 Enough of Colonel Peter Hayden. It's my pleasure to introduce the very accomplished big brain panelists for our next featured topic, Strategic and Legal Challenges to Combating the Adversary. You can find their full bios in our program, because if we listed all their accomplishments now, it would take up the entire hour. So please hold your applause, whoops, hollers, and other exclamations until after all of the panelists are introduced. Dean Cheng recently retired after 13 years as the Senior Research Fellow for Chinese Political and Military Affairs of the Heritage Foundation, and has spoken at Harvard, MIT, US Stratcom, and at the US National Defense University. He's testified before Congress numerous times. Mr. Cheng is the author of Cyber Dragon Inside China's Information Warfare and Cyber Operations. He's currently a senior fellow at Ptomac Institute for Policy Studies and a senior advisor with the US Institute of Peace. Beth George is a former acting general counsel for the US Department of Defense, immediately previous to Ms. Kras, who spoke to open our conference. In addition to other impressive public service roles that include serving as deputy general counsel litigation at the DOD, and in the National Security Law Division of the DOJ, she's lectured at UC Berkeley School of Law, and at Stanford University's Law, International Policy and Business Schools. She's a senior adjunct fellow for NYU School of Law's Center for Law and Security, and was previously an affiliate at Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation. Ms. George is currently a partner at the San Francisco office of Wilson Sonsini, Goodrich, and Rosati. Brian Murphy is served as both a principal and acting undersecretary for intelligence for the Department of Homeland Security, where he served as the chief intelligence officer, chief information sharing officer, and chief counterintelligence officer for the department. Prior to DHS, Mr. Murphy was a special agent with the FBI for over 20 years and a Marine officer who deployed to Iraq in 2004. He has his PhD from Georgetown, his master's from Columbia, and his bachelor's from William & Mary, which is most famously known as the second best and per se in school in Virginia. First is obviously Washington and Lee University. I went to Washington and Lee University. Brian has a book coming out very soon, Russian Disinformation in America and the US government's ethical obligations to respond. He's currently the managing director at Logically AI. Finally, our moderator for this panel is Ms. Jana Malekosmith. Ms. Malekosmith is a cyber law and policy fellow with the US Army Cyber Institute and affiliate faculty with the Modern War Institute at the US Military Academy at West Point. She was previously an assistant professor at West Point and a professor of cyber warfare studies with the US Air War College. She's a former Air Force Jag, which just proves that nobody's perfect. You've probably read one of her articles or seen her commentary in The Hills, LA Times, Politico, CNN, Nature, Physics Today, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. She's co-authored most recently an article with Lieutenant Colonel Mark Biskher in the Spring 2023 Cyber Defense Review. And she's currently a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Ladies and gentlemen, now's the time to let out all that bottle of applause for our panel. Before we begin, I'd like to thank Captain Larkin for that very kind introduction and also the organizers of this phenomenal conference. It's an honor to be part of the community represented here in this room of national security professionals. The central pillar of our panel today, symbolically represented here with the beloved children's game of stacking wooden blocks is lawfare. I see some smiles already in the room as well as some quizzical looks, but we'll get into that. But first, our distinguished panel will deconstruct the concept behind lawfare, examining both the means and these strategies employed by global powers such as China and the Russian Federation in leveraging the law and the legal process as a weapon to both signal to the adversary and shape their strategic behavior, but also to influence the strategic operational environment. But what is lawfare? First, it's important to step back and recognize there is no perfect definition here and there are many competing interpretations of what lawfare constitutes. However, this term was first coined by General Charles Dunlap, describing its nature as quote, the application of the law as a weapon of modern warfare to either achieve a military objective or deny an enemy an objective. So returning to our wooden tower here as a demonstrative example of lawfare, assuming our guendo that the main objective of the adversary is to erode trust in the foundational integrity of the legal system represented here, how is this game played? Well, the opponent wrongfully manipulates the legal structure to their advantage. So they're strategically chipping away at it piece by piece as you can see here in the strategic decision of, what block should I place here? To then have additional weight and strain placed upon the system, to use a Claus Witzian term, you're imposing friction on the adversary and the operating environment that they're working in. Now, more concretely, techniques here in employee and lawfare include the misuse of legal terminology to manipulate the international institutions and also creating negative public opinion about the adversary. It includes also initiating multiple lawsuits against the adversary in the courts of the international system. And lastly, prosecuting foreign nationals in domestic courts, perhaps as a tool for political theater or leverage. All that said, these tactics are employed here debilitating the foundational core of the legal system until eventually the system can't take any more strain and the system collapse. Now, lawfare is the sum total of these strategic effects that you've seen here in this demonstration. It's attacking the rule-based international order for a strategic, political, or military objective. And on that uplifting note, let's please now turn to my colleague, Dean, who will unpack for us in sharing his insights about how China conceives of the Western adherence to the rule-based international order and explain for us how that adherence can be used for strategic advantage. Dean, over to you. Thank you. And thank you to the organizers of this conference for the opportunity to be here today. My comments are going to examine Chinese concepts of legal warfare and drill down a little bit on how, in particular, the Chinese might apply cyber operations. Before I begin, however, I think that it's important to note two broad contextual aspects. The first, and this goes directly to Professor Maliko Smith's comments, is that China, unlike the West, is not a rule of law society. It is a rule by law society. As Westerners, we see the law as an institution for arbitration. We see it as ideally trying to determine the truth. And in particular, we