To discuss, we have brought together experts. Wheatley we will begin with comments on the Current Situation from the director of analytics and research followed by a Panel Discussion of two new publications. First, we will be discordant joined by a professor who will analyze the propaganda threats targeting democracies globally. We will be joined by dr. Ingram, who has done a project addressing gaps addressing propaganda and disinformation threats. Crucial gaps in the posture confronts malicious activity. Overall, the publications offer a straightforward, strategic framework for understanding state influence. Strategic policy guidelines. Please join me in welcoming our guest. [applause] ladies and gentlemen, good morning. I am the director for analytics and research at the Global Engagement center at the department of state aired its my pleasure to be here on behalf of the gc special envoy. Before i give a few remarks, i would like to say thank you to George Washington university. We thank you for your continued partnership and our ability to be research and data driven. And, of course, a special note of gratitude to dr. Ingram. It has been a privilege for the gc to participate in these interviews and to share with you our plan as part of this inquiry. We are honored to be participating in this event with dr. Allison reed. Our special envoy and staff are committed to using every available tool to counter disinformation and propaganda and are advising and our adversaries undermining our society. We are encouraged to read that the doctors assessment of our ability to do so is optimistic and we look forward to todays discussion of the paper. We are especially interested in the framing of statesponsored information as antidemocratic threats due to their shared intentions to erode trust in society. For me personally, i can say firsthand that they have positioned themselves as the Mission Center of the u. S. Government and pushing back against false narratives and the views those narratives create. Our work is never final. More and more people have access to the internet and more and more people are able to find these audiences globally. It makes it more difficult for the u. S. And their partners to reach key audiences. For example, i can tell you that one of our adversaries has taken advantage of and continues to take advantage of the coronavirus out like and continues to push disinformation campaigns in at least five linkages. Some of these narratives include the coronavirus as an engineered bioweapon and that the cia cooked up this virus because china is an economic rival. Three, blaming bill gates as the mastermind behind this. Im pretty sure hes busy somewhere, but you get the point where it the point. While you and i can ask ourselves how would anybody believe this, the fact is many do believe these laws. And for some, it reinforces or shapes their views of the west. If these false narratives are repeated, it may become increasingly difficult for public clumsy efforts diplomacy efforts where they are most needed. This is a challenge we are grateful to have partners from the community that are with us. Today, the gc has by far the strongest mandate, staff, and budget. In that regard i would like to share with you our five key lines of efforts. The first is to leave the agency in coordinating and synchronizing efforts. The second is to do the same with our international partners. The second is the civil sector including academia and engagement such as these. The forces to adjust and to be effective in the information space. Last line of effort is to strengthen the gc workforce. We have made tremendous progress, especially in the last year. They are hard work on a range of efforts both big and small. We can be more effective at deterring our adversaries from attacking us and our partners of course, we cannot do it alone. I did not put this in here because it is sounding good, it is very true. We need our allies to help protect the democratic values. I will stop there for now, i just want to say thank you. We look forward to the discussion. I will hand the floor over to you. [applause] thank you very much. Good morning and thank you for coming along. I just want to say a few words about the special issue. This is before i turned over to the role of cdc communications. In the special issue, we wanted to look at the weaponize station of communication with state and nonstate actors which has emerged as one of the most pressing security issues. This communication threat has been transformed by the rise of the Islamic State. It is not that the Islamic State is something new. Its that they have been more successful than previous groups, in part to have a have exploited new technologies to allow them to communicate directly. However, this emerging threat goes beyond isis and we have seen other movements become increasingly challenging online, particularly from far right nationalist groups. But this goes beyond extremist groups we have seen state actors using these technologies to launch disinformation campaigns. In short, the girl democracies face ultimo threats from a spectrum of Different Actors in the nature of these threats has been transformed by new technology. However, the threats do not exist in isolation and our responses must be strategic and comprehensive. While there was a tendency to look at the issues individually our focus was to look collectively to identify the spectrum of threats facing modern democracies and to understand modern Communications Theater in which they are operating. We can also understand the tools to better understand how to counter them. The special issue touches across aspects including nonstate actors, the sociology of can indications, and the challenges we face tackling propaganda online. It also includes much, much more than that. I also want to move on to the article i wrote about prevention. When we look at the role Strategic Communication