 All right welcome everyone to day two bright and early. Today I have the pleasure to introduce Dr. Rand Waltzman deputy CTO of Rand Corporation and Z-term program manager at DARPA. He'll be speaking on disinformation. Without further ado can we give a large round of applause for our speaker. Well good morning everybody. So since this is after all DEF CON people are interested in how to do things. I'm going to give this talk about disinformation not from the point of view of how do you protect people from disinformation or me am I but how do you actually do disinformation? What what makes quality disinformation? How can you tell? And I also want to specifically emphasize the reason for the title of the talk saying that it's the thought that counts is that I want to try to make sure it's the purpose really is to get you in the right frame of mind for this kind of business and the right frame of mind is not to get hung up too much on technical tricks. You've heard a lot about deep fakes and you're talking about deep fakes and all that. Okay that stuff is all fine and these are tools of the trade but they are not the main point and that's what I'm going to try to show you explain to you today. So I want to start out with a quote the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them in as much as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors and how all do you think that quote is? Thomas Jefferson 1807. So how much is really new? Well that's pretty questionable I think at this point. Actually I don't know. I haven't even heard the first speaker yesterday anybody? Yeah so that guy he made an interesting point you know he was trying to say well disinformation these kind of techniques are not really new they even go back as far as the 40s. Well I got news for that guy to go back way further than the 1940s. These kind of techniques go back a very very long way and they have a very long tradition. People talk about the Russians for example. People talk about the KGB you heard him active measures how many times active measures you know what that is. So people talk about that well I can tell you that the KGB was using a playbook from the Ochrana. Anybody know what the Ochrana was? So the Ochrana was the predecessor of the KGB that was the czarist secret police. The czarist had a very active very effective secret police and also involved in a lot of active measures and disinformation campaigns and other kinds of things. They were very active in fact I just wanted to start out by going give you an example to show you how far back this really goes how effective things can be without technical tricks and there was a case there was a guy by the name of Raczkowski who was the head of the Ochrana office in Paris at the end of the 19th century the very beginning of the 20th century and he was he was one of the great minds in the field of active measures really really one of the truly greats and one of his schemes actually is still out there and active today over a hundred years later it's spectacular so I want to talk about that a little bit just to show you but before I okay so I had one one side here you know sort of the bottom line up front is a sanitary basically things have gotten to the point where you know time is compressing to a point space is just blown out completely and you can get messages out anywhere in the world instantaneously as you have this confluence between communications technologies everybody seeing everything that's going on all at once and all these things that happen and it gets to the point where that alone that state of affairs is having a great impact on events and offers tremendous opportunities for this kind of activity so just to show you the first example how many of you ever heard of the protocols of the elders of Zion oh look at that some of you have see now the protocols of the elders of Zion to me that is one of the great pieces of deception and disinformation of the 20th century the way it came about was my friend Rajkovsky in Paris from the Ochrana got this brilliant idea among many and he found this document called what was the original name of the document let's see this is so tiny to read it yeah he found his document called the dialogue and held between Machiavelli and Montesquieu now that document in French was political satire had to do with Napoleonic politics had nothing to do with anti-Semitism at all totally irrelevant so Rajkovsky took found this document which was already old by the time he did this he took the document and he edited it somewhat and he transformed it into the protocols of the elders of Zion in fact if you look at the protocols and you look at this original work this dialogue you'll see huge pieces of the text are just like taking word for word but then he did some creative editing and this was all done in French and then he took the document he sent it to Russia he had it translated into Russian and it was released in finally in Russia in 1902-1903 timeframe and so some of you have still heard you can still get it on the internet today it's still out there okay that's more than a hundred years later now what's really interesting about this and show you how effective it really was and it also illustrates some important principles behind doing this kind of work is that Henry Ford remember Henry Ford Henry Ford had this thing translated and printed up and distributed 500 thousand copies of this piece of crap in the United States and at the beginning of the 20s when it was exposed by the London Times as being a fraud you know what Henry Ford's response was I got bad information so assuming that was it didn't change a damn thing the thing is still in circulation today didn't make any difference it was used the Nazis used it for propaganda and their techniques I mean it was used by all sorts of people throughout time and it's still being used to this very day so I think that's speaks to the genius of Rachekov see now he didn't have any computers he didn't have deep fakes he didn't have anything but what he had was a lot of imagination and he was in it he looked at these things from a