At this time, let me introduce the participants in todays discussion. We have a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution. She served as a minister to the dutch parliament. Focused parliament, she on furthering the integration of nonwestern immigrants into dutch society. Larry diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Years, hehan six directed fsi center where he now leads the program on democracy and its Global Digital policy incubator. Was the 26th assistant to the president for National Security affairs and served as a commissioned officer in the u. S. Army for 34 years before retiring in june, 2018. The moderator for todays panel is neil ferguson. Hooverior fellow at the institution and a senior fellow for the European Studies at harvard. Please join me in welcoming this esteemed group to the stage. Thank you,ernoon, tom for that introduction and thank you for joining us on such a beautiful afternoon when you could be outside playing frisbee. Im extremely excited to be moderating at this distinguished panel. When you come to think of it, we have some amazing expertise appear on the platform. We have a former National Security advisor who really was the mastermind behind a thorough remaking of National Security strategy in 2018 and we will talk a little bit about his contribution to that. Diamondr left, larry editor of a role as major report on chinese influence operations has caused a major stir around the world, both sides of the pacific. Seated sitting on my immediate left is the leading critic of islamic extremism and fundamentalism and in the interest of full disclosure, i should say she also happens to be my wife. [laughter] [applause] reassure you, there will be no softball questions. Quotationbegin with a the first time we have ever appeared on stage together. We put it off but finally hoover talked us into it. And incidentally, our sons are the first hoover fellows to have been bred in captivity. [laughter] i want to begin on a more serious note by quoting a grand master of strategic thoughts. Henry kissinger, who for a man who just turned 96 has an astonishingly acute grasp of the issues we will be discussing this afternoon. He has written on Artificial Intelligence and in his book, world order he made the following observation the social, financial, and military sectors have revolutionized vulnerabilities. Most rules and regulations and the technical comprehension of many regulators it has in some respects created nature. Asymmetry, and a kind of disorder, areld built into relations of cyber powers in diplomacy and strategy. Absent articulation of some rules of international conduct, a crisis will arise from the inert dynamics of the system. Framele more quotes to the subject. Admiral michael rogers, former head of the National Security agency and u. S. Cyber command said a couple of years ago we are at a tipping point. And finally, i want to quote from an assay cryptographer famousmorris senior, the rules of computer security. And you may want to make a note of these, ladies and gentlemen, because everyone these days has to be worried about computer security. Rule one, do not own a computer. Rule two, do not pirate on. Role to, do not turn one on. Theory, let us start with h. R. Mcmaster. Cyber attacks offer low cost and opportunities to seriously damage infrastructure, cripple businesses, and attack the tools and devices that americans use every day to communicate and conduct business. Impose swift and costly consequences on foreign governments and other actors who undertake significant malicious cyber activities. Can there be effective deterrence in cyberspace . Thank you. Motivatedoverall what this dramatic shift in policy that you saw broadly in the december 2017 highly readable, just in time for the beach, National Security strategy. 2018 is when we were able to put this in place. Sensek it was really a that we were at the end of the beginning of a new era but we were behind. Behind because we were not competing effectively against adversaries and rivals. The reasons we were behind were due in large measure to overconfidence in the 1990s associated with our priam in the cold war, the collapse of the soviet union, the lopsided victory in the gulf war and a period of sustained Economic Growth. Dot com success. Our overconfidence lead to complacency. And then we encountered difficulties. Unanticipated length and difficulty of war in iraq and afghanistan. Financial crisis. I think that jolted our confidence in a way that we became passive and did not engage competitively for reasons of pessimism rather than over optimism. Tomade a conscious choice there out how to reenter competition from which we had been absent. Ciber is one of those. Can deter certain attacks in cyberspace by two fundamental means. One is to impose cost on a cyber actor or make clear that you can impose cost far beyond those which the actor factored in at the outset of the decision to attack you. Those are cyber offensive capabilities. But also capabilities outside of cyberspace that you can then there to the physical space through sanctions and Law Enforcement actions. When you have the authority to do so, military action as well. Deterrencespect of to go back to Thomas Schelling in the 1960s, deterrence by denial. Convincing adversaries that they cannot accomplish their objectives through the use of that capability. That involves defensive measures. Moreg our infrastructure resilient. And ensuring our systems can degrade gracefully rather than fail catastrophically. We have a reminder of this Ransomware Attack on baltimore for example. These are with us right now. We have to recognize that our hasusiasm for technologies also made us more vulnerable and prone to catastrophic collapse. I am reminded of a book from the 1960s and titled man, machines, and modern times. In it he said men and women have it