 So we're going to start this with another of our hopefully viral audience polls, so if you can bring it up there So the question is Will a terror attack inside the United States be live streamed on social media in the next year? So it's not just will there be a terrorist attack in the next year, but will it be live streamed? I was gonna say we're hovering around 70 30, but we're making a push back here So let's go ahead and close it off there You can see it's roughly about two-thirds of the audience thinks that it will be live streamed in the next year So I think it's important to pull back on all of this This all started in 2004 when Mark Zuckerberg sat in his Harvard dorm room and Started working on tinkering away on a software program to allow fellow Harvard undergraduates to vote on who was hot or not what was called Face-mash the origin of Facebook. It had little to do with war other than maybe the war between the sexes We then two years later saw Jack Dorsey Launch Twitter and it was similarly fun and games his very first post the very first post overall on Twitter was quote Just setting up my Twitter and the subsequent tweet went on to explain the name for this new messaging site was taken from the Oxford English Dictionary for quote a short inconsequential burst of information Today these spaces these social networks have become clearly more than just fun and games and more than just Inconsequential it's become the space to homes of images like this So you just saw the flat version of it and know that we will be victorious and they will be the losers And you will be the biggest losers if you're sitting at home and doing nothing That was first the credit that goes to Charlie winter of KCL for posting that's at least where I came across it But of course, it's not just these kind of you know calls to action It's being woven into battlefield operations So for example, we're right now fighting the second battle of Mosul in this conflict The first battle of Mosul was kicked off with a hashtag. It was a military offensive that was announced in the open It wasn't kept secret was announced in the open launched just like a Conference or a movie or a new video game We're also seeing the weaving in a popular culture in lots of different ways So Hamilton's popular now. Here's weaving it into why you should rise up Important though, this is not just a story of ISIS or the Middle East social media has become Critical part of the new story of crime We can see it in everything from drug cartel operations to the Instagram accounts of hit women It's also becoming part of state link war setting the stage for state link war This is negative articles circulated on social media in the years leading up to the Ukraine conflict to The descriptions of what happened when little green men popped up in Ukraine They clearly had nothing to do with bad activities. They were just there to help find lost cats To We're weaving it again into battlefield operations This for example was posted by Christopher Miller a reporter in Kiev of what Ukrainian soldiers are getting Right before a recent Russian offensive where they're getting messages specifically to them to saying quote You're nothing but meat for your commanders quote your body will be found when the snow melts And it's becoming a shaping force in US elections A technology that was supposed to bring us all together Instead we're seeing a split So this is a image of essentially where people were getting their news on social media And you can see there's two very different clusters between Democrats and Republicans we're living in two different worlds or arguably maybe two different realities and Maybe it's not just shaping it there But it's shaping it in terms of foreign operations to go back to the state link side where we saw the US intelligence Community connected to the topic of yesterday's conference on cyber security where a hacking operation was then linked to an Influence operation. So this is a space that goes beyond Just ISIS it wraps through war and politics and we've got a great panel to help us figure out what's going on And what do we do about it and essentially I'm going to pose the same question to all of them the first question is What do you see as the biggest challenge in this space when the technology of social media comes crashing together with? war politics and beyond and first I'm going to turn to Brad Allen be he's a co-director of the weaponized narrative initiative of New America and ASU center on the future of war and I'd steer you to they have a report out very right fresh off the presses. Maybe you can give us sort of set the scene for that so in looking at in looking at the the most important problem that faces The Americans I think you look first in the short term and it's Russia and it's Russia because what Russia has managed to do Is to get inside the American? OODA loop the OODA loop is a concept created by a strategist called John Boyd observe Orient decide and act and essentially if you can do that faster than your competition You can destabilize their assumptions their behavior and their institutions Russia has done that. That's essentially what has happened So they've gotten inside our OODA loop the traditional responses You try to tighten up the way that you respond for a number of reasons United States will be unable to do that We have to assume that going forward the Russians will be able to get inside our operating loop and do it faster and better than we Can now we do have I think some unconventional responses, but we have not yet utilized them to the extent We should but that's short term because Russia is a weak state and it needs to be managed But that's not really I think the long-term challenge the long-term challenge comes from the fact and this goes back Very very basic that humans communities Institutions and our societies are among many other things information processing mechanisms over the past two or three decades We've significantly challenged Them with the amount the volume the