 Good afternoon and thank you all for coming along to the National Security College. I'd like to begin by acknowledging and by celebrating the first Australians on whose traditional lands we meet today and pay respects to the elders of the Ngunnawal people past and present. Welcome to the National Security College at the Australian National University. I'm Rory Medcalf, I'm the head of the college and it's great to see some familiar faces, but also some new faces in the audience here today. Just to remind you to please switch off your phones as we are recording today's event or at least keep your phones on silent so that you can tweet furiously in the spirit of the information wars that we're talking about here today. The theme of today's special seminar or special panel discussion is of course one of the hottest topics in the news and in the world today. The role of the mass manipulation of information for, I guess, for competition between states, for coercion between states or indeed for purposes in non-state security issues, for terrorism, for counter-terrorism, really for influence of all political kinds. And as someone who's just returned from Donald Trump's America and that's why probably I'm looking a little bit bleary-eyed for probably more reasons than one, it's very clear to me and to all of us that the use and the abuse of information and of truth, if you can call it that, has become really prime material for the study of national security and for the wielding of real influence. And it's really changing a lot of the dynamics that we who study and work in national security policy thought that we understood. So understanding the dynamics of this new age of digital manipulation is absolutely vital to the national interest countries like Australia. The panel we have today are all experts in their fields and those fields range widely as you'll hear in a moment across cyber security, across interstate relations, across counter-terrorism, across countering extremism, across public policy of all descriptions. But what they have in common I think is this acute sensibility that informs the national security college. That is bringing together the rigorous study of national security problems with relevance to the needs of the nation, the needs of the policy community. And so that goes really to the mission of what we do at the national security college, bringing together the interests of society and government and the state with the rigorous study of the issues at hand. This is really part of a wider set of activities we conduct here at the college that we call our policy engagement program really, where we bring together our academic experts and policy practitioners. So the other pillars of our work, of course, much more in the space of training and education more traditionally understood, but this is really core to the value that we add in Australia. I guess I'd just note by way of passing before we begin that we do have an exceptional all-mail panel here today and that's partly a function of the fact that one of our speakers, Michelle Price, had to drop out pretty late in the piece, but we do have an extremely talented array of speakers all the same. I would note just in that context that if you haven't already got a flyer for our Women and National Security Conference in a couple of weeks, please pick up a flyer from outside because I think that conference on the 4th and the 5th of April is another of the major contributions that this college is making in terms of contemporary national security thinking and practice. With that I'm going to hand over to my colleague Matt Sussex. Dr Matt Sussex is the director of our academic program here at the college to take charge of proceedings today. Thank you very much, Matt. Thanks, Rory, and thank you everybody for coming out here. Let me echo Rory's words in saying that it's just absolutely fabulous to see that I think this is the third event we've run primarily driven by the academic team in terms of public engagement with hot topics affecting national security and today's turnout is very similar to others so we're absolutely delighted that you're interested in the things that we have to say. In fact, we probably could have filled this panel three or four times over amongst my colleagues. There was intense competition for slots. I was originally going to be mumbling a few words about Russia and hybrid warfare but fortunately for you I've made way for speakers much more erudite than I. We have an excellent lineup today to talk about information wars and of course this is a topic for security policymakers which cuts across a whole sweep of different other arenas that we've typically associated either with the domestic business of the state or with the coercive punitive functions of the state in terms of outside security so whether or not information wars find themselves in traditional geopolitics as we saw in Crimea and as we continue to witness in eastern Ukraine or whether you find it in compromise against officials whether you find it in social manoeuvring of individual communities, groups, societies and the influence of domestic elections in the world's most powerful actor. Information wars are probably here to stay and probably here also to continue to challenge liberal democracies and liberal democracies of course are not particularly well set up to deal with these types of issues and to explore that in a little bit more detail we have indeed assembled I think a very fine panel for you today I don't intend to take up too much of your time and leave the vast majority to discussion and the thoughts of our experts. Let me introduce first of all Professor Roger Bradbury who is in charge of our strategy and state craft in cyberspace program originally Roger is who we know to many of you I would have thought originally Roger was a complex systems scientist trained as a zoologist but he has since made that transition from animals to other types of animals I suppose and studies humans in terms of the way that they behave in cyberspace he's worked with the Australian intelligence community for numerous years on a variety of different things and he's effectively the NSC's chief scientist I think probably rather than run through all our presenters what I might do is give a brief bio of each of them when they come to the lectern but just for your information after Roger we will hear from Dr Tim LeGrand the seating order is somewhat out of whack but never mind Dr Haroro Ingram and to give his final thoughts and his observations on the panelists views Professor Paul Cornish in his debut performance for the National Security College and we're all extremely excited to have Paul on board working with us so let me begin then by welcoming Roger to the lectern and ask him to speak for about 10 minutes or so Thanks everyone I'm a scientist as Matt noted you can't take the boy out of science but you can't take science out of the boys so you're going to get some science I'm going to offer you a four part scientific hypothesis about what's going on this current mass behaviour in the political realms it's scientific in the sense that it's testable it's explanatory and I hope it's predictive so here's how it goes and I'll gallop through this and we can talk about it later so the first part, the first point of this hypothesis and they're independent but they hang together the second part is that humans have a deeply embedded inability to effectively reason it's deep and it's based on our evolutionary past it's a sociobiological phenomenon our reasoning abilities such as they are had adaptive value in early human evolution because our survival depended on hypersociality we were weak, we were clumsy but we defeated the other nasty things on the savannah because we could cooperate in ways that were just unheard of before human beings walked the planet but this kind of hypersociality has a huge free rider cost it's always an advantage not to go out and enjoy the hunting ban but stay back in the cave we evolved a capacity to argue and to reason in quotes to win arguments to make sure that there weren't free riders to ensure that all group members took their share of the common load and allowed this hypersociality to flourish so it's rhetoric rather than logic and rhetoric trumps logic as we've seen in parliament all the time and there's very strong evidence for this very, very strong evidence a lot of evolutionary psychology studies a lot of studies on fairness behaviour which is widespread across cultures and seems to be independent of culture and so on deeply embedded behaviour but this human reasoning to be successful in a Darwinian sense doesn't need to be truthful doesn't need to lead to the truth it just needs to lead to a shared, agreed position and understanding which itself then promotes hypersociality and then feeds back and then enhances the group so that's the, that's the phenomenon the base phenomenon that we're dealing with well how did that play out over the next from prehistoric times through to the present what happened, I think, over the period of history is that elites captured this process over the last few thousand years and used it ultimately to create the nation state they created it because they could create an approved story about about whatever the current situation was we'll all remember