point of view of the long game and this that's really important and I want to I'm going to keep emphasizing that so the next frontier of course in forgeries are digital forgeries as we as you've seen today and so first I want to talk a little bit about just very quick coverage of some of the new and fun techniques and digital forgeries that are coming down the pipeline and you know we've partly even I mean the point is that we've barely begun to deal with tech space forgeries or tech space disinformation and now we're getting into this multimedia business and you know things were bad before and I can guarantee you they're going to get a lot worse real fast so deep fakes is part of the next generation of forgery technology so everybody's pay careful attention I don't know how many how many of you've ever tried this website that I'm showing here this person does not exist calm yeah it's really great isn't it I mean you can just keep doing a refresh and generating bogus faces all day long it's really impressive nice very nice piece of work but the basic the really the bottom line of all of this and with the tools that are coming out tools that are in the pipeline tools that are about to become available is total democratization of weapons of mass disruption is how we call them basically anybody will be able to build these things for very little cost so you do it at home create your own digital forgeries high quality really high quality digital forgeries and you know like this I don't know if you heard the second speaker yesterday but he talked about you know how he found ways to counter to detect these forgeries well you know the reality is it's in an arms race as fast as somebody figures out a way to detect these things somebody will find out a better way to make them so they're not going away this is that is not actually going to fix the problem I mean it's you have to do it it's a great thing to do but it's not the end of the day so I want to talk and said a little bit more about what kinds of fun and interesting things you can do with these kinds of forgeries so here you see a few sort of broad categories like you know distorting policy debates eroding trust and information damaging national security disrupting international relations all kinds of interesting things you can do with these forgeries that you produce here are a couple of more specific examples so like for example the first one fake videos could feature public officials taking bribes uttering racial epithets or engaging in adultery that's a useful thing to be able to do if you really if you really have to get somebody that's a good way to do it soldiers shown murdering innocent civilians in a war zone precipitating waves of violence and even strategic harm to the war effort or even better a deep fake might falsely depict a white police officer shooting an unarmed black man while shouting racial epithets that's always a winning concept so lots and lots of fun things you can do and I just wanted to show you quickly a couple of examples and you've seen some of these that we may have seen this one specifically but and I went to Russia and took this you know beautiful shot of a cathedral it's great you know it's almost good enough to be reasonably priced easy to download stock footage which it may in fact be but it's got this horrible spotlight blocking the cathedral the whole time right so I'd love to get rid of it how can we do that should we even try should we yeah Photoshop and I'll select the spotlight here and the top here and use the incredible content aware fill and we'll see this result is pretty good I'd want to touch it up I could use the stamp tool here because there's a lot of repeat what that result looks like if you put all those frames back to back and this is obviously not going to work right it's too obvious there's like some sort of force field effect it looks like the shape of a of a this here and look at the result and you'll see I removed this spotlight thank you so in this case you know we're removing something that's sort of freestanding in front of a background but this will also work in cases where it's something's attached you know so if you have a stain on your shirt or you've got graffiti on the wall you want to remove or maybe your your drone has a shadow you want to remove in this example I'm removing the strap from the guy's backpack and this is kind of a subtle result but I hope you're impressed because it's really hard we never see behind the strap so we have to imagine what it looks like behind the strap and then you know convincingly propagate that through time even as the guy moves and the lighting changes yeah so this is a this hard one to do and could you still use that on the people can you yeah we can we can remove the people yeah see where did they go being tracked and then they disappear they got taken by aliens so so that particular tool that comes from adobe and the real innovation there was as you saw so they have they had a way to write simple bounding box all you got to do is draw back anybody can do that for around the object it's pretty simple and you press a button and remove it from a still image the real innovation here was that it would work across multiple frames in a video instead of having to do it frame by frame so that's that's really a nice piece of work but again it shows how easy it is for somebody to do that it's really easy you know in the old days when Stalin wanted to remove somebody from a picture and erase them from Soviet history it was a lot of work an awful lot of work to do that today just like that this thing will be available in a store near you soon there's another fun example now listen carefully what the guy says the narrator is really fun let's try and darken that up a bit with some cloud oh that's wonderful what if we were to change all that to rock okay let's click on rock and then we can press the mountain let's try waffles by pulling water down from the top there okay wouldn't it be great if everybody could be an artist if we could take our ideas and turn them into compelling images this technology allows us