plays, it has been widely accepted as playing a key role in policy. If you look at any strategy of most countries, you find the reference somewhere. But when you look more closely at it, Strategic Communications is rarely actually strategic. We have these Communications Apply to one particular aspect of gce, particularly within the interventions sphere. This might be almost synonymous with counter narratives and counter messaging. What we put forward in this article is that Strategic Communications have far more to offer than just counter narratives. They should be an integral part of the totality of counterterrorism strategy. As our framework analysis views the uks counterterrorism strategy based on four pillars. If we look at the perceived pillar, that is the hard edge of counterterrorism. This is using the police, the military intelligence agencies to identify, go after, arrest, and ultimately prosecute terrorists before they have been able to carry out any attacks. However, there is much scope for the application of stratcoms and how they can be used for counterinsurgency to shape the environment. Particularly with terrorist groups who rely on support from their communities. But much candy gain from awareness campaigns which encourage the public to come forward with suspicions to be able to provide actual intelligence to operations. This is particularly important with the rise of lone actor attacks. There is often no organization to infiltrate. The aftermath of an attack, almost inevitably, it turns out somebody saw or knew something but did not know the importance of what they knew for who to tell. One of the challenges how can we have awareness campaigns to educate to be able to report in a way that allows Law Enforcement to be able to go forward and prevent attacks. In this way, successful awareness campaigns can help us combat the socalled bystander effect. If we look at the protect pillar, which provides our Border Security that protection from Critical Infrastructure and public spaces, there has been a long history of vigilance campaigns, particularly on public transport, such as if you see something, Say Something campaign from the new york police, see it, say it, sorted campaign from the british police, these have been focused on public transport infrastructure but also focused on preventing imminent attacks. Trying to get the public to report unattended luggage that may carry an explosive device, etc. There is much scope for vigilance campaigns that go down further, such as precursor materials which are used in running an explosive device. Campaigns which target the supply chain so that people who work in the supply chains will be able to spot what is a suspicious transaction. What is a suspicious amount of a certain chemical . Some have legitimate uses and are frequently brought and available, but how can people in the industry be able to spot things . There are many other areas where we can work to have targeted vigilance campaigns at specific audiences. Another aspect on which communications can be applied is in deterrence. It is one thing to be up to protect your Critical Infrastructure. It is another thing to be able to communicate the protection offered to your adversary in such a way that you shake up their behavior in such a way they realize their success of attack is very limited, so they dont go ahead. One of the reasons why there has been a decrease in terrorist hijackings is because of the security and infrastructure changes we have had at airports. It is not just structures put in place to prevent it, it is also that terrorists are aware and dont even try it. It would be much harder to be able to do it. If you move onto the prepared pillar, it is designed to reduce harm, stabilize and aid recovery quickly in the event of a terrorist attack what can we do in the aftermath to reduce its impact and aid recovery . This is perhaps the most underdeveloped pillar. Sorry about that. Most undeveloped pillar from a communications perspective. Terrorism is not just violence, it is the communication of violence. Terrorists carry out attacks against individuals and infrastructure that are here to have an effect on individuals over there, to be able to terrorize them or inside them insight another group incite another group into supporting them. They impetus for a terrorist attack depends on how it is communicated. This event ceases the wind of opportunity to decide how attacks are perceived. We go to public sense making, where we understand the crisis. We normally have a Communication Campaign to help shape the narrative around this. Governments need to be able to be prepared to have a communication strategy in place so they do not surrender the communication space to terrorist and surrender the narrative to it, but that would help reduce the social impact. It is not just terrorists that carry out the attack which are operational in this communication space after the attack, we see many other aligned actors taking place, such as other extremist groups exploiting the situation. After jihadist attacks, we often see far right groups the backing piggybacking attacks and exploiting it for their own agenda, using it to drive polarization, leading to reprisal attacks, a surge in hate crimes, after attacks, there is normally a surge in hate crimes afterwards. Also by accident or by design, between minutes or hours of terrorist attack, we often see conspiracy theories developing or misinformation, which in turn shape how things are interpreted. Also one of the most disturbing is we see hostile state actors being operational in this instance, in order to help manipulate the communication field, to amplify its effects, to drive polarization in order to push an agenda. Critically, if states are not prepared to be operational in this phase, they are surrendering to the other actors. We need to have a communication strategy in place to help shape the narrative and reduce