Can we have everyone sit down . Thanks. Thank you. Hi, welcome to the second session of todays symposium. This is titled combating online operations. Im the senior fellow for digital policy at the counsel, and were very lucky to have these experts with us to discuss this issue. We have renee, thomas, and clint. I anticipate a very lively and fascinating conversation. I want to start with thomas. When the Supreme Court and the u. S. Decided on Citizens United back in 2010 it predicated the whole idea that corporations should be able to spend money in elections because the internet, you know, which was then seen as this great engine of transparency and democracy, that the internet was going to bring full transparency to american election. And so that was going to be the magic bullet. And, you know, at the time i was in the obama administration, we were really taken with the idea of internet freedom. But it seems that since then the openness of the internet which we hoped would solve a lot of political problems, undermyna thoritarian government is almost being used to undermine democracy by some authoritarian governments. I wondered if you give us a little history, what it is were missing and what do we need to be mayipaying more attention to. Thank you, id be happy to provide some history. Im writing a book right now. Please stop me if i start to skip into too much detail there. But disinformation or active measures to use the old soviet term of art which emerged in the 60s is of course a very old phenomenon. And if we go look at the cold war we literally have hundreds more likely thousands of examples. Small individual active measures of disInformation Operations. I interviewed a few people who actually worked in active measures for their entire career, as you may be able to hear in my funny accent im german. So i recently interviewed a form former stazi operator. From one of them i got this great line that they thought the best mix between truth and fact, fact and forgering, truth and lie is 8020. 80 true, 20 false because that makes it really hard for journalists or experts like us to actually tell whats true, factual and whats not factual. So lets make an example of a particularly vicious operation from the year 1960 that was revealed in a congressional hearing in the mid1980s. In 1960 the context here is decolonization. And many african countries merely independent wondering if they should join the west or the soviet bloc. And in that context suddenly a pamphlet appeared, a 16page pamphlet appeared in i believe 16 different african countries in french as well as in english. And it contained pictures and text, and it was entitled to our dear friends. And it was on the face of it written by an africanamerican in the United States african many organization to africans in africa explaining to them the true ugly face of American Culture at home. And it was full of racial discrimination, lynchings in the south, Police Violence against africanamericans. Now i checked and went through the press reports at the time and almost every single detail in those 16 pages is completely accurate. Down to the very gruesome details that im not going to repeat here. But this is an example of an active measure that was a real headache for the state department. Very difficult to counter because it was based in truth, facts. But at the same time under a false cover of a nonexistent organization. So it is just one of literally hundreds of examples that i think highlights some methods of operation that we still see today. So clint, youve been talking about how the u. S. Has to respond for quite some time. And we see in some other western democracies there is some response in the operations. Can we talk about what seems to be working, what might be some interesting models . I dont know anythings working yet. There is some progress. Theres the defense and then the sort of countering portion. The europeans get it because theyve been in this game much longer than we have in the United States. Theres a twopart failure in the United States with russian meddling. One, we didnt understand hacks were being used for influence. We were looking at it from investigations. And the second part was this was already going on in places like eastern ukraine, brexit. We didnt think it would happen in the United States. We were arrogant to this, that it would never come to our shores. But they are more in the trenches on this. Theyve been dealing with it for a long time. So the things they did a 50year period is education. We dont invest in it here, but they very much push forward their stances on it. And the other thing theyve done is go ahead and acknowledge when these untruths are being leveraged towards them and in certain cases czech republics they are organizing. For them its a challenge because they have different audiences. If you want to understand russian active measures its about language not necessarily about culture because thats how you communicate in social media. So if you want to track and influence a campaign you just need to look at the languages theyre using and the way theyre narrating all that. Whats interesting with all those countries as opposed to our own is, you know, the basic rule youre taught in boxing which is you dont punch back until youre feet are on the ground. So they understand what they want in their country and what theyre defending, what their policies are and then can move to counter the influence narrative. We have failed in this for a decade now whether its been the terrorists or the russian disinformation in our counter influence because we dont really know if we believe in it and we dont always stand for it. You cant counter back whether its online or on the ground a counter influence campaign unless you know what your nations policies are, believes are and what youre going to push back with. If you look at the cold war, we were prodemocracy. We had nationalism. We had things we were trying to advance around the world. Right now i am not sure that the russian message is different than our own here at home. And so you cant do counter influence or counteractive