 Well, okay. Well, hello. I'm David Geo, visiting professor of intelligence and international security here in the Department of War Studies at King's College, London. And on behalf of the KCL Cybersecurity Research Group and the Army Cyber Institute at Westpoint, thank you very much for registering for this event on defeating coercive information operations in future crises. I'm thrilled to have Dr. Paul Stockton, the paper's author, and he's joined by Captain Dr. Maggie Smith and Major Joe Latel of the Army Cyber Institute at Westpoint as discussants. I'll start off with some introductions and then give Paul the microphone for about 20 minutes to lay out his paper's key arguments. Then I'll turn the microphone over to Maggie and Joe for a collective 10 minutes or so for feedback and discussion on Paul's presentation. Then I'll give Paul the opportunity to reply to Maggie and Joe's points and reaction before opening the floor to the audience for some questions. Please do put your questions in the chat box and I will try to moderate those and pass them along. Okay, our panelists. Dr. Paul Stockton is a senior fellow of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab and was Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and America's Security Affairs during the Obama administration. He holds a PhD from Harvard University and his full bio can be found on page 199 of the report that he authored, which is linked in the Zoom registration page. So you can find it there. Our discussants, Dr. Maggie Smith is an active duty Army officer serving as a researcher on the Army Cyber Institute's Information Advantage team. She's also Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Sciences. Major Joe Latel is also an active duty Army officer on the Information Advantage team as well. He's a Psychological Operations Officer and holds a graduate degree from Duke University. He teaches the academy's most popular interdisciplinary course on intelligence and cyber operations. So let me turn it over to Paul and I will go ahead and drive Paul's slides. So Paul over to you. David, thanks so much to you and to everybody who's participating today to take a little time to think differently about information operations than we typically would. And that gets me to my first slide, David, if you wouldn't mind. So it's level set here. I've stolen this definition from the U.S. Joint Staff and tried to civilianize it if you will. This is the way I'd like to have us understand information operations for the purposes of today. You'll notice that there's both an offensive and a defensive component to information operations. We'll primarily be talking today about how to play defense while still upholding the United States Constitution. Not an easy thing to do. Next slide, please. We're all familiar with the ongoing Chinese and Russian campaigns happening today to corrode the faith of the American people in their own government to convince them that COVID isn't really a serious disease most recently, that U.S. government policies regarding COVID are corrupt and useless. So these are ongoing campaigns. We face them every day. My focus today is talking about the crises to come in the Taiwan Straits, little green men pouring across the border from Russia into the Baltics, these intense edge of war crises that might actually go over the edge. I want to focus on the use of information operations in these incredibly tense situations. The goal that adversaries are going to have is to convince the American people and U.S. decision makers and allied decision makers in the case of NATO that the cost of living up to our defense commitments are not worth, rather the benefits of living up to our defense commitments are not worth the costs that we'll pay in terms of the incredible punishment that our citizens are going to suffer when adversaries use cyber capabilities to disrupt the flow of power, cut off water service, everything else on which modern life depends. If these threats of punishment prove inadequate to drive our behavior, then adversaries will make good on those threats and begin conducting cyber attacks, begin displaying their capabilities to disrupt life, and then of course threaten more punishment to come unless our leaders yield. Next slide please. Let me give you the key findings of the study. First of all, when there is a crisis, the U.S. public turns to social media to an extraordinary extent as a source of its information, and China and Russia have all kinds of capabilities now to exploit that dependence and turn it to their advantage to help shape public perceptions, beliefs, and behavior. And what's most critical to understand is that even small-scale events now can be leveraged by adversaries to create major psychological effects because they can use social media and the public's dependence on social media to magnify the cognitive effects above all the fear and sense of panic that the public will have even from small-scale events. And that's a huge advantage, isn't it? Because in a cyber pearl harbor, very large-scale cyber attack against U.S. or allied infrastructure, well, we're going to respond with proportionally destructive attacks and shwack the bad guys. If they can conduct very small-scale limited attacks and get the psychological benefits they see by using information operations, that's a win for them and much more difficult for us to counter. Next slide, please. So here's what we need. First of all, a defensive strategy that understands that we've got day-to-day information operations, but we need to be ready for edge-of-war crises. And then if cyber attacks begin, those information operations are going to continue. We need to be able to defend from peacetime through the beginning of war against information operations. We, of all need to get ready for what I call the dark gray zone. Everybody online today is familiar with the gray zone, that area between peace and war that we're in today, but when we get to an edge-of-war situation, the public is much more sensitive to online messaging for reasons I'll talk about. We need to get ready for edge-of-war situations and then, of course, what the Russians call the initial period of conflict where they'll try to prevail right away at the lowest possible cost to themselves and get us to back down. We especially need to prepare for information operations against our coalition defenses. And everybody here online is familiar with Article 5 of the NATO Treaty. Collective defense is critical to the future of the West. Adversaries are going to use information operations to target the NATO decision-making process to delay and disrupt our agreement that collective defense is essential. And then finally, we're at risk of having two cylinders of excellence. Over here, we have the beginnings, thanks in part to the work of the Army Cyber Institute, thinking about how we make defenses work against information operations. And over here, we have cyber resilience initiatives to strengthen the protections for the power grid, water systems, etc. We've got two separate lines of effort. I'm arguing today we need to integrate those efforts because the bad guys are doing that themselves. They're preparing to execute combined information and cyber operations. Our defensive strategies need to account for that joining together of lines of effort. Next slide, please. Here's what I'd like to talk about and tee up for discussion, first of all by Maggie and Joe, and then by all of you. We have a great opportunity to suppress enemy attacks at their origins. The Innet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, wherever the Chinese will launch their attacks from, we need to be able to take down the infrastructure and operations as attacks begin. But we're never going to achieve perfect attack suppression. There's always going to be messaging that leaks through. We need to be able to block that coercive messaging, stop those IOs from reaching the American people and allied publics while still upholding the First Amendment. Not an easy thing to do, but we'll talk about some options today. Then we need to prepare for effective counter messaging. We've got to be able to make sure that the American people will listen to the president, take his views into account, even though 40 percent, approximately, of the American people don't think Joe Biden is the elected president. Then finally, we need to think about defeating micro targeted messaging against senior U.S. officials. Everybody who's sitting in the White House basement in the situation room during a crisis, when crisis is intensifying, those folks, their families, they're going to receive specialized, personalized messaging to convince them to yield in the crisis. And then finally, as I mentioned before, we need to strengthen allied coordination, especially under Article 5. Next slide, please. Let's take a step back now and try to get a hold of how the nature of warfare is beginning to change. The U.S. military, and I'll defer to Joe and Maggie on this, the military is changing the way we're going to achieve victory in the future. In the past, think back to Desert Storm, we'd physically annihilate Saddam Hussein's forces. In the desert, that's how we would win through physical destruction. Now there's been a significant shift in U.S. military doctrine towards shaping adversary perceptions and behavior, and above all, convincing the adversary to yield when conflict is looming and convince adversaries that they can't win at a price that is acceptable to them. That's what's going on in all of the armed forces, U.S. Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force, 16th Air Force, for example, this shift towards achieving victory in the cognitive realm in conjunction, of course, with other lines of effort, including possibility of cyber operations. And big organizational changes are underway. We can talk about those later. Next slide, please, David. So we're getting ready to conduct information operations and potentially combined information and cyber operations to shift adversary perceptions and behavior so that we can win, ideally, without firing a shot. And yet somehow, we are failing to imagine that adversaries will do the same darn thing to us. And that is especially odd, giving what we know about Chinese and Russian doctrine. Some of you are familiar with informatized warfare that China is going to conduct against us. And just last week, there's a new document, I have it here, the military and security developments involving the People's Republic of China, new DoD study. China is moving down this path very, very quickly, thanks especially to the applications of artificial intelligence, towards being able to shift US perceptions and beliefs in times of crisis. Then in Russia, of course, we have new generation warfare. I hate the phrase, Gerasimov doctrine goes far beyond one person. But again, coercing enemy decision making, that's the coin of the realm in Russian doctrine. So that they can win, ideally, at the lowest possible cost to them. Next slide, please. They've got a leg up on us, don't they? First of all, there's been a decades long, multi decades long loss of public trust in federal government in the United States. For a lot of reasons, and over three decades now, the American people have lost confidence in their own government, to tell the truth, to be able to source the source of credible credible information. And adversaries now, Russia and China above all, are pouring gasoline on that fire, aren't they? With their ongoing information campaigns, her own faith in democratic governance. Second, as I mentioned in the introduction, when there is a stressful event, a severe hurricane, a terrorist attack such as the Boston Marathon bombings, Americans turn to social media as their source of information. Yeah, the bad guys are all about exploiting that dependence. Micro targeting of social media messaging, every day and every way, China and Russia are scooping up what they can, from monitoring social media messaging, stealing data from the Marriott Corporation, all the sensitive information about those who stay at Marriott hotels, the list goes on and on. They're gathering this intelligence and thanks to artificial intelligence, they're able to make use of this in order to begin micro targeting social media messaging. And you're all familiar with the rise of deep fakes, now audio fakes, the exploitation of social media algorithms, where Facebook makes extra money of high stress, anxiety-producing messaging, because we'll stay on longer and click on ads more frequently if they're purveying stressful content. Again, that's wonderful for the adversaries. They love those algorithms and are ready to exploit them. And then, of course, winning and outwitting assistance by people inside the defense line, inside our territory, by Americans who retweet propaganda from Russia and China, and serve as either knowing or unknowing agents of influence for our adversaries. Next slide. How is the crisis going to evolve? Well, first of all, we're going to get this course of messaging. Adversary is going to say, hey, American citizens, why should you stand up for a country like Latvia that you can't even find on the map? Why should your families be at risk? Why should you be willing to suffer loss of life, mass casualties in exchange for a NATO ally? So we're going to get that first. But if IOs prove inadequate, they'll start making good on their threats of punishment. As I said before, I believe they're unlikely to launch an all-out cyber attack because we'd launch a proportional response and inflict unacceptable costs on the adversaries. Instead, we're going to face what Alexander George, Thomas Schelling, other theorists of coercion in the Cold War called exemplary strikes, very small-scale, carefully limited attacks to demonstrate adversary capabilities, vividly display maybe even enhanced with defects, the amount of suffering that the adversaries have been able to achieve in one particular city and then send out messaging, hey, you ain't seen nothing that. The same horrors that are being visited upon Seattle or Boston or whatever the city is, that's coming to you next unless you abandon the Baltics or Poland or whatever the target country is. Next slide. Fortunately, we've got a head start in countering these information operations. In the United States, we have programs run by DHS, beginnings of programs run by the State Department to help counter foreign influence, to help deal with threats of shaping U.S. electoral outcomes. Everything that we've built for day-to-day operations, we can put on steroids to get ready for the coercive information campaigns to come. But what we have today is nowhere near what we're going to need in a severe crisis. We need to understand, we need to develop a threat assessment of what those coercive operations are going to look like. And we're beginning to do that today. There's lots more we can talk about, but I think the most important thing we can do as a next step is collectively, including within the NATO environment, begin to understand, okay, here's examples of how information warfare went forward in Russia's invasion of Ukraine, hybrid war, for example. Here's what it's going to look like using much more sophisticated tactics, technologies, and procedures in a genuine edge-of-war crisis. And we need to, again, think about not just only peacetime operations, but edge-of-war and into the beginnings of cyber attacks on critical infrastructure. And we need to get rolling right away. Next slide, please. So how do we get rolling right away? We need to be able to suppress attacks where adversaries are launching them on adversary territory. According to press accounts in the Washington Post, which many of you have seen, prior to the 2018 elections in the United States, U.S. Cyber Command used its capabilities to disrupt the infrastructure and operations of Russia's Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg to prevent the IRA from launching imminent attacks to shape and influence and disrupt that U.S. election. Well, geez, we've got these capabilities for suppression. We've used them before, according to press accounts. Let's begin to adapt those. Let's ramp them up for use to suppress information operations in a severe crisis. But something's still going to get through. We're going to have leakers, right? Attack suppression is never going to be 100% perfect. And so let's get ready for the leakers. And above all, Russia and to a lesser extent China, they're now using infrastructure inside the United States, servers, everything else on U.S. territory, assembling botnets of U.S. computers to conduct information operations against America from inside our own borders. So we're going to need more than attack suppression, right? We're going to need the ability to handle information operations that, despite our best efforts, get through. Next, please. So what do we do? Well, borrowing from George Orwell, of course, we could always establish a ministry of truth. I don't think that's a great idea. And in fact, doing so, backing away from our commitment to freedom of speech, that gives the bad guys a win. The very last thing we want to do is to mimic the treatment of our citizens that Xi Jinping and Putin do today. We need to stand up for the Constitution, not begin to nibble away at it. There have been Supreme Court rulings, including Lamont and others, that have reiterated that American people have the right to access foreign propaganda. The U.S. government can't block foreign propaganda, no matter how hateful, evil and disruptive that it is, according to the Supreme Court rulings. But the president has emergency powers under the Communications Act that was enacted right after Pearl Harbor, never applied to this kind of scenario. There may be ways that we can build out the potential use of those authorities in extremists. When the president declares an emergency, we need to figure out, okay, does this apply to social media, which of course didn't exist after Pearl Harbor, and develop plans, capabilities and exercises to use these emergency powers, only in those extreme circumstances, not in the day-to-day environment in which we operate today. Next slide. We also need to collaborate with social media companies in order to block a course of IOs. I know that this is going to be tough. Everybody's been reading the leaked documents from Facebook watching the congressional testimony about the degree to which the whole business plan of Facebook and other social media platforms depends on sending out inflammatory and potentially Russian and Chinese-generated messaging. So we'll get all excited and upset, stay on their sites