communication, think traditional media. We have a source that delivered a message through a medium to a receiver but now the receiver has also become the source so what do we need with that . The receivers can share, they can recreate but also they can create their own content or dissemination but the question is do people notice the difference . Do people distinguish between a professional source and their friend tweeting atthem and what we see is they actually dont. Another thing we injected media is media trauma, for instance the newspaper area we had a clear section that distinguish media from entertainment to news and we also had boxes and those boxes of dust differentiate advertisements from the information and the same happened on tv. Lets look at what happened with social media. Here is an example from my histogram so you can see the New York Times, the sponsored content and a blog that i follow. Initially they look the same we see an absence of this categoryin social media. But ill do we evaluate content in the absence of this category mark we rely on rule of thumb that are triggered by technology so take for instance the bandwagon triggered by the number of likes that youve seen the news shared in your social media and this uses the idea that if many people think the article is good it should be good for me to so we tested this and we gave participants and experiments, half of them are real story and half of them a false version of the same story what happens in social media is that when someone publishes a real story such as this one, theres always one rated to come up with a false version of the same story but we also gave them half of our participants had a number with a low number of likes and half of them with a high number of likes and what we found is that those participants who received a false news with a high number of likes versus those that receive false news with a bone number of likes or real news was high or low number of likes were more likely to share this particular news story. What happens is when false news has received a lot of likes it suspends our participation and that is persuade users to shell the content so in asking, the answer is yes. Yet another heuristic what we have is the real is interested in this is the perception that seeing is believing. We tend to this premise in the context of india using a whats up messaging service and we gave the exact same story to participants in text, audio or video and this is what we found, participants who saw the story in the video condition thought it was more credible than those in the audio or text condition and were more likely to share it more. This is important with the accidental deepfake is where we can create a video and have anyone say what we want and so in social media we rely on this touristic but we also notice categories so its our responsibility to more accurately convey these categories for ethical communication practices thats something im currently involved in a project where we are creating a Machine Learning algorithm to be able to classify the different types of content we have online so we developed a taxonomy of online information where we identify 80 different types of content you can distinguish these types of content on unique features so for instance, here we see features of real news and the features include linguistics, structural and network features. Linguistic features are Something Like this, the example is an indicator that it is likely to be anopinion piece. Here this does not even exist and is actually a false website. We also have actual heuristics, that seems to be on abc news article that if we look at the url, the ending is a giveaway that this is a false website and finally we have network add hueristic. All of these areunknown sources. On the other hand, we have this Institution Network and we have a News Organization, the real information is more likely to be picked up by News Organizations. So what do you . We have this feature and what we do is feed them into a supervised learning model and what we do is feed the news and we train based on previously classified particles and these articles have been classified by organizations and then we test them and see if its able to distinguish between false and real news. These are by no means classifications, our approach is a multino meal classification meeting we wanted to see real false news but also the layering between such as needed advertising. So there is a little bit of our approach will work. I want to point out that this is a probabilistic argument being that no one indicator alone will be able to distinguish a particular of content so for instance here, our algorithm will first figure out if this article has been used in authoritative writing, say the answer is no, you will go to the next route for certification and if it has no certification it will go to the next route and so on until an actual categorization or classification has been reached. Furthermore we provide an accurate report which allows us to further assess the veracity of our applications so in answering can we detect misinformation, we are currently working on this algorithm and we see some promising response and we are hopeful we can share those as well very soon. Thank you. [applause] were going to go ahead and get started, call of our panelists. For this next conversation about social engineering. So im excited to introduce ourpanelists , that would be fantastic. Thank you. He took my remarks, now i know where they are. Not at all. Make yourself at home. Governor, youve got the mic. Let me introduce our panelists here. I think i do want to thank the speakers we just had really in particular kevin and maria , you gave us great examples. Im sorry . You gave us such great examples of how were being manipulated things that believable data we think is trustworthy to see the work you are doing at penn state with other researchersto identify this in ways that are sophisticated, not just short , its really impressive so without further ado i have katie cordero, shes general counsel and senior fellow with the center for new American Security and she is a legal and National Security analysis with cnn. Also, shes an adjunct professor at georgetown law and cofounder of checks and balances. Org which is something in which governor rich participates, sitting next to her is emma alonso who is the Free Expression project director for cdp. Next to emma we have josh who is the executive director and is a professor of law for georgetown institutional, institute forconstitutional advocacy and protection. We have yet another penn state researcher, Kevin Montford next to josh is the assistant professor of Political Science social Data Analytics at penn state so were going to do this as the panel as a conversation the same way we did the other one and hopefully have time for q and a in the audience so carrie, if its okay if i start with you, we heard from some of the speakers earlier a little bit about what we were learning about russian and other nationstate deployment but can you give us what we know about our elections from the Senate IntelligenceCommittee Volume . Absolutely and thank you to and and governor risch. I want to start out because we do with some information about the Senate IntelligenceCommittee Report because the Senate Select committee on intelligence as been doing a in depth and very comprehensive investigation into the 2016 elections interference. Obviously recent news has focused a lot in terms of what we are reviewing to happen in 2020 and what type of election interference activities might take place over the course of the next several months, but the Intelligence Committee report has done a valuable service in showing us a little bit of a roadmap of what we could see again and i think it hasnt gotten enough of a billing so i want to highlight a fewthings that it did. So so far, three volumes of the Senate Intelligence committees work have been released. Those three volumes have been declassified and so their investigation, they are producing these volumes on a rolling basis, as soon as they finish the volumes they put it through the classification process which has to go through the executive branch, director of National Intelligence and Intelligence Community and once its cleared for publication putting the volumes out. I think there are one is not to more volumes will come out on time over the course of the next few months. Volume 1 of the report focuses on russian efforts against election infrastructure, really getting to a lot of the details we heard about on the earlier Panel Discussion today russian efforts in 2016 to probe election Infrastructure Systems down at the state and local level area interestingly, the report says that there was no, and it says this double times which is why im focusing on it, it says there was no evidence discovered that actual vote tallies or Election Results were affected either russian interference efforts but it also says that it appears, this sentence of your several times through volume 1 at the intelligence communities view into whether that is the case was very limited. So one of the things that i hope we can think about Going Forward is whether or not there are ways that we actually in the future could be able to verify that information because theyre doesnt so far seem to be an auditing capability. The second volume of the Senate Intelligence committees report focused on russian use of social media area this is much of the information in our Public Domain we heard come forward throughout the special counsel muellers investigation, in other words the activities of the russian intelligence services, the entity that they formed known as the Internet Research agency actually was conducting online activities, disinformation, fake personas , interacting online with americans in the effort to affect the election and election discourse. The Senate Intelligence committee described the russian interference activities, Information Warfare which is significant and in much of the conversation that i had in my teaching and in Public Discourse i tend to describe it more as an intelligence operation, a sophisticated one of the Intelligence Committee report describes it as information were fair. The third volume which i will highlight and it will open the discussion of this is on the Us Governments response to the 2016 election interference efforts this is the area that im most interested in us doing better this time. We know from in particular from the comments of the fbi representative earlier in his talk and department of defense and also just from public reporting that there are certainly some types of activities being conducted by russia, potentially other countries but certainly we know russia to place some role in interfering or affecting or taking an interest in the 20 20 election area much of what volume 3 of the Senate Intelligence reports ascribed is the difficulties that the Political Administration in 2016 had figuring out how much information shouldthey make public . There was with volume 3 lays out was this intense debate to place within the administration about weighing whether they should make information public or whether by making information public about the threats that were taking place and the malign activities they were seeing whether that would further undermine the confidence in the election. So those are the three things that they laid out so far. Whats important about the Senate Intelligence committees work is that it is a bipartisan report read several members did write additional views at the end of the report, its really critical that theyve been doing their work in a bipartisan way because especially now in the Public Discourse as we are starting to hear individuals question whether russia really interfered in the 2016 election or question what types of activities we are seeing, im grateful that the committee has done this work in order to establish a historical record. So ill pause there and go from there. s do you want me to take over . [inaudible] the characteristics of the internet are set up and promise of how we live. But its also anomalous and misinformation owes freely and normally without consequences. It takes some time to identify who the source was and you can attribute it, you really dont have any dire consequences to discourage them from future use but it does have consequences in terms of our electoral process and undermining confidence in our democracy so from yourperspective , were these content dividers virtually driven and i think the russians had a couple thousand accounts on facebook, twitter. But from the senators pointof view , [inaudible] where do we go in terms of trying to regulate content . The fbi did a great job, we want to attribute the source, if