First World War all the states had an approved story about why they were in the war and all said, got mit uns, got is with us logically that's dumb but it worked as an approved story it worked to increase the hypersociality and it worked at the state level what they did was harness this evolved trade of hypersociality to create larger and larger and larger groups ultimately reaching what I call the dynamically stable complex system that we call the nation state it couldn't go bigger than that because the stories would start to break down couldn't go less than that because the state could always elevate the story up they could do this because they could control the dissemination of the story because the medium in which the stories were handled and disseminated were very expensive and only the elite had the capacity to manage the story to manage the rhetoric because books and so forth at that time were very expensive and so you needed an educated elite to control the story and that in itself fed back to create the nation state so that's why we have the authorised version of the Bible very important document in that sociological sense and that's why we have even received pronunciation of English and we call this civilisation broadly the third part of the argument is that in the middle of this creation of a big story came the Enlightenment it found a space to flourish in this it found a place to flourish in one part one civilisation at one time in history it was harassed and harried because it wasn't part of the main story from Galileo to Darwin but it survived it survived because it was useful to the elite not because and because there was a space for truth for organisation but the broader story just continued so it could coexist the Enlightenment could coexist when there was a single dominant other story in which it could sort of become a symbiont or a parasite too Darwin wisely kept his views about the human dimension of evolution under a fig leaf because it would have ruined the story Galileo wisely recanted his heliocentric heresy in order to maintain to allow the flourishing of truth in this little side pocket so now we come to the last part of my story the fourth part the fourth part of this argument says that the emergence of cyberspace is an authentic new domain come to my lectures and I'll tell you more about that an authentic new domain of human activity it breaks the nexus between the elite and the story the emergence of cyberspace has broken this model of elite capture because now once again groups of any size can create their own stories and they can close them off by confirmation bias because human beings are not reasonable so you can get this just as and nation size lumps once closed off the stories any size group can now control the story groups can fuse and split arbitrarily at all scales because the cost of disseminating the story is now negligible and everyone, every splintering group can have its own authorised version of its own bible so the conclusion from this is that firstly none of this speaks about truth I'm not saying this is good or bad I'm saying this is what it is except perhaps the existence of the Enlightenment which was this funny little attempted getting to having an algorithm that creates truth we're seeing a secular change in the world system as a result of the emergence of cyberspace and it's a greater change in the world system than the Enlightenment itself and because the Enlightenment only affected a small bit of the world one bit of a civilisation in one part of the world so as such there's no, as the title suggests there's no real manipulation going on here as such by individuals or groups there's no conspiracy there's rather just a deep shift in the dynamics of the world system or the human bit of it and we're seeing the emergence of arbitrarily sized and often ephemeral and sometimes persistent groups rather than the steady, equilibrium forcing of groups to conform to the story and the view of a nation state we're seeing the unshackling of the very small Enlightenment group from the dominant elite group the Enlightenment group that liked the stuff that we talk about was a symbiote or a parasite on the former elite group it was tucked away safely and survived instead of it being a tolerated parasite of a single dominant story of whatever civilisation it was in it's now, the Enlightenment part is just one story amongst a competing smattering of noisy stories that are coming and going and so has no privilege over any of them so it may turn out that the Enlightenment itself was but a minor detour in the evolution of the species they're my comments it's always nice to hear the Enlightenment referred to as a minor detour reminded now very much of earlier writing in the 1990s about the emergence of a so-called infosphere a cornucopia of truths, half truths and outright lies which managed to predict, I think, old truth and old fact quite nicely but didn't predict the fact that the old fact may in fact be in residence in the White House now folks let me move to introduce Dr Tim LeGrand from the National Security College who is our trans-governmental policy network specialist who also works on security governance who works on transnational crime who works on counter-terrorism there's a wide suite in fact of research specialisations but in particular I think it's worth noting Tim's work at the juncture of cyber security and public policy making and certainly information and the manipulation of information is something that I know he has a very deep interest in so let me welcome Tim to the stage thank you Matthew and thank you everyone and I'd just like to put a caveat to that I'm interested in the manipulation of information but as an academic my job is hopefully to portray information in a value-neutral way as much as possible as Matthew said, my interest is in public policy and in government and in respect of our theme today cyber security is one of those issues which has been rapidly ascending the political agenda with a meteoric rise that terrifies many policy makers and officials for its sheer incomprehensibility often because of the technical aspects and the seemingly numerable opportunities for influence and for changes in political practice today I want to talk to you about digitising democracy and how our democracy has been radically transformed in several dimensions there are lots of ways in which we could talk about the digital landscape but of course you're all familiar with the digital landscape and how democracy as you engage with it has transformed I bet that most of you in your pockets have a mobile phone and I bet most of you didn't turn it off when Rory said, please turn it off imagine some of you even didn't turn it to silent but living in a very connected age we connect socially with one another we connect with our communities with our friends, with our families and what are sometimes called bubbles we connect with people with similar political beliefs we connect with people with news sites and news media channels who tend to have more or less similar political outlooks to ourselves as an academic I'm guilty of this I go to the Guardian every morning with my cup of coffee and read the latest left-wing whitewash of whatever before going on to the Daily Mail obviously I don't but we know this don't we we know that our engagement with democracy and with our communities and our social lives has been digitised and not just in the way in which we consume and understand the world but in terms of the way in which we communicate with that world so some of you in here will be on Facebook some of you will be on Twitter Instagram or any number of other social media networks your voice now is amplified to a magnitude never previously accessible to any political figure in the past X million years your voice can be heard in California right now should you tweet at the right moment to the right person or into the Twitter sphere your voice could be heard in Antarctica if the exploration missions there have internet access your voice can be truly digitally global in respect of a politics and a social in respect of a social attitude and a political attitude which has never been experienced before now governments need to exploit this rightly so governments are saying the way in which our institutions engage with the public is important so we can share information more quickly more rapidly than ever before people can engage in public consultations can engage in political debates in a way which they could not previously so the digital services of governments are becoming increasingly resonant in democracy today and of course the channels the news channels of communication which have the orthodoxies of the old media so the Sydney Morning Herald the age those news outlets which we know and trust are now being complimented by new channels of information Bright's Bart some of you may quiver at the thought of Buzzfeed, Gawker new sorts of social media and news media websites which are becoming increasingly popular and influential in dissemination and proliferation of particular sorts of news now I want you to reflect on the proliferation of information the globalisation of information in news in respect of democracy and its pressure points now you might think of democracy in terms of its elections national, regional, local