We have an important guest with a limited timeframe, so we are going to get started. I am ellen weintraub, chair of the federal Election Commission and i am delighted to welcome you to digital disinformation and the threat to democracy, information integrity in the 2020 election. A symposium i am cosponsoring with pan america and the digital policy incubator. This information has become a newly potent threat in the digital era. It has weaponize dare most cherished freedoms, some discord and undermined democracies worldwide. In the west we saw russia deploy disinformation as one of its tools, when, in the words of the mueller report, the russian government interfered in the 2016 president ial election in sweeping and systematic fashion. Alarms are being sounded throughout americas intelligence community, in the halls of congress by the departments of Homeland Security and justice, and by many of the experts who have generously taken time to speak to you today. They worn these attacks are ongoing, accelerating, and unlikely to be waged by russia alone going forward. In may, when the committee on House Oversight subcommittee on National Security held a hearing on securing americas election infrastructure and political discourse, i was pleased to be called upon to testify. I spoke then about how the infrastructure of our elections is not just the physical electoral apparatus run by state and local governments, but more fundamentally, the faith that american citizens have in our elections. I spoke about how that faith has been under malicious attack from our foreign foes with Disinformation Campaigns. When the russian government spent millions of dollars to interfere with our election that directly implicated the ban on foreign spending in our elections that is part of the Election Campaign act administered by the fec. They violated the core disclosure mission of this agency, but the problem is so much larger than that and cannot be meaningfully addressed if each of us views it through our own, narrow lens. This information is a fundamental assault on our democracy. On the united character of our United States. Disinformation exacerbates our division and distorts the truth that binds our common experience. The russian chess grandmaster and human rights activist, garry kasparov, a close student of russias disinformation and its main tool, propaganda, puts it this way. Quote, the point of modern propaganda isnt just to diss and form, it is to exhaust your Critical Thinking. To annihilate truth. Well, today we will prove that are Critical Thinking is not nearly exhausted and that truth has not nearly been annihilated. I am so gratified that this event has drawn to the fec one of the largest gatherings ive seen in my time as a commissioner. We have overflow space, standing room only. It is really terrific to see you all here. We have on hand current and former officeholders, scholars, journalists and advocates. We are focused fortunate to be joined by luminaries such as mark warner, and former Homeland Security secretary michael chertoff. A number of representatives from the Tech Community are in attendance including folks from google, microsoft, facebook and twitter. Some of them are on panels, but all of them will have opportunities to ask and answer questions and make comments. I think you for coming and i welcome your participation. In this gathering today we seek to launch a conversation. We have brought to this room many people with many different perspectives. We invited many others. Not everyone could make it, but this is a good beginning. We have a wealth of expertise and i intend to do far more listening than talking. Some of us here today, like me, swore an oath to protect and defend the constitution from enemies foreign and domestic, so it is fitting that we are gathered on constitution day, 232 years after the constitution was ratified, to Work Together to defend the system of government created by the constitution, which is indeed under attack. The task before us is large and challenging. We wont solve all of our problems today, but we definitely wont solve them by working in isolation. We have to Work Together and we have to see the big picture. I am grateful to have as my partners in this effort, cosponsors of this event, p. E. N. America and Stanford UniversitysGlobal Digital policy incubator. P. E. N. America has been a strong and consistent defender of First Amendment values and a leader in spotlighting the risk to free speech and open discourse posed by disinformation. I want to thank them for the vision, focus and energy that p. E. N. America and its ceo and washington director of brought to this joint project. Stanford universitys Global Digital policy incubator is another leader and innovator bringing together governments, Tech Companies and Civil Society to develop policies that advance human rights and Democratic Values. Thank you to the executive director, Eileen Donahoe, for all of your help and insight. I wont take the time to fully expand on their many accomplishments, but one really does bear noting. Working together they were instrumental in the passage of the firstever u. N. Resolution on Internet Freedom in 2012, which lay down the foundational principle that human rights must be protected online, just as they are offline. After getting housekeeping out of the way, my administrative staff asked me to point out to you two exits to this room. Right over here and way in the back. Doing my Flight Attendant routine. In case of a fire or emergency please exit in an orderly fashion and head to the staircase by the water fountains