have expended a great deal of effort in trying to contain his Natural Environment. And in so doing has created an artificial environment that is more complex than the Natural Environment ever was. I think we are on the right track in terms of recognizing this as a competitive domain. We have seen a lot of critical actions taken to make it easier to use offense of capabilities as a part of deterrence and offense. Long waynk there is a to go both on deterrence by denial and the ability to impose cost. We have an opportunity to learn from someone who has been right there in the room where it happens making and remaking american policy. Ofn i of harper joe nye harvard wrote an article saying deterrence in cyberspace it is not really like deterrence in the age of the cold war where you had to determine the soviet union from firing a missile because if they did, we would be in world war iii. This is a different type of deterrence. You will have cyber attacks. It is a question of whether you can keep the level down so you do not suffer serious distraction. Actors are trying to avoid the imposition of cost back on them. Cyber is a way where we have , competitors such as russia, china, but north korea as well and iran try to accomplish objectives below the threshold that would elicit a concerted response against them. I think we have to do a number of things. A range ofevelop capabilities that can be applied against these actors. You have seen that in the last election. In the midterm elections. And there are other actions that we can take that are not purely defensive and inoculate ourselves against the effects. I know you will talk more about influence operations. But we can take a lot of important tasks like educating ourselves so we are less susceptible to manipulation by these actors or we can figure out a way to present credible information based on verifiable sources and be able to access that routinely in a way that blocks out the attempts and misinformation and propaganda. Can we draw that distinction out a little more . About cyber war for cyber warfare before 2016. That was our focus. In fact, what the russians did in 2016 was quite different which was information warfare. Can you help us understand the difference . It gets back to the complacency problem. A corollary to this overconfidence is we believed there was an arc of history that guaranteed our free and open society. Our confidence that came under attack. Our confidence in who we are as a people. Our common identity. 80 of the messaging and bought traffic wasnd bot aimed at dividing merchants all along lines of race. A distant second was on immigration. And then gun control. Whatever could be a polarizing and then to attack our election so we do not have faith in our democratic processes and institutions. We came late to the game on this. It was because we were overconfident in the inherent strength in our society and system. Im glad you observed a the fact that there was not effective disruption of the 2018 midterms ourto be put down to disruption of the communications. I think we can say that we did learn from 2016. Is thatverall lesson you cannot separate in andrspace offense of defensive. It is Public Knowledge that if you develop a cyber tool and use it, it has a shelf life of 96 hours until there is a countermeasure. Is what clouse said war is. It is happening at electron speed internationally in a new form of competition. What we had to do is aligned the authorities for those operating to defend us from these actors, to employ combinations of offense of an defensive abilities. This is a good moment to turn from you to our next guest. I remind ourselves that though there has not been a major islamist terror attack in the United States or sometime come it has not stopped around the world. And just remind the audience, these are numbers from the u. S. National consortium on the subject of terrorism their most recent report records 10,900 terrorist attacks around the world which killed more than 26,400 people. The top three perpetrators were Islamic State, the taliban, and alshabaab. Overwhelmingly, the incidents around the world that kill people in large numbers are driven by or perpetrated by radical islamist groups. I wanted to begin with a question about those groups the ways in which they have used the Technology Developed in the west to organize, to mobilize, and to build far Bigger Networks in 2001. Aeda had back educate us about how these networks currently operate. Thank you. I was listening intently to my colleague, a chart, and thinking here we are, talking about operations. This is cyber. , ourare the people adversaries, who are using ciber. In the 15 years i have been in since 1989,ybe even the one thing we rarely talk ideas, ideologies, and principles. Said our core of identity i automatically assumed that it is these classical, liberal ideas that the u. S. Has established. What we forget is that there are who organize, who have political and social frameworks that are radically different from ours. So when you think about islamism , it is a political and social philosophy with a religious underpinning. And when the agents or the people who believe in this i think you look at islamism and you see a tree with two main branches. One branch is the use of violence to achieve their aims, to achieve what they think of as which is ton ideals establish a society on a local el and even a global level to achieve an end goal that society is based on the rule of god. That is their interpretation. That is their organizing philosophy. Now, think of it as a tree. One branch is the use of violence to reach that goal and that is called jihad. Everywhere i go, i ask americans raise your hand if you think you know of the concept of jihad. Just raise your hand. That is exactly it. A lot of people, maybe 80 or room like people in a this say they are familiar with it. And then i ask people, raise your hand if you have ever heard of the concept of [indiscernible]. 