The annenberg Public Policy center, also on the university of pennsylvania. There i hand it over to moderator, this discussion is being livestreamed, and you can post your comments and questions on twitter using the protectdemocracy2020. Our team will be monitoring the monitoring the hash tag and pose your questions to the monitor. America may have been caught off but theres no the samer falling for tricks again twice. Understand the influences around us, take steps take proactive steps to counter them, and work to strengthen our democracy. This collaboration is our effort to do just that. Im now going to turn the over to the professor claire finkelstein, my friend and faculty director of the center for ethics and the rule of law at the university of pennsylvania law school, who is theleading voice on intersection of law, ethics, and national security. Willto claire, who introduce our guests for the session. Thank you soin much, carrie, and its a to have this with c nas. N more important topic today than Election Security as we approach the 2020 general election and look back at what last foured in the years encompassing the lessons 2018 key. 016 and it is critical that different stakeholders, experts, academics, practitioners come together to think hard about the security of our democracy and about where we need to be moving forward as we approach the elections and beyond. I am delighted today to have two of the greatest experts on this topic and friends and colleagues as well. Kathleen jamison, the director of the annenberg Public Policy and the author of a very important book called cyber war that dealt with the 2016 elections. Im delighted to have kathleen here. And director james clapper, director of the office of toelligence from 2000 one thousand six. Im also pleased to say he is an executive board member of the center of ethics and the rule of law, of which i and the faculty director. Jump right into goingnversation, and im to moderate a conversation with director klapper and professor Kathleen Hall jamieson in an informal conversational manner, inviting them to jump in, and then we will field your questions. Im going to raise a few topics for discussion, and in the first instance, let me just pitch this to jim klapper. The general review of what we know about the 2016 election and the dangers that lead up to it are something you have spoken about consistently, written about and discussed widely, but give us a sense as we approach the topic of Election Security in 2020, what are the lessons we need to have learned from the 2016 election, and what should we be looking at in particular, drawing from those lessons for the upcoming general election . Mr. Klapper thank you and see thisnd others for hosting very timely discussion on Election Security. Russians have a long history of interfering in elections, theirs and other peoples, and the expectation, i think, was we expected sort of the ambient level, some reconnoitering, if you will, reconnaissance, as well as perhaps intervention. Russia has a long history of interfering in our country, going back to the beginning of the cold war era. Normally not that difficult to detect. 2016, they took it to a new low, and of course, they capitalized socialtechnology and experiencedey never depth, scope, and aggressiveness on the of an attack on our fundamental system as we did in 2016. Multiprongs included a very sophisticated Propaganda Campaign on two Principal Networks funded by the russian government, in addition to, of course, the hacking and timely dumping of emails, but to me, the most disturbing thing, which we were unprepared for was the social media assault. The most current insights we have are that russia reached 400,000 americans on facebook alone. They had messages for everybody black lives matter, white supremacists, whatever group there was, they exploited their grievances and helped, i believe, to suppress in certain cases voting. The electionnd, came down to less than 80,000 votes in three key states that russians targeted. Beenng back, i wish we had more aggressive about publicizing this. Contemporaneously reasons for not doing that initially. It was quite reasonable. For one, concern about magnifying or amplifying what the russians were doing. I think the bigger point for president obama was he was very concerned about the perception, favoring one his candidate against another against the backdrop of the accusations already being made. Y then candidate trump others have gone to school and what the russians did, so we have the chinese and iranians involved, but the primary threat continues to be the russians. The chinese and arabians i think are overly ambitious. What concerns me the chinese and iranians i think are overly ambitious. What concerns me is the problem of the russians who will have. One to school the russians made public their tricks from 2016. Im convinced they are at it again, but it will be harder to detect, so i will stop there. Professor finkelstein in you book, cyber war, russianate if interference may have actually thrown the election. Can you talk about if in fact you think it did. Think then i dont social Media Campaign did. They were engaging in activities consistent with the Trump Campaigns and knees. They were trying to mobilize constituencies that he needed to mobilize like evangelical catholics, for example. They were trying to demobilize black americans, and they were trying to shift votes where they could to thirdparty candidate jill stein. We knew that from the early evidence available. By the time the second edition came out, we had a complete block of all the twitter content, though facebook was much less revelatory. What we could tell from that, from the additional materials that had been exposed between the First Edition and second edition second edition just came out in june we were able to analyze the extensive content that was there, that very large multimilliondollar number, most of which is not direct electoral content. If you look at the amount of the exposure they had, they would have had to reach high levels of susceptible individuals in large numbers to create a decisive impact. They did not have enough reach contentnot have enough on social media to do that. They probably created some effect on the margin. They changed however, they changed the media agenda across time, and that change was across time far more visible to the american electorate overall than anything on social media. Media in and the direction that disadvantages one candidate because you create a message and balance against that andidate, you create imbalance. 