we get the source we want to attribute that but we dont deal with content area most of the challenges associated with this transition or even the speech , First Amendment, theyre not yelling fire in a crowded theater there disrupting the electoral process. Thats the milliondollar question. That is several gigantic crucially important questions and ill try to just kind of do the 3 to 5 minute answer. To that we can get into a lot of this a lot more. So there are a couple key things to think about when we are thinking about the rule of law in all of this, particularly in theUnited States. One is the question about the First Amendment and how much protection it provides to speech. I think it will only need to keep in mind and we are talking about infinite misinformation and political advertising misinformation is that or four different kinds of speech that have maybe different First Amendment doctrinal backgrounds so you have this question of commercial speech, commercial speech in the us does receive a lesser degree of protection and say core political speech but typically when were talking about commercial speech talking about the opposing transaction. By this brand of toothpaste, iron me to clean your house, whatever it mightbe. That is really not what we can be talking about when were talking about a little advertising which is a high level of First Amendment protection reinforcement remember the Citizens United case from about 10 years ago the Supreme Court found that independent expenditures were in fact really crucial in their view to people being able to form associations and promote their political opinions. However you feel about how the Supreme Court decided Citizens United its crucial to understand that as a strong signal from the Supreme Court about how seriously they take the idea of people being able to collectively pool money to promote a political view. That gets about as i a level of particular political protection as the press does and its important to understand even lying as some Legal Protections if they are not intended to defraud, they can receive First Amendment protection as well and theres a case us versus alvarez dealt with the stolen valor act was a law that congress had passed to try to restrict people being able to falsely claim they had gotten Different Military honors or that they had served in the military on the basis that was damaging to the valorous act of true military service. The Supreme Court found that law is applied only cause it was two people who were lying but without any kind of intent to defraud or to receive military benefits or other components to the act was unconstitutional, just restricting someone from falsely claiming they had served in the military and binge their First Amendment protection so setting aside the internet component, thats a pretty significant set of First Amendment hurdles or thinking about restricting misinformation. Particularly we start diving into the lines between slanted reporting the fact versus out and out fraudulent statements of fact. Quickly a couple of things on the online speech component of all this. One of the key factors to keep in mind when we are talking about online speech is the sheer scale of what were doing or dealing with. Youve heard the factoid of 400 hours of video are uploaded to youtube every minute, there are millions or billions of posts and trees and images and videos uploaded every day let alone all of the other content. Our traditional publisher liability that and was talking about in her presentation really does not apply the same way an online speech as it did in the newspaper publication face. The law that and reference, section 230 sets out the kind of liability framework for posts of her thirdparty content was cast with very specific reasons. Before 230 was passed into law in 96 there were a couple Different Cases trying to apply traditional publisher liability online speech. They were dealing with the Online Services you may remember prodigy and compuserve and they went in 2 different directions. Compuserve no moderation of the content on their service and when they were sued for defamation for having published someones defamatory statement, courts said no, you are really just dissipating this content, you didnt know about it, you didnt know it was illegal and you have nothing to do with it, you wont be liable. Prodigy on the other hand did moderation. They took down comments that were offtopic or had told garrity and they were trying to shape their Message Boards into something more than just a totally openfreewheeling environment. That meant a court concluded they had more liability for the comments that were posted because they wereacting more like a traditional publisher. It made sense as a way to apply traditional publisher doctrine that it didnt make any sense for the internet where we all know if you have totally unmoderated spaces, youre probably going to end up with a lot of spam and other materials that are needed going to interfere with constructive medication so ill stop there because i know weve got a lot of other things to get you area thats just a little bit of the groundwork and not answering some of yourquestions which i hope we can come back to in the discussion. Ill take it from there to ask josh a question that we talked about. I think its something that is helpful and is raising is that the original purpose of the cpa was to encourage sites to call through for content,particularly child pornography. They didnt want sites that were working to take down unlawful content to be liable so its in an important thing. Weve heard all about the election infrastructure, the technical election infrastructure and mores gave us specific examples about what were doing to improve infrastructure. But i like this term you have that i came across or that you had emailed me about about what are we doing as a nation to upgrade the nations cognitive election infrastructure . You want to talk about that . Im happy to and grateful to be part of this gathering today and these interesting conversations. In some ways, think about the threats to Election Integrity as roughly divided into two buckets, one you might call threats to Data Security and one you might call threats to discourse security Data Security you might think about oversimplifying a bit as threats to the voter rolls , get somebody reaching in and changing that, where the books themselves, did somebody alter that and we heard a lot about how our electric infrastructure, the machines you go vote on the databases that hold information about who is registered to vote, theres been progress i think its fair to say and i say that bolstered by the expertise we had appeared earlier, progress since 2016. Not as much progress, not as fast as i think experts would like to see but theres certainly greater awareness of the problems and the threats and its fair to say there is at least some work thats been done in some parts of the country to address those. At the election infrastructure to deal with data integrity then theres the discourse integrity, thediscussion of can ended it, their views , who they are, their histories , even discussion of who is allowed to vote, when they are allowed to vote, whether they should bother to vote and that requires a cognitive infrastructure area it attacks vulnerabilities able or willing to believe what is essentially junk but not just any junk, junk tailormade for a particular audience micro targeted to them to convince them that the pope endorsed a particular candidate which of course the pope never endorses a particular candidate or to convince them they should go vote on wednesday, not tuesday i would of course they will have missed the chance to vote and remember, as terry said in 2016 the threat to data integrity was the one that seemed to have been probed, she used the right word, the word i think the Senate IntelligenceCommittee Use what we dont see the data having been manipulated to our knowledge. But the discourse integrity was a mess, we all know that. Thats clear from the senates report, clear from media reporting, its clear from all of us went back and digesting some of what was circulating online and amplified in other settings read in 2016 and on that front, i worry that the cognitive infrastructure has gotten perhaps worse better than better. We now see that at least wide portions of the audience meaning americans and especially voting americans even other americans who talk to voters, they continue to digest and share and reshare things online that are not true. And in fact that material is in a sense higherquality or more appealing in 2020 and it was in 2016 because a lot of it is originating at home. That give one concrete example and i will look forward to a broader conversation but i was curious when the Inspector General of the Justice DepartmentMichael Horwitz and released his long anticipated report on some of the 2016 activities. I was curious how that was being reported by rt, essentially a propaganda arm of the russian government. Theyll skew this in some way but i wonder how i looked at the rt story online within hours of horowitzs report being released and it began with a big block quote, did indeed skew what Inspector General horowitz examined and that did that big block quote came from the attorney general of the United States, it was what he had said it was thisinformation. Was not an accurate rendering of what roberts had concluded. Instead of in 2016 where to our collective consternation we had us domestic actors amplifying russian created disinformation, in 2020 we see a lot of russian actors amplifying us created disinformation that strikes me as perhaps more concerning cognitive infrastructure against which this will all play out this year than what we had 4 years ago. Kerry was talking about the contents of the Senate Intelligence committees report and one of the recommendations was about education and putting inplace , you want to addressthat . I have a lot of talk on the transparency piece so as i mentioned the line 3 of the Senate Intelligence report focused on the considerations that were being given within the administration about what information they should put forward and it wasnt until october 2016 that the Us Government, the department of Homeland Security jointly with the Intelligence Community release a public report that describes what the election interference activity russians were engaging in was put out october 2016 was late. And there had been a lot of handwringing frankly within the demonstration about whether to even do that or whether they could have done more. Their judgment at the time was that for information likely would undermine confidence in the election. I tend to have a different perspective on that Going Forward. I think that it is incumbent on the Intelligence Community and Us Government more broadly to inform certainly congress and then as much as possible the public about what it is that is their best assessment of what the threats are to our Election Integrity. And the reason is that because we see what just happened last week, so normally intelligence oversight is conducted primarily behind closed doors to protect sources and methods so we have the Intelligence Committee of congress that are set up to do that but in the environment we are in right now what we saw last week is we saw one of those closeddoor briefings take place immediately bits and pieces from the briefing came out and now i couldnt tell you sitting here today what actually was the truth of what was reported in that briefing from the Intelligence Community refer to the members of congress. So what i really am, have been encouraging is that the government be more forthcoming with information that is indicative of the current election threats and as much as im grateful for the Senate Intelligence committees report i do think and this is coming from the perspective of someone who used to be a National Security lawyer and would be in favor of protecting as much information as possible, there was far too much information even in the Intelligence Committees report. For example key findings of the report are rejected. A key paragraph about, that is the head Intelligence Community awareness about what the threat was reenacted. That doesnt help us looking forward to 20 20. Might observe that theres a lot of over classification of whats considered to be secret or topsecret information that i think unfortunately it puts a restraint on the kind of information public can deal with compromising sources and methods so thats just an observation that ive made during my time in government. Kevin, youre not going to get off the hook here. I remember back in 82 when i first ran, we were going to target with a literature drop or a radio ad or a tv commercial, was still a large group, some area of geography. 