longer and click on their advertising. China and Russia are all about exploiting those algorithms. So what I'm saying is, well, let's do something that runs counter to their underlying business models. That's going to be tough, I recognize it. But there are opportunities for progress and we've got to try. And I think the model for what to do is provided by filtering of child pornography. Social media companies have done a good although not perfect job of defining what constitutes child pornography and then developing filtering mechanisms to block that content when it's been identified, adjudicate uncertain examples. Let's do that for coercive messaging. Let's develop a definition of coercive messaging that is narrowly focused, that's tight, that in particular addresses the kind of messaging we're going to get, which is they're going to threaten us with horrific punishment, primarily via cyber attacks. That gives us a starting point to narrowly define the course of messaging to come. And then develop protocols for what we'll do in coordination with social media companies when a crisis occurs. Again, not day to day. This would only be used in extremists, just break glass, I think is a great term. But of course, anything that you don't exercise isn't real. So that would be an important component of moving forward. Next slide, please. That's it. I want to thank you all today. I've opened the door to discussions of how micro targeted messaging, including the US military officers, such as the one online today, can help accomplish adversary goals. I've talked a little bit about how NATO needs to go forward to strengthen its decision making processes and procedures under article five. There's lots more to talk about, but now we at least have a shared foundation for discussion. And I'd like to turn it over to my colleagues now for their thoughts and disagreements with what I've said, so we can move forward together. Thanks very much, Paul. Dr. Maggie Smith, over to you. Thank you, everyone. I'm excited to be here. And before I begin, I have to give my link at this claimer stating that the opinions that I expressed and the information and ideas that I deliver today are mine and mine alone. They're not the Army cyber institutes. They're not the United States Army and they're not West Point. And now I get to go back to Dr. Stockton's amazing paper. I really enjoyed this piece. I think it's such a long form narrative that really spells out and includes some really awesome historical nuggets we can build on. And it actually puts forth a way to begin the conversation around these really complicated, often contentious problems that involve the information environment and what individuals think. And to begin my comments, I turn back to one of Dr. Stockton's first comments is like, how do we actually play defense in the dark gray zone while also ensuring that we're protecting the U.S. Constitution? And because we always are concerned with free speech and enabling free speech in a democracy, one that is destined and desires to maintain that transparency within the government, as well as the way that government conducts its activities as it relates to the public. There are some examples, I think, that can help inform how we go about this that aren't mentioned in this piece, but I think can be really brought in and studied to give potential ways forward to evaluate how when we're operating in a contested environment and the decision makers are also being micro-targeted by our adversaries to influence their capacity to make decisions. I think we can potentially look at how people respond to and act in hostage and high crisis situations like hostage situations. So turning to the interactions of both law enforcement and hostage takers as well as the family members who are deeply invested and concerned about the outcome of those types of events. Of course, that's not a complete or an even perfect type of analogy to make, but I think the high stakes that are concerned and we can imagine that our adversaries may micro-target specific decision makers with holding information that's personal or holding people that mean a lot to that decision maker at risk is potentially one way to help shape the decision environment around high crisis situations. So I think bringing in that literature may be able to help inform us on how individuals may respond cognitively to high stress situations when things that they hold important are taken at risk. And the other one is touched upon and I want to expand on it because I do think it's critical. We know a lot, especially because social media has enabled us to be able to collect data and assess the information environment immediately following a act of terrorist violence or a violent act that has taken place on domestic soil. So Dr. Stockton brought up the bombing in 2013 at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. We are able to see how public opinion and how miss and disinformation surrounding the event spread on social media because we're able to go back and access that data and to be able to then conduct analysis on it. And so we are able to kind of see that how it stands out from the immediate epicenter of an event. And so if we're able to understand that and assess how great dark gray zone activities and how significant events happening against US and domestic infrastructure and potentially we can assess what areas we need to focus on when we're concentrating targeted messaging to help inform the general public of actions they should take in the event of a crisis or how dis and misinformation tends to spread between different online communities in response to a terrorist event can help inform us how it may those same so same types of communities may respond to an act of aggression from foreign nation state. I think that is a critical analogy that Dr. Stockton draws into his analysis but is something that really help can help us determine the information flow that spreads out from the epicenter of an attack on our homeland. The other thing that I think we still are struggling to define in the United States and I love Dr. Stockton's assessment that we just need to get started. We've only started scratching the surface by beginning engaging in conversation but I think something we need to identify and do quickly is who is actually responsible for these activities. We don't have a single entity that is the owner of the problem said it's that's something that Major Lytel brought up yesterday when we were having conversations about this. But if we are going to attack this problem then we need to identify who is actually going to be the coordinator of this problem said who is the entity that is going to provide the verified and truthful information that we can disseminate to the United States public because otherwise we're at risk of having multiple focal points for information that may not necessarily especially in a contested information environment be coordinated and be providing the same types of information to different populations and segments of the American people. So the risk of war is obviously greater when we have these events happen and when we have coordinated attacks especially because if we have a kinetic and a cyber attack happening in a coordinated fashion then that not only attacks our cognitive ability to assess the situation but it also attacks the infrastructure that we are able to use for command and control. So these are types of events that Dr. Stock is looking at that would cause high stress to the American public and high stress to those decision makers and that's what really gets me nervous about this situation. Not only is it the American public that could be under attack in the cognitive domain but it's also the decision makers that are going to be taking action and are intended to be the ones that are to protect the American public from further harm. The other thing that I find really fascinating about this problem set is how we place this in a collaborative environment with the social media companies and how we view their role in this entire problem set and I think Dr. Stock did a great job of bringing up the difficulty in placing trust in social media companies to come voluntarily forward to participate in any collective or whole of society response in a manner that's actually for the public good and not for their bottom line and I think that's a challenge that nobody has a good answer to at this stage. We've obviously seen Mark Zuckerberg and the other social media titans testify before Congress saying that they have the public's best interest at heart but we also see leaked information about the deleterious effects of social media and those platforms that they can have on sectors of our American population as well as the global population like teenage girls for example as has been identified with Instagram and Facebook. So I think that's one area where we do really have to focus on understanding what regulations may be effective to help social media companies collaborate when we are in a crisis situation across platforms even when they have competing business interests and when it is necessary for the president to intervene and establish a baseline of information to be provided, information to be blocked, information to be suppressed as well as information to be physically and logically removed from those websites