 Good afternoon. So I don't know if anybody heard, but the Russians might have influenced the election in 2016 And I bring that up because two years ago I was giving briefings on this and there would be no one in the room. No one cared about this at all If you remember back in this town DC, we were talking about one thing in 2016 and that was ISIS and how prolific and amazing they were on social media and And they are amazing, right? Until they get hit with some JDAMs and their media battalion goes down and then they're less amazing So I'm among amidst all of that starting in 2014 and what you'll see if you can go to the next slide here We were watching on Twitter what was going on with ISIS in Syria and In January of 14 I'd written an article about how we might try and negotiate with the RRL shahm at the time to go against Al Qaeda because we Knew Al Qaeda was trying to infiltrate them and as soon as I did I got trolled like I never been trolled before now I've been trolled a lot. I have lots of high school friends that aren't happy with what I do Terrorists don't exactly like what I say, but these were different. They were all hours of the night They tend to say the same thing. They're almost uniformly deployed around the world in English-speaking countries And when you looked at the photographs of them, it didn't quite make sense. You guys have all seen them now Right you pull up the Twitter picture It looks like a Target or Walmart frame picture, right? No one smiles that much about their flowers But you know, they always wanted to talk about Syria Assad is the solution We need to leave them in place and I was a supporter of Al Qaeda, of course having worked counterterrorism all these years Two people I worked with and they are, you know critical to this work that we did over a almost four-year period We're coming up on the four-year anniversary right now the first time that I briefed this when everybody yawned and all we wanted to talk about with Isis Jam burger Andrew Weisberg brilliant social media analysts and they saw some of the same things going on There were three kinds of accounts that tend to surfacing these Twitter storms one where the hecklers the people that are just constantly yelling They're still out there today. I'm sure all of you now have seen it Everyone has somebody harassing them, but closely intertwined was a group of hackers that were very Well integrated with a group known as the Syrian electronic army You might have remembered that which was doing all sorts of database hits at the time Alongside them were honeypot accounts He's oftentimes would be women that wanted to tell you you were doing really well with what you're talking about need to Establish a direct message relationship with you because I need to email you something important I need to direct message you a malware payload to get into your Information space or maybe it's an article I want to send that I want you to put out and your information space playing on your implicit bias that if you were friends with Somebody you're more likely to take information from them Watch this army swirl all the way through 2014 was most fascinating was a petition and we put this in an article a petition They were circulating which was called Russia Our Alaska back to Russia was on the White House website gained about 40,000 signatures in only a few days Oftentimes they were tweeting in Russian because they would make mistakes And this is what we call capability development and information warfare on social media So we saw these covert personas and what made it very apparent was they were always sharing the same information Same links same stories and they were pumping them mostly around two issues Ukraine Syria Ukraine Syria Ukraine Syria What showed their hand and this is why it's always interesting to hear disputes even to this day is you can hide your hand in hacking But ultimately you can't hide your hand and influence because all support all messages usually go back to whoever the influencer is Ultimately you were going to hear this play out tomorrow on Capitol Hill As they were doing their influencing they kept sharing the same media at the same time and pulsing and we were watching some of the first Social bots that were out there. They oftentimes shared state-sponsored outlets and through 14 and into 15 these Twitter accounts Increasingly wanted to talk about a wide range of issues to include Bahrain Venezuela Cuba the Saudi economy How many Americans in Ohio who like softball want to talk about all those issues? Only the fake ones it turns out so if you watch them over time you can get a pretty good idea who they are so we just stayed on them and Going into 2015 they were pushing towards social issues in the United States They would play both sides you guys have seen it now from the disclosures from the Senate Intel Committee For black lives matter against black lives matter Bundy Ranch standoff is terrible The government is coming in to take them Can you believe what they're doing at the Bundy Ranch and one exercise above all Jade Helm 2015? military exercise going down to the US Southwest which was displayed as a conspiracy theorist and some social media platforms as Martial law was going to be declared by the Obama administration. We'll take all your guns away We laugh about it now John Stewart did some amazing coverage of it, but in Texas. What did they do? They deployed observers to make sure that there was not going to be martial law from the federal US federal military It was a poor colonel down there that had to brief this every day And I'm sure he wanted to pull his hair out when he was going through this in the summer of 15 We were watching the rebirth of active measures. They pushed four general themes political social Financial and calamitous messages calamitous if I scare you you are more likely to believe what I send you next Social I will divide you on social issues so that later I can influence you on political issues and non-election years States that want to interfere in our politics will push on social issues to divide us once they infiltrate the audience on Social issues they will influence them on political issues alongside that they would put push financial issues US economy is going to collapse because of tremendous debt Such-and-such company you guys might have heard about the poison turkeys at Thanksgiving NBC did a good story about that Walmart selling poison turkeys scare them and hurt a company We watch us continue state sponsors were out were there with their outlets our tea and sputting news And you could see almost immediate overlap with these fringe outlets What we didn't know but what we saw was emerging was hackers We knew hackers were doing massive hits through the fourth quarter 2015 and into 2016 I knew in part because I got my notification as well We didn't know what they were doing and at 16 you could start to see the setup of dumping that information out into the internet if you would next slide as A case study we were going through next slide please And go ahead and click on this what you're gonna watch is what happened on July 30th of 2016 Jam Andrew and I were watching this and there was a story that came out about insulic air base Maybe there's a protest that's out of control There are nukes there. Do you know what's going on? We used to follow a group of amplifiers which you see in blue when all the amplifiers show up We know that is a campaign and when there are campaigns We see a lot of social bots spring up in the first 78 minutes. We pulled down the first 4,000 tweets That's all that we could do at our level when we looked at all the bios of those You'll see a lot of green dots pop up if you're a green dot your bio red Constitution country family military Four hashtags were pushed nuclear