elections these are orthodox pressure points you might think of democracy's pressure points in terms of the scrutiny of parliament so how bills and how legislation is scrutinised and tested through parliamentary processes we might think about political parties and the way in which they organise their political agenda and their manifesto for election if you're more community minded you might be involved in interest groups and the way in which interest groups apply pressure both in the wider community but also to political figures there are a range of different points at which we apply pressure and have our voice heard or have influence over the political process potentially and now I suggest today that the cyber domain can and has changed these pressure points in three key respects firstly as I've already intimated the atomisation of digital news means that there's now proliferation of news sources out there these may be credible, these may be non-credible the debate is open as to how we discern whether news is fair reporting or compromised reporting fake news in the discourse of one prominent commentator such news is easily compromised through digital techniques what are called botnets are often used to promote particular news stories botnets are computer programs which exist virtually and can be used and manipulated by a single point of origin to promote particular news stories or through Facebook, through Twitter or other social media in other words the algorithms through which we select our news stories are subject to manipulation now this leads to the shaping of the news agenda to either promote certain individuals or discriminate against certain individuals Hillary Clinton during the recent presidential campaign was accused of running a child sex ring out of a pizza shop again, a piece of news which had no basis in reality but yet took traction through its promotion online on social media and we know that the use of fake or planted or even leaked news stories can attack the credibility of figures seeking election this is the fear of Germany at the moment that the recent hack the Bundesstag in 2015 is being used to against particular individuals who are more left inclined than those who are right inclined and this might echo some fears that we've had in Australia in a parliamentary hack in 2011 so the landscape of news is vulnerable secondly, institutions are vulnerable I'm not here to spruke but it just happens that I'm going to spruke that I did a report for Macquarie telecoms and with the NSC on looking at the security of cyber governance in governments and in mid-sized corporations and we find a very mixed picture of cyber security our institutions are vulnerable and yet they are important to us because they speak to public trust an example of this, the disruption of the census the Australian census in 2016 caused enormous embarrassment to the government highlighting the vulnerability of both digital services and our trust in those digital services to cyber attack of course institutions can also be targeted to acquire politically sensitive information which then might be used to influence public debate or embarrass the incumbent government or influence public opinion again, the democratic national committees the leaking of their emails during the presidential campaign is evidence of this UK's GCHQ have recently warned the political parties of the UK to tighten up their digital security because of fears again that foreign attackers may be able to intrude in their service and exploit their cyber security to leak embarrassing emails something that's not necessarily mentioned very often but law firms have a role in this as well the protection of their clients data and security goes to a lot of the litigation processes in courts in Australia but also overseas on the line here is a credibility in public institutions and the processes of democracy and finally individuals themselves and I think this is an important point really individuals themselves are increasingly vulnerable decision makers, politicians, public servants judiciary, police and security officials and so on are more vulnerable than ever before in this digital landscape frankly because, and you know this already we increasingly rely on digital services to store our emails and our digital and our data I imagine many of you have a Dropbox account and upload the contents of your computer hard drive regularly to a server in a country that you've never heard of or if you have heard of it you don't know necessarily which country is owning your data at any particular point an example of the vulnerability this induces is, well there are many let's think about the Red Cross last year admitted to leaving open a database of blood donors and their histories that they have to report to become a blood donor which includes their sexual history I don't know about you guys but I'd rather that information was kept private in 2013 Yahoo lost access to around 500 million accounts estimates vary but millions of accounts were compromised amongst which we know were current political figures like servants, lawyers, policing and security and security agency officials not to say the officials of our future were part of that data set so those who are not even part of our decision making processes now were potentially part of that hack it takes little imagination to consider the ramifications of the loss of such personal data foreign actors might easily target influential decision makers in governments the judiciary, policing agencies and so on they might exploit knowledge of the indiscretions of their past their sexual history, drug use, financial investments or even the indiscretions of their family and friends they might use this to coerce certain political, legal or financial decisions or even non-decisions they might use this information to subvert advice for example given to ministers they might use this information to their competitive advantage in competitive tendering processes in short the possibilities open to foreign attackers or even domestic attackers exploiting personal information I suggest is severe and it's imminent blackmail and extortion are as old as humanity but the digital age makes the acquisition of this information available to anyone anywhere with a connection to the internet and the requisite technical skills so to draw to a close I suggest, albeit somewhat briefly that these three vectors of vulnerability amount to a very concerning future that digital attacks represent a relatively low cost and low risk to the actor means to pursue political ends indeed the cyber landscape is a murky one you'll note I've not spoken about particular actors protagonists themselves may be anyone it's difficult in a cyber age to verifiably ascribe blame to specific individuals or states I think that to some degree is irrelevant because it's increasingly clear that as we as a society ramp up our reliance on digital systems to safeguard our information our public information our state's democratic decision making processes we're becoming increasingly vulnerable to anyone anywhere with a requisite skills and we ignore that threat at the peril of contemporary democracy thanks very much Tim it does strike me actually that when we look at the dark arts of information manipulation it's somewhat surprising that it tends to be located in more or less what we used to understand as soft power and I think perhaps we've made a couple of errors when it comes to looking at soft power the first one was to believe entirely Joseph Nye when he said soft power was about getting others to want what you want and with apologies to my colleagues who've heard me on this on numerous occasions soft power I think is also about getting others to reject what they have and this is very much what we're dealing with when we come to looking at the manipulation of information the other error I think we made when looking at soft power is in assuming that it was benign and also not able to be goal directed by different actors be they states or non-state actors now increasingly I think information can be directed there are many many metaphors and many models available and I don't intend to offer a sweeping new one but amongst the the litany of hybrid warfare and non-linear warfare and all sorts of other typologies let me offer you a gardening metaphor because I'm coming to the age where gardening is starting to look like an activity that I might reasonably perform whereas 5 to 10 years ago it never really entered my mind but increasingly information can be seeded it can be propagated and spread to other channels where one didn't intend necessarily but proves to find fertile ground and it can also be pruned to produce an exactly targeted message depending on the audience with that in mind I think it's interesting and appropriate for me to introduce the work of Dr. Haroro Ingram whom we share reluctantly with the Bell School but Haroro is an expert particularly on propaganda and on messaging and his specific area of expertise is Islamic State and the Afghan Taliban he's recently emerged unscathed from a DECRA Discovery Early Career Researcher Award well done Haroro and he's working increasingly now with primary source materials during his field work in South Asia and also South East Asia as well and the Middle East