21stcentury politics is microtargeting, you can get down to the individual street for the individual constituents. So you got this microtargeting ability because of data, misinformation flows specifically to that individual or group of individuals. That individual not necessarily digitallyvery literate, not pay too much attention to the source , this creates a pervasive impact on that electoral, i know youve been doingwork in this area and id like you to comment on it. Thanks, though i use that term Digital Literacy. I think that as there is a science about misinformation and its always been a problem but obviously something is going on now, something novel so if we look at the postmortem of what social scientists have shown from 2016, theres significant heterogeneity in terms of what who was sharing fake news on facebook and it seems like people over 65 were 47 depending on which report times more likely to share misinformation on facebook that were younger people so eight is simply a proxy here i think or Digital Literacy. So there are people who have been using the internet for their entire adult lives, for work and this kind of thing but if we look at who was actually joining facebook in the years leading up to 2016 there are people who are most likely to be joining facebook for the first time where people 65 and older so i think what we come to realize is the internet and social media and all of these systems were designed for and by the young and tech savvy so if you were an early adopter of the internet and you happen to be the type of person whos good at using technology, good at navigating the space and as the internet is penetrating deeper into our society we are realizing there are some people who dont have this capacity, they didnt get the training, theyre not embedded in social Networks People understand how this works so i think its something that a lot of the blame on facebook and i think there are certain things theyve done to make it too easy to access, too easy to share. They certainly move quickly and change the world too quickly, their whole arrogance logan of move fast and right things, they succeeded in that. But i think that facebook now as it is is sort of the way ofthe world. The internet and social media is not going to go away. What this represents is a novel information irrigation system. So weve seen some of the legacy information verification systems more topdown and now its really matters to everyone on these spaces is. The bandwagon effect i think is incredibly important for understanding how information verification happens in the spaces will now that we have almost everyone in us society on the internet and on facebook were seeing the presence of even a small number of people who do not have access to highlevel internet literacy pose a threat to the health of our information ecosystem and we have to think of these people in terms of their mrs. In our elected total verification of information and i think education is what we have to do quickly, we like to do some kind of quickfix in terms of Media Literacy, Digital Literacy, anyone everyone up to speed on how the internet operates but i think moving forward are going to live in a world we have to my percy and the fully mature internet that we have today were going to realize that we need to get everyone in our society up to speed the level of informational educational inequality that we had is not going to be accessible from a National Security standpoint. One quick question and we will open it to the group. Anna, how do we both robustly embrace the First Amendment and address misinformation western mark. I think the answer to that. Ultimately, whos the gatekeeper of truth . Everybody just tucked in. No pressure, emma. The short answer is i dont think youre ever going to get people to agree on who should be the gatekeeper of truth. Thats the fundamental problem is that people might, some of us might think absolutely no one ever should be, some of us have candidates in mine but theres not going to be a consensus definition and i think that part of what the First Amendment is trying to protect her all of us, the freedom to form our own opinions so much of whats been discussed has been about this question of what are the authoritative sources of information . Is it Senate Intelligence reports, is news reported that people can trust to be actually news reporting and not something that looks like news reporting to a person whos just getting on facebook for the first time this month. I think any answer to misinformation online will have to be multifaceted. Theres no silver bullet, theres no you just put this label on content and everybody understands that label to mean the same thing, response to it the same way and your problem is solved. The research that weve seen in the past 3 or 4 years as started to uncover a lot of different interesting andvery sometimes counterintuitive conclusions. I think not to try to do an entire summary of all of that research but there are lots of different contents online, we talk about facebook even just as one platform as its one thing area there are hundreds, thousands, millions of groupings of people on facebook who will respond to some of the interventions facebook is doing in different ways whether that labeling of information as thirdparty, by thirdparty fact checkers, whether its amplifying information or removing it, whether its microtargeted at so i think for me, the kind of fundamental answer to how do we start addressing or do better addressing misinformation actually to the point on transparency and in particular being able to get more independent researchers access to information from the different Online Platforms though that Different Research studies can be done. They can be peerreviewed, cross checks, five because i think absence that kind of true scientific inquiry into whats happening and what the different interventions half, were going to be at this point of saying trust me, i know the answer to this question or trust me, this is the right intervention for the right outcome and what we have is a lack of trust in society so to me , scientifically minded, the answer goes down towards more ability to do verifiable research on the dynamics and the impact of different kinds of proposed solutions. Thank you. Right answer, i just one additional thought really is i do think at least the major companies, facebook, twitter, youtube are somewhat different ideologically orientation as they approach this problem in 2020 from where they were in2016. Again oversimplifying were purposes of a six and discussion, i think in 2016 it would be fair to describe them as roughly and saw First Amendment doesnt apply to them or not state actors. Section 230 allows, does not require that the content moderate but they made almost an ideological choice, and institutional choice to be by large hands off. That has not yielded them great applause as we have digested what happened in 2016. My characterization of where they are in 2020 would be toe in the water. Set up some and are trying to figure out how to apply those and whether those rules go far in it strikes me as thing that needs to mature quickly and their multibilliondollar corporations, all multibilliondollar corporations make some decisions and then get criticized when those decisions i dont look bad in principle or look bad in implementation and i think they need to hear from about when theyre notliving up to it. Maybe more than a toe, maybe a foot or lease up to the ankle because they basically were threatening if you dont do more selfpolicing, more content aware or try to eat a little more aggressive to take this misinformation off we may have to regulate you. Questions . Yes. My name is speedy sorry. He had his hand up. Im michael nelson. I work at the Carnegie Endowment for international peace. We recently launched a partnership or countering influence operations. Im glad rather a multidisciplinary crosscultural debate here, particularly as technologies, its good to have lawyers, political scientist. Ottawa to ask, where should our priority be . Professor mckenna made the case that section 230 is causing a lot of this problem. Some of us believe authentication is a bigger problem since we cant know who is saying what. Is there a third thing we should focus on first . What sense of priority here should we have . Quickly to describe what the third thing might be, ill point to a framework that a researcher have talked about, the abc framework of actors behavior and content. So if 230 is about content and liability for content, can you make rules or laws against certain content . Thats as we discussed extremely difficult to truly judge is this all like him is this intentional misinformation . We can talk about deep fakes. The texas law is interesting. Content is a a known thorny ise especially to evaluate its skill. Looking at actors, thats an interesting question, although when you start getting into ideas of regulation around limiting peoples ability to speak anonymously online, one, your First Amendment concerns for Free Expression concerns more broadly but you also may run into the risk of crafting a regulation that prevents regular people from taking advantage of the benefits of that can enable people to express things they might face reprisal for come through important element. But those relations to be circumvented by highly resourced especially for a nation state actors to circumvent those search and protections. That leaves us with behavior and looking at this is an approach all of the major social Media Companies have taken up is look at what can you see among patterns of behavior online. Is there, facebook cause accorded coordinated an authentic activity. Twitter also looks at drawing from their research and expertise around fighting spam on the platform, are the ways of information being disseminated that are characteristic that tend to look more like previously identified patterns of misinformation spreading, rather than natural human behavior. A lot of this gets into the question of is this information be amplified by bots . Is this information promulgating through networks the seem designed for specific purpose and not a kind of more quoteunquote natural collection of people . Theres the confounding element of how companies own algorithms for promoting and recommending content, can play into that very much have dynamic of bad actors seeking to manipulate those recommendation algorithms to get more amplification. A lot of the research is rent this behavior question, and agnostic to hussein get a what is pink said, is there something kind of more discreetly measurable in the patterns of sharing of information that could be targeted. I just want to make a quick point because i get the background of the cda because i think that is missing from the conversation sometimes, people dont understand why the will is a different today than it was 20 years ago. I get that background. I think the reason were having this, such as focus is this is going to take an interdisciplinary fix. That is required technology. I think its requiring Significant Education of people of all ages, but i think that is critical here. I think that something will have to figure together. Kevin wants to make an observation as well. To this other angle, the majority of misinformation on facebook is financially motivated. And so that is an area where there is potential for regulation which does not fall a file in First Amendment concerns. The person who started the fake news website distort the rumor about the pope endorsing donald trump, he was an entrepreneur. He said i was in california, is hard for me to start a business otherwise. This was a good way for me to get on the internet and make some money. If facebook can put some more frictions in this process, if we could be more restrictive about who is able to make money from advertising, thats a relatively easy way to not eliminate or reduce significantly the overall amount of misinformation on these networks. Will have more questions from the audience. Weve only got a couple minutes. Can you get that over there . Shes bringing you the mic. She will be there in one one s. Thank you. Im from russia. Im here in fellowship from university of maryland. Many people today mentioned russia as an actor that interferes with american elections in american democracy. My question is, is there a chance to negotiate or to address this issue with actually some russian actors, either in the government, either in the business, either in the Civil Society . Because, well, russian political system is complicated. [laughing] ill answer so to quickly and i will pick up a point from earlier. Certainly theres space for government actors to have a role in this and