value the concept of an independent judiciary. The law standing unto itself. None of this is true for China, and please note I said China, not the People's Republic of China. And that is because across five millennia of history, there has never been the rule of law in China. China has always seen the law as an instrument that was never an independent judiciary. Sorry, Imperial magistrates served as court, served as judge, served as investigator, and insofar as defendants' rights matter, served also as the defense. So China comes out of a fundamentally different view of how to think about that rules-based international order, beginning with who writes the rules. And second of all, why do the rules matter? The second aspect, and this ties us over to cyber issues, is that China is ruled, the People's Republic of China is ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, which is a Marxist-Leninist party. Why does that matter here? Because from a Marxist-Leninist perspective, the means of economics, the centerpiece of modern power has shifted, and because of the CCP's view of that shift, that has distinct implications for all of its activities, economic, military, and the like. From the CCP's perspective, we have transitioned the world, not just China, from the industrial age where what mattered was stuff. How many tons of bauxite did you process last year? How many I-beans did you produce? How many merchant ships were launched? To information. The currency of power has shifted. What matters more, it's not that all the things I mentioned before didn't matter, but what matters more now is the generation, transmission, and analysis of information across the spectrum of human activities. So in warfare and conflict, what matters, not to say air power doesn't matter, not to say space power or maritime power doesn't matter, but information power and the ability to establish information dominance to gather, analyze, and transmit information more accurately and more rapidly than your adversary and prevent them from doing so has become the means of dominating whether economically or militarily. At the strategic level then, from the PRC's perspective, what is central is the use of information to deny the legitimacy or desirability of an adversary's actions. In this case, we were talking about the United States, thereby reframing how American actions may be perceived or justified. And to this end, a fundamental tool is that of political warfare. And political warfare should be thought of in some ways the hardest form of soft power. It is the use of the range of aspects of information, news, media, outreach, et cetera, to influence, first, the domestic Chinese audience. We're in the right. Second, adversary governments, leadership, and populations, are you sure you are in the right? And finally, third party leadership and populations. Side with us, not with them. Or alternatively, don't side with them. You can stay neutral, but don't join them. Fundamental to political warfare are the so-called three warfare. And here we will focus these remarks primarily on legal warfare, but let me just briefly discuss there is also public opinion warfare. Public opinion warfare is seen as always in action. It does not require the outbreak of war. China right now, one, sees us, the West as waging political warfare, sorry, public opinion warfare in particular, against China. Why do we insist on talking about Uyghurs, Tibetans, Chinese environmental problems? It is to erode international faith and trust in the People's Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party. Since we are waging public opinion warfare against them, China must wage both defensive public opinion warfare and offensive public opinion warfare. Second is psychological warfare. This is ultimately about intimidation, but it's also about influence. There is positive psychological warfare. When a country, when a people are positively disposed, that is partly public opinion, but it is also more broadly psychological. Some have used the phrase cognitive warfare. And finally, legal warfare. And legal warfare in particular has a role in things like strategic anti-access area denial. Before we get to the anti-ship ballistic missiles screaming in on American aircraft carriers and Chinese submarines trying to pick off destroyers, there is the strategic context. How can I, Xi Jinping, shape and mold the views of the Philippines, of the Taiwanese, of the Thais, but also the French, the British, et cetera, about whether or not American actions are legal? And here it's important to note that when the Chinese talk about legal warfare, it is very explicit. First off, that the issue is not about determining legal basis or justification, but is about portraying the other side's actions as illegal, using the law to gain political advantage, and not about determining what is legally correct. To this end, from the Chinese perspective, legal warfare then is only partly about filing lawsuits that General Dunlap has so excellently written about using lawsuits, et cetera, to wear down an adversary to tie up legal resources to potentially remove individual players from the board. When the Chinese talk about legal warfare, they are very explicit about saying it is not just about international law and treaties, it is also about domestic law, it is about regulations, it is also about law enforcement agencies and court systems. And so, as an example, when we look at the South China Sea, we see the Chinese applying a variety of legal warfare means. We see them issuing declarations dating back to 1983 that anyone who fishes in the South China Sea must first register specifically in the paracels, before non, sorry, in the paracels before they are allowed to fish. The use of the Chinese Coast Guard in order to enforce their claims is an interesting methodology for legal warfare because the implicit political message that is being applied is, well, of course it's a law enforcement agency because this is Chinese territory. This is domestic issues. You would use a police force to enforce the law in Chicago. You wouldn't use the police force to enforce problems in Chesapeake Bay. Why would we use the Navy when everything within the nine-dash line is Chinese territory? So there is a political message, a la legal warfare, that accompanies the specific decision to use the Chinese Coast Guard, a law enforcement agency. And we also see this, by the way, in the Senkakus, the disputed territories involving Japan. So how do cyber operations fit into this? To begin with, the Chinese, when they talk about political warfare, are very explicit. Political warfare occurs alongside military operations. And that's not just in wartime, but also in peacetime. So gray zone activities will be a mixture of political actions, military actions, also diplomatic and economic actions. We watch the PRC use of cyber activities then to support political warfare, including legal warfare. And we have seen the Chinese, for example, as I said, in the South China Sea. Part of the goal, as a good professor knows, is