velocity and the variety of information that we've provided to the extent that we have destabilized the institutions that we rely on and for a lot of people their sense of identity What this means I think is that we're looking at an entirely different game when we talk about War and conflict for example this election. We all know that there were wiki leaks that were were Used against Miss Clinton what happens if four years from now every time a politician gets up to make a speech Their image replicated perfectly their voice replicated perfectly the background All of the necessary information replicated perfectly in 50 or 60 different versions is spread by Cambridge analytics to targeted sub markets What's real? How do you ever find out what's real and the answer is you won't and my question to you is how are you going to function in That kind of society because it's not science fiction. It's here We can do this now. We just don't do it in moss and the Russians among many others have an incentive to use this So what I think we're looking at most profoundly our most serious challenge is In a period of very rapid change we've lost our optimism and we've lost our imagination and unless we get both of those back I think we're in trouble So next we're going to hear from Yasmin Green who comes from the land of optimism and imagination Director of research and development at jigsaw, which is essentially the place within Google alphabet that brings together public policy research and Vision in terms of sort of the civil society implication of things So what do you see as the biggest challenge in this space? Thanks, Peter and thanks, Brad I should probably say that you know clarify that my optimism comes not just from my DNA But actually because our goal at jigsaw is to understand Evolving threats, but then then to build technology to mitigate against them So that's a fairly like motivating positive narrative I start by saying that you know when we look at digital insurgencies Which is what I think we're talking about here with with regard to state-sponsored information warfare. We're seeing a Lot of benefits versus physical insurgencies in in terms of far reduced cost much risk, you know much less risky actions Actions that states can take against other states or their own populations that are Unlikely to trigger public outcries because they're stealthy and because attributions so difficult in this space They're unlikely to trigger retaliation. So we will see much more of of You know state-sponsored social media manipulation What what we've seen what we've heard discussed over the last year in the context of the US presidential election Are a few things fake news and Publishing classified information that has been leaked and the stealing of you know fishing and hacking and stealing of emails Which I think is one half of this challenge And I think the public discourse has missed a really important part of this because Even if you fabricate a story or you you know, you get a hold of an incriminating email It really doesn't do much to further your aims if no one finds out about it And the part that's missing from the the public discourse has been dissemination networks and that's really key to like weaponizing or deploying any of the intelligence that you're gathering through any of these other means and The way that this is working as we're beginning to see is is through a seed and fertilizer strategy Which is state controlled social media personas that are well distributed in social networks different social media conversations and that plant conversations with with narratives and with Supporting evidence whether they're from a real news outlet or from fake news outlet from leaks And then those those go on to have their own life as popular movements And there are there are several reasons why a digital army of this kind is really valuable to a state What and then they're domestic and in pursuit of domestic and foreign policy goals one of the one of the the use cases which we've seen actually popular across Mexico China Russia Ecuador Venezuela really globally is is for censorship and targeting dissenting voices domestically be a journalist opposite opposition figures and we've collected case studies from from many of these countries a lot of them are in Turkey Where you see some of the hashtags going after journalists starting with you know the mayor of Ankara or you know Everyone's chief of staff if you trace back the first time and we have reports from these individuals and there's a interesting. There's this woman All online intimidation as an aside and goes after women worst It's just easier to assault and intimidate women. So there's this Turkish journalist who said She described an attack on her where she received a dozen rape threats a minute So like there are not just bots that are programmed to harass They're also sexual, you know sexually harassing bots as well, which is Pretty innovative in a perverse way And then and then thinking about foreign policy goals, of course It's not just to catalyze, you know a change of sentiment in a population abroad, but also Potentially to change the way they act, you know, perhaps the way they they vote And one thing for us to note is that while we may be accustomed to thinking of intelligence gathering in the context of You know being deployed in a military operation or to help with a diplomatic or trade negotiation in in for other countries Subversion is the main goal. So there are some narratives that seem so outlandish that we think to ourselves That was a fail for information Operations, but actually the goal is to create noise and and you know erode the underpinnings of a healthy democracy Which are some consensus around facts and history and I mentioned yesterday when we were talking That we have a troll we have a Russian troll farm handbook Which is really interesting to behold because it's exactly what you would imagine that it would be It's like a it's like a script for a call center, which is kind of what these, you