to create a smart paint brush so that if you wanted to create a new picture you can just draw the shapes of the objects that you want and the neural network can then fill in all the details if we add a water feature the network is able to add reflections not because we told it that but because it learned it or if we change the ground to be covered in snow then it knows that the sky also needs to be a different color i really think this technology is going to be great for architects designers people making virtual worlds to train robots and self-driving cars the input to this model is something we call a segmentation map it's like a coloring book picture that describes here's where a tree is here's where the sky is here's where the ground is and it doesn't have any details and then the neural network is able to fill in all the texture and shadows and the colors based on things that it's learned from a large database of real-world images i would like to see that tree reflecting in that pond the real advance here is that we're able to synthesize images with a lot more diversity and more fidelity than we were able to in the past i really think this technology is going to be great for the dreamers of the world what he didn't say was that this technology is going to be really great for those who want to create nightmares not just dreams so he kind of like kind of glossed over the issue of all the interesting people who are going to be able to take advantage of this kind of technique but you know after all well he's selling this thing what can i say but yes as you can see that comes from the video nice piece of work that will also be available to you soon which can imagine with very little artistic skill anybody can conj up beautiful pictures of all sorts showing all kinds of things that don't exist now as i you know said before this kind of deep fake this is this kind of technology is really an arms race so here was just an example to show that even the speaker yesterday because he did this work but i'm throwing it in anyway i'm repeating if those you didn't hear it uh somebody noticed that in these fake videos people weren't blinking the eyes weren't blinking that doesn't look natural so so he and his friends they all came up with some brilliant algorithm to detect cases where the eyes are not blinking well unfortunately within like a few weeks of the time that they posted the paper online describing this really clever technique that they came up with he started receiving links to pictures of fake videos and guess what was happening in the pictures the eyes were blinking there you go so all his fine work well it wasn't for nothing but um wasn't going to save this it wasn't going to solve this problem so here's one i want to show you now that pay careful attention to the final result of this look at this video from saturday night live that someone altered and posted on youtube i'm sorry let's this is going so well on the left kate mckinnon as hillary clinton on the right clinton's face digitally inserted they did the same trick with vladimir people can now buy software and doctor video at home to create what's called deep fakes at carnegie melin university professor alan black specializes in speech synthesis he shows us how it works with an audio clock he has me read some times the time is now almost 12 and then plugs my voice sample into a synthesizer he's able to have me say whatever he types time is now exactly 10 past three in the morning okay i didn't say that and so and that folks is the real point so it's the so which is really what is really all about it's not the trick itself the techniques it's what are you actually going to do with it and the point is that an end in real disinformation real deception okay disinformation is part of a larger idea of deception operations so any any kind of large-scale deception operations whether it's a tactical hit-and-run type of event or a large long-term deception or plan it requires a lot of thought a lot of imagination and a lot of planning it isn't only about technical tricks and i want to show you a few examples so here was this was a really interesting case so there was an incident that had occurred in India in the state of Uttar Pradesh in 2013 so in Uttar Pradesh you have two kind you have hindu and muslim populations living side by side and there's a lot of tension and discussion between them so there was an incident where a hindu girl was being hassled by a muslim boy she went to complain to her brother her brother and cousin went over and paid this boy a visit and he ended up dead so that set off some significant amount of violence things were looking bad until somebody got the great idea they did what i call a cognitive vulnerability analysis a cognitive vulnerability analysis simply means what is it that my target audience is prepared to believe and so they did that they thought it over and they put up this video so if you have a weak stomach you might want to turn away but this is a very gruesome video i'll stop it there but it goes on this thing goes on and it shows two guys getting beaten to death by a mob and it's really i mean he gets really if you thought this is better he gets really ugly later in the end it took 45 minutes to kill these two guys beaten into death in in front of a mob like that and then he dragged the bodies to the street was a whole was a whole thing somebody took that video put it up on youtube and said it was the two hindu guys who murdered the muslim boy being beaten to death by a muslim mob in retaliation for that murder when that video went up the violence got so bad that the indian government was forced to bring in 13 000 troops to put down the violence okay so this isn't just some random things right i mean this is this is pretty heavy stuff so it turns out that the video is in fact a real video showing two guys getting beaten to death by a mob that's for real just not those two guys not only was it not those two guys but it wasn't even india what there really was pakistan and had nothing to do with hindu muslim relations it was about two guys who got caught as