Countering threats to free and open societies. This research this creature onthis researcher focused nonwestern immigrants into the society and defending the rights of muslim women. For more than six years, mr. Diamond talked about the rule of law and leads a program on democracy and mobile digital policy incubator. Senior fellowis a at the Hoover Institution. 26th assistant to the president for National Security affairs and served as an officer in the u. S. Army for 34 years before retiring as a Lieutenant General in june of 2018. The moderator for the panel is neil ferguson. Was a senior fellow at the center for European Studies at harvard where he serves to where he served for 12 years as a professor. Please welcome this group to the stage. [applause] mr. Ferguson good afternoon. Thank you for the introduction and thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for joining us on a beautiful afternoon where you could be out playing frisbee. I am excited to be moderating this distinguished panel. When you come to think of it, we have some amazing expertise here on the platform. We have a former National Security advisor who really was the mastermind behind the securityof National Strategy in 2018. We will talk about his contribution to that. Left, Larry Diamond whose recent role is the editor of major report of chinese influence operations. Is ms. ,y immediate left ms. Ali, who has been the leading credit of fundamentalism and she also happens to be my wife. [laughter] but let me reassure you [applause] there will be no softball questions. [laughter] begin with a quote. This is the first time we have appeared together on stage. We have put it off. I want to begin on a more serious note. I want to quote from one of the grandmasters of strategic and American Foreign policy. Henry kissinger, for a man who just turned 96, as an acute grasp of the issues we will be discussing this afternoon. He has written on artificial book, hence, ended his made the following observation. The pervasiveness of network munication and social and military sectors has revolutionized policies. I am basing most rules and created as, it has state of nature, the escape of provided the motivating force for creating political order. Is built into relations between powers and diplomacy and strategy. Absent articulation of rules of international conduct, a crisis will arise from the inner dynamics of the system. Frame thequotes, to subject. Michael rogers, former head of the National Security agency in u. S. Cyber command set a couple of years ago, we are at a tipping point. Nsai want to quote from cryptographer Robert Morris senior in the famous rules of Computer Security. Everyone has to be concerned about Computer Security these days. Role one. Own ae 1, do not computer. Rule number two, do not turn it on. Rule number three, do not use it. With that, i want to turn to hr master. I want to ask you about the National Security strategy to begin with. Because you really radically changed the u. S. Posture on a range of issues, of which probably the most noteworthy was our stance toward china. Interesting things to say about cyber warfare. I will briefly remind you of something you said. Cyber attacks offer a low cost opportunity to seriously damage critical infrastructure, cripple american businesses, we can our federal networks, weakn our our federaleaken networks. The u. S. Will impose swift and costly consequences on actors who undertake malicious cyber activity. So let me begin with a question. Can there be effective deterrence in cyberspace . Mr. Mcmaster thank you. You asked what motivated this dramatic shape dramatic shift 2017. Icy that you saw in highly readable, justintime for the beach. December 2018 was when we put everything in place. I think there was a sense that we were at the end of the beginning of a new era, but behind, largely because we were not competing effectively against adversaries and rivals. The reasons we were behind was due in large measure to overconfidence in the 1990s associated with the triumph of the cold war, the collapse of the soviet union, a lopsided victory over the army in the gulf war, and some sustained 1990s. Growth in the the first big. Com boom in the boom in theg. Com valley. This led to complacency. Then we confronted difficulties in the 2000s. Attacks, the 11 difficulty of war in iraq and afghanistan, and the 2008 financial crisis. That jolted the confidence in a way that we became passive and did not engage competitively for reasons of pessimism, rather than over optimism. Choice to a conscious really figure out how to reenter the competition from which we had been absent. Cyber is one of those. Succinctly, yes, i think you can deter certain attacks in cyberspace by two fundamental means. Costs on theose cyber actor or make clear you thosepose cost far beyond which the cyber actor factored in at the outset of the decision to attack. Those are cyber offense of capabilities, but also capabilities outside of cyberspace that you can bring to bear in physical space through sanctions, Law Enforcement actions. When you have the authority to do so, lee terry action, as well. The other military action, as well. The other deterrence is denial. Convincing potential adversaries that they cannot accomplish their objective through the use of that capability. That involves defense measures. Making infrastructure more resilient. Ensuring any systems can degrade gracefully, rather than fail catastrophically. There ramp somewhere attack on baltimore, this is a problem with us right now and we have to recognize our enthusiasm for technology which has made our lives so much easier has also made us more vulnerable and prone to catastrophic collapse. A book from the 1960s, the author wrote that men and women have expended a great deal of effort in trying to tame the Natural Environment but has created an artificial environment