know How these these state-sponsored troll factories work and it has the domestic and foreign policy goals, you know, Russia has You know that undermining make opposition leaders the kidding of them So for example was suspected to be the work of the CIA Some of the foreign, you know international goals like undermining NATO and that it's not working and it should be dismantled And it's literally the headline the talking points and the links, you know The social media is sorry the the online links be it news sites or you know other supporting evidence for their claims So we see evidence that this is happening. I think it's the beginning I think we'll see a lot more one of the One of the things I think is the biggest challenge the biggest challenge here is this this notion of useful idiots Which sounds really disparaging but I'll follow up by saying that's all of us Which is people who are not the state-controlled assets But they're the people who become mobilized and and weaponized without having any idea So let's hear from Adam Sharp Adam was former head of news government elections at this platform for short inconsequential information Which actually is quite consequential Twitter. Yeah news government and elections turned out to be a pretty consequential vertical to to lead in the last several years for sure I Think in terms of challenges Brad Used the words velocity a few times speed a few times And I think just the sheer volume of data Twitter alone half a billion tweets a day and The speed at which that data moves tends to be the root of a tree of many many challenges for many many actors that in the intelligence space and War fighting space that we're talking about today You wind up with a balance of power really determined by who can get over the technical hurdle of finding the needle in the haystack Finding it most quickly and turning it into something actionable while it's still relevant This problem is not hugely different than the problem company customer service groups have and looking at social media what individual users have Trying to find the relevant news and updates from friends and family or even what the platforms have like Twitter and Facebook in Policing and enforcing our own policies on the platforms Any time you then try to solve for that by layering filters on top of that You are as Brattles noted creating different realities where the reality of what's happening on Facebook What's happening on Twitter? What's happening in the world is defined by? Which algorithm which curator which filter you laid on on top of it? I'd note that these once you get past these technical hurdles. They also translate into policy challenges and and others you look at I mentioned for example using Twitter and Facebook for intelligence gathering and the challenges to speed and actionability there a Lot of the obstacles are there for good reason a lot of the obstacles and slowdowns are to protect constitutional freedoms of Americans at home and so on and so forth, but at the same time the laws that are in place to govern this We're all created before Mark Zuckerberg sat down in his dorm room. So on one side you see abuse of this loophole through programs like prison and so on and so forth and You see the companies stepping in to try to fill the void Twitter Most clearly creating policies in terms of protecting their user rights against government intervention and so on That's a problem when these platforms become the core fabric of communication on the planet and It winds up pretty lawless governance of them and the companies just fill the gap You now wind up with this patchwork where your individual rights are not determined by What country you live in they're determined by what app you're using on what device on which version of the terms of service didn't you read before you clicked okay and so the volume and speed is the core root and then from that you see technical problems policy problems procedural problems Across the board for all players Let's finally hear from Oppen Eunice who is both Part of this new fight and part of a new organization in this fight He's deputy special envoy and deputy coordinator of the Global Engagement Center at the Department of State What do you see is the one prime challenge in this space? Well Clearly we're talking about two different problem sets. I'll start with the first one, which is the non-state actor problem set and the Primary challenge that we see is that recruitment to terrorist organizations is a one-to-one Communication reality whether that happens on the ground in real life or it happens online Most people who join terrorist organizations Don't join them because they saw a plethora of tweets or they saw some sort of documentary they joined them because a human being that they know has communicated to them directly and Convince them that this is the best course of action for Ameliorating whatever social ills that they're attempting to to ameliorate One-to-one communication for the most part as we see it moving online is happening in encrypted space and the challenge with encryption is that it renders the vast majority of people who can dissuade young people from joining terrorist organizations or engaging in terrorist activity that is Inspired by the ology ideology of terrorist organizations It limits their ability to do what it is that they need to do in their families in their communities in their groupings in order to engage in that dissuading process and so arise governments Us and other governments around the world as really the primary players in penetrating that encrypted space We are the people that have the tools to do so and When governments get into the business of penetrating encrypted communication They are by nature pushing against and there was a reference to a number of countries here the general stream of Social development towards democratic realities if governments are in the business of intercepting Communication in encrypted one-to-one formats They are not us but for the most part Engaging in an