measures until theres some consensus at home about what we believe in here, what we defend, and what well promote overseas. The narrative we saw rise around the election is antieu, antinato, lets Work Together to kill isis, be a nationalist, not a globalest. You first, the world second. How do we counter that . It sounds pretty familiar. So im just saying in terms of you cannot move forward, the way the europeans are moving forward even in their own countries they have a baseline from which theyre standing in their counter influence campaigns. They know whos in charge. I dont think we have that here. Both structurally and in terms of message theyre just much more grounded. They can punch back. Just to pick up on that, one thing ive heard people talk about it is its just so much easier to be negative. Its much easier to get your message out than if youre in favor of something. What youre saying is theres been some success. People at least have a better ability to articulate what democracy is about. Right, its not just about democracy. Some countries will say its about us first and not our adversary. But they have a clear way of communicating to their publics both from a Leadership Perspective and through their media and Public Affairs where they communicate out to their public very clearly, this is what we stand for, this is what we believe in. So its a positive message. Its not just an antirussian for example. Thats right. And it may be a nationalist. And our biggest challenge right now it has been, i will be coming up on the fouryear mark the first time i talked about this in government audiences. In 2014 the last Government Group i talked to was three or four months ago and i have the same deer in the headlight look when i talk about this stuff. Not because theyre doing anything wrong, there are agencies in the u. S. Government that want to do things. But the way our system works is policy sets requirements, requirements set funding. This is how we move our organizations. And im not sure anyone knows what their role is in countering influence online or who would have the ball. I made specific recommendations. Theyre pretty easy actually. You know, fbi should look at investigations of hacks now for how might this be used for influence later. And thats inoculation strategy. Dhs and state department at home or abroad should defute falsehoods almost immediately. In the Intel Community we have decide what our strategy is in information and influence. No one really knows at least i dont know whos in charge. Its been a year sips this happened now, and i dont see any gears moving at this point. Rene, i want you to take us to the private sector and talk about the private platforms. Theyve been doing a lot, some more than others. But putting in people to review accounts, review posts. Talk to us a little bit about where the incentives for the these platforms are and to the extent of which they have the incentive to cleanup versus the tension between their economic model and cleaning up disinformation. Sure. Theres a i want to first pay ba back on this idea that no ones in charge. Theyre Business Models are based on attention. Theyre selling ads. They want to keep you on their platform because they want to be the one to serve you the ads because thats how they earn revenue. Theres a fundamental Business Case thats underlined why the kind of fundamental challenge is doing things to make you happy on the platform is such a core part of the business. And thats why its so personalized. You see the things that are likely to make you happy and keep you on the platform. And so when that intersects with an influence operation its very carefully tailored. Influence operations have been around for decades. But the vectors of disinformation have changed. The ability to personalize that content has change. The ability to target individuals with exactly whats going to work for them based on the corpus of data that platforms have accrued about each one of us over years and years of use, what did you click on, that tells me something about you. If it doesnt tell me something directly, i have a correlation to someone like you. Anybody running an ad or growing an audience on a platform like facebook is reaching people who are predisposed to be interested in the content. Thats why its such an effective means of delivery. So thats the kind of base framework. So the problem is if this used to be ten years ago now the concept of the filter bubble became popular, the idea that the platforms were showing people what they wanted to see. And that was kind of creating these information silos. When you look at what has to be done to break people out of that or to say these people are more likely to be prediz posed to disinformation content, the platforms are not coming back and telling people who viewed this content that they were targeted. So right now a lot of conversations weve been having are what are the responsibilities of the platforms sphcan we ask them to act against their own economic interest in the interest of society . The way in Information Operation is connected is its not limited to one network. By writing an article, creating whats known as a content forum or blog or anyone can write anything on the internet. This was supposed to be a great advantage because we all had the opportunity to make our voices heard and get information out there. But i can write something on my blog and post it to reddit. I can do this with tons and tons of content and i can see what gets left. I can see the ranking of whats moving up the page. Its being voted on by the readers. Theyre endorsing it. Then i can take the content that plays really well and move it over to facebook. And on facebook i can use an ad campaign to grow an audience. Once i have some audience i achieve whats called organic lift. Thats the idea of rather than having to pay content to somebody each time, my hundreds and thousands of people who have been onto follow my page or who have joined my group, are going to push that content out for me. So facebook has a much larger audience than reddit. What ive done is tested the content on reddit. Theres a number of these kind of platforms where i can see the reaction of the community i want to go for. Then i can move it to facebook where i can begin to have people do the sharing work for me which brings down the cost to run the campaign. At this point i have hundreds and thousands of people disseminating my propaganda for free. Also im going to take it to twitter. And what im going to use twitter for is twitter has a high concentration of media users. Theres a ton of journalists on twitter, millions and millions of followers. Donald trump, for example. 