that is much more complex than the Natural Environment ever was. So i think we are on the right track in terms of recognizing this is a competitive domain. We have seen a lot of action taken to make it easier to use. Offense of capabilities, as a part of deterrence. But there is a long way to go in terms of denial and the ability to impose costs. Mr. Ferguson i want to pursue this a bit further because we want the opportunity to learn this from someone who was right there, in the room where it happened, remaking american policy. Recently written on the subject. A quote. Iserrence and cyberspace more like crime governments can imperfectly correct. In the cold war, you had to deter the soviet union from firing a missile. But this is a different kind of deterrence. You are going to have cyber attacks. Cyber warfare is a permanent state. It is a question of whether you can keep the level down so you do not suffer serious disruption. I think cyber actors are trying to avoid the imposition of cost on them. Way where we have seen rivals, competitors such as russia, china, north korea and iran try to accomplish objectives below the threshold that would elicit a certain response back against them. So we have to do a number of things. One is to develop a range of capabilities that can be applied against these actors. I think youve seen that in the last election, in the midterm election. More and more will be known over time. We acted more aggressively than we had in the past against those who are trying to disrupt our elections. There are other actions we can take that are not truly defensive, but in many ways, inoculate ourselves against the effects. About you can talk more Information Warfare, but we can do, we have to take a lot of important tasks like educating ourselves so we are less susceptible to manipulation by the actors. And we can figure out a way to present credible information based on verifiable forces and be able to access that routinely in a way that blocks out some of the attacks at disinformation on propaganda. Mr. Ferguson can we draw that distinction out a little more . There is a distinction between cyber warfare and information more. In some ways information war. In some ways, the u. S. Spent more thinking about cyber warfare. Do assumption we caniran certain things to iran. That was the focus. But what the russians did was different. Can you help us understand . Mr. Mcmaster it goes back to the complacency problem. We believed there was an arc of history that guaranteed the free, open societies. It was our confidence that came under attack. Confidence in who we are as a people, our common identity. Boughtthe messaging and media traffic on social was aimed at dividing along lines of race. A distant second was immigration. Gun control. Whatever could be polarizing that could pull the society apart and pit us against each other, and then attack our election so that we do not have faith in our democratic process and institutions. We came late to the game. It was because we were overconfident in the inherent strength of our society and system. Mr. Ferguson i am glad you observed moments ago that we did up our game and although it did not get much coverage, the fact the way the administration hit back and disrupted communications. Quicklyd say we learned from 2016. Mr. Mcmaster one of the lessons overall, you cannot separate in cyberspace offenses and defensive. If you develop a cyber tool and of 96, has a shelf life hours before there is a countermeasure deployed against it. So you have a continuous interaction of opposites. That is happening at electron speed internationally in this new form of competition. So what we had to do was align the authorities for those who are operating to defend us from these actors, to employ combinations of offensive and defensive capabilities. Mr. Ferguson this is a good moment to turn from you to ms. Ali and remind ourselves although there has not been a major influence terrorist in the United States for some time, it has not stop around the world. Just to remind the audience, these are numbers from the u. S. National consortium for the study of terrorism and responses to terrorism. Records recent report 10,900 terrorist attacks of all kinds around the world that killed more than 26,000 400 people. The top three perpetrators were Islamic State, the taliban, and alshabaab. Overwhelmingly, the incidents around the world killed people in large numbers are driven were perpetrated by radical islamist groups. So i wanted to begin with a question about those groups. The ways in which they have used the Technology Developed in the mobilize,ganize, to and to build far bigger networks. Talk a bit about that. How the networks currently operate. Start, ii wanted to was listening intensely to my colleague, thinking, here we are, talking about operations. This is cyber. Here are the people, advertisers adversaries using it. In the 15 years i have been in the United States, the one thing , maybe since 19 1989, the one thing we rarely talk about, ideas, ideologies, and granting principles. Said the very core of our identity, i assumed the core of our identity are these classical, liberal ideas. That the United States is established upon. What we forget is that there are, in fact, people who organize, who have political and social frameworks that are radically different from ours. So when you think about islamism , it a political and social philosophy with a religious underpinning. And when the agents or people , i believe in this ideology think you look at islam and you see a tree with two main branches. One branch is the use of violence to achieve the aims, to achieve what they think of as the utopian ideal, which is to establish a society on a local and regional level, be be a global level, to achieve an end goal that society is based on the rule of god. That is the interpretation. That is the organizing