and platforms to ensure that the public's best interest is really what is being upheld in a crisis situation. Again I think this report and this piece is filled with a ton of amazing insights into the nature of the problem in a centralized location so you can really assess from front to bottom doing really good linear learning on the information operations problem set and so I am very grateful that Dr. Stockton took the time and did the research to put this together it's something I'm going to rely on in the future and get my students to read as well and with that I'm going to turn it over to Major Joe Latel for his comments. Thank you Maddie and thank you again for having me here everyone. I also have to do the disclaimer of all the things that I'm about to say are my opinion and do not represent the Army, ACI or West Point. With that being said I also agree with many of the things that Dr. Stockton put forward but since Maggy was very agreeable I'll do the contrarian effect and say a couple of places where I think potentially we could improve some of the things that were before it. So one of them most key to me is the reactive stance of counter messaging. There have been numerous studies one probably seen by many of us from Deb Roy out of MIT that fake news or false stories, false narratives travel around six times faster than truth and from traditional news sources and mediums. This becomes a very difficult problem when you're trying to counter a message you're assuming that you were going to A, reach the same people that that false narrative reached and B, you're going to be able to convince them that that was false in the first place. People who share false messages tend to have some sort of preconceived bias that allowed them to pick it up in the first place and allowed that to resonate with them. For me I always keep a mental model for influence operations and for information operations that are coercive or malign or however you wanted to find them. As there's kind of three things you can attack right you have the man and I use that term universally so the man or the woman both individually and as a social group we all have beliefs, values, preconceived biases, fears, all these things that play into how we perceive our world around us and that can be individually or that can be at a group level. I saw someone put in the chat about QAnon. QAnon has its very specific belief structure which shapes how they have their worldview. The next thing is the message itself. In many works it's referred to as narrative warfare it's these deep stories that affect people based off of their worldview. There are things that have been around for a long time that have been built upon so I find QAnon fascinating so I'll keep along that strain a lot of what QAnon has built off of this anti-Semitic you know blood rights from the medieval times right that Jews were going around and capturing Christian babies in Slavic nations and doing blood rituals to stay forever young and gain power right this crazy idea but if you followed anything with QAnon there's this idea that the elites are doing something similar to stay young those in Hollywood and the liberals and left this in the United States or around the world have this secret cabal that controls the world so you have the message. The other part of it is the medium which I think we focus pretty heavily on in the lab doctor Stockton's work that algorithmic confounding these emergent technologies like deep fakes and things of that nature that will affect how things are pushed to individuals and each one of these can be affected differently so if we talk about trying to counter them they're going to each be a different type of countering so you have to understand what people's beliefs and biases are if we're going to go directly to a group of people or the people we have to understand those deep lying narratives in order to counteract any effect that Russia China might use to essentially take those narratives and use them as their own for their own national security or political objectives and finally the the mechanics of using recommendation excuse me recommendation algorithms against ourselves or using deep fakes to blur the lines of what is truthful and what is fake are definitely going to change. One thing that there has been some studying on is the effects of various moderation from everything from like soft moderation like we saw with COVID where Twitter would have a light panel over a meme that was shared saying this is probably not correct you should go to NHS or CDC or whoever and look up the real statistics for this we've seen more hardcore deep platforming in the case of former US President Donald J. Trump he was the platform from multiple different places to include Facebook and Twitter and while that has certain effects on the ability to spread information especially when you talk about information laundry where useful people in the United States who have big followings may take a piece of course of IO from China or Russia and spread it to a greater masses by removing them from that cog in the machine they're not able to spread it as far I believe there's a signal report following President Trump's excuse me former President Trump's removal from Twitter that disinformation around the election dropped something like 75 or 76% in a day the other side of that is China and Russia don't care about being the platform they assume that their bots and their sock puppets and all their different accounts that were going to be the platform they just need to set the seed and once the seed is going the natural forces within those algorithms within social media as a whole will push it forward and it will spread it to these people that we as you know the truth tellers or the government as the truth teller if we're assuming that's the case will not have the same reach that that original you know seed pushed in will have and with that because of people's preconceived biases and their notions and worldviews some people will be very susceptible to certain types of information and some people will not I always like to say everyone's susceptible to something you just have to find the right narrative cord to influence them so in the United States we have a very strong looking at you know far right conservative movements white supremacist groups as being you know what Americans can be influenced by but there is a chance if you know our adversaries wanted to push the far left they could potentially do the same thing they would just have to use different narratives to do it and that's to say that a narrative singularly can be used or be viewed by different groups we were talking about narratives against the military recently here at work and the idea of being left behind which is a long-standing narrative within U.S. military culture specifically around Vietnam right the Vietnam troops were left to drive they didn't do everything to fight the government didn't do everything to fight the war and they were left behind and left to suffer and then once they got home they were left behind and weren't you know recognized for their sacrifice well if that works in certain populations of the government but it doesn't work in others if say you're a woman serving in the military maybe sexual assault is you're being left behind you weren't protected by those who were supposed to protect you you weren't one of those individuals that was necessarily a part of the in-group and therefore you were left behind same thing with people of color the U.S. army has had a history well I should say the U.S. military has had a history of treating people of color very differently than white service members specifically looking back to World War II there were segregation in groups and units that had higher pert dominance of a specific minority might have seen more combat than others based on being seen as expendable when they returned home the GI bill wasn't given to African Americans the same way it was done for white service members so there's a lot of things that this one single narrative is overarching but it means very different things to different people and I think that that's a big key on how we defeat this is well what narratives are there how do they affect them because that's what our adversary is looking for our adversary is looking for those wedges in between our society they want to expand them because that disarray that as Dr Stockton alluded to you know very few people are not very few people very large amount of people around 40 percent of people don't think this is the legitimate president that is a huge thing if we would have to go to war to defend one of our allies are people going to actually put the full force of the U.S. government you know on their backs and say yes I will happily sign up or have my child sign up to defend one of our allies are to defend this country and that's a huge problem if half the country says no I rather just see this guy fail when you know it's actually their livelihood just as online as someone who has a different political opinion and I think that those are some things that we have to potentially think about when we start deciding what is the best way to counteract these these malign coercive IOs I think I've taken over my time so I'll stop there for the general discussion give it back to Dr. Gio. All right well thanks both