2016 was unusual. Electorate is pretty locked in by the conventions. It was not in 2016. We also had a High Percentage of people who did not like either candidate, and coming into the period in which that content was most visible, we had a high level of early voting, and as a result, the influence from the hacked content was much higher than the social media influence. Also, theres evidence the russians influence jim coming to Hillary Clintons investigation. The voting patterns in the last week turned against her decisively. That could have been a mediaation of the hacked and the comey disclosure. If there is any role of russian influence in that disclosure, then it becomes much more decisive. Dr. Finkel thing professor finkelstein you say this represents a shift between the first and second edition of the book . The First Edition, we knew the social media activity was based on sound information before the election. There was enough to create a message imbalance, but the First Edition did not know how money people were actually reached by electoral irrelevant content. Once we saw all of what was there, we did not see all of what was there before the First Edition was out. We largely saw the advertised content. Everything about her, but enough that was electorally relevant reaching enough people to create , the hacked content had ther hand media Agenda Setting is powerful and also creates message in balancing against and. We have advents from our server that those people who were shifting their votes across time were shifting them consistent with the patterns of media change associated with the hacked content released in the first and the second and third debates hacked content, its a media problem as much as a rush intervention problem. The perception that Hillary Clinton had one thing in public and another in private, the inference was strong the people he said that, difference between those who watch the debates and didnt were less likely to vote for Hillary Clinton. Thats a clear evidence of impact than anything you can say about the trolls. What did we know, when did we know what kathleen is saying right now, how influential the hacked content was and what could have been done about it . We had a month to put together our ica, so we didnt have the level of detail that you just heard at the time. I wish we had, but we didnt, and some of this, frankly, came from these sort of innate instinctive reluctance to media, Domestic Social and so we didnt have quite the i dont know that we were able to gauge in the short period of time we had what the impact was, and in my book, assert, which are published two years ago, that based on what i russiansel sure the really made the difference in swinging the election towards donald trump and away from Hillary Clinton. Now you just heard some very specific empirical evidence that makes that case, but we didnt have the detail or specificity specificity for years ago that looking back we know now. I would commend come for example, the first part of the Mueller Report, which doesnt get a lot of attention, and the extensive technical detail that the decision to publish was made while as intelligent people traditionally are concerned sources and methods as well. It went into just extensive detail about the technical basis and the evidentiary basis for extended russian interference, so all these things, this is a good thing, that have come out since the assessment we did which we put together in one month. All have one followup with you, jim, and then i will come back to you, kathleen. The hacking that took place, there were supposedly hacking of the rnc, not just the d c, but we never saw and emailed dont from the rnc we never saw an dump from the rnc. What exactly do you think the russians were thinking when they and then release them on wikileaks, as far as we know . Dir. Clapper i dont know what they were thinking, im not a mind reader of the russians, but i assume they felt there was political hay to be made here, since they clearly, it starts with putin himself had a very strong animus for both clintons, but specifically hillary, since he held her responsible for a revolution against him in the elections of 2011. She i guess they made the continued decision that whatever they could do that wouldnt anyway embarrass her and damage her candidacy, they would do. But i cant tell you what they were actually thinking. Kathleen what you were saying, the timing was a big part of the impact with the media amplifying that content and helping to assure ironically that it had the impact the russians were seeking. This question of mr. Clapper, on october 7, did the Intelligence Committee mean to convey that the russians were behind the hacking of the d c only and not behind the podesta hacking . Because what happened on october 7 was that the access Hollywood Tape being released on that day, your Intelligence Report comes out, then you get the access hollywood hit and the same day content washacked dumped. With the journalist to understand from the intelligence briefing that the hacking in was it only focused on the earlier dnc hacked . Dir. Clapper