so he is very much an expert on propaganda and messaging and let me invite him to the podium to give his thoughts Haroro well thank you Matt for that appropriately dark introduction for what I'm about to say and thank you to NSC for the opportunity today so what I want to do is highlight some of ISIS propaganda how ISIS propaganda campaign has evolved from 2014 to 2017 I'll then make some observations on how this should shape our understanding of the strategic logic of their messaging campaign and I'll conclude by drawing out some implications for combating it in this information theatre now from its peak say through late 2014 to early 2015 the ISIS decline is now very much into a freefall Politico militarily ISIS are significantly worse off than they were even 9 months ago by almost any measure so take for example the global coalition against they have recently reported that ISIS has lost over 60% of its territory that it once held in Iraq 30% of what it once held in Syria and this represents more than just a territorial loss because it also means the freeing of millions of people in these areas who were formally under varying degrees of its control now ISIS generates much of its finances and of course it's manpower from these local populations so this is more than just a great humanitarian achievement of course the war itself is inflicting crippling losses personnel and resources meanwhile the foreign fighter numbers and foreign support in its various manifestations have plummeted compared to earlier peaks most painfully for the group I suspect has been the killing of key leaders movements like ISIS are designed organisationally and strategically to deal with loss it's part of the business but brilliant strategists pivotal hubs in tribal and logistical networks powerful symbols symbolic figures they have been crucial to ISIS's rise during periods of boom vital to their survival in periods of bust and so such losses really hurt this group now while these political military indicators are great I would argue that the clear decline of ISIS propaganda machine particularly in the last few months is most heartening particularly for me and many others who have closely followed this group sure ISIS propaganda output as a quantitative measure has been well down from its 2015 peak for some time now while there is a quality to quantity the strategic downsizing and streamlining of ISIS's propaganda campaign in late 2016 did not necessarily mean a less potent ISIS propaganda effort there was a very very real potential for the opposite to be true that this strategic shift this strategic downsizing and streamlining would actually result in a more potent propaganda machine and I think that this shift was really encapsulated in about September with the release of Ramir magazine which replaced a kind of a suite of multi-lingual magazines such as Darbuk in English in French, Constantinople for Turkish speakers and for a couple of months I think there were many analysts who felt that perhaps ISIS was pulling this streamlining off you know that there will yet based media units would produce propaganda for locals some of that material would then find its way into transnational dissemination while Ramir emerged as its flagship for transnational propaganda and the idea behind it was we as in ISIS use content from El Naba it's Arabic newspaper and this provides a consistent messaging across a range of different transnational audiences while also producing exclusive content in sections called exclusive content for specific target audiences specific linguistic target audiences while overall a better synchronicity of messaging across its various formats and as I said I think through September and October we started to see this synchronicity play out with Ramir 1 themes in Ramir 1 playing out in videos such as the slaughterhouse video making of illusion or Ramir's just terror section its instructional section being synchronized with an instructional video called how to slaughter the disbelievers but this synchronicity this streamlining strategy did not last long war is affecting ISIS's local propaganda efforts while Ramir has stumbled through its last two or three issues with airfield translated material diminishing and weak exclusive content comparatively poor synchronicity across formats and much less prominent instructional material being released by its official outlets the slack of which is being picked up by some unofficial forums but nevertheless these trends are significant and furthermore given the central importance this group places on propaganda in its strategy these trends are all very telling a significant barometer of the depth of ISIS's decline while there is no doubt that efforts to disrupt ISIS's online networks have significantly impacted its reach in the online world while cyber efforts targeting Ramir have taken its toll on the quality of the material being produced I'm most interested in the decline of the content the quality of its propaganda as an instrument to shape the perceptions and polarize the support of friends foes and neutrals that steep decline in quality has occurred for a range of reasons but two are particularly significant first the loss of key propagandists most notably Abu Muhammad al-Faqan also referred to as Dr. Wail al-Fa'ad and Abu Muhammad al-Adnani and these losses must have been huge for the organization this is a group as my colleague from the US Naval War College Dr. Craig Whiteside reminds us this is a group that puts its best and brightest into propaganda roles losing the equivalent of Steve Jobs after the second iPhone would have hurt Apple and the equivalent has hurt ISIS except they lost the equivalent of two if the value of al-Faqan and al-Adnani is in fact accurate of course something else has been going on that has helped to diminish the quality of ISIS propaganda and it's rooted in the trends I opened with this afternoon ISIS's political and military decline contrast the content of ISIS's messaging now with 2014-15 in 2014-15 ISIS's messaging was dominated by narratives and imagery promoting what Ben-A'ad for would call its competitive system of control its political and military strength compared to its enemies and it did this using what would be described as rational choice appeals in its messaging something that I'm sure seems quite weird for people to hear that ISIS messaging is dominated by rational choice but it was to local and regional audiences ISIS's messaging prioritised these rational choice appeals that asked target audiences to consider ISIS in contrast with alternatives they know what perhaps we in counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency too often forget that you don't need to be perfect in asymmetric warfare you just need to be better than your opposition look at Dabik during this same period the English language magazine targeting transnational audiences well away from its areas of control ISIS nonetheless wove together these rational choice appeals with what we'd call identity choice appeals messaging that asked supporters to think and act because of who they are in this case as Sunni Muslims slick production had a small part to play but much of the potency of ISIS messaging to appeal to audiences during this period arguably lies in this interweaving of rational and identity choice appeals that thus aligning very powerful decision making processes in their audiences so let's fast forward to 2016-17 where the dominant message from ISIS propaganda machine was once for supporters to join their ranks to support their caliphate and to be on the right side of history as it hurtles towards the apocalypse their message now emphasises the value of struggle during hardship that now is the divinely broad period of struggle destruction and death when the ranks must be purified now these trends in ISIS propaganda undoubtedly represent opportunities for state and civil society groups to shape their online and offline messaging hopefully of course synchronised with real action in the real world but my fear is that ISIS well and truly on the ropes that a combination of short-sightedness and reachable thinking may limit these efforts reaching their full potential worse still that ISIS's decline is so apparent that complacency kicks in an attitude of the caliphate has crumbled your apocalypse didn't come what more is there to say our actions will speak for themselves while the contrast between ISIS propaganda circa 2014-15 vs 2016-17 says it all now this thinking and the messaging it will produce will resonate but it will resonate with ourselves and with those who are already skeptical of ISIS and of course it may resonate with some who are in that grey zone that we're competing for but we need to be targeting our message to those most susceptible to ISIS messaging where the competition really lies and to do that there are nuances in ISIS messaging that must be taken into account so let's focus for a moment on ISIS's caliphate and apocalypse claims within the broad messaging trends that I've described comparing 2014-15 to 2016-17 are nuances which are important for us to consider particularly those who are in the business of developing policy and strategy you see ISIS messaging deploys a kind of hedging strategy which imbues its propaganda with elasticity over time this is achieved