think a lot our conversation is focus on the role of a private sectors but theres a course or role for government. I think so for weve seen is that from a diplomatic perspective, the u. S. Government has underestimated the role that certain modest this comes out and Senate Intelligence report modest diplomatic efforts visavis russia could take in terms of this dissuading russim engaging in these maligned activities. So the efforts of the last administration were not so effective to the extent that they took them. I think right now the public doesnt have a whole lot of clarity regarding what, if any, activities the Current Administration is doing to dissuade russia maligned activities. Just to followup on that though, it is a very valid point theres a role of government. One thing we need to keep in mind when it comes to the role of the Technology Sector and the content platform is that there are all sorts of other industries that the u. S. Government regulates and takes on when the play significant role in the u. S. Economy or society. For some reason at a think theres a right the factors we wont get into here, the conference has been congress has been incapable of doing anything in this space. Theres all sorts of elections to get a bill pending in congress that have had any action on them whatsoever. But if we look across all sorts of other industries and activities of private sector activity, whether its limits on abilities to prevent corruption and the way American Companies to business overseas, and i think about the foreign corrupt practices act, that we regulate the action of companies to engage in activities overseas. When we look at the traditional telekinetic haitian infrastructure here in the United States. It would look across to do any of the industry we see the u. S. Congress has been capable in the past of doing something about i it. Lobbying. Might have role. So next question. In the back there, and this is the last question. Then where are going to take a quick break. Theres boxed lunches out there and well come and governor ridge and lost its will lead an open conversation the audience is involved working today. I think you really fault on that well with the idea of why are we not addressing this am a legislative perspective . That is part of the fix that is needed. I think he made a point about being able to get information out in a timely manner with regards to election threats, and being more forthcoming. Im interested in your thoughts on that in a practical sense, particularly the events that transpired last week, for folks are in government, you know, i think theres some really interesting lessons and issues and interested based on your back to a perspective, sort of how folks ought to go about information and that sort of would look like . All give you one quick answer may my of the panels have ideas. My First Response to something that could be done immediately is with Intelligence Community to schedule the worldwide threat briefing. This is an annual briefing that Intelligence Committees do every single year. Its the one opportunity that the Intelligence Community leaders, so that would be whoever is the acting director of National Intelligence of the day, plus the other heads of intelligence elements, and they appear before the Intelligence Committees in an unclassified session and then there can also be classified session after it. They have to prepare a written statement so that when the white house would not be surprised a book is into the statement which is part of what we heard about perhaps happened last week. So there would be a vetted a written statement that it would cover all sorts of threats but obviously threat to Election Integrity we need to be one of them and it would give members of congress an opportunity to ask those members these Intelligence Community leaders questions about the threat to the 2020 Election Integrity under oath. I was going to suggest two things. That was one of them. The other not mutually exclusive, if anything i think it would be complementary, would be for either Intelligence Committee or ideally both to call a hearing specific on the state of 2020 election related threats at the unclassified level, means that not everything can be shared but it does mean something can be shared. And to ensure that people, joe maguire should be among those called to testify, current dni, whoever it may be at that moment in time also should be called to testify. But to a talking point prepared for them by the rankandfile of the Intelligence Community who i firmly believe continue to do their very best to identify and track these threats and help inform policymakers on how to address them here what can be shared at the unclassified level should be because were all sitting here 30 wanted to know and really deserving to know in the context of our functioning democracy. Okay. Thank you. Thank you kevin, josh, emma. [applause] all right, so lets grab some lunch and come back in. You can bring your lunch in here. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] so a break in this conference on Election Security hosted by penn State University. This will be about ten to 15 minutes we understand as attendees get a chance to grab some lunch. When they return former home executed director tom ridge will host an open discussion on steps to secure u. S. Elections focusing on technology and legislation. Idea and that will be ten to 50 minutes from now. While this brick continue some discussion from earlier in this conference. Break continues. Good morning, everybody. My name is david porter. I served as assistant section chief to the Fbi Foreign Influence Task force, or fitf as wilmer broadly referred to in the Intelligence Community. I appreciate the opportunity to be here this morning to represent the men and women of the fbi. Many women who are working tirelessly on behalf of the American People to protect the integrity of our democracy, to include the 2020 elections. Ten minutes is not a lot of time, some going to get right to it and what i want to do this morning with my time with you is to speak to three different things. First, i want to define what we in this space refer to as maligned foreign influence threat. Second, i need to articulate some of those objectives and tactics, techniques and procedures pertaining to the threat. Unless a couple to scotland about what we do in this space and how we mitigate this threat. First, to defining an ally for its influence threat. I think whats to do is draw a distinction between normal foreign influence activity and maligned foreign influence activity. So the former would be normal diplomatic activity carried out by every country usually conducted through diplomatic channels. The latter, maligned foreign influence activity, its actions are actions by foreign power to influence u. S. Policy, distort Political Sentiment and Public Discourse, undermine confidence and democratic processes and values, and this is import for us because its the focus of our investigative efforts at a beer and with fitf. It is the subversive, and declared criminal or coercive nature of these activities that serves as the basis for our investigative interests. Our adversaries frequently use a whole of government approach here. The vectors including the official outward facing component of a foreign government, intelligence services, cyber actors, state run media, businesses, close to government officials, and social media actors. The Broad Spectrum of foreign influence activity. When a country moves from normal and official diplomatic engagement to conduct in the subversive undeclared criminal or coercive conduct, that is when we see the maligned foreign influence activity, can show itself through economic coercion, bribery, money pots, media reports, social media exploitation, blackmail, to name a few. So to move on to the second point, objectives. There are two main objectives for foreign malign influence actors. The first visit push for in goals and pose at the expense of the United States. Some countries, lets say china, use influence activities driven by priorities associate with their National Development or stability. For example, chinas primary objective is to strengthen and perpetuate the rule of the Chinese Communist party. Beijing also seeks to ensure sustainable economic development, protect against perceived threats to its state sovereignty and territorial integrity, and maintain the stability of its political system. Second objective and one well talk a little bit more about is create division and muddy Public Discourse. These operations seek to weaken an adversary from within. Countries like russia use information confrontation to target the perceptions of their adversaries population. These methods erode confidence in Democratic Values and institutions to encourage negative sentiment, apathy, and mistrust of government. Election interference is one of the vectors in this space. Its designed to degrade confidence and the very foundation of our democratic system and our leaders ability to govern. Its also designed to weaken the adversary from within. By identifying existing dissident political and social issues, and driving wedges into those fractionalized to amplify them through online manipulation and disinformation. In an effort to create and a private of permanent cacophony, unrest and conflict. Its also designed to undermine the publics confidence in the credibility of an established, free and independent news media, to create an apartment of public mistrust and the narrative reported by traditional News Organizations. This environment is then exploited to push consumers toward alternative news sources, social media where of course it is much easier to introduce false narratives. Its also designed to sow doubt and confusion about true narratives by exploiting the media landscape to introduce conflicting storylines, undermine credible sources of information, and saturate the Information Space with unreliable narratives. To be clear, the goal here is to exhaust our ability to think critically and to separate truth from falsehood. The primary objective is not to create a particular version of the truth, but rather to cloud the truth and erode our ability to fight, trading a sentiment that no narrative or news source can be trusted at all. Some of the ttps in the space wont necessarily come as a surprise to you but we are taught about intrusion into u. S. Government networks and political organizations, hack and delete operations relating to compromise or embarrassing information, Cyber Attacks against our voting infrastructure, the targeting of u. S. Persons or elected officials by social media and disinformation, suppression of voter turnout by spreading misinformation regarding polling and voting, manipulation of media through the injection of false stories, and news reporting, and subsequent application of disinformation to shape Public Discourse. There are a few overarching similarities regarding the manner in which our two principal adversaries, china and russia, execute these objectives. Both countries use a whole of government approach. And use sophisticated and aggressive efforts to advance their national priorities. However, there are clear differences in the space as well. China and russia very and extent of their aggressiveness and risk tolerance. We see russia is willing to conduct more brazen and disruptive influence operations because of how it perceives its conflict with the west. In some ways, however, china contains its maligned foreign influence operations to its strategic goals of developing a modern National Economy and building its geopolitical prestige to be respected as an equal, if not superior rival in its eyes to that of the United States. To put it simply, in this space russia wants to watch as tear ourselves apart, while it seems china on the other hand, would rather manage our gradual economic decline over the course of generations. So what do we do in this space . The director established the fitf in october 2017 to bring together the fbis National Security and traditional criminal investigative expertise under one umbrella, to identify and counteract maligned foreign influence operations, targeting u. S. Democratic institutions and values. At the time we were primarily focused on the russian maligned foreign influence operations. However, the fitf scope has expanded since then to address other global adversaries. China, iran, north korea. Our structure, the fitf structure, bears some resemblance to the Fbis Joint Terrorism Task force, which exists at fbi headquarters in very large fashion but also in all 56 of our field offices. However, while we do work sidebyside with detailees from various federal agencies in the fitf, our internal structure is a little bit different. The