effort to persuade people to support some sort of political Ideology and so what you have is the people with the tools to deal with the problem are not the folks who can build the organic realities at the grassroots that Render the use of violence as a means for social change Ineffective we see that one-to-one communication happening in the state actor model as well Disinformation and propaganda by nation states is true It is true that this is a communication that happens to many people from one source or from the troll farms Etc. But what we're beginning to see in our research is that very specific people in the online space are being targeted with very specific messages and Those individuals might be individuals of who have great power, but they do not know that what they are reading is The propaganda and disinformation of a nation state attempting to sway their opinion or their analysis on an issue from one position to another and Because of the intimate nature and these people are more expert than I am at this because of the intimate nature of social Media one tends to assume or presume that this is an authentic Communication from an authentic source that is not attempting to dissuade me through propaganda and disinformation So this general trend of encryption and the general trend of one-to-one Communication as a means of getting people to do something in the non-state actor mission terrorist activity in the state actor side of the house Believing that one state is more legitimate in its propaganda than the other renders governments our government and other governments to be the Primary players in the online space and that by its very nature Works against the building of the types of realities that need to come to fruition transparency of governments Democratic realities social engagement civic participation an inclusion of women in the public space and in decision-making spheres Religious freedom for minority populations the fundamental building blocks of societies where this type of activity is not needed as A means of ameliorating the negative realities that people are trying to change So this is a policy town of policy conference. I want to hear from each of you one distinct policy that should be put into place to Answer either the problem set you put forward or maybe the other ones out there But what's one policy that can be enacted by a congress by an administration and kind of keep it pithy if you could so I'll go back to run one if you're gonna have Russia go asymmetric with Disinformation campaigns you need to go asymmetric. We should be they go low. We go low not We go we go with our principles. We're a capitalist economy So what we do is we go talk to the oil companies and we figure out what kind of tax break they'd need to knock 20% off the price of gas and We tell Russia that that's exactly what we're gonna do unless they stop it. What did we do? We expelled 35 diplomats They took it as a mark of pride What do we do if we knock? We knock them with a 20% drop in the price of patrolling products. We hit them very hard We've got to think asymmetric Another example of asymmetric is we should be flooding the market with books that ridicule mr. Pudin If you think about it, you know, he's running around bare-chested with motorcycle gangs that have joined the Russian Confederation primarily because the banditos were moving in on their turf Now if that's not a satirical novel, I don't know what is He doesn't care if we tell people where his money is But if you ridicule a person like that what you do is you undercut his narrative and you do it badly. I haven't seen any of that There's two I think that's a really good point that they're about what What there's no form of deterrence here because it's this is new, you know Like the motives are not new I mean hoaxes and politics and satire and information warfare have been around since the beginning of media I think what's new are the tactics and because of this challenge with attribution and the novelty there isn't really a doctrine around Around proportional response and there is no deterrence. So I think that might be in an area for Focus for policy makers. I think it's important to preface my answer here by reminding everyone I bio is former head of news and government at Twitter. So it's a personal opinion. I think just The investment from an appropriation standpoint as well as a thoughtful standpoint in creating policy framework Has been lagging in this regard, you know, the president's budget Announced in the last week does dramatically expand funding for the military But it is actually Disproportionately focused on a more traditional War footing and not on these areas and figuring out how to maintain the US's edge in these information processing challenges on the policymaking side where things have been left ambiguous because work in this space has been Conducted through laws 20 years old The companies for good reason will fill that space with a bias towards protecting their users And so if you do take the position that There are times when the government has a rightful legal path for Needing to access certain information and access it quickly You need to create that path and you need to create a legal framework based in the technical realities of today To get there because if you are basing it in the technical realities of the mid-1990s as most of these laws are Then you're leaving it up to the companies that are going to take the most Anti-government position and the most pro user position because when in doubt Respecting and defending the user's voice is the principal objective of the business It's hard. I mean offensive counterintelligence and political warfare Are things that we deal with all of the time and We at the GEC are one of the few parts of government that have Some carve out from the Privacy Act that allow us to do things with big data that other Offices are not allowed to do I guess, you know The the the legal restrictions exist for a reason We fight these wars with one hand tied behind