by drawing upon four spectrums of appeals that run through its propaganda campaign now on either side of these spectrums sits a theme which ISIS messaging will prioritize dependent on strategic conditions so one spectrum has statehood epitomised by the caliphate sitting on one end and on the other is these themes of struggle and sacrifice for another spectrum there is conventional political military efforts conventional operations bureaucratised institutionalised kind of governance and on the other unconventional political military efforts terrorism, guerrilla warfare and functionally reaching into communities despite not having an institutionalised control another spectrum is building the ranks with foreign fighters and targeted recruitment to the territories and on the other purifying the ranks encouraging homegrown terror and murder operations and on the fourth emphasises the caliphate and the collective while on the other the apocalypse and making personal appeals now during its boom-bust history ISIS will tend to prioritize messaging on one side of the spectrum over the other but the messaging from that the other end of the spectrum does not disappear if you look at Rumiya 7 it talks about the value of the caliphate the importance of supporting it it's just that it is dominated by ideas of purifying that the ranks destruction sacrifice now this is the thing about apocalyptic groups and their messaging their most skilled propagandist know to hedge their bets they don't just throw it all on black they don't say yes the apocalypse is coming tomorrow because if it doesn't you look kind of stupid and you lose a lot of credibility and ISIS have done this and we need to recognise this hedging strategy that they use confronted with the surge and awakening in 2007 ISIS are facing similar dynamics in 2017 and they will act similarly look at their propaganda now it features old speeches and publications from that period especially from the leaders of that period who he dismissed as incompetent and it turned out that they were strategic geniuses it highlights that they will highlight in their current propaganda examples from that period of the struggle and of the benefits of the struggle their supporters to dismiss their enemies claims because they will be disproved again all this needs to be calibrated into current messaging efforts and this is merely one of many examples of how the devil is very much in the detail so I just want to very quickly conclude with two points first propaganda will remain central to ISIS's strategy and so defeats to that machine have repercussions that shake this organisation to its core for ISIS propaganda and this quotes essentially from their doctrine propaganda lights the path and revives negligent minds it is deployed as a multifaceted force multiplier for their own advantage and an equally multifaceted force nullifier against opponents all mediums not just the internet will be essential to ISIS as it reverts down its strategic faces of its campaign strategy and it keeps its agenda alive secondly our strategic communications efforts continue to improve but there remains a long way to go kind of cliched superficial understandings of our enemies whether they are ISIS or other states simply won't cut it the target audience we are battling for with ISIS that relatively small proportion of people who are actually susceptible to ISIS messaging are not ideological automatons blindly following theology nor are they bloodthirsty lunatics or a hybrid of both that are beyond our reach they are human beings who as the behavioural economists remind us are dominated by automatic thinking who use mental models like identity and narratives as lenses and for whom social factors further shape how information is interpreted and decisions are made empirical research has shown how propaganda takes advantage of these dynamics to for example manipulate cognitive biases and stunt deliberative thinking in audiences now whether we are charged with confronting state or non-state adversaries in information theatre there are some fundamentals we must understand and harness to our advantage I think central of which is this idea that we don't need to be perfect we just need to be better than our position so thank you very much thanks very much Haroro when Charles Darwin was preparing the origin of the species his first attempts were described I think as a sketch of an abstract of a pricey of an introduction so I propose to do that with Paul Cornish's CV otherwise we'll be here for a little while for those of you who don't know Paul he is one of the world's absolute top cyber security scholars he spent two different stints at Chatham House firstly as a senior researcher in the 1990s and then subsequently as the Carrington Professor of international security in the head of the international security program at Chatham House from 2005 until 2011 about the same time he also developed and led Chatham House's highly successful cyber security cyber security policy research program he's a member of the UK chief of the defence staff strategic advisory panel he's a fellow of Oxford University's international cyber security capacity building centre and a senior associate fellow at Roosie so he has a long and storied CV and with that let me invite him up to give some thoughts on what he's heard today thank you very much I'm blushing deeply really from that wonderful introduction thank you very much I'm blushing even more though now that I see that Rory has gone Rory is actually of course my boss for the next month so now that he's gone I can actually be rude about his use of grammar we were introduced as an exceptional all-male panel as opposed to an exceptionally all-male panel and of course I think every woman in the audience had this little thought there's no such thing as an exceptional male but there we are what I'm going to do is just pick out really all I can do having heard such excellent presentations I only did your own comments Matt is just to pick out some of the things that struck me most and then perhaps to give you some of my own my own ideas there was something that you said actually Matt you talked about the information was in both traditional and non-traditional strategic environments, strategic contexts and you said that they're here to stay and my thought at that stage was well they never went they've always been there we've always been familiar with these ideas in broad terms about mass manipulation information was indeed propaganda and so on so these are very very familiar ideas we mustn't forget that then on to Roger Roger's remark struck me in several ways first of all this notion that the the nation state this I think was a fundamental point that nation states can no longer control the story as effectively as they used to and if you want a good example of that think back to the Arab Spring in the Maghreb when Facebook was used as the as the means for distribution intelligence among the masses and Twitter was used as the command and control system of social media in deeply atomized distributed ways completely beyond the control of all the state governments involved I use the term atomized a lot and I know Tim did as well I think it's absolutely bang on the atomized if you want another term the self-curated version of reality this is what was going on Roger then I think finished by saying that the Enlightenment story no longer has a controlling or a privileged or a dominant position and described the Enlightenment as telling me as a minor detour I think to paraphrase you horribly Roger a minor detour on the human evolutionary story which I thought well we are really we are really all stuffed if that's the case oh my god I'm trying to get my flight back tomorrow I mean the Enlightenment of course was not just about science and discovery it was also about tolerance and indeed fundamentally and ultimately about human rights so heavens above we can't lose sight of that on to Tim's remarks very tellingly very strikingly I liked Tim what you said about the proliferation and the globalization of use this is I mean you use the term that we're all very familiar with from the weapons of mass destruction dialogues over the past decade something I've worked on a lot during the Cold War and it is proliferating yet this is news this is supposed to be the proliferation of truth this is supposed to be the great cosmophones and liberal experiment in revealing to all of us the truths about everything it's supposed to have been a really good idea and I think we're all having second thoughts he talked about the new pressure points on democracies and atomized news again and then finally you mentioned that individuals are becoming increasingly vulnerable and this struck me again if we're atomizing news we're also atomizing in a sense vulnerabilities and if you're atomizing vulnerabilities if down to the individual level each of us here is feeling differently vulnerable differently exposed then what you're also doing and this must resonate with state governments is you're atomizing politics in a very very different way and I think that that's important to think about and then finally on to Aurora the decline of the ISIS propaganda machine very strikingly put I thought something I've been working on not working on but reading about I'm editing a book