the social impact of threats. I will quickly wrap up. 1. I want to get back to, communications in Counter Terrorism is far more than just counter narratives. The thing we often forget about in communications is it is meant to be strategic, and it has a role to play in the totality of counterterrorism strategy, and not just in an individual aspect of it. Thank you so much. That was very interesting. I look to this whole series, such an Impressive Group of academic writers involved in this project. It is very interesting to read. I will now hand over to dr. Ingram. Thanks, and thanks, alastair. And thanks to everyone who is attending. I appreciate those of you who are here and made it. I also need to take this opportunity to thank the Global Engagement center for the opportunity that they gave me to access these internal documents and evaluations and provide the assessment that i will talk very fleetingly today, looking forward to the discussion, but the policy paper is on the website for those of you who are interested. My goal in the next 15 minutes is to give you a bit of a background to the policy paper, talk about its key findings, if assessments, and then conclude with recommendations. The paper owes much to the access that i am fortunate to receive from the state department, but it also owes a lot to the work of other researchers, those who have tried to understand this complex system of threats, many of whom are in these audiences, my colleagues at the Naval Postgraduate School they work into specific threats, things, and trends. In informed and allowed me to adopt the approach i did, which was to understand the current u. S. Posture in the context of a broader in touche and all history. That institutional history that preceded it. So what is the current state of u. S. Posturing and how to address this propaganda and disinformation threats . It is captured pretty well by the 2017 National Security strategy, which says that these events have been covered and fragmented. U. S. Efforts have been lacking focus and hampered by the lack of properly trained professionals. The question is, well, how did we get to this point . Of course, posture is not just the product of current decisions. Decisions made in the last six months, year, even two years. It is that institutional history. The impact that history has not only on making decisions, on precedents, on the legislation that already exists, this Strategic Policy and guidelines that already exist. But also, there are abstract things that are harder to understand or turn into tangibles, which is the mentality of staff working in these areas. And of course, the collective of all of this. What i want to try to do is understand not just the policy dynamics and the broader dynamics, but some of the more abstract things that are just as important to success in National Security and in championing the foreignpolicy agenda. To look back and a more textually considered way at what has been done in the past and how weve got to the situation we are in right now. I have distilled this assessment down to a few points. Firstly, the answers to a set up recurring questions has driven the evolution of u. S. Government information efforts for about a century. Here are the questions should Persuasive Communications play a role in how the u. S. Pursues its foreignpolicy and National Security agendas . If so, how should this be achieved . Therefore, who should be responsible . Deceptively simple questions, implications, bureaucratic legislation has been profound. Trends in the government sector has reflected the answers to these questions, which themselves have been influenced by shifting perceptions of who are the primary threats. Different beliefs in the u. S. global role in the world and Risk Appetite at the time. His history about a centurys worth of this history can be captured in this regularly repeating dynamic of building up the central mechanisms of the u. S. Government and the National Security policy information sector, dismantling it, to rebuild it again later, just to dismantle it and rebuild it again later. This trend, i would argue it can be traced back to 1919, when the u. S. Committee on Public Information was suspended by executive order only to be rebuilt decades later, in response to the nazi and japanese propaganda threats. The u. S. And many of its allies have with Persuasive Communications can also be traced back to world war i, when the alleys were seen, at least with hindsight, to have manipulated the minds. They capture this sentiment well. The report falsehood in wartime captures this sentiment well. He says that the deflowerment of the human soul is worse than the destruction of the human body. This is something that has remained ingrained in a way that so many of these institutions, the cultures and mentality of them have at the time. We see this trend i talked about constantly playing out, where the u. S. Government information sector, especially such as the office of war information in world war ii, the cold war, the gce during the global war on terror, they are belatedly built in response to a threat. The rebuilding process will be split by the interagencies doing this work already. At first, the mandates of the central mechanisms are narrow. Poorly defined, and the Institutional Knowledge is lost. One of the key recommendations is that it is essential that some of the historical lessons, that we return to those and try to capture them. And so you have this recurring dynamic through the second world war, roosevelt establishes the owi, the office of war information, to streamline functions. This was centralize functions. It creates tensions with the oss and obviously with the Armed Services as well. This was not just about finite resources. Just as much about philosophy and strategy. A shining city on the hill or do we play the way our adversaries do . Covert and unattributed . Of course, what happened to owi, it