philosophy. Think of it as a tree. One branch is the use of violence to reach that goal. That is called jihad. Go, i asked people, raise your hand if you think you know what the concept of jihad is. Raise your hand. A lot of people, 80 to 90 will say they have heard about jihad and i am familiar with it. Ifn i ask, raise your hand you have ever heard of the dawah. T of always a minority. That is the other main branch of islamist tree. What does it mean . Philosophyrs in this that has underpinnings and effortn puts together an in engaging in campaigns, arguments, propaganda. Promote thefort to ideas. The effort to persuade. That is where cyber comes in. When it comes to jihad, we are focusing on that and the Big Companies are focusing on the jihadi aspect, where are they plotting a terrorist attack on where will it be, what medium will they use . That is under the branch of jihad. , youhen it comes to dawah have to ask yourself, how are they using cyber to raise awareness, to recruit people to their cause . How are they using cyber to organize, strategize, change tactics . How are they using cyber to raise money . Warfare, how are they propagating conspiracy theories. One Conspiracy Theory is the United States is out to get all muslims. Say i put me, i will this under the realm of Information Warfare and disinformation. I think everything hr said is true. We are used to fighting these operational wars. Cost and you impose defense by denial. That works on the operational level. Question remains, are we really engaged in terms of ideological confrontations . At are we not really wasting the opportunity to use the internet, comee cyber to promote a to ideology . And and a system of ideas . That is where we fail. Mr. Ferguson there is a book related to this, have very different Islamic State was from al qaeda. Al qaeda carried out the 9 11 attacks partly because it was so cut off and closed as a tiny network that it pretty much was undetected by our security forces. Islamic state is different. It is a very open, rapidly changing network that uses social media, all kinds of different platforms to disseminate the ideology. You look at the work that has been done by people in National Security in the u. S. It is mind blowing how big this is and how sophisticated. So is it right to say that Islamic State might have been defeated on the ground in syria, but it is still very much alive in cyberspace . Ms. Ali think of Islamic State as only one branch of these global phenomenon of islamist. Al qaeda is just another brand of islamist. Becauseqaeda failed they put all their money in the jihadist branch. They thought, we are going to shock the world into submitting to our ideal, and they were obliterated. Almost obliterated. Obviously, they adopt, like we do. Mistakesn from their and they have always gone back refocus the other branch, persuading, getting into the minds of human beings to persuade them to come to our viewpoint. In a way to do that is through schools, families, neighborhoods, communities, and through the internet. They are making use of all the various tools that are available to all of us. , we in the United States, the academics, we try to draw these lines of distinction state, al qaeda, islamic Muslim Brotherhood, and other organizations. But that is not how it works. Islamism, they have their disagreements on tactics, how to get to the end goal. But they agree on the end goal. So a lot of communication takes place. A lot of collaboration, exchange of money, commitment, all of it happens, much of it happens to cyber. But the most important thing is while we focus on brands like Islamic State, we are missing the big picture. Reconfigurations and reunions between the Islamic State and Muslim Brotherhood. Al qaeda and some shiite , you will read some are killing each other. That is the case, but only part of the story. A lot of the communication takes place through cyber, the internet. But when the government hr described makes it very difficult for them to use cyber, they turned back to the old methods of one question i specifically want to ask you about nonviolent extremism is how important the internet is in the process of radicalization. Attackone reads after a that the perpetrator was radicalized online. Is that actually what happens . There is a school of thought that eliminating social media would solve his problems, but i do not agree. , theyeople go online often have ideas. When you are 15 or 16, you may turn to religion. Places have put a lot of money into putting their own infrastructure in place that has displaced the local, get along islam. So you are a young person, you four inn the u k the u. K. , you are think about the difference in right and wrong. You go to the mosque and you listen to a ceremony. They tell you about this worldview that is so coherent swords andr with its the hereafter and the sacrifices you have to make. Because it is so complex, many think that they give references. Its like, at the end of my talk, i say why dont you go to the Hoover Institution website or a Classical Liberal website. They do the same thing, and that is what you see happening on cyber. People are coming on thinking now they will get more information and they get sucked in. But cyber is only part of the story. Im going to come back to a bigger question i want to ask about the open society and its enemies. It is in the title of our event. Larry. To turn now to about islam,d lets talk about china. Your report talked quite a bit , but itchnology theft struck me that it said relatively little about chinas online activity. I would like to ask you to talk a little bit about that. I wonder if we aint seen tohing yet, because compared the russians, the chinese have not begun Information Warfare. Should we be bracing ourselves for that . You for that question. I want to begin since we are talking about china by noting that 30 yea