between the two doors. I hope the warnings are never necessary, but i especially hope they are needed today because i want this symposium to bring light, not heat, to the discourse on disinformation. In that spirit i am please to bring one of the countrys leading lights in the fight against disinformation, senator mark warner. From his seat on the Senate Select committee on intelligence he has been at the forefront of the ongoing counterintelligence and debate investigation. In a town torn by bipartisanship, he has worked hard with the chair of the committee to keep the efforts bipartisan. Senator warner is recognized as one of congresss preeminent voices in the ongoing debate surrounding social media and user privacy. He is the cofounder of the bipartisan cybersecurity caucus. One of his bills would write new tough Data Protection standards. Another addresses the use of dark patterns, deceptive tactics that trick consumers into handing over personal data. If it is digital, senator warner is all over it. Im excited and delighted to have him here today. Please join me in giving a very warm welcome to senator mark warner as he delivers our opening keynote. Thank you very much. Thank you for those kind comments. I will also agree that hopefully we will not be rushing for the doors, but if you happen to see a posting on your device, rush for the doors, no question who is behind that. Again, thanks to the chairman weintraub and ambassador donahue for hosting me today and for putting together this very thoughtful and timely event. Actually ive never done this with glasses, so i will try to do this without glasses. Michael, youve probably dealt with glasses. I want to think again, p. E. N. America, which has a long standing standard of Free Expression and public discourse. Unfortunately, like many of our institutions today, that discourse is under assault. It is under assault from dark money, russian trolls, and extremists who exploit social media. Through each of these cases, and others, we see openness, diversity, accountability of the public sphere being undermined. The internet optimism of the 1990s and early 2000s obscured this trend for many of us. But it was a bipartisan consensus that the internet was inherently democratizing and liberating. We based major portions, major policies on this underlying optimistic assumption. Our stance on china and the revolutions. As a result, we now face serious policy challenges. Today, and i say this reluctantly, i would think we need to rethink that optimism. We need to come up with a new set of foreign and domestic policies based on a less optimistic, or at least more realistic, notion of technology and the internet. To be sure, this is a somewhat surprising place for me to come from. For many years, as alan mentioned, i have kind of been known as the tech guy in congress. Like many policy members i show the consensus that these technologies and the companies that built them are largely positive forces. Now, weve seen how the misuse of Technology Threatens our democratic systems, our economy, and increasingly, our National Security. Russias attack on our democracy awakened a lot of people to this truth. We know the United States faces a serious threat in the cyber domain from both state and nonstate actors, not to mention the threat of misinformation and disinformation efforts. By russia and increasingly by those who copied their playbook. As a result of this information, we are finally beginning to have some overdue conversations in the privacy, data transparency and other Critical Issues related to social media. But we also must confront the way that domestic actors have also exploited these technologies. More broadly, our position as a Global Leader on Technology Issues has been weakened by the retreat of the United States on the global stage, as well is by congresss unwillingness or inability to formulate smart policy responses to the challenges we face. And frankly, i worry that this administrations haphazard approach to trade may end up exporting and internationalizing some of our worst app policies. While i am encouraged that governments around the world, including the eu, have begun to fill this vacuum, the need for u. S. Leadership, pragmatic, tech savvy policy, has never been greater. As vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence committee ive spent the better part of the last 2 1 2 years on the only bipartisan investigation into russias attack on our democracy. The truth is, the United States was caught flat footed in 2016 and our social Media Companies failed to anticipate how their platform could be manipulated and misused by russian operatives. Frankly, we should have seen it coming. Many of the technologies relied upon by the russian were not new. The recommendation algorithms. These and other techniques were longstanding tactics of online fraudsters. We even saw an Early Warning sign of this context in something called gamer gate back in 2014. You will recall that gamer gate was a concocted and connected Harassment Campaign waged against women in the videogame industry. It foreshadowed how bad actors could use a variety of Online Platforms to stoke conspiracy theories and in recognized Facebook Groups and other seemingly innocuous oh, you know what i mean, online communities. We also missed the warning signs in the international context. Over the last two decades, adversary nations like russia have developed a radically different concession of information security. One that spans cyber warfare and Information Operations in a single arena. I feel we have entered a new era of