to introduce friction into an adversary's ability to respond to Chinese operations. So they can be negative influence operations, fake news, falsified reports, leaks of sensitive information. It can involve the hacking of legal organizations' information systems determining strategies, figuring out what your adversary's briefs might be. Interference with communications to hamper interagency coordination. We also see the Chinese highlight, for example, where there have been cases of potential discrimination against ethnic Chinese who are saying things in favor of Beijing, that this is a violation of those citizens' rights. Rights, ironically, which might not even be available to a genuine Chinese citizen in their own country. But that's not the point. The point is to say, you, Australia, you, Canada, you, the United States, how you treat Chinese is illegal, not whether how I treat Chinese is illegal. One of the key things to consider here, then, from a Western, particularly military legal perspective, is the role of legal warfare in time of conflict. And here I would suggest that the Chinese view because of the lack of rule of law is very much more akin to a mafia lawyer than a district attorney. A district attorney, by definition, has to be careful about the kind of evidence they use for the poison, oh, I should have prefaced this, by the way. I am not a lawyer. I have no legal training. So if I misuse terms I asked for apology, I asked for your indulgence in advance. But as I said, a DA has very clear rules that they have to play by. On the other hand, Tony Soprano's lawyer, basically if Tony wants to take over Jeff's bar, will probably come back and say, give me three days and I'll give you 12 reasons why you already own the bar. It's, he's the one who's in trouble. From the Chinese perspective then, we need to recognize that they're military lawyers and they do have them. Interestingly, they are embedded in their political warfare department. Have a task, not only to try and keep their military on the straight and narrow, but again, to apply the political warfare technique of basically saying our adversaries are in the wrong. And that raises a fundamental question about whether we're not from their perspective, the laws of armed conflict of which they are familiar. And they have referenced and cited whether their interpretation of those laws and the upholding and abiding by them align necessarily with our definition and our conception of the laws of armed conflict and how they would be applied. And let me note here that in this regard, the Russians at least have certain degrees of familiarity. We have interacted more with them than we have with the Chinese. As I said, their military legal personnel are embedded in the political warfare department and frankly we have had very little interaction with their political officers as well as their political, in particular their military lawyers. Thank you very much for the opportunity again to be here today and that concludes my remarks. Thank you Dean for those insightful remarks on China's legal warfare doctrine. And I agree with you that the word friction will surface quite a bit in our discussion today. So if anyone is playing word bingo in the back, Klausowitz. With that I will turn it over to now shift our regional perspective looking at Russia. Brian, if you wouldn't mind sharing with us both your remarks on securing the homeland space and Russia's conceptualization of lawfare as well as your forthcoming book. Congratulations. Thank you. I'm gonna go back to something that Captain Larkin said. I think it has to do with information warfare. So I did go to William and Mary and I guess she went to Washington and Lee and you may be right that one school is better than the other but I played football in college and I knew every year who our homecoming game was gonna be. So. So I'm gonna talk about China, Russia, Iran, other foreign adversaries and the impact on the homeland and try to entice you to think about ways that you can lean in from your perspective to keep secure in the homeland. So really what I'm gonna boil it down to is a lot of what my colleagues have covered which is cognitive influence operations. Information dominance but from a cognitive perspective. What is the adversaries after? And really as the way I think about it is they are seizing and taking control of key cognitive pieces of terrain to action their objectives and I think some of that's been discussed. I'm gonna go about this in three ways in the next seven to eight minutes is I'm gonna just level set everybody when I talk about cognitive influence operations I'll talk about one specific technique that's deployed and that's gonna be disinformation and I'm gonna level the playing field about what I'm talking about when we discuss this information at least for today. Second, does it matter in the homeland? Does the fact that the adversaries regardless of what state it is litter our social media with all kinds of garbage does it make a difference? We'll explore that a little bit today and lastly what is the ethical and a little bit of the legal response that is required by the executive branch to do something about it? What's that line look like? So when we talk about what is disinformation as an aspect of cognitive warfare is one of the instruments that a power can use. You'll hear and I think rightly so there's a lot of ways to describe the information. It's an ageless proposition Klausowitz talked about it. Chinese generals from 5,000 years ago mastered the discussion on it. Really every civilization's had some variation of using cognitive influence operations specifically disinformation. I think in the homeland, probably in this audience we could get 15 different definitions of it and I think that extends to both academia, the media and goes on and on. So I'm gonna establish a little bit what I'm talking about from when we mean disinformation and I'm hoping it gives you an idea framework that we can detox the politicalization that is associated with the word because right now it's a very tough word to use in the homeland space because it brings up a lot of passion rightly or wrongly for people and it makes it difficult for the executive branch to have a conversation about what to do about it within the homeland. So there's three things that I think need to be in place for a piece of content to qualify as disinformation. Number one, the sender of the information has to be using a covert nexus point, right? They have to be masking the true identity of who's sending the information. So you have a covert aspect to disinformation, right? Put another way, if I'm Putin or whoever your adversary leader of De Jure is and I'm speaking, that changes the way that I receive that information, right? I know who you are. So there needs to be for it to be disinformation there needs to be a covert aspect that's the first part. The second part of it is there needs to be malicious intent behind the sending of the information. The adversary is trying to achieve some type of objective which