45 million i think. At that point i can kind of cross the rubicon, and if i can make something trend on twitter, retweet my content, retweet my article i can at that point guarantee there will be some Media Coverage of it. The Media Coverage might debunk it, but it doesnt matter even with the active debunking its still keeping it in the public consciousness. We call them hoaxes, but its a very quaint term. Or if the media doesnt cover it, i can start a Conspiracy Theory why the media didnt cover that trending topic. So im going to win either way. So this is the way that somebody interested in conducting a campaign will do it in a Cross Platform strategy. And theres no one really responsible for shutting it down because the platforms, im told they have some kind of back channel information sharing. But we didnt see anything really remarkably effective in 2016. And weve continued to see some interesting hoaxes take place you know with regard to the alabama election right now, ongoing. So thomas, talk to us about this concept of organic and the bots plan. Whats the role of the bots and whats the nature of the problem . Bots are certainly an important problem. But before we talk about some of the more technical aspects of application operations on social media, i think we should take a small step back and speak about the role of the press, the role of journalists for a short moment, i think. Again, historically theres a great line, the head of the stazi Disinformation Forum he was brill i want. He was better at this than kgb, because their main target was west germany. They literally could sometime listen to them, they could make german jokes and west germans would laugh about them. You know, as much as germans joke. [ laughter ] and so they had this idea what would be the active measure without the journalists . So the journalists is an integral part of this operation. We saw that play in 2016 in the election interference in a new way. Lets tease out how it was new. Active measures, i mentioned this particularly bad one from 1960, back in the day were artisinal. You needed to know if youre doing the work, they required craftsmanship from intelligence operators. Today or in 2016 the active measure was very much industrial scale. They hacked a lot of data, put the data in the Public Domain through wikileaks or other fronts. And then it was the journalists of the victim society, the victim country, in this case the United States that actually created the value in terms of the damage done. Because they went in looks for the demes and the nuggets and reported them out and ignored the source. Now every journalist or everybody really who now we think we understand the risks and we wouldnt make the same mistake again, i think we all have to think again. Two weeks ago a little thing happened in germany which is remarkable. Two weeks ago theres people running a story about germanys u. N. Ambassador, the former security advisor. And theyre reporting that hed cept an email to the u. N. Secretarygeneral asking in somewhat in an improper way to create a job for his wife. He probably shouldnt have done that. But that email they dont say where they got the email from. The next day another source tells the newspaper we know that ap 28, and they explicitly identify that as russian intelligence, hacked the systems, found the email, gave it to a speaker journalist and he ran the story for the second time. He had already done that a couple months prior knowing he probably advances the interest of a russian intelligence agency. Ask i think we shouldnt underestimate the competitive the rough competitive nature of journalism in a crisis that is actually created by the social Media Companies. So you have the perfect storm for active measures. Clint, would you pick up on that . And sometimes its the competitive force, sometimes its ignorance, right . Right. And sometimes they feel they have no choice. Something becomes trending, the bots are pushing it, the president has talked about it. What can be done, and if the government if theres a limit to what our government can do, Civil Society in other countries is taking measures to push back. Right. I mean, hes exactly right. Comtitian is one of the motives that makes it super easy to get active measures to work. The other one is fear. If you can scare a population, which the russians and the soviets before them were very smart about doing calamitous messages. You hit them with fear and load up a political message right behind it, theyre more likely to fall for it as well. And you see that with benghazi conspiracies that would be pushed around, some of things we observed in the social media space and people would grab them. Very few in a couple of cases, and their followers can spread it much more quickly. I think there are a few things we need to think about. The internet and anonymity. Everyone comes to the internet or social media with the best of intentions. And the those with the resources, time and worst intentions ultimately take control of it. You can look at criminals and hackers arent they going around the world making us transparent and free . Anybody ever happened what happened to those guys . You know, the big and the powerful ultimately come to learn how these things work. And if you arent under the rule of law, if you dont have to worry about civil lishlts, if you dont have to worry about a free press checking you, youre going to work around the system. I think myanmar is great case system how this has been duplicated in a year. I think were seeing