nationstate conflict. When in which nations project strength less through traditional military hardware and more in cyber and information warfare. But our adversaries arent necessarily using highly sophisticated tools. They dont need to. They are attacking us opportunistically, using fishing techniques and rattling unlocked doors. In many ways, we brought this upon ourselves. We live in a society that has become more and more dependent on products and networks. Yet the level of security and integrity we accept in commercial technology, in commercial technology products, is shockingly low. Think about the fact we still do not have basic Security Standards for iot connected devices. And as a society we continue to have entirely too much trust in technology our adversaries have begun to exploit. While some in the private sector have begun to grapple with these challenges, many remain resistant to the changes in regulations needed. Lets face it. This may come as a shock, congress doesnt have it either. It is not enough to simply improve the security of our own infrastructure computer systems. We must work in a coordinated way to deal with the adversaries and bad actors who use technologies to attack identified institutions. Internationally we need to develop new rules and norms for the use of cyber and information opportunities. We also need to better enforce existing norms. But norms on traditional Cyber Attacks are not, alone, enough. We also need to bring Information Operations into the debate. In addition we need to build international support. Rules that address the internet potential for censorship and oppression. We need to present our own alternatives that explicitly embrace a free and open internet. And we need that responsibility to extend not only to government, but to the private sector, as well. Truth is, western companies who help authoritarian regimes build censored apps were Walled Garden versions of the internet, are just as big a threat to a free and open internet ask government actors. We need to realize that the status quo just isnt working. For over two decades, the United States has maintained and promoted a completely hands off approach and today, the Large Technology platforms, in effect, the only major part of our economy without a specific sector regulator. For years, we told the world that any tweaks around the edge would undermine innovation or create a slippery slope toward a dystopian system. Instead, our failure to act, the opposite has happened. Many countries have gravitated toward the dystopian chinese model. In part, because we have not offered pragmatic, valuesbased alternatives. And we have seen how laws originally intended to promote this behavior, like section 230, which was meant to incentivize effective moderation, are used by large platforms as a shield to do nothing. Just last year americans were defrauded to the tune of 360 million by identity thieves posing as military service members. Now, as the New York Times reported, these arent sophisticated state actors using fancy marketing tools. They are pretty basic scammers in internet cafes in west africa and the truth is, facebook faces no meaningful pressure to do anything about it. Neither do the defrauded americans, to sue facebook under section 230. To make matters worse, facebook faces no competitive pressures. Section 230 was born out of an era of more vibrant competition on the web and it left the incorrect assumption that sites would pursue robust moderation, because they felt, or the assumption was, that users would flock to other providers of their site became dangerous or abusive places. Obviously that restraint does not work. This is one example of the internet government regime we have convinced ourselves and try to convince the rest of the world is working just fine. Obviously thats not the case, at least in my mind. Instead of dealing with the misuse, these Large Companies have externalized the responsibility of identifying harmful and illegal activity to journalists, academics and independent activists. Rather than promoting pragmatic rules of the road, the United States continues to promote a laissezfaire approach whether it be refusing to sign the christchurch call or including new platform safe harbors in trade agreements. Last summer, i put forward a white paper, helped in many ways. Let me acknowledge a person on my staff, rocky martino, who many of you know. It lays out a number of policy proposals for addressing these challenges. I recognize they intersect with a number of the issues that will be discussed today, so i hope this will get the conversation started. We can start with Greater Transparency. I think folks have a right to know if the information they are receiving is coming from a human being or a bot. I also put forward legislation that would require Greater Transparency and disclosure for online political ads. Companies should also have a duty to identify inauthentic accounts. If someone says they are mark from alexandria, but they are actually boris from st. Petersburg, i think folks have a right to know that. And if a large Facebook Group claims to be about texas pride, but its administrators are constantly logging in from moldavia and those ip addresses, again, i think the users following that group should know the information as well. I have a series of additional bills, beyond the ones ive already put forward. We need to put in place consequences for social media platforms who continue to propagate truly inflammatory content. We saw facebook cut flatfooted in the face of rudimentary audiovisual manipulation of a video o