our back because other nation states don't have the legal regimes That require them to respect the individual and require them to respect the free flow of information So I would say certainly there is room for public discourse Around more freedom for us government agencies to engage in this kind of activity Provided that there is very serious and continuous civil rights type oversight over that activity But you know, this is something that I deal with every single day There is a point at which you reach diminishing returns and that is when you are engaged in so much activity that resembles the enemy that You no longer look like the country that you were before you began that type of activity And then I don't know really who wins at that point in time Great point. I'd also toss out as a policy the need to recreate the active measures working group, which was the Cold War group It was interagency between intelligence community State Department military that identified Soviet lies that were being spread as rumors and information operations We have a need for that today with the Russian version But I would say involve the tech companies and civil society in it in particular It's not just about identifying it. It allows you to then debunk the activities of useful idiots, which is a Russian term Who deliberately spread those lies to to their own political advantage in our system So you can point to the origin of the false news that they're Spreading and say hey, this actually is coming from Russia and it gives you a more official means to go after it So let's open it up to the audience Would love to get your questions. Please wait for the mic come to you. So just go ahead and raise your hand None whatsoever. There we go right over there Yes, good afternoon. Thank you very much for being here. My name is James to key with James So in warfare, it's easier to destroy than it is to create and so much of what you've all been discussing today Is the ability of adversaries to destroy the truth or just you destroy the narratives that we try to create? Do what do you perhaps think that it might be that we might should prioritize what we choose to protect in terms of narratives as a way of protecting as Protecting our resources the limited resources that we have available to us to fight these online battles with our various adversaries Yeah, absolutely. Um, I think it becomes in periods of rapid change What you know is that most of what you think and more importantly the implicit assumptions underlying it are going to be Contingent in ways that they were not Before so one of the questions that we should all be asking ourselves is if we have to give things up that we believe in What do we give up and to your point? What can we not give up because it means we give up too much of what it means to be an American? That's the kind of question that we need to be thinking about now because we're we're beginning to do that at the edges And we're certainly going to be challenged one of the things that this country is among many other things is The primary enlightenment power we believe in the individual We believe that there is a truth and that is it is accessible and that the way you can find that is through science What happens when that no longer is the belief of the public which in many areas of the public depending on the issue It's not how do you respond more importantly? Who responds anybody who listened to the talks this morning can have no doubt about American conventional superiority? It's important to realize that we have lost our overall superiority not because somebody thinks they can challenge us Conventionally which I would be very surprised if they could but because what they've done is they have gone radically asymmetric And we have not responded and we don't know how to respond a great illustration of that is if we go to the Russian case example World's 13th largest economy just cut its defense budget by 25 percent But I would argue has made a much better investment in their influence operations Let's get another anyone else want to weigh in on this question I was just gonna weigh in because Brad raised the point and going back to your earlier comment. I think that public discourse about those rights is essential because rights that nobody knows they have wind up being on action rights and I think the challenge right now is That you do have this patchwork where there's gaps over here that bad actors take advantage of and Areas over here that are made up by a patchwork of the company's trying to come to an answer And that's where I think we do need to come to a solution. I tend to fall more to the pro company civil rights side of the equation But we can't just leave it as a jump ball and say okay, it's done We need to get to some point of resolution there. It's a challenge You know yes mean and and I have been in a number of For where this is discussed and and where we try to find a sweet spot where we can work together on those things We can work together on Active measures is a challenge because active measures the there are a number of people that work for the GEC who are part of The active measures working group and we have that problem set As well as the non-state actor problem set since the National Defense Authorization Act The purpose of active measures was to expose But exposure requires a level of literacy and a clarity of branding between the two teams That renders it valent in its ability to convince people that that Disinformation that is being directed to you by that nation-state is actually not in your interest And I'm not sure that we're at that place in the world at the grassroots Where people say yeah absolutely the United States stands for and these other guys they stand for something that opposes that and so That the enhancement of literacy at the grassroots around the world for them to understand What are the interests of nation-states in engaging in the disinformation and propaganda that they did that they engage in is a necessary corollary to a Product