Watch booktv this Labor Day Weekend on cspan2 and be sure to watch the all virtual 2020s National Book festival Live Saturday september 26 on booktv. Good afternoon. Im jane harman, the president and ceo, like me you are probably suffering from zoom 50. However, to in here. This is a very important event and im excited. This is one of the zooms im really looking forward to. Because we are celebrating a new book, an important book by our very own nina janke waits who has done stellar work at the Wilson Center disinformation fellow, the coolest title ever. Since last october. Before that she was a scholar with our institute on russia and ukraine and how to lose information war, russia, fake news and the future of congress. Its an amazing title and is essential reading for everyone on this call and zoom in all your friends. We remember russia Successful Campaign in 2016 to so distrust and confusion in years ahead of the president ial election but in order to win the information war as nina would say, we need to understand what this information is. I heard her on this topic before, and what it is not. This is false list thats different from misinformation which can also be harmful but lacks the maligned intent. It also has broader goals and propaganda which involves the promotion of the nations worldview. As nina wright quote unlike soviet propaganda which sought to promote the specific communist centric worldview, the kremlin today divides population around the world with one goal in mind, the destruction of western democracy as we know it, unquote. Our democracy, no surprise to anyone on this symptom continues to face tremendous threats of disinformation. Issue we face not only another election but also a pandemic which nina will tell us has read shadow pandemic of disinformation of coronavirus. Weve done programming on it and washes writing the book nina like the rest of us have no clue the coronavirus was working around the corner but shes done an excellent job keeping up with the changes of disinformation affects more and more of the media lansky. I would like to say her job is to spread information in the world of disinformation and in a book she has an engaging journalistic writing style with the rigorous look about this spreads virtue draws on the critics. In ukraine which he received fulbright grant to advise Ukrainian Government on strategic communications. Most importantly she does what the Wilson Center does best, which is to offer clearheaded policy recommendations to the United States and other governments this challenge. Joining gene on todays panel are Matthew Rojansky as well as asha rangappa, former fbi counterintelligence agency, agent who is now senior lecturer at Yale UniversityJackson Institute for global affairs. Please note if you have questions for the panel you can email them to cannon at wilsoncenter. Org. Or mention us on twitter at the Wilson Center. To kick off the discussion now, and its my delight to recognize Matthew Rojansky and nina, kudos and bravo, you would are a treasure of the Wilson Center and write a book in addition to all the of the good work you do for us is just magical come very exciting. Over to you, matt. Thank you so much. Im going to start things off and going to do that by thinking you enable at the Wilson Center so much for your support over the past three years, this process was a threeyear long process from conception living in ukraine to today from office and it wouldnt of been able to do it without the support of the Kennan Institute. Matt and the Kennan Institute saw the work of this project was in its infancy and supported it and help give me the room and space to development and, of course, the program shepherded t to the end. Im so grateful for your support and im thrilled to be with you here today. I thought i would read a little bit from the conclusion of the book which i wrote about this time last year, the end of july, early august when i i was tryig to imagine what this topic future say would look like for the United States if we did not begin to push back against disinformation. Not just but the domestic valley which is begin to infect our discourse at a really alarming rate recently. Again this topic future think youll find some of the elements are hitting a little bit closer to him than i imagined when i wrote them. Imagine if july 2020 and another u. S. President ial election is fast approaching talk in most americans you wouldnt know it. Turnout has been on a steady decline since 2020 when a nationwide Democratic Party organize social media manipulation campaign sprint. After election day came and went, trump easily won a second term at a ukrainian journalist uncovered this manipulation story was fabricated. It originated from a trial accountbased and sochi russia were another troll factory had been operating quietly for years. The story alleged the leadership of the Democratic National committee itself had been using russia style social media tactics, with a welltimed tweet from an authentic account in sochi to Rudy Giuliani, the rumor got its legs and with a single retweet the former new york mayor turned the entire twitter sphere rabbit. And it crossed party lines. It was no matter story was complete hearsay. No one ever reduce the shred of concrete evidence about the whole affair but after the dnc had been hacked and its email plastered across the internet during the 2016 election it lost members and more importantly unaffiliated swing voters. They were fed by nonstop. In a vicious unending circle the news media reported on the new allegations despite a lack of evidence. It was what voters candidates and parties were discussing. How could believe it untouched . Doubt and integrity of the american electoral process bloom. Technical difficulties with electronic Voting