at the moment about how how crap the world is at the moment and it's all going to go get really crappy by 2020 and one of these is a scenario really to do with ISIS my response to what you said about the ISIS propaganda machine Aurora was that if for some say the word Daesh that we've been mistranslating it as Islamic State ISIS or ISIS if what Daesh actually means is more dynasty than state it's going to be back it will be back they're already thinking about it they're already reconfiguring their propaganda their messaging and if in need and this is a long shot if we can conceive and some people do if we can conceive of ISIS or Daesh and Al Qaeda beginning to collaborate at some point in the future what Al Qaeda need is military experience and what ISIS are going to need is space to operate if they could somehow get together then there's going to be another big story to tell and let's not forget as well that even the word propaganda the word propaganda has always been and is always contested and is now even more challenged as several people have mentioned in the course of the seminar of the discussion well, referred to what's going on in the states I think at the moment is all you say about that so now my job as a discussant is to say what my colleagues should have said information war is the fine art of mass manipulation in the digital age I think the broad question the underlying question in this is cyber security something that we've been working on here for a long time whether it's becoming somehow more civilizational than technical it's as broad a challenge as that or is it I happen to think that cyber security has really come into the main frame in something like the last six months or so it's the DNC attacks and that sort of thing it's elevated itself onto a new and very much more important level I think the problem of cyber security I think I used this model when I was speaking here last about a year ago I like to think of it not just in terms of the zero day problem that we've heard about the problem of an attack an exploit that just happens with no warning but also the zero source attack we have no idea where it came from and the zero intent attack what do they stand to gain so let me just go through those very quickly the immediacy problem as I call it the zero day attack how much warning can we expect do we need how do you know when an information war has begun what on earth does this thing look like when did it begin we know what happens when a proper war begins something goes bang what happens in an information war and how do you know importantly when the information war has ended and truth has reasserted itself all of those problems all of those questions I think require intelligence from trusted sources I was speaking at a conference in Leon Cullen in Oslo a few weeks ago and at some point in my remarks I said that what NATO needs is British intelligence and I got an enormous guffaw from the audience we all need intelligence from these trusted sources who are and where are these trusted sources there's also a requirement for intelligent sharing but with whom who can be trusted who in the republican party in the US trusts the UK's government communication headquarters at the moment agency the zero source problem who or what is conducting information wars or mass manipulation we're familiar with problems of ambiguity and plausible deniability all these are very familiar problems but what we're saying more and more is the blurring of agency boundaries we've got the individual criminal the corporate criminal the state criminal Jim Lewis a US academic in CSIS in Washington who was very certain he was going to have a very big job in the Clinton administration in Boston about a week ago there's shell shock in the US among the wannabe democratic administration is huge it's going to last for four years anyway he said this the Slovaki the Slovaki and criminal gangs in Russia he wrote are so tightly integrated that in some areas it's seamless and he made a key point that this seamless network is shifting to foreign policy and now we have state sponsored privateering if you want to find a big event in the last few weeks look no further than the 15th of March 2017 indictment by the US of four Russians for the for the Yahoo attack big big event probably bigger than the US indictment and naming of the People's Liberation Army the Chinese officials a couple of years ago so what next we're going to see autonomous individuals acting on behalf of states with no distributed al-Qaeda style of command structure nobody needs to give orders you just do it because you know it's right and you're acting on behalf of a big message and then finally motive the zero intent problem we need to know what the adversary wants to achieve and how badly he or she wants to achieve it otherwise it's difficult if not impossible for us to make a proportionate response with that structure of zero day zero source and zero intent that this is more a problem not so much of mass manipulation as a problem of elite ignorance what's the effect of this well as I said at the beginning mass manipulation information warfare what's new same old same old do they actually matter very much it's not a very fine art in any case I think the speed and the scope and the volume of information transfer at one level make old things for example breaches of sovereignty breaches of borders they make these more possible but in different ways ISIS for example is publishing an online guide to propaganda so it's actually proliferating the idea or the science and art of propaganda we can also see new things happening new new things really new things such as as I mentioned earlier Russian interference in elections in the not just the US but also very probably the UK and France and Germany and in time it'll be here in Australia so what could all of this mean at the minimum I think we're looking at familiar old problems of security and terrorism all of these things in new guises I've just said at the maximum perhaps this is corroding trust corroding trust in national and international politics in other words all politics at a very rapid rate in other words perhaps we really are facing the oblivion that was talking about ICT information communications technologies were meant to be the vehicle for a great liberal cosmopolitan experiment revealing opening up but perhaps globalization is in some way now beginning to consume itself Neil Ferguson who's the British historian center right historian and columnist wrote just about a month ago you wrote this laugh out loud he said laugh out loud if you dare globalization is in crisis populism is on the march authoritarian states are ascendant I'll finish with that but just with one final word information war as I said a few minutes ago can be both domestic and foreign if you want a sense of how complicated this is becoming just think that the Chinese the Chinese government actually is now coming out and saying it would probably prefer social media in China to be uncensored and uncontrolled completely open like it is in the West why because it allows the Chinese government to really get a grip on what is going on thank you Hi Chris Farnham National Security College I just wanted to talk about the most recent and well known version of propaganda and information wars is obviously the recent US election of fake news we saw a lot of this news that was being generated wasn't actually generated by the Republican parties and by the actual political actors created by individuals and then propagated by other individuals in Eastern European countries that were doing it to raise advertising revenue that they were non political actors and a result of this idea of fake news is that we're now seeing organizations like Google and Facebook controlling fake news and vetting the news that is on their websites and there's even talk that in part of high school curriculums students are going to be taught how to identify fake news does that mean that we're going to be seeing a shift in the way that the new form of propaganda is created and used or are we just seeing the controls of information handed over to new actors I think that's probably one for Tim in the first instance and then is this working it is thank you very much for the I wouldn't call that a Dorothy Dixer hoping that a colleague would ask me a nice easy one to start with but that's alright I think that absolutely the way in which propaganda if that's what we want to call it the way it operates and is used and deployed now is absolutely going to change as technologies change so it's not just the contents I think this is an important point that we produce amongst young children and young adults everyone critical thinking about not necessarily taking literally or taking at face value the news that is given to us I think that is important but it's not just about the content of news I think it's actually the way in which it's structured and disseminated which is changing and so it's not just the the interpretation of particular news stories it's the fact of some news stories being elevated above others so it's a structuring of an agenda I think that's becoming embedded in contemporary propaganda or contemporary models of influence so it's the manipulation of Google's algorithms for example to put in place particular