like the exposed mechanisms of the active measures working group to have any sort of efficacy in this conversation Let's get another question back there in the corner Hello, Matt Zase. I'm a US Army cyber command Assuming that what we see on social media platforms has not been adulterated by nation-states or non-nation states That everything that we see is true And assuming an understanding like mr. Singer said that Russia had the information warfare is a core competency In Russia, but it's not the United States What concretely needs to change in the DoD and what does that look like and? Secondly to what what level does that responsibility rest upon companies in Silicon Valley? So yes, I mean you we just saw your boss Or on stage Speak to this cross between the Silicon Valley view and but you also interact a great deal with the military So where how would you answer this? Yeah, I think I think the way that Eric framed it was right that you know his role with the Pentagon is to share ideas and suggestions and Help transfer whatever's working well in the tech sector to make Silicon Valley You know the most innovative place in the on the planet. I Have the same feeling about where our relationship with government should focus and that is on Us as the tech sector being able to understand the tactics that are enabling you know like the the I guess like the Turbo boosting of information and operations as we see today because again the motives aren't aren't real What's you know the internet is the game changer and it's the mechanics that? should be the focus for us because things like ISIS recruitment online or Russian troll armies online like none of that is good for business ultimately the tech companies don't want that They're not turning a blind eye to it Intentionally or maliciously like they are trying to solve these problems, and it's our job like you know and at Google We say like the mission is to is to like make the world's information useful, and I've got it in our own mission It's been 11 years Basically is access to information and it is but it is a bit of a whack-a-mole question a lot of the The ways that we come up against an adversary with regards to organizing information is criminal networks You know like you know I go and speak to our security team at Google, and I'm talking about you know like State-sponsored bots and he's telling me about Viagra sharing bots because that's the thing that he sees in volume And he can talk about and there's definitely a similarity there We're really good at thinking about commercial motivations and criminal motivations For doing malicious things online. We're a bit less good at looking at political motivations But I think that's where we have to focus and you know we don't we're doing some work on this already in terms of Being able to identify and detect and hopefully in the future disrupt dissemination propaganda networks one thing I would add is the Training environments need to be updated so for example in the article we did for the Atlantic We looked at Fort Polk where it you know was the story of where the army mechanized and Tested in Louisiana maneuvers. What does it mean to move to tanks and trucks then during the Cold War is where we trained for? large-scale armored warfare Then after Afghanistan and Iraq start they change the training ground to be villages a couple years later They realize they need to populate the villages not just with enemy forces, but with actors playing civilians of tribal leaders media civil society Now they've just started to update at Polk to put a simulated internet over it where civilians are tweeting and Recruiting and posting Video of their ambush, but Polk is a is a as an example of it. It's not universal across the system So we've got time for one last quick question right here. Thank you. My name is Nzar Farsak I'm a leadership consultant My question it seems all of you are talking in that the situation we are in is one where we are not prepared Right the tools we have are inadequate for where we are It's kind of the nuclear age where we were not prepared to this for this scientific tool, right? And we had to learn how to deal with it my question to you since all of all of the tools that we have are built on Assumptions that are no longer valid How far back do we need to go on for example the separation of powers that we thought the government would respect the Constitution But in fact it did Betray the Constitution so what are the things that we need to teach our children or what do we need to change? What are basic fundamental things that we need to take a second look at? Given the new environment we are in that we still don't understand okay quick one sentence answer What would you change in our education system and you can choose whatever level from elementary all the way up to Professional military education so one thing that you would change You're the professor Dodge come on so So It's very clear that education is one of the institutions that is going to fail and fail radically at all levels Including universe one sentence change in curriculum I think that I would shift from trying to teach people how to function as Individuals to teaching them how to function as part of integrated techno human cognitive structures Gotcha I would say teach geopolitics and technology courses and teach technology in geopolitics courses Information evaluation and critical thinking as a jumping-off point to any number of paths from there But it's not the typical multiple choice standardized test question That's right a pedagogy of critique without critical pedagogy and the ability of a young person to engage in critical thinking at Multiple levels in the personal space as well as in the social space. None. We have no chance Teach how to source properly and the importance of sourcing properly Which then will help you in both social media warfare and the problem of plagiarism. Yeah, all right So thank you very much For this great panel for joining us. Please join me in a round of applause