to Joe and Maggie for some useful and constructive feedback for Paul so Paul I saw you assiduously taking some notes there would you like to take a couple minutes and and respond and maybe while you're doing that if I could I do see one question in the chat but if I could start to invite folks to drop some questions in the chat we can start to broaden it out in the next couple minutes after Paul is done with his response so over to you Paul Paul you're muted. There we go thanks I was taking notes like a maniac because there was so much great information that Maggie and Joe shared including things that I had not known let me follow up with two questions to them based on their excellent comments Maggie it seems to me based on your analysis that for counter messaging to be effective we might need to do the same kind of micro targeting that adversaries are going to do to us that is rather than spam out generalized messaging from the president or whoever to American citizens we might need to have already understood the kinds of messaging and the way of framing it that will resonate with individual consumers of social media. I can understand why that's a good thing but how would you collect information I don't want to use the intelligence word but information on American citizens in terms of their proclivities their biases as Joe would say there the narratives that they would be vulnerable to without getting into deep deep hot water of U.S. government collecting information against its own citizens that makes me ultra nervous. So my immediate response is that you know in our domain and Major Latel and I have experienced this but there is definitely barriers to doing any of that especially as the U.S. government service member in terms of collecting information on our own people now my counter to that is this already being done our advertisement agencies and you know those big data aggregation companies that are essentially these data warehouses on the American public in our our intensities for certain you know things on Amazon over another. The other partnership that you bring up in your paper that we haven't discussed yet is actually developing a partnership with those legitimate news and media outlets that already exist and so I think immediately that is one avenue where the U.S. government could partner with an already established media organization in order to deliver information that has been verified and trusted from an original source meaning the U.S. government and have those media organizations compelled to deliver that message to the persons that are most likely to be watching or tuning in or reading the news on their site of course that has to imply or almost implies that those media organizations have to be willing to partner with the U.S. government and make that partnership known that in the event that there is a crisis we are going to be delivering information and we have to do it in the manner that the United States government is asking us to do so but oftentimes we've seen in research shows that if a person hears something from a news source or an opinion source that they trust that they are going to be more likely to tune in and listen to them in the event that they're asked to do something in a crisis information situation so I think that could be one area where a partnership is developed or where that notion that you have in your paper of partnering with established media outlets can be furthered to also be the people and the organizations that are collaborating with the U.S. government to disseminate information in the event of a crisis situation where the information environment is contested. That's great and then Joe you raise an incredibly important point on the difficulty of counter messaging and that is once the false narrative is taken hold that is compelling and very hard to overcome and in my paper I talk a little bit about the first mover advantage it's almost like a first strike advantage in the nuclear realm once people have lodged within their brains a false narrative it's very difficult to dislodge that false belief even when you confront people with evidence that their beliefs are wrong would you recommend again speaking as a private citizen here that we think about preemptive messaging very early in a crisis that rather than giving Xi Jinping the opportunity to shape the narrative by going first maybe the president should go first and early on begin making the case for why we ought to defend our NATO allies or whoever the victim of any aggression is so yes I am very much an advocate for a proactive approach to information operations and influence operations you touched on the lack of trust and I think that is a huge problem with much of this however I think we can always assume what our adversaries are going to go at and what attacks they're going to make prior to them making them so if we can get out ahead of that it makes it less salient when it actually does hit the the forum that they're pushing it on right so if we're saying we're going to defend Taiwan and again this is my opinion this is not US military if we're going to defend Taiwan at all costs if there is a level of transparency by the US government and saying this is what the cost is and this is what we can assume won't happen and that is what happens there is a level of trust that will be built off of that that we can go forward to protect ourselves essentially against what our adversaries will do now the problem is is in these lighter points and when people's own political ventures domestically are put on on the line they are less likely to be transparent and that's just human nature right we will always want to protect ourselves however I think the more transparent and the more proactive we are the better we are in that realm because there's no vacuum for our adversary to fill we're already there they have to now be our narrative and obviously there's always going to be conspiracy theorists who say oh well they're still lying to yes we'll never get that crazy 10 percent away from it but if we can get you know 90 percent of the population understanding what the truth is and what our intent is then we will do better but we have to again there's the narrative of the government lying to you from god knows how long you know as long as there has been a federal government and especially in the last 20 years with some of our military quote-unquote in ventures we've seen in Iraq and Afghanistan they may not have started on truthful notes all of them so there's that overcoming that to make someone believe what we're doing militarily is needed and isn't something beyond some political mood. Okay Paul did you want to respond further or should we proceed? I'd say let's proceed but both of those responses were rich in terms of potential policy recommendations and I'm going to capture that in my future research really very valuable comments thank you. All right well the first question I have this little bit of an eye chart here so if you excuse me it's from Andre thank you for your presentation would the counter misinformation doctrine that is aimed at foreign adversaries be applied to domestic misinformation efforts such as QAnon which are often equally as potent in sewing discord in our country um yeah I can only footstomp that that question right you know and I think we sort of even spoke about that Paul a little bit yesterday right you know how do you how do you how do you disentangle the domestic from the foreign and oftentimes those seem to be code for you illegitimate versus legitimate when we use those those boundary sorts of frameworks over to you Paul. It's a great question but I want to go back to the distinction that I raised earlier that is very very important going forward from a policy perspective we do have QAnon we have efforts to sew discord in our country folks that constitutes preparing the cognitive battlefield for future coercive operations they are distinct and they're going to require different kinds of policy approaches we are getting social divisions sure and adversaries are trying to wind them every day that provides the basis later in a crisis to call into question US policy to mobilize pundits in Fox News or MSNBC whatever you think is appropriate to mobilize members of Congress to get to their staffs their political donors everything that bad guys are doing now to sew discord that improves the terrain on which they'll conduct coercive information operations when they threaten us with horrific punishment and then most important we haven't talked enough today begin to inflict that punishment begin to take down power and water systems in the United States okay thanks for that we we do have some questions coming in up Paul I'm going to read two of them at the same time from the same questioner and maybe you can if you want to answer both feel free or you can choose one first question from Seb if we need to contest adversarial information operations how do we do this if they're taking place in the population or cognitive domain of allies and partners on what legal basis can we do this so that's question one question two fully agreed with targeting the infrastructure of information operations but how do we stop the quote unquote patriotic practitioner or social media influencer that is conducting ios not as the at the behest of a nation state for example isis