it was only focused on the earlier hacked. Would noturnalist necessarily have been able to say that the podesta hacked content was russian in origin when it was used to counteract counterbalance the access Hollywood Tape and that story. Dir. Clapper we didnt factor time, this stuff at the the access Hollywood Tape obviously caught us by surprise. We had decided to do that a week or two at least before it was actually released because we did have to haggle over the language wein, protecting source had to run it through the interagency, so it just was a happenstance that we got all that done in publicly release that statement on the seventh of october, and of course the message was completely emasculated by the access Hollywood Tape. First theres the evidence of the russians changing the media agenda. Had you had that announcement by the Intelligence Committee and the access Hollywood Tape, and remember the second debate is october 9, two days later, would have been an antitrump media agenda. How do you know, what you know about the russians for practical purposes, the media agenda, Intelligence Communitys report drops below the front fold on the first page and out of the media agenda on the sunday news shows and as a result was not being featured prominently by the media as it began to cover the rest of the hacked content week by week throughout the rest of the election. The first clear electoral effect of the russians through Julian Assange is to create an equivalence media play that day that resulted in the downplay of the Intelligence Community report and creates a parallel between what does donald trump say in private and doing public and what does Hillary Clinton say in public and do in private . So now instead of two pieces of news that would be potentially damaging, the counterbalancing of the hacks against the content been played against the access Hollywood Tape, donald trump potentially wouldve lost his place at the top the ticket had you had only those two pieces of potentially problematic news for trump and not the potential counterbalancing which is why its so important to know whether the reporters could reasonably surmise the russians were behind the hacking of the podesta content or not, and raises the question, when did the Intelligence Committee know the podesta content was russian hacked and how and when did it tell the press that . I do not recall specifically the date and time that we realized we were overwhelmed we were aware of the podesta tapes. I just dont remember clearly the sequence there. One of my critiques of the press coverage, as we look to 2020, how would the press treat , not as important important,xtremely and the press cannot know from the intelligence guidi that the podesta content was russian hacked, then you should have been saying all through october and november russian hacked every time you covered podesta content, because they wouldnt have known that yet. Why were you saying to the Intelligence Community, was it russia hacked . Lets go on to what we can anticipate in the next 50 days. We havent seen that kind of this time around and maybe its yet to come, but lets since youve highlighted that with the hacking side of things for the moment. Jim, what have we done, from what you know, and obviously you are not in office anymore, but from public reports or from anything else that you know, what have we done to protect ourselves against this kind of hacking content in the runup to the 2020 election . Dir. Clapper well, i think the first thing that is important, theres a lot more awareness and threatvity to the whole posed by the russians, so im sure a lot has been done through the state and local level to improve cybersecurity, and thats probably uneven in places, im sure are better than others. There is the greater awareness of it and if it were to occur, i would hope, i dont know, that there would be a more aggressive publicity about it. I do think that there could effortbe another such made by the russians. Im part of an effort called cyber dome, which is a group of people that on a volunteer nonprofit basis are trying to those helping and with the campaigns to secure their networks, and i think there are a lot of efforts going on. Dhs, they feelm confident that they are much better prepared, and im sure they are. Age how effective thats going to be or nor can i foresee exactly what other things that we havent thought of the russians might do. Questionsof the kathleens discussion raises is if such a hack and dump or to occur in the next 50 days, or we prepared to manage the fallout of that in a more effective way than we did the last time . Taught society and in particular is the media prepared to identify or at least be suspicious to a greater degree than they were in 2016 . Out,ch information coming itorder to potentially label as hacked content. Medialapper when you say , there are wide variances in the spectrum there, so i dont know the answer to your question about how well the media is prepared or the public. Im frankly concerned about how the government reacts. So what is your thought about that . Then i will turn back to kathleen and ask her the same question. Dir. Clapper the appearance at sort of muzzling or at least i think slanting the message a bit, we received so a highcant say i have level of confidence about just how much of this would be shared with the media and the American Public or anybody or Even Congress for that matter. Claire kathleen, do you think were better prepared to deal with this kind of hack and dump this time around that we were in 2016 . Kathleen we know there are attempt to hack right now, so the question is are we going to see this happening sometime in the next weeks . Failureure in 2016 is a of journalistic norm enforcement. In fairness to reporters, they had over 150,000 blocks of or units of content being dropped. Thats an