search items in autocomplete which some of you may know of you know you start typing into the Google search bar and some suggestions drop out of that as an algorithm now that's something that could be manipulated and that's quite a basic example but a lot of the news collation websites like Google like Yahoo operate on those algorithms and select and privilege particular forms of information which seems to be popular at the time and they can be gained they can be manipulated and that goes to all the information that we access through search engines that are controlled by a particular sort of filtering and algorithmic sorting which can be changed and adapted now that's a long way of saying that the political agenda is subject to people who are able or agencies are able to gain those algorithms so the structure of political information I think itself is changing in propaganda anyone else I just added a couple of points to that I think firstly this is much broader point I guess is that when you look at how propaganda that the term itself has actually evolved throughout time I think that it's actually quite telling about how we in the west have come to interpret this I mean the very fact that we refer to it as the dark arts and the black arts I think is problematic in itself I mean there was a time where the term propaganda didn't have negative connotations it was a very pragmatic kind of definition what changed it within this western context was frankly World War I and you know the report by Ponzenby who kind of said that the defilement of a man's soul is much worse than essentially ripping them apart with bullets and so this fundamentally changed not just so much of your perceptions and the expressions of how you think are manifested in words when propaganda became a derogatory term it changed the culture the intellectual culture around propaganda and what this thing is and how it should be used now you then see throughout the history of the west's involvement in this is that you know so on the back of World War II our response to the Nazi propaganda machine and we're in awe of it and oh look how slick and great it is and of course we're dealing with the delay that we shut down all this messaging these propaganda units so then there's the time delay of bringing them all back up again and once we sober up and get calculating and predatory about this we along with our political and military actions defeat it we have that success we shut that all down and we do the same thing with the Cold War we have that success Fukuyama tells us that we've got this thing covered we don't need to sell ourselves anymore we shut all that stuff down and then the wars on terror happen we suddenly better start doing something again so we have these there's a real deep historical and cultural cultural problem that we have here I mean I think a lot of our adversaries are laughing that the masters of political communication democracy is going all the way back to the ancient Greeks that we're struggling with communication I mean it's like this bizarre ironic kind of historical joke and we're the brunt of it you know we're the we're the final line I suppose the second point is that when you talk about conspiracy theories and fake news to demonstrate the sophistication of the ISIS machine although I don't want to give them too much credit in Dabig they warn their supporters of conspiracy theories of fake news and they say to them you are succumbing to the thinking of a kufa of the kufa of the disbelievers when you perpetuate the lie that September 11 was by the Jews and the Americans and you undermine the genius that is our efforts to strike at the heart of America and now anyone who's been to the Middle East knows that these conspiracy theories have this immense kind of hole and you have to be on the ground to actually get a real sense of it ISIS confront that by saying that if you engage in this kind of rubbish you are helping the enemy and you are undermining us Can I add a couple of quick points Matt? Yeah Sorry I'm just looking around the room I think it was a great question Chris and it struck me that there was this wonderful irony at the moment that Donald Trump is castigating everybody really for all these leaks from the White House and the New York Times and in almost the same breath he describes the New York Times in terms and says that everything they produce is fake so you know exactly what's his problem is it true or fake whatever the sort of soft liberal in me says that there probably is going to be this is all cyclical we're going to get wise to this there is going to be a Darwinist culling of all these charlatans and it will happen at some point I don't know when but what I think we can do with young children very young children from the start really and certainly with university students is just to impress upon them something that everybody in this room knows intuitively that actually you don't just trust the first thing you read you go for the second source and even the third source what every good journalist does they don't just pick up one story and then repeat it they actually investigate and they check their sources so I'm not suggesting we need to teach young people to mistrust everything they come across and to abandon the hope there might be something that could approximate roughly to something like truth we don't need to teach them that rather dark view of the future but we can teach them not to be completely credulous I might run a couple of questions together yes and then you sir next to it from the camera times arguably you can decide whether that's a fake news institution yourself thanks for four excellent speeches I was wondering we've looked at various defensive techniques for example closing down the google and trying to alter the algorithms I'm wondering whether or not some of the tech geniuses who've started these companies actually desire to do that anyway but is there also a need to actually engage in offensive strategies by instead reinforcing the enlightenment project by saying that we need to reinforce the BBC or the ABC other organisations to purvey supposedly quality journalism such as that hello David Goyne this is something that I'm following on from what Paul said and then Haroro as well it strikes me that the world is being subject to three forces at the moment technology probably part of this in a neighbour connectivity which is a very big enabler the third one is political disillusionment and the trouble is that political disillusionment has made people vulnerable to this in other words if we had a greater faith in our own politicians our own systems we would be more immune to this what we do to rebuild that immunity to me is the question so offensive cyber Roger do you want to take the one first? I'll try and pick up flavour of both those very interesting questions I think we've got to be very careful to separate out broad phenomenon that's going on here from what you might call the epiphenomena of course the epiphenomena are that people are going to exploit these changes that are recurring in the world there are going to be commercial forces will try and exploit it there will be political forces trying to exploit it through propaganda and information wars and so forth but the underlying change that's going on is this issue that we are pre-programmed through evolution to believe what our group believes we've got to bias to the group belief and that's been well established when that group was controlled by the elite and was the nation state things were hunky-dory we could have an ABC we could have a BBC we could have a Canberra Times that was broadly believed because that was our group once the now that the groups are becoming of arbitrary size splitting and forming at all scales that issue of what's my group and therefore what do I believe in also suffers and I think this is going to go to your group it's not so much disillusionment it's just that there are multiple versions of anything that is occurring in the world simultaneously in play and the group that you think you're in is the one that you would have a bias to believe in and that says that none of that has anything to say about truth the Enlightenment project has a lot to say about truth and the Enlightenment project as I said was grafted on to the nation state group for a period of civilization that that's breaking down now too so I think we are we are in for really rough a rough ride as we try and establish how we pass verifiable authentic unbiased knowledge on from one through the world we're losing it at the moment on the defensive I was going to say what was it that Trump said to the BBC BBC U2 Canberra Times U2 there is there has been a big I was going to say sea change it's not really a sea change the only sea change has been in the willingness of governments to actually say they now do offensive cyber and also to say that if it gets to that point we might even react in kinetic ways otherwise we might actually use military force in response to an attack so there's been a really significant ramping up of the rhetoric but not just the rhetoric certainly in the UK there is now more money going into real offensive cyber being British we don't like to call it offensive cyber we instead we call it active cyber defense David I thought your question was fabulous