although I wonder if the the Russian patriotic hacker might be the the the broader example of the phenomenon uh so let me pause there uh Paul and and turn that back over to you sure i'm going to tackle question number one and then turn over question number two to Maggie and Joe on on question number one the uh allied and partnership issue is uh highlighting Seb the importance of working these issues through NATO and our East Asian alliance relationships as a form of coalition preparedness there is no way we can tackle as United States government the sovereign responsibilities of our NATO allies and other security partners we need to agree in advance how we're going to proceed against ios and again today Russia is preparing the battlefield by messaging every day to weaken allied cohesion every day there's messaging to play divide and rule in that gets them ready to disrupt article five decision making this has to be done as part of a NATO operation and equivalent operations with our allies in Asia so let's get rolling on that this is not repeat not a us only effort it's going to require genuine deep partnerships in areas where we've just barely begun to tackle a problem of coercive operations as opposed to day-to-day Chinese and Russian messaging thanks okay great uh Maggie and Joe you can probably see the chat question as well either Maggie you're you're unmuted you want to go first sure um so to the first point i think um when we think domestically so the United States army has been working through kind of a very similar question about you know what is our role in information operations against the American population and i think one of the mechanisms that we have that's already established and has legal authority is our public affairs officers and those are the ones that are really kind of the the mouthpiece of of the military but it's increasingly being noted that they play a large role in this whole kind of um 365 degree conception of what the information environment and how it's able to be used uh for offensive military operations and the role that the pao for the public affairs officer plays in presenting verified and factual information in an official capacity so legally that's part of informing and educating um the domestic population and that also in many ways translates to our areas of operation globally there is a public affairs um element to international operations um so that's another um kind of bullet point to what dr stockton was saying that made out and then on the second point um it's mentioned in dr stockton's paper but joint task force areas was established within um army cyber command and the cyber national mission force and us cyber command in order to take a look at and tackle the problem of the islamic state in the information domain as well as the cyber domain and i think part of the way that nation states um or the difficulty of attacking information operations and ios that are coming from nation states is that most of the time especially when we're dealing with russia and china we're dealing with a near pure um adversary and that means that we're really trying to keep everything below the threshold of war so in many cases our information operations as well as our cyberspace operations are really used as signaling events uh to express this satisfaction with the current policy or things like that but when we talk about a non-nation state actor someone that's a terrorist or an external organization that is a rogue entity within the domain like the islamic state then um there's the ability to actually conduct coordinated offensive actions against those entities so things that happen in and through cyberspace but then also in and through the cognitive domain and the information domain writ large so i think um we have a lot of njtf areas or joint task force areas is really a test case for this but there are mechanisms within us cyber command and the elements that are under the control of general loxoni as the commander that are able to leverage a lot of different assets to tackle the information operations as well as cyberspace operations of non-nation state actors um but it is different than when we're thinking about a nation state simply because the outcomes um and the desires that we have in terms of our intent behind these operations are different um and then i'll turn it over to major latino so i want to touch on the first one a little bit more on the ally side so full disclosure i'm a psychological operations officer and um typically in use stock but i'm up here at aci right now her army cyber institute um so we do the joint training exchanges with various partners across the world on what is and isn't information operations and what is and isn't psychological operations and how to best defend against that depending on the nation state we also have numerous um uh liaisons with different government agencies within our allied and partner forces that allow us to have that partnership there so if we needed to do something within a country that you know say we're in the Baltics and they are pushing some sort of messaging against us we have that relationship already built up with those various nations and we can go to them and say hey this is happening can you leverage your forces to make this stop happening as a you know favor to us or whatever as our partner so that is part of how we handle things that are happening outside of the united states in one of our allied forces countries uh with the about the infrastructure for the patriot practitioners or the isis i think maggie really covered isis well we have a lot more authorities when it's a foreign adversary even if it's not a traditional nation state on what we can and cannot um do however once you start getting into a domestic act or you know whether you want to call them like a useful idiot passing along information or they're actually well tied into a nation um state for whatever way there are very strict laws on what we can do and rightfully so right we don't want to hinder our first amendment rights of our citizens um it really depends on how and the way those connections are made if that makes sense so if someone's on the payroll for russia it becomes something very different than if they're just spreading russian um propaganda on their own they believe it fully but they have no real ties at russia right we would never be able to stop that unless they go to the like realm of you know threat statistical violence and breaking um terms of service and whatever on that whatever social media platform there but we're not going to be able to arrest them for speaking their mind or speaking their place if they're a russian asset then you start getting into the idea of um are they disclosing that you have to do foreign disclosures if you're working for a foreign government on their behalf things of that nature which we've seen come up over the last couple years with a couple who've been arrested in conjunction with the russia collusion um so that answers that as best as i think i can within this forum and i just add one thing there uh maggie pointed out accurately that concerns over escalation are a paramount with uh nuclear powers like russia and china but they're going to try to maneuver around our existing nuclear and kinetic capabilities to prevail in a crisis and let me read to you from the do d assessment of the chinese military that came out last week the people's liberation army judges that aggressive asymmetric actions against perceived us political military and psychological weaknesses are effective counter balances to us military superiority in traditional domains let's stop thinking exclusively about a2d2 and how many carriers can dance on the head of a pin and get ready for them to hit us where we ain't uh thanks for that all three of you um i'm going to just cherry pick a couple questions here now i'm going to start with jim uh is there evidence of overt or covert collusion between russia and china in influence operations that are ongoing against the west and if i can just sort of maybe put a little spin on that uh i want to put this in the in the framework of of you know so-called great power competition and now everything has suddenly become russia and china but they're very different creatures and they're different in cyberspace and they're different in their intelligence uh you know posture against the west and on and on and yet we sort of keep lumping them in the same bucket um and i wonder you know do they interact at all i guess maybe the question if i've understood it right do they interact at all synergistically or you know do they piggyback on each other or these just attacks one's coming from the east and one's coming from the farther east uh or does there is there mark more to it than that over to you paul uh david uh no fair handing me that hand grenade i'm going to ask you to provide an answer you know much more about great power competition than i do and i'd very much be interested in your thoughts well that's totally not fair i'm here to moderate um i can answer if you guys want i have an answer to that yeah okay let me let me let joe uh go over my career i will totally punt i'll formulate some thoughts uh over to you joe so over covert collision between russia and china influence operations i would say that it's more on that synergistic level that dr geo alluded to