fitf combines personal from across the fbi, including Personnel Special agents come intelligence, analysts and other professional staff from the fbis counterintelligence, the cyber, counterterrorism, and criminal divisions. Our multidivision task force has the authority and mandate to bridge all fbi programs and equities to combat this threat. In addition to investigative operations in broad intelligence sharing across our state and local partners, the fitf also works hard to build strong partnerships with the private sectors and academia. The fitf Management Team meets regularly with social media and tech companies. When appropriate, the fbi provides actionable intelligence to social Media Companies to help them fight abuse of their platforms by foreign actors. Our work in this area, one thing that is very important to us, particularly on the cyber side of things is that attribution is key. We do not run around chasing content in addition to having a host of First Amendment issues. That approach would be inefficient and ineffective. We dont focus on what the actors say. We spend our time concentrating on who they are, attribution is key. When were able to identify and track foreign actors as they established and use the infrastructure amateur the online presence, the fitf works with social be compass to illuminate and disrupt our adversaries activities. Including at times through penn state dickinson law bos. What we thought we do with this section is make it interactive, audience participation. We are very interested in we do have many of our panelists have remained. We would like them to respond and participate in the session as well. We will continue our discussion about some of the vulnerabilities within the infrastructure itself. We also want to continue our discussion about the disparate evasive and negative impact of social media. Its appropriate to let colleagues from Penn State Dickinson School of law to initiate the conversation. So gentlemen, you guys may proceed. Hello. My name is im a thirdyear student at Dickinson School of law. Hello, everybody. My name is brian, im also a thirdyear student. Happy to be here. Shall we kick it off . Proceed. So if we could, theres a variance of come with a lot of interesting topics. Its wonderful was a cross does bring to it was and am glad we had some experts on hand with us. Were going to start. Id like to talk somewhat about Technology Hurdles or we have thoughts about ways we can detect or combat sort of this maligned social engineering that you see. Mostly with misinformation. I thought the Machine Learning algorithm featuring the origin and evolution of might as well turn it on. So to reiterate, talking a little bit about the tackling and combating misinformation or i was really impressed by the day the science Machine Learning program for identifying the evolution or origin of maps, infographics are a fantastic way for people and voters especially to get information and quickly digest it, but it is as us on some ways vulnerable to the kind of manipulation. Thats a wonderful first step and i wonder if there are ways we can also look forward to compiling some sort of resource for individuals to at least know even if its platform from twitter or imager to a different site hey, where did this picture come from . What did it mean . Does anybody want to add to the inquiry . If we have thoughts [inaudible] sorry to interrupt. Will go back to penn state for that answer. I think its interesting that you bring these up because when us talking about the algorithm, imagine a lot of different features to use. A lot of the seizures whatever we are collaborating with those who program all of this stuff, they come back to us and tell us some of these cannot necessarily be placed in an algorithm. Humans might be better to detect it. What were seeing is a lot of the features that are coming up with its that only about how can a machine detected but also how could we use the same features for Media Literacy . I think thats where helping people to be able to detect, this might be a false image, just a simple Google Search can give out that type of information. Whenever we are consuming news and social media, its not like when necessary think of that, right . We are not thinking im going to quit and reverse this image to see where it originally came from. But that is something we should be able to inform our public so that the note different features and the ability they might have based on that technology or the news or misinformation are being derived from. Its not only about misinformation versus real information also all of those sections in between we also think is important. The public being able to differentiate what is an advertisement versus news versus opinion satire and all of those layers as well. One of our previous speakers i think it was amy cohen talked about eight to 10,000 local jurisdictions that hold the responsibility to make sure that there are fair and free elections in their then you. And it just seems to me that it is asking then you the federal government is asking, opposing quite a burden on these locals, many of whom dont have any cyber experience. Most of whom dont have knowledge with regard to the technology deployed even in the machines. Very few of which have resources to even upgrade as to what they should upgrade to. Really interested from the panelists pointed you and the audiences point of view, what you think the federal government should do were not going to federalize the election, to assist these eight to 10,000 jurisdictions to prepare as best they can and manage the risk of hacking into the electoral infrastructure. I would like somebody to take that on for me. I think i can begin this one. We heard a lot about what the government can and cannot do today. Especially director emma llanso and executive director talked about First Amendment and whom it applies to. So technically, the people who were at the front line of this, this fight against misinformation such as private actors, such as facebook and youtube. They dare not obligate it to give you free speech rights, right . So very similar to the algorithms talked about here. Youtube employs something called content id. It has an error rate which some of us might consider an impermissible infringement of our freedom of speech. It essentially facebook can tell us when to speak. Youtube can tell us when to speak, but they are the ones doing what were trying to do as government, as the government, right . They are trying to protect us from misinformation, or at least i like to believe that they are. So yeah. That the very important social justice aspect to making sure the infrastructure that localities rely on is still the thing i think mr. Deering talked about that all of it, along with ms. Cohen. Theres 10,000 jurisdictions overseen the selection. The money, the infrastructure, i think we have an obligation to help them. Id like for you to tell what you think they ought to be doing. [inaudible] [inaudible] 16 of hers are. I want to weigh in on this from a multiple perspective, absolutely governor ridge, you point out that we have so many local Election Officials in this country with such a range of capabilities, resources, Different Levels of support from the state pics i think its incumbent upon both the state and federal government to provide support to them in different ways as well as society, right, universities, nonprofits to help fill these gaps as well. And we see a lot of different efforts, but everybody in Election Security recognizes this is a challenge. Its hard to even be able to reach all eight to 10,000 local Election Officials with a piece of information. We dont have a good process. We have a good process to be able to reach the 50 state Election Officials when theres information they need to know. Reaching those eight to 10,000 local Election Officials, its a huge challenge. Going to the states, through multiple different associations, through the election assistance commission, through different avenues. But even telling them something, one piece of information is a challenge. I would say support from the cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has been huge for the states. Its been huge for the localities who are using it. They highly value the services, vulnerability scans, fishing assessments. Just resources about basic information on cyber hygiene. And so that continued support to be able to provide the support to the localities is huge. And to be able right now they dont have the bandwidth obviously to do this in every single eight to 10,000 jurisdictions. So figure out the most efficient way to provide that kind of help also the states are providing a lot of help to the locals and lucky a a certain programs that have been effective in how we can expand upon that is huge here i dont remember who mention the cybernetic you to program in illinois but that is a model a lot of states are looking to replicate. Where the state hires on cyber skid expertise at the state level to go out and provide boots on the ground direct cybersecurity support in the counties. Their tally to all of the counties. Iowa and minnesota both recently launched cyber navigator programs. Right now they have only one cyber navigator so there are challenges there but i think those are programs well see expanding. A lot of states also use their National Guard to provide similar support so the National Guard going out to localities to provide assessment. We need to look at whats working and how we can expand upon those sorts of things took another issue you briefly mention is like the challenge with procurement for local Election Officials is huge. Knowing what our trusted systems and those sort of things to the center for Internet Security i mentioned nonprofits, they put out a procurement guide for Election Officials, and that is a great resource for Election Officials to use to start thinking about asking their vendors security riskbased question when choosing systems. At again, the challenge just getting that information out to local Election Officials, not just local election official local ip, local procurement officers. Its a very complex system, as you put up. I appreciate that. Our friend from kentucky, jared dearing, i hope is, could maybe make an observation. You are very impressive testimony, i figured you might be able to enlighten us. In the back of my mind unthinking you got dhs, youve got nist which put out a platform for businesses, just even a primer on Digital Security pics i got dhs, i have the fbi, ive got nist pickup got some really keen experts on the cybersecurity Digital Security world. Why cant we build out a template for every local jurisdiction to say, at the minimum, at the minimum youve got to check these boxes . You can go from there, jared. [inaudible] just Election Security in a box, right . Its not going to fit every jurisdiction but yet here are the five simple things you might be able, these things, your security will increase exponentially. I think it needs to be a public and private partnership. It cant just be the government. If it was just a federal fix, you would have, theres jurisdiction authority both of the state level and the county level and it would be counties that will gently say hey, thats fine you want to give me this, i dont want it. Like we dont want to work with the federal government. What we find is when theres an interlocutor in the process, when theres a third party, a nonprofit, the state sometimes enacting as as a pastor from te federal side, then all of a sudden those partnerships become meaningful. Theres a couple things specifically we could do, going back to the cyber navigator. That could be issued opportunity that we are providing. Basic theme in every state can go from county to county to make sure they are sent to patching the systems on a regular basis, making sure they are holding this data protocols when it comes to passwords and second backdrop authentication. The things were trying to reiterate on a constant basis to also think theres room for a system that might be Something Like teach for america which would be using the model of taking professionals that might not find themselves in a community of need because they graduate from a Prestigious University and can go into any what they want. If were using that model with i. T. Professionals, inserting them into the counties on a temporary basis but providing that knowledge gap in between, i think its got to be a partnership between all those sectors. I like that combination of entire resources capability. Certainly continue to use sustained funding from the federal government. I think we agree to that. Your turn. I would like to ask are there more questions on august . Im david levine. Now im the elections goodfellow for the lights for the current democracy of my previous job director of elections for ada county idaho where boise was picked election management advisory for the d. C. Board of election a Deputy Director for the city of richmond. For those eight to 10,000 jurisdictions jurisdictions, right, we came out with a report that they provide six steps that we think our unilateral steps that are modest but manyfold the folks can do up to 2020. 