we'll talk about in a minute but it's not a friendly piece of information they're sending, right? It could be positive but they're still trying to do something that is negative, right? Stoke up preexisting points of polarization in the United States, change hearts and minds for a political opposition, whatever it is they've got what we would consider a malicious intent. So that's the second part. And the third, there has to be a political, economic or military objective behind the sender's information. The intentionality behind it is everything. If you have those three pieces of criteria in place and a piece of information passed through it I'm gonna call it disinformation or it could be at least. So why does that matter in the homeland? I've kind of alluded to before. The word disinformation is an ambiguous term in most contexts. I would also ask you to go back and look at your own definitions for it. Most executive branch agencies, if they have a definition I would call it a shallow definition. It's probably about a sentence long and it matches how it's thought about in the public space within the United States. And what my colleague was talking about is at the end of the day these words matter because if you look at the lawfare aspect of this China trying to make it seem that the U.S. is doing something illicit or illegal the reason why these shallow definitions matter is they're ambiguous. They leave a lot open to the imagination. And so I think where the executive branches and not every department and agency of course but many of them, they're just starting to kind of think about this, right? Just starting to establish definitions. And many of you are probably looking at those definitions and seeing if they survive legal muster and that's a good thing in my book. But I think they're still pretty shallow. So why does it matter? The term remains highly political in the United States and when executive branch agencies use it it is hard for people to find truly wealth, I shouldn't say well thought out, deeper level analysis associated with it. The press, all these great institutions we have out there people's public opinion. When we think about the model that was set up here and what my colleague was saying adversaries are trying to take advantage of the First Amendment to use it against us in this Gordian knot that we sit in when adversaries are in the homeland speaking using all those three criteria from a covert perspective, right? So they're undermining all of the things, the institutions that we all hold dear. And part of that is that we don't have great definitions in United States and criteria to kind of remove it from the political toxicity. So what disinformation is not. It's not political speech. It's not lies. It's not hate speech. It's not mal speech, whatever that is. So there's a, if any of you've read it there's a well kind of regarded piece of literature where you hear MDM if you've heard that term. Misdiffs and mal information, I don't know what mal information is. It is not a legal term one that would survive I think much muster in this room but it's used quite a bit including by the U.S. government. And it's not propaganda all the time. Although have you imagined the concentric circles? There's more association between disinformation as a cognitive technique from an adversary's perspective and propaganda. There's some overlap there. So it doesn't matter. What's at stake? I talked about it before is the adversary's already occupied pretty much all the key terrain features in the cognitive domain within the United States, okay? So they're already there. And there's some reasons I'll get it to in a minute. So does it matter? I'll ask you, think about 2016, the presidential elections. People really started asking themselves did this disinformation at the Russian campaigns launch? Did it change any votes? I don't know. I think personally that's an unknowable question because we didn't really have the research lined up to answer that. You may feel differently, I don't know what that answer is. But does it matter? A couple of points. Since 2016, the science looking at this, all of the work that you've done, et cetera, I think we've kind of established in most experts' minds that yes, disinformation matters. Where we are now in the homeland is saying how much does it matter? And that's the question that I'm trying to evaluate every day. Is it a one or is it a 10? Where does it fit? And it probably depends on the issue. But does it matter? I think it's safe to say, yeah, it matters. At least from my opinion it does. I'd always happy to hear back. Now it's the degree to which it makes a difference. But why it matters, I think it's the next part of it. It matters because, as I said, the adversary is occupying those key pieces of cognitive terrain, right? They really own the social media space. They manipulate it daily. I'm gonna pivot into my third and final point. That is what's been the executive branch response in the homeland. Really not much. And what I mean by that is, because this is a complicated toxic political issue, that if you imagine the model that my colleague set up or what my colleague talked about in terms of what the adversary's trying to achieve through lawfare, through their own version, in this case China, but Russia the same, through their own version of lawfare campaigns, right? It's a complicated, touchy issue to do something about from the executive branch. So that's a reason why I think the executive branch really hasn't done much. Our response to date's really been to kind of look at the social media companies and either to blame them, put them up as the answer or everywhere in between. That's been the bulk of what we've done. If you follow the NDAAs for the last five, six, seven years, almost all of the money is traceable to the US efforts overseas, right? Talk about cognitive influence operations. We spend money across the board and that's a good thing to bolster our allies' resiliency. There's virtually almost nothing, there's a little bit happening in the US, right? Nobody wants the US government to fund people and schools to tell people how to think, right? But what we do fund is we fund our allies across the board so they can build resiliency campaigns. There's a difference between the two, but yet we don't do that same in the United States. And again, there's a lot of good reasons for that mostly. I think it's less a legal issue, it's much more of a political issue, but there's a large legal dimension to it. So what should happen in my humble estimation to kind of start recovering some of this cognitive terrain, right? There are some answers out there and I think a lot of this is held with this community here. Legal plays a strong role. We need to understand what the adversary's doing, number one, we need to recognize that in order to build resiliency, it requires different ways of thinking. My colleague Corey Simpson was leading a panel about innovation. I've heard it talked about before, his previous speakers talked about GPT. These issues all are, I