um we saw with covet uh some of the same themes and narratives that were being used were being used by both countries and it was to attack the west particularly in our inability to control the virus and the pandemic however we know that that's not truthful because we were honestly reporting our number of cases and our number of deaths where russia and china were hindering um what was being reported right um same thing with the anti-vax movement both countries have um had attacks against our vaccines which we've seen have major problems with getting our populace fully protected um from the virus so i think there's definitely a synergy as in a true connection one i don't know if this is the form to really get into that and to i don't necessarily to go back to what dr geo said they have different goals right china wants to be the sole superpower and russia wants to get what they can't right and they go about their information operations in very similar yet very different ways because their ultimate end goal is going to be different right russia wants their piece of the pie they don't necessarily want to be the sole superpower whereas china has been you know from their view emasculated for centuries by the west and they want to be respected and they want to be the sole you know superpower within the world above the united states where they are looked upon with you know prestige and pride and much of what they're communicating to the west through their three warfare which is you know the public opinion warfare psychological warfare and legal warfare is basically pushing that goal right to become the sole superpower and because of that they're passing they cross because they have beneficial means to it but i don't think that they're necessarily trying to work together because china doesn't want russia to be on their same level they want to be higher than russia right so there's no reason for them to synergize unless it really the past cross in that specific spot i have opinions can i say too yeah please go maybe right so um i love this example and it came out a little while ago but recently on a russian language forum it was found that china had put a message or had socialized the story um in russian language um that the covid-19 virus was really uh developed and was released from fort detrick in naryland which should sound familiar because active measures uh the book by thomas rid lays out operation infection which was a soviet effort to socialize that the age virus was created by the u.s army at fort detrick in naryland so it's interesting to see china now taking kind of a playbook or a page out of the russian playbook and trying to get russian speaking forums to start socializing a story of that the u.s created um the covid-19 virus and major latel made some really interesting or good points about the the aims of both countries and when we think about china so it has this long legacy of this amazing civilization that's over 3000 years old and russia also dates back well before the united states um and one thing that's fascinating about china is that they're not only interested in this information domain but they're also really dedicated to their built-in-road initiative which is developing infrastructure in um africa and underdeveloped areas which then gives them access to these massive data sets and these massive populations because one of their stated goals from their 2019 um some of the releases that they made about policy in 2017 excuse me um is that they want to become the leader in ai and artificial intelligence technology and so the cultural aspect that china is attempting to really culturally influence globally the way the world actually functions the way that infrastructure is built and the way that we communicate with each other i think is an important distinction between russia and china because confucius centers are popping up all over south and central america as well as within africa when china builds infrastructure for you they not only um implant or you know um import the infrastructure but they also import labor they bring chinese natives and nationals to build and be the ones that are monitoring and developing that infrastructure for you and so the cultural aspect i think is really strong with china um but they do definitely play on the same types of themes the same discord narratives that we see russia being on both sides of in the united states for example like the pro police movement and black lives black lives matter excuse me movement are two areas that russia latched onto on both sides where we have pro gun control and um pro first second amendment or nra type narratives we see china there as well um and i think it's important to add that even though we focus great power competition on russia and china primarily in part because of their size and their economic powers as well but um the middle powers or those like india your iran and north korea also play a critical role and in many cases iran and north korea pay back on some of the initiatives that china and russia do but i do think the distinct focus of each of their ability or what they're really going for in the information space is different russia is really just trying to be disruptive whereas china is really trying to ensure that the chinese people and the chinese kind of brand names um are well respected within the international community because instead of having an americanized world they want a chinese world and then um back home they're really invested in creating a narrative that um focuses on the party and adherence to this great notion that china is really this ancient civilization that should be at the forefront of the globe but it's a fascinating problem set and i think it's um something to wake up in the morning to study every day well i'm glad that i uh i i went last gave me a second to learn from my colleagues and i don't think i can improve upon that but uh to not totally punt i think what i would simply add is that i think russia first of all i don't think there's any coordination going on in terms of you know at the white board you know hey what messages are we gonna put out so i think these things start to interact as joe said synergistically once they're out in the wild uh but in terms of you know placement seating you know message crafting you know i don't i don't think any of that is coordinated um but it seems to me and you know i don't have the evidence to to sort of back this up yet it's still something i'm working on that the uh the russians surprised themselves with how vulnerable america was to influence operations even before the 2016 election and i always like to go back uh to jade helm in 2015 is one of my you know my favorite you know the russians started to play you know sort of in this this alt-right chat universe and uh and i think they they were just sort of you know putting a toe in the water to see whether or not americans would swallow absolute garbage um and sure enough we did and then this is not dave joe this is me quoting general hayden uh who basically said you know once once the russians saw how we reacted to jade helm 2015 which in the interest of time i'll just let folks google if you're not familiar with it uh that that's when they decided they could actually play in the big leagues and go interfere in the in the 2016 presidential campaign the the russians have been doing this you know since soviet days as maggie mentioned and you know operation infection and for detrick and aids and and they've had you know mixed success and you know we we know that one because it's kind of the grand slam of information operations you know but they they struck out a lot as well but i think that the the chinese i think learned from the russians how vulnerable we are and how much like a great white shark will eat a license plate or a tire you know like we'll just swallow it and just see what happens and you know and so the sufon report uh put out something recently that said actually the russians have been eclipsed by the chinese in sheer volume of of things that that that are coming out and so i think unfortunately you know we talk a lot about the effects of information operations and how effective is this can we measure it and what are the counterfactuals and and whether or not it's effective i believe that the chinese think it's effective and so they went all in and they put a lot of chips in this game where they really weren't playing in the same way so i think the chinese learned they saw the the sorts of i would think would be success of the russian efforts and then the chinese said wow that works uh and now it's gone it's almost sort of jumped the shark in a way uh you know joe and i were talking earlier today about a newspaper article where covet got to china from main lobsters and then and then came back you know whether or not the chinese would have put out something like that you know if covet had happened in 2014 let's say you know i tended doubt it i think they were a learning organization and and now they've they've learned anyway all right enough from me i have two questions that deal with the role of the private sector one from clain and one from nick so i'm just going to read those as a as a pair and then we'll turn it over to whoever wants to take that there's a mention of getting the private sector involved in combating information operations