media Trump Benghazi One mistake July 30th was a Saturday night and what are Americans doing on Saturday nights? Not paying attention So if you run a organized sweatshop like the internet research agency You will make mistakes and whenever you can't gain traction You will show your hand in the information space this use an advanced tool known as Microsoft Excel to download tweets We then used a function called count if and then it would render that Many of you in here will purchase multi-million dollar sophisticated software which will shoot out charts with lines and dots This was done for free and it took 15 minutes Have fun defense acquisition folks in the audience over the next few years Now I bring this up Because everyone is doing research on Twitter and I am not really that worried about the Russians moving forward I know I should keep saying this it's good for book sales. You can make media appearances But the enemies and the adversaries that you're gonna meet in social media moving forward are way more numerous next slide, please Everyone does research on Twitter Because everyone can access Twitter We know very little about how social media influence happens because everyone is doing a social media influence on Twitter project right now and Trying to push it out there. Why because it's an open system Twitter is that at a disadvantage for getting beat up on because everyone can access and go I sucked in 10,000 tweets Here's what I found isn't this interesting. I'm going to post it on medium tomorrow. Thank you That's every 24 hours. What we don't know though is how this whole ecosystem works What the Russians did which is more sophisticated than everybody else is they were multi platform multi persona multi language They honed what a lot of people had put together, but they integrated it all together. It's the combined arms of information warfare Twitter is important because it's the fastest way to propagate information if you don't believe me watch what the news is about It's a largely about one person tweeting So people think they're not influenced because they're not on Twitter But if you want to propagate a message around the world the fastest way to do it is on that platform The ones that are totally under research are Facebook and other saturation platforms where you're in more closed communities If you want to get a message out you have to be on both if you want to influence people You have to saturate the audience on a one-to-one basis That means you got to be any trusted or more trusted friend network No one really trust any of these anymore, right? But you have to be closer. That's how you can play on implicit bias The other thing is you have to have hosting platforms. YouTube is a great hosting platform Because anybody can put up video Americans would not watch Russian state-sponsored television if it was coming through their satellite channel But through YouTube, what were they able to do? They were able to slowly push out content and push it through distributors namely Reporters and producers who go into your communities on Facebook Twitter or whatever platform you're on can even be Pinterest Place that content there let you grab it once you grab that content and you post it I then take a social bot and I amplify what you say. I even engage you in conversation. I make you feel like a hero So that you go tell all your friends. Hey, man, where did you find that at? Oh, I found it on 4chan and Reddit these anonymous posting sites. That's great Can you show me where you got it from? Well, it was here yesterday. Man, don't worry about it At least the message out there now everyone will know the truth It's multi-platform and so that brings me to the conclusion. I've only got a few minutes here There are five real adversaries out there and they've all built on each other much like we saw in cyberspace Each level builds or takes a component that's learned from the other and expands it as we all know the hacktivist Collective Anonymous is the most powerful group in the world If you had read Time magazine in 2011 and 12, that's what you would have thought They're nowhere to be found hardly anymore and they're totally influenced and broken up because they Turns out if you're anonymous, it's hard to build trust with each other if you don't know who the other person is But they did something that was novel, right? They hacked people's information They put it out onto the internet which drove the media and other actors to then influence on them The next level that came and you can jump slides. Hopefully I got it I think that was a lesson. This is a great book coming out of May 29th by the way The next level that really came of it though was terrorist That's where I was entering into that space to watch this What did we find out al-Qaida the internet was their savior social media was their demise They were torn apart on social media by who al-Qaida and Iraq who became the Islamic State in Iraq remember AQI They were the champions of YouTube in the beginning and so they built these levels. What did they do? They combined propaganda with recruitment with operations They synchronized in a very significant way and they started to move to automation The next level that came was the Russians and what the Russians did was they integrated it all together in an almost seamless way And what Russia knew that no one else really understood is that the only thing worse than no information is too much information Dominate the space use hacking to power influence Use real propagandists and pair them with social bots and they will achieve things you couldn't imagine Distort the landscape to confuse fact and fiction Divide your adversary based on issues and then push them against each other when you're occupied with this active measures The force of politics rather than the politics of force in your own country You cannot pivot towards anyone else The fourth actor is what you're seeing Play out today and right now. I call it trolling as a service If you thought the Russians were bad politicians lobbyists PR campaigns, they are going to be far worse They have two advantages that any state nation-state doesn't have right now a lot more money and a lot more technology Are what we're seeing with Cambridge Analytica. I know people are getting upset about it It was a natural evolution Remember we've celebrated every politician that's used the internet to win victory up until now, right? 2008 man I there were people running around this town trying to find out who was in charge of the Obama campaign to figure out How they use the internet now we all go no, no, no, don't you do that on? the hill in the next two days You've got social media going up against politicians who paid to operate on social media Who's the pot and who's the kettle will be the question that comes out tomorrow in the next two days? If I were doing the open statement tomorrow, I'd walk in say thank you all for contributing to my company Thanks for all your purchases. I was able to institute controls to control you now with all of your investments in my platform We all know that the ultimate enemy is us the fifth enemy in social media are users They don't understand the platforms are on they don't understand the information. They're sharing your biggest enemy and information Warfare is not David and Goliath. It's Judith It's you and your friends who will trade your information when they get angry if you want to track bad actors Don't suck in ten years of tweets Just wait till Friday night when they drink too much and then download their tweets and who they're arguing with They will cough up gold for you and that's what every human intelligence operator knows and the Russians are the best at the business That's it. I think I only got 15 minutes, but thank you for having me