2020. And i think im not going to shill for the entire thing but touches on a couple of things. Number one is making sure idea for information getting out there its a point lindsey make it we talked about the fact added of chris krebs is made this point about how unfortunately only a a small fraction of those just actions have a dot gov website. There are reasons from both secured your perspective as well as information perspective to have that. And being able to walk through and make sure local officials know and then have the funds to do that is important. One of the other things thats also important is what kinds of simulations you are doing to make sure you get into high level or high highintensity elections with higher turnout, being aware what to do. There are increasing number of states and jurisdictions that engage in tabletop exercises but there could be more doing things like mock election, or that of doing things like pilots weather was audits or other things. I think one of the other pieces thats worth noting, i dont know how many other local Election Officials are here, but being able to bring those folks in and getting their take on some of this i think would also be helpful to speak to the point about some of the things they are redoing as well as what more they can do. Thank you. One more comment. Right up front. Mike nelson again, Carnegie Endowment. I would have a question for the last three speakers, for david and jerry and lindsey. Weve noticed in our discussion today that hacking into election systems is pretty hard. Its a lot easier to lie about whats going on and convince people the systems are not working. So Information Warfare is probably having a bigger effect. Particularly when the story is we have reports that this county absentee ballots have been shred which is what jared told us about. Is there a federal role for helping journalists sort out the rumors from the fact . When they get a report that oh, my god, election machines all across southern florida are out of commission, they dont even know who to talk to. There isnt a place in washington to call. Maybe the secretary of state isnt even going to be bold answer the phone. Is there a role to counter disinformation about the election victory on election day or the days right after . And i would love your peoples thoughts and that but i like to add theres an inherent tension if anybody can speak to it not been into lose myself between trying to verify your sources and even the most trusted news sources do this and needing to be the first person to report on anything. Because the impact and im sure our Data Scientist would know on a bed that i do of the first headline that comes out regarding something, whatever its brassy turns out to afterwards, it has its point in her discourse. If anybody could speak to some of those issued we would love to hear it. Thoughts or feelings . There we go. Thank you again. In terms of the initial question, i would encourage journalists to look to whoever the state elected official is picked if the question is about time, place or manner about whats going on in the administration of the election, i would encourage them to go to whoever that state Election Officials. Theres people in the federal government who can answer certain questions about elections, elections could specifics, cyber suit infrastructure, Security Agency for example, but theyre not going to take a question that a state specific. They will point the journalists to that state election official. So there that would be what i would encourage journalists to do. The broader role for Election Officials in this area, its challenging, something they are figuring out as we work through this. All Election Officials would consider it their responsibility to try to counter disinformation. Disinformation. If they see something incorrect online about how you vote, where evil, when you vote they will try to correct that and they see as a role to get that Accurate Information out there. When you get into medical discourse though, as the last panel highlighted with all of the different legal considerations, thats a lot more challenging. There are certain Election Officials who are taking a larger role in trying to educate the public. Media and Digital Literacy type of issues and educate them about the attempts and efforts to interfere through disinformation by a foreign nation state actor. But that is a bigger challenge than those questions of wrong information about the election. [inaudible] certainly. I mean, i would, you mean the misinformation about the election itself . [inaudible] and a lot of states have systems for being able to report Incorrect Information. Well, you always could call your Election Officials reported but a lot of them have more Automated Systems and theyre telling more people about them and to report Incorrect Information about where he could develop and would you go to vote, how you vote, i registered to vote. Certainly you should report those things to your state and local election official so they can address them if you see them. But is there a federal role to inform them . Absently. Election officials are strongly encouraging the federal government to get them the information about disinformation as quickly as possible. I want to follow up on what you mentioned with this question we talk about automatic detection. Thats why want to tackle is is breaking news, that is very hard for our normal person to be able to detect it quick. Algorithm can be a little bit better at that but you mentioned something at the end, its the role of 24 7 journalism. Ms. Reporting can also occur. Thats something were also trying to tackle in a sense that when we see psychologically, like we both come with the survey of the creek that headline with the new information we see that actually people have a hard time believing that correction. If i already saw this article and it is misinformation, the likelihood of me coming back to the article and deleting the new correct information, its harder. We do encourage a lot of these ideas of picking up on these very quickly so that that cannot move farther from what it already has. [inaudible] microphone. So in terms of this process as a look for a technological solution to this, and we talked about the legislative assistance that would aid our state Election Officials here but if we look at the did a fight that, if an ugly the something, how we get platforms, baby this comes in federal regulation, to be required to use algorithms that automatically identify and rate content in terms of very built for the categories which you had up on your slides. [inaudible] so thats a good question also difficult for me to answer in the sense first i want to highlight what ever i show those eight different types of content. We do identify misreporting a Something Different than disinformation. We think that is very important because i sense there is very different. So i think we have to be very disciplined if we do incorporate out written detection on both separate. Because journalists are not actually give false information but on the detecting side that is something difficult for us to detect and thats because we utilize source come for instance, as one of those indicators. Because we do believe a News Organization will be more likely to have information that is accurate and factual. Thats where the challenge is for us tactically the able to differentiate. That means reporting whenever it does happen. I have a thought about a solution. And that is, research for active or nonactive past the words through nsf, National Science foundation to we find a total of six results that include the word disinformation in the title or abstract about the research. Thats out of the tens of thousands of Research Awards have been made over multiple decades. Its going to require technical and social couples solution together to make a dent in these problems. Thats my suggestion is to start working on this problem. They cant only happen in think tanks were copies when iceland june its like hours scraping by was will bits and pieces to make it work. Its going to require a more Robust Research and restructure. Professor evans, do you have something you want to share . So im wondering if its another role for private industry here, how many of you have some kind of a virus checker on your computer . So what about Something Like this where we can choose to put this virus checker or misinformation checker on our computer or on our web browser . I have a followup question. Were talking about automated programs, and when we think of the rules, like laws that we need to follow, we have checks and balances for that. We have notice and comment situation. We have a rulemaking process for all agency actions. But if we allow these technologies to constantly update their roles and learn, since they are learning machines, how the identify these speeches, undoubted expert in the thinks i think you have comments on that. I do want to highlight the different, theres two different Machine Learning methods for one to supervise. The other is unsupervised. A method that you talk about is unsupervised. So there we dont have clear goals but the algorithm kind of detects it based on whatever it sees the pattern. Our approach is based on supervise Machine Learning, meaning we see those rules dash and we feed those rules to the machine. We also believe transparency of those types of indicators. I think that is very important to distinguish. Then i do want to point out something that was mentioned, because it didnt quite answer it, its a difficult. But whenever we develop this type of algorithm it does depend on private sector and the user itself to see how he or she wants to incorporate that. So its a once to [inaudible] we are about one of the things i would like to hear people touch are, theres a bit of a tension when it comes to marketbased solutions such as it might be really productive. One of the things that might give a market incentive is if distributors of content and platforms felt they would be held liable for things, and as professor mckenna pointed out there are limits to that. Generally speaking, Silicon Valley is culturally resistant to the notion that you should impose any kind of restriction on it. But if you look at things such as the approach for copyrighted material or hipaa relation to medical records, i think it seems to this nontech person that theres probably a feasible answer out there, and perhaps the threat of liability to some sort of amendment to the cda could motivate them to do something clever, like billiondollar companies do. That ties in well with is there a regulatory here to this . We clearly see thats required and thus obligatory piece just require platforms to embrace technological review of content in an ongoing way that identifies it . I recognize that a significant concerns in the moment i stood up and talked about regulation of content online and it flew in the air the hands flew in the air. [laughing] chemic at the mic over to emma llanso over here . Okay. Do you want to, appear . Is that okay . Thank you. I think this mic is also working. So just one point on this question of creating a liability around the content. Its important to remember you can only do that if the underlying content is illegal that is a think what we went into this real challenge of misinformation about what of the big suite of content that we could call people would call this information would actually sit some existing or newly developed prohibition against that content . If its not illegal, then there is no liability for the publisher distributor unless you are kind of broaching a brandnew territory of like how you would ask up is to regulate content rather than Something Like the dmca where the question is, is the Company Liable for an unlicensed distribution of copyrighted material. They could be a matter of time in trends or services or other ways they could have a violation or stomach. I understand but maybe disinformation as you mentioned being distinct from misinformation, just mistakes. There are people working to do harm. Sure, and then youre talking about questions of intent behind the speaker, the creator of the content, which is notoriously difficult for the platforms to judge. These are exactly the right kinds of questions to ask about any question where we are