1, 2, 3, 4. Always a minority. But that is the other main branch of the islamist tree. What does that mean . It means the believers in this philosophy that has its underpinnings in religion puts in engagingeffort in campaigns, argument, propaganda. In short, it is the effort to promote the ideas, the effort to persuade. And that is where cyber comes into it. I know that when it comes to jihad and we are focused on that they are focusing on the jihadi aspect. Where are they plotting a terrorist attack . That is all under the branch of jihad. But when it comes to the other concept, you have to ask yourself how are they using ciber to raise awareness . To recruit people to their cause . How are they using it to organize, strategize, and Exchange Tips and tactics . Are they using it to raise money . How are they using it to pass the idea that the United States is trying to destroy islam. Me, i will say the concept of islam a phobia i put it under the realm of disinformation and information warfare. How it is used. Everything my colleague, h. R. Mcmaster, said is true. We are used to firing these operational wars. The two things you mentioned, make sure you impose cost on defense by denial. That works on the operational level. But the question remains, are we really engaged in terms of these ideological confrontations . And are we not really wasting the opportunity to use the promote acyber to counter ideology . And a counter system of ideas. And i think that is where we are failing. One of the things that most rec me when i was writing a book related to this was how very different the Islamic State was from al qaeda. Al qaeda had carried out the 9 11 attacks partly because it was so cut off and closed as a tiny, conspiratorial network that it was undetected by our security forces. Whereas Islamic State is quite though a quite open rapidly changing network that uses social media, all kinds of different platforms to disseminate its ideology. When you look at some of the work that is being done in National Security in the u. S. That graphs the network of islam and state activity online, it is mind blowing how big this is and how sophisticated. It right to say that Islamic State may have been defeated on but it is in syria still very much alive in cyberspace . Think of Islamic State as only one brand of this global. Henomenon of Islamist Al Qaeda is another brand of islamist. Al qaeda failed because they put all of their money on the jihadi branch. They thought, we are going to shock the world into submitting to our deal. And that did not happen. They were almost obliterated. Obviously, they adapt as we do. They learn from their mistakes like we learn from ours. I think the world has gone back to let us redevelop or other branch. Getting into the minds of human beings to persuade them to come to our viewpoint. The way to do that is through , family, neighborhood, and community and through the internet. And making use of all of these areas tools that are available to all of us. We in thet to say, United States or people who try to study because we are academics, we tried to draw these Straight Lines of distinction between al qaeda, between Islamic State, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other organizations but that is not how it works. If the tree is islamism, they have their disagreements on tactics, on how to get to the end goal, but remember they agree on the end goal. A lot of communication takes place and collaboration and exchange of money all of that happens and much of it through ciber but that is not the most important thing. The most important thing is that while we focus on brands like Islamic State, we are missing the big picture. I see right now reconfigurations, reunions between the Islamic State and the Muslim Brotherhood. Al qaeda and some of the iranian shia islamists. Read any of our newspapers and shia andold the are killing each other. A lot of the communication takes place through cyber and the internet but when our government makes it difficult for them to you ciber, they turned back to the old methods of communicating and carrying out. One question i wanted to ask you specifically about nonviolent extremism is how important the internet is in the process of radicalization . It usuallyreads after a terror attack that the perpetrator was radicalized online. Is that actually what happens . Yes. There is a school of thought were a number of people that believe that if we shut off all the social media accounts then radicalization would be minimized or disappear. I tend to disagree with that. I think by the time an individual goes to his smartphone or laptop or whatever to access any of these social media tools, they have already at least been inspired to rethink things. Mostly young people. They are looking for some kind of moral guideline. When you think of morality and your 15, 16, 17 outside of the west, 90 of the people will think about going to their religion. Imaman go to your local but most of them have been displaced. Countries like saudi arabia and qatar have put a lot of money into their own in moms and messages and an entire infrastructure in place that has lace for get along muslim get along islam. You are a young you are thinking about the difference between right and wrong. You go to the mosque. They tell you about this worldview that is so coherent, with the hereafter and the sacrifices you have to make. It is only because it is so complex that i think many individuals think, because they give you preferences at the end of my talk, i say, why didnt you go to the Hoover Institution website . They say in to the Classical Liberal website, this, that, the other. On to these references, they are thinking, on going to get more information and they get sucked in. On going to come ba