thieves in this village in pakistan which is predominantly muslim village and being caught as a thief in a muslim village as you can see is not the healthiest thing to happen to you so but it was just the video required no doctoring nothing nothing at all all it was was the right label and it was like pouring gasoline on a fire another fun example again didn't require it didn't require any technique at all actually so you remember when there was a big tidal wave and the hit fukushima the nuclear power plant in japan and everybody was scared this thing was going to melt down and a big radiation cloud was going to come and kill everybody so the chinese so you had a billionaire you know a bill over a billion chinese who were scared to death that this was going to happen to them so in that midst of that panic i mean they were sure this radiation cloud was going to come over china and kill everybody so in the midst of that panic somebody got a bright idea to start a rumor in chinese social media space that if you eat a lot of iodized salt you'll be protected from this coming radiation cloud clever idea and so what they managed to do was to create a run on salt there were stores in major cities in china where you could not find salt so i mean it really got out of hand i mean people were putting advertising all kind of people were taking fun advantage of it for example one guy put an advertisement in the paper you know in china there's um is it shorted to women because of the birth birth policies that they've had so it's not often easy for men to find wives this guy put an ad in the paper and he said i have a dowry if you come to marry me i have you know i have several sacks of salt that's that's my dowry so he's giving away salt as a dowry as a result of this idea it was pretty good i mean and there were a lot of jokes and fun made about it but the chinese government took it very very seriously because a run on any kind of commodity item like that is a is a spike in the supply chain and any kind of supply spike in the supply chain could lead to potential instabilities and if there's one thing the chinese government really really detests its instability of any kind so they took it very seriously in the fact that uh this has been done with other commodity items in china as well so imagine if you really wanted to get you know get underneath the chinese skin well all you had to do is create a whole series of these simultaneously and boy you could really generate panic throughout the country so so it's interesting again but required very little technical skill just how could you spread a rumor in social media space not that difficult especially when people are already in a state ready to believe it and that's crucial by the way any good piece of disinformation and deception operation has to be built on real events it has to sound plausible to the target audience you can't just pull something out of your behinds and say okay well i'm going to just put this out and i'll have some fun with it no most of it will fall flat if the thought the thought doesn't go into it to make it really appealing to your audience it won't work so that's really critical it was another example of that this was a case that required a little bit of technical skill but still it was the it was really sort of the psychosocial aspect of it that was really important so this is an event that happened in 2013 where somebody turned out later that there's at least a suspicion that it was some Syrian army but anyway somebody hijacked the Associated Press Twitter account and put out a tweet saying that but it says there are two explosions in the White House and Barack Obama's injured so they put out this tweet under the Associated Press Twitter account the result was that within two minutes or so the stock market dropped 100 points it lost 150 billion dollars of value in the market was wiped out two minutes now three minutes later it had come back but you know that's five minutes of complete chaos and anybody who was really understood what they were doing could have made a fortune on that i mean if it was me i'm not sure it wasn't me but if it was me doing this thing i would have all my trades lined up betting on the market going down i would have all my other the whole other line of trades betting on the market going back up i would have pressed the button when i saw it start to drop like a rock i'd execute all the first line of trades and when i saw it start to come back up i'd execute the second line of trades and i'd be done and i'd have made a fortune now the interesting part about this is i would recall to you a story of Willie Sutton how many of you have heard of Willie Sutton no one fell back there okay okay so Willie Sutton was a famous bank robber in the 1930s he was kind of like a celebrity as well as well as being a bank robber he was a celebrity for being a bank robber and somebody asked him after his course said Willie why do you rob why do you rob banks and he said well because that's where the money is not that complicated the beauty of this kind of business today is i could be sitting in a yurt in out of mongolia and i could have done this scheme i don't have to go to the bank i have to go anywhere i have to be anywhere where anybody could catch me so that's really the foundation of white collar crime today you can do things at a distance you can even do things like assassinations but i won't get into that for the moment maybe maybe this time later i will spend you how you can assassinate somebody with social media i don't know anybody you've just ever seen the show homeland okay well if you ever saw the show homeland starting in the fourth season they introduced a lot of things with social media and the first episode they actually they assassinate the chief of the the head of the cia and and pakistan so all that stuff that came that they're using in social media by the way came from me i was i was consulting on the show and they used my trick about how to assassinate somebody in the first episode that that was fun um okay so next thing another simple example this one is very