talking about liability but to flag that is not necessarily as simple as great a dmca for disinformation because theres a lot of unpacking of that the tentative. If it were easy we would need so many voluminous people to help us try to figure it out. Its very critical to recognize this distinction between talking about the regulars of the cut itself versus education of what the content is. So to hear what maria is described as an education of the content. So my question to the audience is, could we look at this as requiring forms, educate users about natures, the nature of the content . Just the way we require certain financial sectors under grammleachbliley to engage in certain encryption practices. Could we carry over some sort of educational regulatory requirement about online content . I understand that opens up a whole can of worms but we had been working toward solutions. Because as it is now, we are, democracy is really under significant challenge. I have a session about that, which i think build on whats been said before, which is from a technical standpoint what you can require is the companies be able to provide providence for the material that they present. So theyre not liable for the publication but they are liable to identify the source, if need be. Theres an issue obviously anonymous speech but a think thats one direction. It seems to me i would be interested to think about how, what can a policy would encourage the developers of the infrastructure to provide the tools to support that kind of providence . Theres a second thing i want to say actually regarding collection infrastructure and the problem of the entire country having lots of jurisdictions, trying to make treatment decisions intelligently about this. Theres not that many providers of that technology and seems to me theres a real argument to be made for some kind of guidance, maybe not from the federal government, 80 from the sectors of state but organized organize guidance about the structure of the systems and justifications of the systems by some third party. That would take a lot of the burden off of local officials if they can look to the kind of certification. Maybe the federal government is not the right place to do it but there needs to be some third party state that sits down and says look, heres the certification requirements. Yeah, it is about 1 00 or im going to sound half of emma and myself fma, though i think its very difficult to do something that would undermine the right to anonymity in speech, particularly online. Its such a cornerstone of our democracy and allows the person who wouldnt otherwise speak to speak. I think those are great points that i think thats a hard challenge, but weve reached the end of our time. I want to thank all of our speakers, governor ridge, eric and brian thank you for jumping in leading this to us. And the audience can we really appreciate our time, finally our spots, penn state dickinson law, Brennan Center for justice and the center for democracy and technology. Thank you. Thanks everyone and have a great afternoon. [applause] [inaudible conversations]. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] cspan your unfiltered view of government. Previewed by cable in 1979 and brought to you today by your television provider. Congress returns this week from the president jake recess. When the senate gavels and at 3 00 p. M. Eastern Tammy Baldwin will deliver washington farewell address. The senate will take procedural vote on two antiabortion measures. Legislative work on tuesday with the first vote expected wednesday. Later in the week in the house the house will ban all flavored Tobacco Products including e cigarettes. See live coverage of the house on cspan and the senate of course here on cspan2 appeared also this week defense secretary mark esper and joint chief of staff will be testifying about the president s 2021 budget request. It will be live wednesday morning on 10 eastern, online at cspan. Org or you can listen with the free radio app. Tonight on the communicators. From the state of the net conference, Justice Department associate attorney general and former fbi general counsel james baker. On Encryption Technology and privacy. If facebook ended encrypted platforms, the company itself will lose visibility into what is happening on its platforms. Estimation is 75 of those will go dark. Well never even learn about it. Think about the children that are being abused as we speak who we will not be able to track down. My view is Law Enforcement needs to rethink it approach to encryption and light that congress will not act. That they are the untrimmed are these significant threats. Embrace encryption instead of find ways that is not really what Law Enforcement is trying to do. The security of all americans. Watched the communicators tonight at 8 00 p. M. Eastern. Up next, u. S. Agriculture secretary sonny perdue delivers remarks on u. S. Agriculture outlooks. We will also hear from the usda chief economist at this forum. It is about 90 minutes. [inaudible conversations] good morning, everybody. If you could please find your seat. I would like to welcome everyone to usda 96 annual outlook forum. Usda oldest annual meeting. I am stephen, deputy secretary of agriculture. It is great to see everyone here this morning. This years theme is that innovation imperative. Shaping the future of agriculture. This is a fitting theme for the secretary to announce something we have been working on at usda called the agriculture innovation agenda. We are excited to share more with you this morning. I am joined in this room by many of you that are working to shape the future of our agriculture economy. It is important that we take stock, not only where we are today, but also where we need to go to meet a growing Global Demand with rising standards of living at a time when producers are dealing with uncertainties in the farm economy and the conditions needed to farm, including the climate. Our chief economist doctor Rob Johansson will provide an indepth overview of the state of the farm economy. There is a lot to take in. 2019 was certainly not a typical year. There were many factors influence in the economy including extreme weather, trade and policy changes and importing and exporting countries to name just a few. Following the talk, the secretary will outline some of the amazing progress we have seen and should be talking about more in the agriculture sector. As i mentioned, he will also tf what we are calling on this call the continuing trend of success that we have seen to meet the future challenges. Including doing our part to make sure we are growing enough food to feed a population that is likely to grow to 9. 7 william people by 2050, while at the same time conserving our Natural Resources for the future. That will be followed by a fireside chat that the secretary will have with john hartnett, founder and ceo of svg vendors a platform of corporations, universities and investors focused on food and agriculture industries. Secretary perdue and doctor hartnett will discuss the future of agriculture challenges facing the sector and emerging solutions that could address them. Tomorrow, secretary perdue will be joined by his colleagues as ministers from argentina, canada and mexico for a session titled feeding the world through innovation. They will discuss cooperative approaches to promoting agriculture innovation and global trade as foundations of global food security. A recurring theme that you will hear through this conference is this, innovation. Innovation will be the key to sustaining the success of our sector. Here at usda we are working to reframe this narrative on agriculture. Speaking of the future, i also want to acknowledge our 30 University Students that are in attendance as participants in this years years agriculture outlook forum. They are here participating in usda 2020 future leaders and Agriculture Program. There attendance in this forum capped off a week long trip here to washington, d. C. , the program selects 20 universities undergraduates and 10 graduate students based on essays on agriculture careers and challenges. These students majoring agriculture related studies, including business, economics, communications, nutrition, food science and veterinary studies. Finalists are selected from universities, hispanic serving institutions and nongrant nonlandgrant college of agriculture. The future leaders is supported by academic institutions, corporations and government institutions dedicated to promoting the education of the next generation of agriculture. This year sponsoring organizations include the university of maryland Eastern Shore and farm credit. This program is one of the many efforts that we have among u. S. Da, the 1862 land grant institutions, the 1890 historically black colleges and universities, the 1994 tribal landgrant colleges and universities and hispanic serving universities. These partnerships support Capacity Building initiatives and bolster education and Career Opportunities for students interested in a career in agriculture. I also want to acknowledge, as part of that, the 10 graduate students that we have in attendance as part of that program. The Usda Economic Research service partnered last year with the Farm Foundation to create a new Agriculture Scholars Program that takes these 10 graduate level students of agriculture through a Yearlong Program of agriculture related training. The objective is to inspire and train the next generation of agriculturalists interested in policy, commodity market analysis, and agriculture finance and other applied fields of economics. Can we have all of our 2020 future leaders and Agriculture Program attendees stand and lets give them a round of applause. [applause] be sure to seek them out during the breaks. These are some of the sharp young minds that we wanted agriculture and i know you want as well. With that, i would like to say here is our chief economist doctor Robert Johansson who unveiled the departments outlook for u. S. Modernday markets and trade in 2020 and discuss the u. S. Farm income situation. Doctor johansson. [applause] thank you so much. Thanks everybody for joining us today. Thank you for those comments, mr. Deputy secretary. Of course, welcome to the 96 annual agriculture outlook forum. We have a Great Program for you. Our theme this year as he just talked about innovation imperative. That is appropriate in many ways. He just enumerated some of them. I will highlight two that will underline some of the comments i make today. First, 2019. The year filled with uncertainty for agriculture in many ways and innovative responses were necessary by farmers to get them through the year. Second, innovation and agriculture will continue to shape our future. What can we expect for 2020 . I know you are waiting with baited breath. Lets get to the numbers. I want to talk about three main themes today. 2020 is a big year for trade, of course. Our top agricultural partners. That will help sales and prices. Second, Crop Production should rebound from last year. We expect record crop, meat and dairy production. Third, the economy continues to show signs of stress, the egg economy, other more helpful signs. Low Interest Rates reducing borrowing costs and strengthening land values. Lets start with the global economy. In january, projected lower Global Economic growth. The downward revisions from the pink, the dark red line on the slide there, may not look like much, but he equals a loss by potential of 1. 