think, relevant to this conversation as we think about how to build resiliency in the home app. We do need to think about it differently. We need to look at what our tax dollars are funding. If you look at Taiwan, radical transparency is one of their answers to defeating what the Chinese are trying to do to sap the will of the Taiwanese people to fight back in the case of a land or some type of other kinetic conflict, right? That's what Russia tried to do in Ukraine. When we think about it, that is what's at stake there and that is what we need to consider. How do we do that? How do we build resilience in the United States and most importantly, maintain legitimacy? As the executive branch looks to kind of put its toe in the water on this very thorny issue, at the end of the day, I'll go back to where my colleagues touched on. It's about legitimacy, right? That's what the adversary is trying to pull the last, I think you told me I can't call it Django because it's copyright, she told me that in the green room, but pull the last wooden block out to undermine our kind of way of life for institutions and use it against us. So it's a tricky issue and if I had all the answers, I'll write another book, but I'm not quite there yet. Thank you. Thank you very much, Brian, for canvassing the cognitive warfare space and highlighting, optimistically, how do we build resiliency and noting the difficulties of that as well? Last but not least, I'd love to hear your thoughts, Beth, on this issue and perhaps a counter perspective from what we've offered. Sounds good. I think I am probably last and least, but happy to sort of take a step back and look at what Russia is doing on the international level. There is probably no more offensive moment to the concept of the rule of the international order right now than the fact that Russia is chairing the security council on the UN, commit in the UN right now. This is a country that has done more damage to the UN charter and to the concept of the sovereignty of nations and its neighbors than probably any other in modern history. And yet, not only does it exercise a veto over any efforts by the United Nations to take action, it now is able to drive the agenda of the security council itself for the next few months. Russia has long used the words of international law to try to cover its actions, which are deeply in violation of international law. Ukraine is a great example. And in fact, if you look back, it was Catherine the Great who first claimed Crimea as part of Russia using the same type of technique, saying Crimea is a Russo-speaking country. It is culturally similar to us. It should have the right of sovereignty. It should have the right of self-determination. And we are here to rescue it from the oppressors that have claimed it. Catherine the Great did it first. Putin has done it incredibly well, but he's certainly not original. Stalin had done it in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Ukraine, Poland before then to find an area to say because there are Russian speakers there to stage, as we saw very blatantly in the Kerosene area, a fake election to claim that that is going to support its position on taking over the territory. Now we can all sit here and say, it's obvious that what they're doing is not in accordance to international law, but when China invades Taiwan, if China invades Taiwan, and we decide suddenly that we want to recognize Taiwan's sovereignty in order to come to its defense, Russia has just spent the last two decades undermining any legitimacy the United States will have in recognizing the sovereignty of a country merely because the country that currently oversees it, that territory has decided to take some type of internal action. These are serious consequences to our foreign policy and to how we're gonna react to the ongoing threat of China's aggression. Together, these two countries have started to undermine the rule of law in a way that will impact our ability to try to exercise it legitimately. So where does that leave us? Yeah, in a difficult place, but not in one where we should be undermining the rule of law ourselves. The reality is, when you sit on my side of the country on the West Coast, see the opportunity to influence Chinese people not because of our strength or because of our influence operations, but because they see the reality of rule by law rather than rule of law limiting their futures. We have a massive opportunity to encourage a brain drain in China to come to this country, to develop AI here, and we don't have to do anything other than continue to be the American Republic that we are. Because in the meantime, China has abducted Bao Fen, one of the most richest Chinese tech leaders in that country and disappeared him in the last couple of months. He's now under investigation only after his company had to publicly disclose his disappearance as per their own securities law. We have Russia constantly having millionaires, billionaires oligarchs fall from building to the point that I must admit that I'm incredibly frustrated with the American media that keeps on reporting these falls without just describing them for what they are, which is apparent murders. This type of rule by law is undermining to their own citizens and where we have left many things on the field is that this, our country has not used that to create brain drains in those countries. We're even seeing a brain drain right now in Israel as Israel works to undermine their judiciary. Israel's tech industry is starting to migrate to the United States. We, in a world where information is our future, where AI will be dictating how the world evolves, fighting for the minds of people who are capable of creating that, who are at the forefront of technology to be in our country, to be staying in our country, not merely learning our education and returning home but having a reason to invest here to know that they can succeed, to know that they can make money, to know that they can keep the money that they've made, to know that they will not be Jack Ma who just had aunt dismantled by the Chinese government and they can be Jeff Bezos for whatever you feel about him is an enormous strategic advantage of the United States that when we are having these conversations about how we are being undermined by lawfare, that we need to understand our own strengths to make it to our advantage. And I do think it's something that we do not, as the United States government, spend nearly enough time thinking about. And I'm watching our opportunities, as I said on the West Coast, and the heart of innovation and seeing the opportunities that we would have to do what we did in the 80s in the Cold War and brain drain our enemies. Let's not forget that as a tactic and one that's inspired by the rule of law that we cherish so much. Thank you, Beth. Those very inspiring remarks on honoring rule by law and it echoes several of the comments that Dean had raised as well, denoting the difference between rule of law and rule by law that I wondered, Dean, would you like to respond to