clever i'll watch this okay so a reporter at large an editor at large from cnn put out a tweet said oh my god oh my god oh my god the polish prime minister snubbed this his wife's the polish prime minister's wife snubbed donald trump okay this is this scene is in poland and he's up on a stage with his wife and with the polish prime minister and his wife so that was the message that came out all right now let's talk about what really happened up there okay so what you see here is that she actually didn't snub him at all and in fact what she did was follow proper pro polish protocol she was supposed to go over and shake mrs trump's hand and then the president and the polish prime minister did the same thing so that's exactly what was supposed to happen and if you had the sound behind you could hear the audience shouting USA USA USA so when you put the sound back in and you showed the rest of the video it told a completely different story than the first cutoff part so the only skill required was just to decide where to chop the video off to produce the desired effect nothing anybody could do that very simple but again it's the thought it's the thought that counts it was another case uh last year uh kidnappings were very popular in india as a topic and somebody showed this video now in india people really went nuts when they saw this video i mean this was this was somebody claimed they had filmed the kidnapping a live kidnapping in the street and this went out and people were really up in arms and upset and um these two poor guys you see in the bottom picture they stopped somewhere to ask for directions and they looked like what you know they were on a motorcycle of the same like the guys in the picture and a crowd uh you know formed and tore them apart and killed these guys and they weren't the only deaths that resulted from all of this business about kidnapping so it became a big deal it resulted in numerous deaths because of people's panic reactions and the fact is the video is so the video wasn't fake in the sense that somebody made it as a fake video for this purpose the video was actually just a little tiny segment of a pakistani training film to help raise awareness about child kidnapping and what this was was a reenactment that they did as part of the training video as a demonstration to show so somebody found the training video they said okay great i'm going to just take that little piece and i'm going to put it up and say it was real that's all i had to do the pakistanis did all the work the guys who made the training video for exactly the opposite purpose of what this was used for and it worked very nicely that's a good trick again the thought it's all about the thought so i wanted to find for you just quickly um what i like to call cognitive security so at this conference everybody's hung up on cyber security cyber security in the united states tends to mean technical hacking i mean it's about attacking the infrastructures attacking the box at the end of the infrastructure and that's all well and good but um cognitive security is actually about using those things to attack the people at the at the end right so it's really all about attempts to do mass manipulation of people and at the end of the day manipulation of people is based on it's really emotional manipulation what we're talking about it's not about reason you're not convincing somebody by a reasoned argument of anybody of anything nobody's really listening to that anyway but things with strong emotional appeal i mean i was talking to the guy the other day about um we were talking about examples of this and thinking about the american revolution so you had the constitutional convention you know these guys brought a lot of clever people sat there made up this constitution they're all this work and hammered all this stuff out and then you know the revolutionary war ensued so then the question is how many people i mean average americans at the time well they were british i guess but average people at the time had any clue about really really really in detail what was in the constitution probably almost nobody really understood it what you know what they understood what the message was the british is screwing us let's get them that was it you know you could take all the articles of the constitution nobody cared you know nobody cared the boston tea party that makes an impression they're screwing us they're taxing us they're doing this it's all unfair we hate them let's get them that's what really drove people not the constitution so the thing that's you know that's different today is that the techniques for doing running deception operations and just using this information there you can do things on a scale that you couldn't dream of before all right i mean you could make things happen instantly over a large period of time so you could do all sorts of things which is simply wasn't possible to do and not only that but the operations themselves are easy to conceal so it's really easy to hide in the mass of things that are happening on a normal basis so really the internet and social media in general provide us with a whole different kind of a background to pull off all kinds of fantastic deception operations and scams of various sorts so that's really that's really i would say different plus the fact that the news media the news itself is no longer the gatekeeper of truth and information people are getting most of the information off from some social media side or other off the internet but there's really very little control there's no redaction i mean it's just whatever people want so you know the journalists have sort of fallen by the wayside yeah another big feature that's new is really the whole idea of participatory propaganda so in this case this information campaigns the people who are you know the people who are the targets are themselves the perpetrators in this kind of a scheme because it's a little bit like the telephone game you see anybody sit around in a circle right one guy whisper something and at the end it comes out completely different all right but imagine that happening