Machines were perceived as potential vote hacking, and the lack of investment in the security and improvement of American Election infrastructures since 2016 made that theory seem possible. Doubt, despite four years of organizing against trump youth turnout reached its lowest levels ever. Young people were to disillusion with the corrupt system to participate in. Chomps base ever lived turned out in droves. He won reelection and the decoration of the american information ecosystem continued apace. His administration slashed funding for the public broadcasting Station National public radio and fed usborn broadcasters on a path to extinction. This is the ideal outcome for moscow, american democracy once a shining city on a hill is is weakened crumbling in 2028. The debate, dissent and protest in which the u. S. Was founded are increasingly foreign concepts. Corruption once kept in check by an active media that engaged electorate reaches the highest levels of government. Consumed by problems at home, viewers is less engaged abroad and the criminal points to the failings of our democratic system to justify repressions and abroad embrace of authoritarianism inside and outside its borders. This scenario shouldnt seem farfetched. The United States along with some of the country profile in my book and venerated european democracies were all on our way to a factory version of democracy like, which the tenets of the democratic process participation and protests are under attack. My book how to lose the information war lays at how to avert this scenario and laser how to rebuild our discourse reporting from five countries on the frontlines of the information war, estonia, georgia, holden, the Czech Republic in ukraine i introduce readers to the people who fought russian disinformation, such as sessa, some muscle the lessons theyve learned. The most important one is that people need to be at the heart of the response to disinformation. Tech platforms can come with comfortableness, none of them can fact check their way out of the crisis we face but if we educate our citizens and repair the crack in our democracies that allowed troll farms to influence them in the first place, we might have a shot at averting disaster. If we dont i feel our efforts will become another cautionary tale and another example of how to lose the information worker now im going to turn it over to matt. Thank you so much. Thank you jane and asha. Nina said exactly right. We at the Kennan Institute were enormously pleased to have found nina. Really it wasnt as supporting nina but her work supporting the mission at a really difficult time for talking and thinking seriously about russia, ukraine, former soviet region issues and anything that had a whiff of election interference. You all know very well, i can imagine england on this call hasnt noticed you cant open your mouth and have a conversation about whats happening in that part of the World Without it becoming about american politics. Nina comes along with just a doggedly i would say clear commitment to the idea that you can work on this topic and not have it just american domestic politics or some other kind of political agenda. I want to offer a few further thoughts about why this book is so worthwhile to pick up and read. I have read it and really enjoyed and benefited from it, why the Kennan Institute was so important to support nina and her work. First is that theres something almost metaphorically perfect about the fact that nina again as a canon fell and was seem like ancient history back in 2017 and is ended up now still wonderfully with us at the Wilson Senate but in the science, technology and Information Program as a disinformation philip reeker sounds like a thank you may have on a desktop but its not that. Its a cool new opportunity that didnt exist back in 2017 but its not only that incident. Its the fact when you start to unpack a lot of the dysfunctional dangers dynamics and russias conflict with the west, disinformation being only one of them, you find yourself quickly when you get to the essence of the issues you find yourself in place thats not so much about russia or u. S. Russian relations. Almost something bigger, globl in nature, something fundamentally human, something about who we are, how we define ourselves, the conflicts to me the world go round. Its very fitting ninas Research Model that path was well and ill come to this in just a moment that i think her final recommendations are just exactly on point in that respect. As opposed to so much of what we see in washington. Let me say word about the regional case but use this in the book is organized potentially [inaudible] i read a lot of books about the former soviet space. A lot of them are organized in country or regional chapters and a lot of them are not worth your time for that reason. They treat each of these cases as interchangeable. They will apply the same tired methodologies. They will shoehorn individual players into the same which my call typecast role. Who was the champion of democracy in this country who was the kremlin agent in this country . We all know these narratives. Nina doesnt do that. These are rich, i think changes the term almost journalistically very well narrated retelling of her own expenses on the grant in these countries to give a rich slice of what its like to be engaged and public debate in which disinformation features prominently in countries that are by and large in the border region bordering kaliningrad and, of course, the Czech Republic not what bearing a legacy of comet is nonetheless an quite a bit influence. Theres an element much bigger than russia. Theres an element that is very specific to the region, the country, the time it and place. All of that is of great value. Then theres the big question race and hope we