the point that Beth had raised? All I would add is just that we actually had some interesting commentary from Chinese about how the party committee system, et cetera, really undermines incentive and that it, one of the things that apparently detracts from the Chinese system is that you have scholars, scientists who go back and they find that even basic decisions within their labs have to be approved by the party committee member who may, unlike Ampersand University's one and two in Virginia, the political commissar, not in the military, this is in a typical university, may well have come from a far lower standing facility but has the power and authority to basically say, no, you're not going to get that funding or, no, you can't hire that person. Pipping off of that, several weeks ago Ambassador Fick spoke at the Atlantic Council talking about the importance of international cyber capacity building. I wonder, based upon our discussion today, how you see the mission to promote international cyber capacity building also as referenced in the newly released national cybersecurity strategy, highlighting that in one of the pillars and squaring that with the challenges that lawfare presents and you remind, what are the risks and opportunities in this space? So is that familiar? That's a good question, I'll take it, yeah. So I do think, at least in the kind of cognitive space they're slightly different and I would challenge the audience to look at information warfare and as we think about that, information warfare lumps under it, usually cognitive warfare. I think they are radically different fields. There's overlaps in it but because, that's a long way of saying it but because it is talked about from a cyber construct most of the time and that is cognitive operations. I do think there's great opportunity for this audience and the rest of the kind of domestic context to learn where our tax dollars are going. There's great best practices out there in the countries around the periphery of Russia built out of necessity and also in Taiwan and the countries around the periphery of China. They have to deal with these threats and we help fund those efforts and I think the results, a lot of them you can't lift and shift directly in the US for a whole host of legal reasons but there's enough there that we should start examining those and trying to build our own resiliency building campaigns. Thank you. With that, I'd like to pivot to opening it up to the audience. If anyone, excellent, I see a hand already. Sir, please unmute yourself and direct your question to the panel. Good afternoon, folks. My name's Captain Ray Macias. I'm an LLM national security candidate at Georgetown University Law Center. This question is for Mr. Chang. Mr. Chang, how was China's legal warfare doctrine shaped by its view of customary international law? When I look at the DOD law of War Manual, Chapter Three in particular, discusses extensively the United States commitment to international treaty, customary international law and customary norms. How does China differ in its approach to customary international law? And does that play a role in the way that Chinese sort of speaks out of both sides of its mouth when it comes to cyber operations under these international norms? So let me, again, preface my remarks by saying, I am not a lawyer. I am in a room filled with lawyers. That makes me as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room filled with rocking chairs. So, but what I will observe is the following. For those who are familiar with maritime and admiralty law, the international waterways are international. So you basically have territorial rights out to about 12 miles, then there's a transition zone of 12 miles. And after that, under the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea, you go out to 200 nautical miles. You have an exclusive economic zone. Under customary maritime law, everything from 12 miles to 200 is essentially international waters where you the owning country have in a sense the right of first refusal on the resources. So out to 200 nautical miles, its American fishing boats have priority, American oil drilling, American seabed mining, right? But otherwise, if you're an ocean liner, if you're a Chinese aircraft carrier, if you're a French submarine, you can transit through and it's perfectly okay. That's customary maritime law. The Chinese interpretation is fundamentally 180 degrees the reverse. Out to 200 nautical miles should be treated as essentially national territorial waters through which other ships and planes can transit. Civilian ships and aircraft without too much problem, but foreign military, governmental vessels and aircraft should register and should seek permission. So what? Well, to support this, the Chinese have established international legal institutions. They publish articles in Chinese law reviews. They try to publish articles in foreign law reviews. All of which to build up a body of literature and teachings that they can say, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. You have all this dusty laws from 1608 from some Amsterdam court. But look, we have equally applicable laws, academic writings, et cetera, that call into question what you term customary, customary to whom? Maritime law. And I would suggest that the same applies across the board for all types of law. To focus specifically on cyber, the problem here is there isn't a body that dates back to grossius and others of maritime law. Cyber law is brand new. So why is China's position coming from the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronauts with a Harbin Institute of Technology any less applicable, any less legitimate than a law review from William & Mary or Washington. Do they have a law school? Oh good, okay. Sorry, that was a genuine, I don't know. I mean, I'm not from here. So, okay, but my point here, my apologies for the distraction, my point being that the Chinese can take advantage of the newness of cyber to basically say we're here on the ground floor. Our findings, our conclusions, which we will use in legal warfare, every bit is legitimate as yours. Dean, can I just address one thing? So Washington Lee does have a law school. It's the place that people go that they can't get into William & Mary law school. I did not realize I was opening such a can of worms. I apologize. If I could jump in, Dean, on your point, not about the law school. Oh please. But talking about the newness of this domain, I wonder, in your research, have you touched upon exploration of outer space, becoming also a contested area and a domain in which you can leverage lawfare in outer space, whether it be commercial low earth orbit destinations or pursuit of returning humans to the moon, have you, do you have any thoughts on that particular subject? How much time do we have left? Because actually General Dunlap has been very kind. I've spoken at his lens conference a couple of times on Chinese views of space and legal warfare. But yes, the Chinese absolutely. One of my great terrors, and this goes to