5 trillion over that time. With all that revision due to declines in emerging economies such as india. Such tanks have responded. Collectively cutting Interest Rates 71 times across 49 different countries. Still that being said, higher Global Growth in 2021 and 2022 is expected which should increase our opportunity to sell abroad. Those estimates by the imf did not account for the most recent outbreak of the coronavirus in china which has been affecting most of chinas economy. The shanghai composite fell by 10 in january with the emergence of the coronavirus. It since has started to recover. We are tracking this on many levels. Globally, we have observed significant disruptions in shipping and supply chains. We would expect less spending by chinese consumers. Particularly in the first quarter. Higher value products such as meat. Private sector forecast, lowered their estimates of chinas firstquarter gdp by two percentage points. Far too early to tell what the final impacts will be. Most of those operations expect the second quarter, Third Quarter and Fourth Quarter two rebound. Any perceived risk of uncertainty often strengthens the u. S. Dollar. That is what we saw last year as a safe investment. Trade uncertainty and Interest Rate cut kept the dollar strong in the first part of 2019. Over the second half of the year, the dollar depreciated against several currencies. We sell moderation of tensions between the u. S. And china, we sell resolving uncertainty above brexit and we did see some Higher Oil Prices in the second half of 2019 which supported both the australian and canadian currencies. We also sell Interest Rate cuts as i mentioned earlier by seven Central Banks such an russia which helps support their currency which is the ruble. The coronavirus has led to an appreciating dollar not affected in these sides. Despite the mixed economic signals headed into 202020, there is been an important progress on trade that im sure we will talk about a lot over the next two days. That will improve access 2020 and beyond. Three main trade deals that we will hear about today and tomorrow cover over half of u. S. Exports. The usmc a will lower trade fiction between our north American Trading partners and is expected to grow the u. S. Export market more than 41 billion in 2020. The japan u. S. Agreement will also help lower tariffs by more than 7 billion in u. S. Egg exports. More importantly it will equalize Market Access for sectors such as u. S. Beef and pork similar to those enjoyed right now by the eu, australia, new zealand, canada into japan. And there large 7 trillion market. The phase i deal with china will boost sales to main agriculture customer. There remains much more work to do such as gaining better access to the nearly 1. 4 billion consumers in india. Our trading negotiators and president s are working on that as we speak. I will put up a site here and hopefully this works. The first time ive tried this. This shows some of what we are expecting and trade, and excited to see. This is a timeline of different economies and the size of the bubble. Reflects how much u. S. Product they are purchasing from us. Their per capita gdp is along the x axis. A lot going on there. What did we see . Japan was our largest market at about 8 billion. At that same time, our experts concentrated mostly on the eu and canada. U. S. Exports at that time to china where less than 1 billion. Experts were only 240 million. Gdp per capita of 700 per person in india at 600 per person. This changed dramatically. 1994. U. S. Ag exports grew 300 . In 1995, wto officially commence boozing access globally. 2001, china entered the wto. Hitting almost 26 billion in 2014. U. S. Exports over the last half decade have declined under increased foreign competition and in 2018 exports will dramatically under the disputes of our Major Trading partners bringing us to, we will watch it one more time and then ill go to the next slide, i just talked about all of this. China in india starting together. China opens to the global marketplace. Growing dramatically as well as our exports. India yet to take off. Highlighting the importance of getting into that market in the future. Where are we today in 2020 . Forecast at 139. 5 billion. Up 4 billion from last year. China forecasting at 14 billion for fiscal 2020. Up from 10 billion last year. That reflects Public Information available right now in phase one. The trade outlook forecast based on a fiscal year and this outlook also reflects uncertainty, as i mentioned earlier. Our top market in 2020 is currently expected to be canada forecast at 21. 5 billion. Mexico forecast up to 19. 8 billion. Eu and japan slightly down for fiscal 2020. Again, just to emphasize a calendar year, phase one commitments are not reflected in a fiscal year calculation completely. One question we get is where do we expect the largest growth to be an import demand over the next 10 years. Global demand especially emerging markets expected to grow global exports. The prospect for additional u. S. Exports over the next 10 years a strong growing at least to 183. 6 billion. Overall, trade projected to increase by 37 million tons up 17 . Big markets in mexico, egypt and south america. Soybean trade expected to increase by 36 million tons. Up 24 . Mostly in china. Global wheat trade expected to increase by 30 million tons. Up 60 mainly in africa and the middle east. The world meet trade expected to grow by 9 million tons. All right. Lets turn to the 2020 crop and livestock sector. I know many of you are excited to see the slides. Lets recap in 2019 what we saw. Drawing a lot of attention and critiques of usda forecast. 2019 was a very wet year in much of america. Spring planting delays led to slow maturing corn and soybean crop. At harvest wet weather has still hindered progress. A surge in demand for drying capacity and some shortages and price hikes occurred in many areas. In parts of north dakota, minnesota, wisconsin, early heavy snow fall on of what ground ended fieldwork early. Harvest in the spring. As you know today, we are coming out with our early estimates for the 2020 year. This is what we had last year for corn in 2019. Our estimates are based purely on supply and demand. We do assume normal weather. Of course we know that it is fairly wet out there right now. The First Official estimates reflect the planning surveys that will be released at the end of march. In june last year we reduced our acreage reflecting observed weather condition at the end of june. They released the report which was used in july. Given the high corn prices at that time to plant corn, not surprising that farmers said they would plant more corn and that was reflected in the july estimates. In august, begin to report monthly survey based data. Acreage yield estimates coupled with administrative data and satellite information. As you all know in august, surveys came in from producers noting fewer acres planted than expected, but higher yields had been forecasted earlier. Take that roughly 15. 9 million bushels. Above the july estimates. Different from the average trade estimates from many of you in the room by more than 600 million bushels. What did we see . Many farmers outside and outside analysts felt it did not reflect the poor planting conditions that were seen on the ground in many states. What the estimates did reflect was farmers saying. Fsa and rma. The december futures falling quickly by 0. 50 a bushel. Further frustrating farmers dealing with difficult planting conditions. One thing we heard this year is why doesnt usda use satellite information to help them with their estimates. We have been using satellites for many years and we have been Getting Better each year as those data improve our ability to estimate Crop Production. You can see how improve satellite information and improved usage of administrative data has helped usda to find their estimate over time. Going back to the 70s, we have not seen a year where the corn Crop Forecast in august was more than 7. 5 off since 1995. The deviation less than 5 over the past five years. The blue here is our estimates in august relative to the final and the orange is the average trade estimate relative to the final period lets look ahead now to 2020. Where are we going to plant all of those acres . Corn, soybean, wheat, cotton, barley and oats average 257 million acres over the 2012 2014 time. Looking at the principal crop acreage, acreage was down in 2019 by almost 16 million acres which, most of that coming from soybeans down 13 million relative to 2018. Looking across the United States we saw significant planting, on planted acres in 2019 relative to 2018. Where are we going to put those acres this year . We would expect a good portion to go to corn and soybeans in 2020. Lets look at what the fundamentals are. Global stocks relative to use to see what we think about the upcoming demand for those commodities. Strengthening in the Balance Sheet for corn and soybeans relative to wheat and rice. We would expect better returns for those commodities of corn and soybeans. Similarly, we expect growing Global Demand for varied diet and increased Animal Protein that continues to stimulate the demand. Not just the United States, but improving their output. Brazil is optimizing their land as well utilizing double cropping, resulting in more soybean acres and a second crop overtaken brazils first season crop. Current production in brazil is at roughly 4 billion bushels of corn and 4. 6 bushels of soybeans. In addition, decisions will be affected by a number of other factors, such as expectations about trade and tariffs and prices compared with rising input costs. The future prices point to a larger u. S. Corn crop. The ratio has dipped to four year lows. In addition we know that local demand and transportation costs will drive regional planting. For example, soybean to corn prices currently favored the planting of more soybeans in the upper midwest, compared to planting more corn on the eastern corn belt as well as the southeastern part of the United States. Under anticipation of return to normal trade was some growth in those markets boosted by trade agreements, we project that Soybean Prices will rise modestly up a nickel to 880 a bushel. Supported by lower stocks compared to last years record level. In contrast, corn is expected to decline 0. 25 to 3. 60 a bushel with larger corn acres and expected return to trend deals. Wheat prices are expected up 0. 35 to 4. 90 a bushel reflecting low ending stocks. Cotton prices remain low. Global conditions and the return to more normal trading patterns with china remain a significant uncertainty for the Cotton Market in the coming year. Last years planting difficulties, as i mentioned, resulted in 13 million fewer acres of soybeans compared to what is equivalent to roughly 6 million. That reduction supports an increase in soybean acreage to roughly 85 million acres. Up 12 . Rising 4. 3 million acres to 94 million following last years plant supported by new crop prices that are relatively favorable to corn. Wheaton cotton acres are down. Lets turn to meat and dairy production. 2020 production of meat will set another record at 108. 8 alien pounds. Meat production will increase about 1 . Pork about 4. 5 and broiler production up about 4 . The increase in production over the past 10 years has been accompanied by increasing shares in production exported. More than 25 of our pork production expected to be exported and nearly 20 being exported of dairy. More than 220 billion pounds expected for 2020. I am going to let you take a look at this slide real fast. There is a lot going on here. Trying to encapsulate with what is going on in one slide. Theres a lot going on. [laughter] i can even use a pointer on this one. What do we see . Significant declines in pork production. China in particular. China hog production down 195 million head and we expect reduction of another 80 million in 2020. Chinese pork prices have spiked to 150200 of what they were a year ago. In 2019, most exporting companies, particularly the eu, increase their exports to china. Dramatically increasing their imports globally with purchases of 150 from 2018. We expect a larger portion to come from the u. S. In 2020. Lets look at the loss in China Consumption supplies. Far larger than all of global trade and pork. We will take some time to resolve. A drop in China Consumption significant. 15. 8 Million Metric Tons. Total trade, 4 Million Metric Tons plus another seven. We have a significant hole there and protein that will be felt with other proteins such as beef, poultry and again higher exports of pork coming from the United States. What do prices show . Despite levels, expected to close unchanged for 2020. Slightly up. Strong demand for pork domestically and internationally expected to support increased hog prices. Broiler prices to come under pressure for higher production levels. Going down slightly, but fairly unchanged. Mel prices expected to strengthen slightly in 2020 as well. Lets look a little bit closer at dairy. Youve heard about that in the news over the past year. We know that u. S. Milk production is expected to grow by 13 over the next 10 years, but milk prices only expected to increase about 5 . As with other sectors, growth and production has been through increased gains and animal inefficiencies with steady increases with milk per cow. However, mary remains a sector experiencing significant structural reform. Following as production has been increasing. Recent usda census shows how the distribution of dairy farming operations have been changing from one with many dairy farms to one with fewer but much larger operations. More than half of u. S. Dairy cows are being milked and operations with 1000 or more cows. Five times higher than we saw 20 years ago. The reason for this is apparent in this chart. Join the cost for dairy farms across the state. The chart shows that the majority of dairy operations have cost the production greater than the all milk price. The majority of milk production is occurring now and operations costing