on a massive scale as it does today so the fact so the way people communicate with each other the way things get distorted you're in fact supporting the effort in various ways when you do that and so you know planners deception planners today are taking advantage of that kind of thing so it's really really uh it's a very useful trick so it's it's not technical hey you're making a guess about people's behavior and you're estimating people's behavior how they react to things so so a lot of this kind of work i mean really disinformation the deception operations in general is really about behavioral analysis i mean that's really what you're looking at and in a behavioral manipulation emotional manipulation that's really the secret um so what i want to do is also just say a word about artificial intelligence i've worked in artificial intelligence business for 35 years i mean i worked at the very first commercial ai company ever in 1983 and i can tell you that the last big wave of ai which was in the 80s i mean i have lived here in my lifetime two ai winters where ai really became unpopular the first one was in the beginning of the 70s and the second one was sort of the beginning of the 90s just somewhere during the 90s and i was two times up an ai program manager darpa so i've seen a lot of this stuff develop as it came and i could tell you that i could take articles that were written in magazines and publications it was it looked in 1983 it looked just like it does today you can't open an album newspaper you couldn't turn on a deal with anybody ai this ai that is going to save the world right everything so and today you hear about the chinese are going to take over the world with ai well you know what you heard in 1983 in the 80s the japanese are going to take over the world with ai how many of you have ever heard or remember the japanese fifth generation project yeah exactly my point most of you have never heard of it i know a lot of younger people who are working in the field today never heard of it and in the 80s it was a huge huge deal and the japanese made spectacular claims how they were going to rule everything with this technology and then when the whole thing fell flat the ministry of industry and transportation industry and technology media who was bankrolling this thing they put an enormous amount of money enormous amount of prestige at the end they just shut it down and that was the end of it they you know they declared it a success and moved on so i can see that happening again soon in a different way it looked different than it did last time but in any case to show just to bring back to you know to why i started on this with ai everybody's talking about statistical machine learning okay well i got news for you ai has a much bigger field than statistical machine learning there's a hell of a lot more to it than that and one of the most interesting aspects of ai technology has been developed over the last 40 50 years is automatic planning systems ai planning systems it is a huge area you can look it up i mean the illiterature is enormous now why do i say it's relevant here because when it comes to actually planning disinformation deception operations and disinformation operations planning this kind of planning is key you have to plan how you know how you're going to what is it that you're going to distribute for what effect and how you're going to distribute it and make sure that the effect is actually happening it's also it's very complicated there's a lot to it if you're going to really do this right and really have an impact so i think it's a good place to bring back ai planning technology to help actually plan large-scale deception operations disinformation operations and so on so i know that's coming it hasn't yet in fact i can tell you that the the original title okay the original title of my phd thesis from a very long time ago was going to be the automatic generation of plausible disinformation so it was an ai thesis i was a little bit ahead of my time but i mean i can talk to all about i i worked out a whole topic of disinformation theory as opposed to information theory what does that mean what is how do you define that uh was a whole lots of very interesting problems with it when you really get into it um so anyway plans i think it's worth it i get there's a couple of references here for anybody just you can there are actually entire courses i mean from ai courses about ai planning if anybody wants to look them up and take a look i would i would recommend it so i think i'm going to stop there um you know this is you've heard of mass manufacturing you know mass customized mass customization of mass manufacturing well we're now in the in the in this age of you know customers customizing mass messaging because mass customization you can customize on a massive scale today in a way you couldn't do before and really define target audiences and that gets really into a lot more techniques about how you actually do this kind of work but i think i'll just stop there in case there are any questions yes yes well it it really refers to i mean it's the idea how do you protect people from mass manipulation through new media so it's like it's like cyber security is about you know of defending and attacking technical systems cyber security cognitive securities about defending and attacking cognitive your human beings well there are certainly practices by the way they ripped that term off for me i gave them the term but that's okay i don't mind well so i just showed you a whole bunch of examples of what you can do from the offensive side right i mean all the examples i showed you those that those are really those are attacks they're all attacks they're all they're all attempts at manipulation through this type of techniques so that's such some of the offensive side from the defensive side nobody's done anything so the basic the bottom line is that the united states government has chosen to leave the population completely undefended that's where we are now yes i'm sorry do they need no not not not like this yes it used to it used to it's really