you're absolutely right I think this political disillusionment is really what underpins all of this there's a chicken and egg aspect to this what came first was it actually all this the technology connectivity that created this or was it already I don't know I suspect probably the disillusionment was simmering at the very least before this all got going it seems to me that what ICT is done information and communications all that it's removed not just distance from the public the voting public and their elected representatives but also deference that's probably a good thing I think they are just humans after all our MPs and whatever else and why should we be deference to them so that I think is a good thing but what we don't want is this sense of completely corroded lack of a very easily very easy condemnation of everything they do and complete mistrust of every single motive that seems to be coming out of their mouths so I think what our elected representatives need to do to win back something like a more acceptable version of deference is to be more genuinely representative what we find in the UK is that you elect MPs to go to parliament and what do they do they spend all of their time trying to get out of parliament most important job which is to enact legislation for the rest of us they want to get out of that rubbish and get into the executive because that's where you get a really important career and a big salary and so on I think that's wrong we need to correct that what they also need to do all politicians everywhere is be more truthful in campaigning manifestors and so on when they say they've got the answer to everything aren't we seeing this big side in the US that man is going to come crashing down when the Midwest realises there are going to be no factories so I think we need more truth and more serious engagement with the people might take another pair yes ma'am over there Hi I'm Suri thank you very much for your speeches they were all really interesting actually I really enjoyed that my question is kind of jumping on the bandwagon that's covered in the last couple of weeks about a phenomenon called gas loading which we know is an old one coming from the 30s it's come up again in the relationship with Donald Trump and how he's actually relating with the news media about the availability of information in the sphere in which we live in do you still believe a phenomenon like gas lighting can be propagated the way it was back in the 1940s or is the availability of information and all the difference in the small groups and their different stories will that prevent that kind of phenomenon from taking hold Andrew McBride I'm an alumni of the Masters program of the National Security College it strikes me that some of the activities that are done in the past are adversary foreign intelligence services such as the Russians what they've done is they've taken fairly traditional intelligence such as they're hacking into a political party in an opposition adversary country and then basically publishing that raw information I just wanted your view on how that kind of fits in with I guess the accepted norms of behavior in cyberspace I'll speak to the first question on gas lighting and the suggestions of this is the dropping of new implications of new allegations and suggesting them as probables as potential this is something that maybe this is something that you should think about public as a suggestion it's not me saying this that someone else has said and suggested this and perhaps someone should go and determine the truth of that I think this this question of sort of dropping in allegations and news stories as allegations dressed up as news I think it goes this a loss of accountability I don't want to say back in the day but back in the day accountability in the was something that could be acquired by having a strong history of being seen as someone who's truthful so journalists their stock in trade was being truthful and the accountability of whether or not their stories stood up was that they kept their job or lost their job publicly if you were to make an allegation against somebody we had a court which again sought out defamation and libel increasingly with news sources now being atomized as we've spoken about and with information being globalized the accountability of any sort of implication or new implied stories is lost because Donald Trump can say something about a politician overseas and there's no accountability there for him because it's just a suggestion I could make an allegation about a politician in the UK but because I'm in Australia they're hardly likely to take me to courts in the UK the fact that we have an atomized news media or news sources means that actually accountability for the suggestions that people put up as alternative stories is gone I think that's what the core of this problem is that question is there's no possibility of loss for some individuals there's no reputation on the line and the fact that the internet and the way in which social media operates means that you can prosecute particular stories with very few repercussions for you personally I think that's the new element to this which is one of the most concerning parts in gas lighting before I suppose going to your question on norms in cyberspace if you want to make comparisons people often do with deterrents nuclear deterrents before you had norms you had deterrents in terms of weapons of mass destruction I don't think we're there yet at the point where we have cyber deterrents in terms of information it very much favours the offensive now whereas in the nuclear age the risks of physical harms are a very strong check against their first use I don't think you have a first use problem when it comes to information but others might have other thoughts Paul? Yeah thank you I'm not actually sure what gas lighting is I'm afraid is it a sort of truth microcosm type of idea or what is it Oh sorry So it's meant to be defined as the obfuscation of true news by putting out misinformation So I meant it in terms of I've heard a really interesting article by R0 News yesterday they've talked about how Donald Trump's actually using Twitter and the obfuscation of the news and coming across as a buffoon essentially to actually hide the fact that for example he's got 2,000 bills towards Congress in Parliament so he's actually many believe using that to take away from what he's actually doing under the helm which has been compared to people like Hitler and things like that who we're using that we used to hide their true needs I thought it was also when you were okay guess what you undermine people's confidence in their own system Yeah because you've got the power so it's an issue of power that compromises people's own ability to make judgment Yeah Okay I've got to watch that on the way back Right Okay in that case I'll turn to the second question Yeah I think the plain answer to whether these Russian activities fit into accepted norms is that there aren't any accepted norms and that's the problem I do a lot of work on this with the Chinese government actually the UK-China cyber dialogue track 1.5 dialogue and after three years we're still just in the foothills of agreement about what the most basic norms might be and if you think that the talent that's going to be in the annual on the application of the laws of armed conflict to cyberspace all agreed or published and so on still is not remotely near being a UN-sponsored document of any sort so we're in very very unsettled ground I think internationally as far as the normative governance of cyberspace is concerned a long way to go yet That said as I just said the discussion with the Chinese is out of that discussion that Xi Jinping and David Cameron remember him had an agreement about about governments not sponsoring commercial espionage in the other country espionage is fine we don't mind that that's what governments do we don't want companies stealing each other's intellectual property so you know some progress some normative progress but very little and at the same time as all that's going on the normative slow motion movement there is also something much more straightforward which is just simple I call it a sort of I don't know a digital version of territorial struggle going on with the Russians and indeed others this is pretty basic Russian state interest and it says familiar I mean you know for good reason there are people talking about a return to something like a Cold War type of relationship not when I say good reason I don't mean it's a good thing it's a supportable argument that we're heading back to something like a Cold War standoff with Russia I've never seen Putin as a strategist but he's certainly an opportunist and he takes every opportunity he can to plug away Well ladies and gentlemen I think we've just about reached time and of course if you haven't had enough alternative proof then we do have some propaganda at the front that you might be interested in graduate programs are available PhD programs are available and we will certainly be having much more to say on this topic in the future given the interest in it let me also note that we do have a light lunch at the front if you would like to come and partake but before we do that could you please join with me in thanking our speakers Thank you