your previous question, is whenever I hear, oh, there's an idea for a new international treaty and new international agreement is the opportunity for mischief. Because I think the Chinese love every new treaty and agreement because they will absolutely sign it. Not because they will then abide by it, but because it is at least one, if not a whole quiver of additional arrows for legal warfare. You are violating the agreement that you have signed up to. I mean, if you don't like the Russians being chair of the UN Security Council, you'll love how the Chinese basically will apply legal warfare. Very quick example. There is discussion from a health and safety perspective of keep out zones for satellites. You don't want them running into each other. Let's have, we'll make up a number, a 10-mile radius between satellites. What could be wrong with that, right? Question. If I, with a state-owned enterprise system, deploy several hundred satellites each 20 miles apart in key orbits, what's the difference between that and establishing sovereignty? I haven't declared sovereignty, I've signed the Outer Space Treaty, but you're the ones who support health and safety considerations. Okay, I simply deployed satellites because I don't care about money as much, sufficiently to create a band. It's legal in the sense that it's a health and safety regulation. It's not a law or a treaty, but it is something that I can use. The same applies lunar activities. I'm not laying claim to the moon, I just happen to drop a whole bunch of missions right at the South Pole where the water is. These are the sorts of things that worry me when people say, but we could sign a treaty with China governing space activities. Absolutely, I think Beijing would absolutely love that opportunity. We'll let that provocative point, oh perfect, I see more hands shooting up. Sir, I saw your hand, please unmute yourself. QRR, ladies and gentlemen, Wing Commander Tim Wood, New Zealand Defense Force Legal Services. Forgive me, this is a question again from Mr. Chang, but Brian, you might also have a view from the Russian perspective. Made reference to public opinion warfare, and I note that our government is quite circumspect about the comments it may make in public about Chinese activities, perhaps because China is New Zealand's largest trading partner, for example. But my question really, Mr. Chang, is with regards to how you might perceive the move through the Pacific, which is obviously the area of concern for ourselves and my Australian colleague, and to a certain extent Canada and the US, but the move through the Pacific and the influence that is being brought to bear on a number of the Pacific nations in particular, and we can sort of use that analogy with Russia, to a certain extent, with Eastern Europe. As to whether you see that as a move with regards to creating a buffer zone for the protection of the PRC, or whether that is actually part of an expansionist campaign with other nefarious objectives, just interest in your thoughts. So, one, I think that the good news here is that China has no particular desire for PLA units to patrol the Kefershtendam, the Champs-Elyse, downtown Wellington, or San Francisco. That is not what the Chinese are necessarily looking for. At the same time, they seem to have a security outlook that is very much like a Russian Matryoshka doll, embedded. The most important, and they tell us this, their core interests are the territorial integrity and sovereignty of China, which includes Taiwan and the South China Sea and the Senkakus and Arun and Chal Pradesh, aka South Tibet. But those are all, from their perspective, parts of China and always have been. After that is when you start getting into the more interesting and challenging problems of the First Island chain, which can be either a barrier for Chinese exit or a shield against Western interventionism, and economic access to technology, chip manufacturing technology, as well as the raw materials and resources, hydrocarbons and food. So, the Chinese tradition, however, has been not one of balancing. Asian history does not have much balancing in it. China is acknowledged to be the superior power. What they are looking for is deference. What they are looking for is self-censorship. What they are looking for is not that a Chinese censor is going to say, how dare the New York Times write this? Line that editor up, have them shot. It is, oh, you know, they're one of our biggest advertisers. I think it would be a good idea if maybe I just had a word with this columnist and perhaps make sure that they don't write about these sorts of things because that's an embarrassment. My colleague was dismayed at how we are not covering Russian oligarchs and the poor quality control of Russian windows. What is striking is that with regards to China, I think far more people will be asking, who's Jack Ma? And what happened to him? Thank you. I'm going to turn to this side of the room, sir. Good afternoon. So you've had a couple of tough questions. I'll toss you a softball. What is your opinion of a little-known app called TikTok? How is that to me? Beth, would you like to kick-start that? So I am speaking my personal capacity and that my role as a law firm, as a partner of a law firm. I would say there is a great deal of hysteria about TikTok and there are probably 10,000 SDKs sitting out there right now being used by a bazillion other apps that are collecting the same amount of data. And if what we're really concerned about is data leaving the United States, we are focusing on a big target that is probably a very small portion of the problem. Every country in the world right now is trying to do data localization under the idea of privacy. I think it has actually much more to do with protectionism, trying to get servers and clouds to come out of the United States and come into their own countries. I think that they're absolutely insane if they think that their data has less protection outside of the United States than they do inside of the United States. And yet, here we are. I think TikTok, the focus on TikTok, I don't have any access to classified information about it. I have no doubt that it is a national security concern. If the government says it's a national security concern, I think you guys are missing the point. People put SDKs and their apps off the shelf. This is how I do it. I'm a lazy programmer. And in the West Coast, we have this concept in VP which does not mean most valuable player. It means minimum viable product. That is the least amount that you need to do to put your product together, to get it on the shelf, to get it to consumers. And what you're gonna do is use libraries that are already been produced and they are being produced by TikTok, by Facebook, by who, I don't care who created this. It's free and it's off the shelf and I can do it. So we're just missing. If you think that TikTok is the problem, you've missed probably 95% of the problem that's actually happening in the tech sector. Brian, would you like to weigh in? I have a little bit of a different