interesting i mean up until the beginning of the 70s we had capability to do this in a serious way but it was all disbanded it was an it was insanity because what happened was detente was introduced at the beginning of the 70s the united states government and its infinite wisdom decided well now we have detente we don't need this kind of techniques anymore so they so they shut most of it down what they had and then there were other issues that came up so you had um there were the frank church hearings and you had the whole introduction of fiza courts and you had all sorts of things that made it very difficult to know or next to impossible to kind of work but it all shut down and then in 1981 interestingly enough when reagan came into office he said well you know maybe that wasn't such a smart idea to shut all that down and he made at least some feeble effort to revive this and he created something called the active measures working group so the active measures working group which i highly recommend you to go out and um you know to find to read the history there's some really nice work done on it the purpose of the group was to try to counter soviet active measures and the group was formed in 81 and it was disbanded in 1991 when the soviet union dissolved they disbanded the whole thing and i was talking to a very senior official from the state department together with a friend of mine who was one of the last members of this committee and i said well you know why did you guys decide to disband the committee in 1991 and all the work that they was doing and she said well the cold war was over wasn't necessary anymore i said wow okay is that a view that's widely held by people in the state department at senior level she said yes i said well you know that explains a lot but anybody believed any of that stuff was over in 1991 just because the soviet union dissolved i mean this is like naive in the extreme i mean if you look at the russians today just to take an example as i say active measures just even the sobeys got it from the ochrana from the tsarist sigra police the modern russians russians have got took to hope the playbook from the kgb so i mean this is a long tradition and i there's no reason and it's even today's even some of the same guys from the kgb days who are doing it so you know these things have long continuous histories the chinese the chinese have been doing this kind of work for a very very i mean we're talking a thousand years right and they're masters at it they do fantastic work i mean i can give a i can stand here and talk to you for two hours about the kinds of things the chinese do but um yeah it's it's but from the u.s. government's perspective no and if you really want to see where we are in the u.s. listen to the hearings when mark zuckerberg was called before the center on service committee and listen to the questions that the members that the members were asking him so orin hatch all right i don't know how many of you have heard orin hatch the senator from uh from utah he said and i quote mr zuckerberg i don't understand if you're not charging people for your service how is it that you make any money well you know when i hear that the only thing i can see is vladimir putin rolling on the floor in his office and hysterics clutching his side from pain from laughter and he's thinking to himself you know i could shut down the gru and i could shut down the fsb this is the russian intelligence what do i need those jokers for because i've got orin hatch and all of his moron friends sitting in united states congress and they're doing all the work just for me i don't need to know them i don't need to pay him i don't need to talk to him i don't have to have anything to do with them and they're doing the whole job it's fantastic i mean how can you beat it you can't so that's so those quit and in fact i can tell you that one of the permanent staffers sent me an email before the hearing and asked me to send some questions that the members could ask so i have two pages of questions i sent them so he writes back to me he says you know these are great questions they're not going to use any of that stuff and instead you heard the idiocies that you heard if you listened instead of real questions which would have been something substantial no completely stupid so that pretty much sums up where we are as the united states government so another question yes how does it play out badly very very badly that's how it plays out i don't see any sign any sign of this improving here i mean i'll give you an example i gave a talk the um there's something called afseav and insa these are intelligence community professional societies and i gave a talk at one of their big meetings i gave a talk and i said and it was a source on open source intelligence that was an open meeting and i came in it came to me and i said i said well you know i said the russians the chinese hezbollah isis the mafia google yahoo basically every asshole in the face of this planet has complete free and open access to our public public social media data i'm not talking about breaking into anything i'm just talking about listening to what you can that's available everybody except the united states government now what is wrong with that picture folks there's something terribly wrong if you're either if you live under title 10 or title 50 the u.s. coach means you're either in the intelligence business or the defense business you are not allowed to be monitoring public social media data well i've heard about you but i actually find that somewhat problematic if you're actually thinking in terms of defending the population and that's only the beginning i mean there are all sorts of reasons why this stuff is not being done and what the problems are but um you know i could give a long talk about that but anyway where we it's it's it's heading towards a very very bad end at this point with no relief in sight whatsoever our adversaries they're sharpening their pencils in their work and an improving technique constantly while we do nothing that's where it is so on that pleasant note i'll stop