come to the standard discussion and thats the question of incentives. This is something we as americans need to be thinking very hard about now. We have i would argue one of the most, jingling of free will, rigid twoparty systems in the world where the incentives if you are coming from the outside or from the fringe, have vacated you have an id that is not mainstream. If someone is apparently healthy, if someone is stirring up dispute, discussion, debate, chaos that brings more attention to your cause its very hard in the face of that monolithic mainstream machine to decline that help or distance yourself from it. Its vital that nina phrases in the book as we watch really dangerous fringe elements gain traction to disinformation in her case studies but how do we address these and the United States in a context where whos to say out of the gate that damages are not needed in our debate . Finally i just want to echo her own concluding words in her excerpt that its about people, its about education, about democracy and i would introduce the term resiliency. To complete the thought i opened earlier, one of the most exhaustively written about anything also exhausting ineffectiveness policy lane is that of punishing bad guys. We have been in search for a quarter century or more of tools that will work to punish bad guys, whether that bad guy is Vladimir Putin or kim jongun or alqaeda, and we go back and forth between overuse of sanctions on overuse of drones and overuse of kind of diplomatic finger wagging. What is the normalcy refreshing if i may say so fundamentally cannon about what nina has written is it looks inward. It is selfcritical about the way that we are not resilient in the face of challenges that are going to be there, whether theres a Vladimir Putin behind in order isnt. I find it very refreshing. It is an unfortunate description of an unfortunate reality but it is in that sense very refreshing. I want to give the floor to asha and then well have conversation and pipit to questions from jane and from our audience out there. So, please. Thank you, matt. I wanted to just pick up where you left off in terms of why this book is really important to americas understanding of this problem, which i think is stymied for three main reasons i would say, and this book actually addresses all three of those. The first is that as nina points out in her book, this is not Americans First rodeo with disinformation coming from russia. This was kgbs m. O. , the house had curious about this in 1982. We have looked at this, but largely with the fall of the soviet union we thought it was all over. And i think that what ninas book does is it goes through, starting soon after putin comes to power and how methodically the kgbs tactics and methods have been practiced, we find, Incorporated New technologies, and basically as we stood by they have been practicing and finding ways to make this more and more effective as it has crept closer and closer to the United States, and literally caught us unaware because we stop seeing russia as a serious threat. In 2008 i think obama even made fun or 2012 obama made fun of romney for saying that russia was a threat. I think what nina shows also with this kind of, our blinders being on and with what she mentioned about russia not being constrained by an ideology is bad it actually gets russia much more flexibility in terms of putting it chemicals into american society, which is something that was very constraining for it during the cold war. We have a natural prophylactic because were in an ideological struggle. There were only really fringe elements which could be receptive to time his efforts were as now we see they have made inroads into the right and the left. Its of this kind of global federation, the practicing of all these methods and we could see in each of these case studies elements that are shown up in the United States. In each of these countries there some aspect that is manifested here. Its an important lesson for us. The second thing and this goes along with why we had our blinders on is about americans well i guess i will put it here. I went into the fbi in 2002 right after 9 11. It has been all terrorism all the time. We dont think of a threat, if it doesnt involve blowing things up and dead bodies and somebody trying to light the a e on fire on an airplane. Thats when you start taking drastic measures. This i think for americans we are very naive about this. Its hard for americans to get the mind around, and i think this is just also partly about the american psyche. Because we havent been practiced upon waking these case studies where the developed a certain understanding of it, americans fundamentally dont get it. We think of war we are very clear economies in america. War is terrorism or no threat or Something Like that it with these very clear ideas, and this really, the Information Warfare really turns this on its head. And i think that these case studies help show why this is very dangerous, why this is a threat even if you dont see something blowup, or its not an explosion or Something Like that. Related to that, the third thing i i also think americans are very naive about the idea of information as a weapon. This i think its partly a good thing and its because our first amendment, our constitution offers so much robust, so much space for robust disagreement. Our food of the press. We have been conditioned as americans to think of the speech and information as a net positive, and the way that marketplace of ideas come the way you combat bad speech with good speech. We havent fully understood how the marketplace of ideas doesnt necessarily translate into the digital space. This whole idea of information as a weapon is what is something were our mind around. Nina does a fantastic job of explaining