view, but I agree with everything you said. I do think TikTok is a symptom. It's not the, I think there's probably some hysteria too, but I think it's a problem that we do need to address. But going after TikTok, you're playing whack-a-mole because there's so many social media platforms we're talking, again, I'm talking more about the cognitive influence operations because the Chinese aren't constrained to TikTok. They may own it better because they've got leverage on the back end, but they are just as active on Discord, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter. So building a resiliency program is the answer. Vice is going as much in one direction for a particular app. Although for the record, I'm for doing something with TikTok, but I don't think it's enough. It's not gonna solve our problems. Yeah, so what they said. But I will add a couple of points. One, there are three different strands at work here. One is data privacy. One is software supply chain. I mean, everyone here presumably has a computer and there's a little clock program running in the right-hand corner, at least on my computer. Where did that clock program come from? Are we sure that there isn't any malware on board that? On your phone, how many other programs are there? Third, and because what I do know a little bit about is China. China takes a holistic approach. So even when it comes to China, it's not just about TikTok. Think about the data the Chinese have accumulated from the OPM hack, from hacking Target, from hacking Anthem Healthcare, from hacking Ashley Madison. Not that anyone here is familiar with it, so I'll explain it is a dating service for married people. From hacking Equifax. Think of the data that they have accumulated to which TikTok is simply an additional overlay. What, if you were developing human intelligence, what vulnerabilities might you identify? If you were programming an AI to emulate an American decision maker, what could I do with all of those myriad data sources combined? And then what could I do in terms of cybersecurity having identified all of these weaknesses? Thank you. Speaking of clocks and vulnerabilities, I believe we have reached our time here. Thank you. Please join me in thanking our brilliant panel. What a segue. That was perfect. I wish we had planned that. So we'll be back in here at 1545. Just want to say thank you again to the folks who were able to join us for this panel. That was, that gives everyone here a lot to ponder and be concerned about. So thanks for contributing to our ulcers. Thanks very much. Hello, I'm Colonel John Gondel, Director of U.S. Cyber Command's Academic Engagement Program. Last year we launched the Command's Academic Engagement Strategy in order to deepen our partnership with academia. Whole of Nation teamwork is critical to defending the United States in cyberspace and closing the gaps in our cyber workforce. We need cyber talent and multiple disciplines, including the law. So I want to share more about our approach. Cyber Command established the Academic Engagement Network known as AEN, which is a team effort across the DOD Cyber Mission Force. Like our partnerships with the interagency, industry and international allies, Cybercom needed a structured program to align our intellectual efforts with our strategic goals. Given our warfighting mission, one may ask why we consider this partnership so important. Simply put, to succeed in today's increasingly complex cyber threat environment, we need the diverse thinking and innovation that comes from collaborative academic partnerships. Furthermore, our combat power in cyberspace depends foremost on our talented workforce. In the competition for talent, we wanted to make sure students from a more diverse group of schools across the United States knew about the unique opportunities to serve our nation as military cyber warriors and DOD civilians. The response from our nation's educational institutions was amazing. In the past year, the AEN has grown to include 112 institutions from 36 states and the District of Columbia. AEN members include nine federal and 103 non-federal institutions of which 19 are minority serving institutions. Within the legal field, University of Maryland Carey School of Law and Penn State Dickinson Law are both members of the AEN. Cyber Command's academic engagement program has four strategic goals. Our first goal is to engage the future workforce by inspiring a diverse group of students to pursue cyber education and careers within DOD. Our second goal is to increase cyber applied research and innovation by encouraging research of our hardest problems. Our third goal is to expand cyber-focused analytical partnerships with academia in order to provide insight into adversary cyberspace strategies, organizations, and capabilities. Our fourth goal is to align senior leadership engagements and enrich strategic cyber dialogue with faculty in order to challenge our concepts and refine command strategies. Today, no other domain faces the same complexity in terms of the roles of the government and private sector in collective defense. We seek opportunities to critically examine and to help shape military strategy in doctrine. This is where you come in. Unlike contract, property, and tort law, which are informed by centuries of legal precedents, cyber law is relatively new and it addresses complex and novel issues that impact our national security. Academic scholarship in areas like cyberspace law is read widely and discussed by our attorneys and this work influences our views on the issues that matter most to cyber operations. Our engagements with the AEN, the exchange of ideas and perspectives and cutting edge scholarship are absolutely critical as we chart new legal ground. To that end, cyber command attorneys often speak in events, provide instruction, as well as collaborate on research efforts which enable us to hear your thoughts on our operations and the surrounding issues. This in turn helps create a 360 degree view of the issues we face as we work to enable the important efforts of the DOD Cyber Mission Force. The command also recently launched the Student Volunteer Program or SVP. The SVP is a highly competitive program for law students who will be in their third year of law school in the fall of 2024. SVP is an in-person experience at Cyber Command and will include exposure to areas of international law, domestic law, and U.S. policy applicable to military cyber operations. Additionally, participants will support domestic and international partnership activities, congressional engagements, and administrative law matters. The SVP offers a unique opportunity for in-depth research and writing on numerous emerging laws and policies. Cyber Command is so excited to support opportunities like SVP, knowing that our most complex questions are in the legal and policy realms. As we enhance our academic partnerships with you, the legal profession, we look forward to simultaneously advancing our nation's cyber warfare capabilities. To find out more, check out the AEN at cybercom.mil.