from our adversaries how do we do this to reach a level of effectiveness and how will we know that we've reached a level of proficiency and then nick has specified for dr stockton the csa m model which i'm not exactly sure what that is relies on voluntary cooperation as dr smith noted not all of the relevant companies are based in the us were willing to cooperate anyway if relying on voluntary participation is insufficient and content based tactics implicate the first amendment why not quote move up the stack unquote and instead target government actions at the economic and profit models that facilitate micro targeting and information operations so maybe some some overlap there happy to turn it over to paul for the first whack at it yeah great questions i think that let's start with voluntary measures and see a csa m of the child pornography model is a great place to start but let's be serious here facebook and other media platforms are in a new political environment there's harsh scrutiny on antitrust measures there's concern that the business models are inherently may have said earlier maybe not in the public interest and i think the risk of tighter regulation than currently exists including under the communications act uh is uh maybe going to provide new inducements for voluntary collaboration but i think we also need to begin imagining what kind of regulatory and statutory remedies may be appropriate if for some reason we can't make progress on a voluntary basis and then the next level up everybody take a look at section 706 of the communications act because if the president declares an emergency the authorities that she or he can exercise are immense you can drive a truck through that so it's not clear exactly how the act applies to social media let's get congress to clarify that in useful ways so three lines of effort right voluntary collaboration if necessary statutory and regulatory initiatives and then the uh if needed just break glass emergency powers of the president okay uh maggie or joe any thoughts on the private sector i don't have similar understanding or belief that he starts small but eventually we're probably going to have to have some sort of regulation on who is allowed what pieces of our data right we've seen this already happening in the u where they've stricken down and gutted a lot of the capabilities of these companies and they still operate there so it's not necessarily hindering their ability to operate it may be hindering their bottom line but it's keeping hopefully and we're seeing the early portions of it their population a little bit safer from the ability to migrate target right um when we talk about you know scraping there's a certain amount of information you put out you know what you're saying but there's also a ton of information that's being taken by third parties cookies um sessions data all these other technologies that allow uh company to see like how long you have your cursor over an ad you know how quickly do you scroll through stuff where do you stop what catches your eye um where does your gaze land and these are all things that we don't really think about what we're using these um these different um platforms there's even the side of uh some social media platforms have what are referred to as ghost accounts where they create accounts on your behalf based off of people who those algorithms things are your real life friends so maybe you're not on social media but there's probably still an account somewhere out there that has your information based off of pictures you've been in with uh you know friends of yours from college maybe you deleted your account and they still have all that data there because we never asked them to actually delete it there's a lot of things that we have to kind of start thinking about more heavily and start slowly pushing into and thinking of is this something that needs to be left to the provider or is it something that we as a government need to regulate because ultimately what can be used for advertising can be used by our adversaries to attack us and our democracy. Maggie did you want to add on to that? Sure I'll take a different approach because um majorly tell spelled out a lot of really big concerns I have about the private sector and had the economic incentives to like collect all the data and do all of the advertising and get people to consume um something that we haven't talked about uh when we truly talk about a kind of 360 degree or whole of society which is the current buzzword um approach to tackling these information and influence operations um we don't necessarily put a lot of onus on the um the individual and so I think similar to how or a lot of equation kind of gets made between I'm going to use cyber security here but we could think about information security as well but a lot of push is put me trying to think about cyber security as like a public good something that if there's a gap in it then the the government should step in and solve that problem or provide a service that solves that problem and when it really comes down to it and we think about cyber security that's easier to think about than just information security or cognitive security um a lot of it relies on like if I make updates to my phone and if I do things as an individual and I think we need to start folding individuals accountable for both the way that they the the information and their worldview if that makes any sense I know that sounds um dictatorial or potentially big brother-ish however the choices that I make and the information that I ingest the sites that I go to have an impact on my understanding and my beliefs system as well as how I understand my relationship to others the country that I live in the government that is that I've signed a social contract with in theory right and and all of those relationships are influenced by how I um understand the world and the activities that are going on around me and unless we put some onus and unless we invest in educating our youth all the way from kindergarten all the way up through um university levels and having people understand the importance of what's of knowing what their media diet is of understanding how they make informed decisions throughout the day the role that social media and these one liners that we read may translate into physical activities similar to how when we think about terrorist radicalization we look for how online activities translate into physical activities so how does the information we ingest on a regular basis how does that media diet and our daily media diet um influence the way that we act and behave as citizens is something that I think deserves more attention and requires some discussion so that we incorporate it into the way that we see ourselves as being good citizens and doing our civic duty that we signed up to as by virtue of getting citizenship and being an American citizen or a global citizen or however we want to define it so I think that's another area that is understudied underutilized and not focused and I think beginning to define that early in kindergarten education all the way up through and understanding how your role in the information environment as an individual is both critical to our national defense as well as just safety and security of everybody around you is an important connection to draw for people oh Maggie it almost sounds like somebody should write an article giving pride of place to oh my gosh is there something coming out soon David of information security as a cognitive security as a matter of national defense okay well we won't give that away too much although I'm getting old waiting for it okay well 87 minutes goes quickly when we're having fun and learning a lot let me give the last minute or two here back to Paul and Paul what I what I'd love you to do is just to you know this moves so quickly you know and I think historians in particular like you know what do you what do you mean I wrote it earlier this year why doesn't need to be updated um and so you know in this space you know with with every hack or breach or announcement or election or whatever things has gone uh things have just gone haywire in this space and are moving faster than we can get things written and published and so um before I give my final thank you Paul do you just want to take a minute or two and you know what what do you wish you know you would have known before you finally just had to you know cut off the information and uh and and go to press with what you had as a way to just kind of you know leave us with the most up to date um the most up to date uh perspectives that you can offer so over to you Paul and David I mentioned the recent analysis by the Pentagon on trends in Chinese exploitation of social media in order to achieve victory without firing a shot ideally uh what I'd like to urge everybody to do uh is think about the deterrence realm today we've been focused primarily on how to play defense against information operations and there's great recommendations that Joe and Maggie have suggested including greater citizen preparedness but ideally we'd like to discourage the uh Chinese and Russians are ever launching a course of campaign when the balloon finally goes up in the Taiwan Straits and I'd urge you to think about what role information operations might play in our response capabilities to an impending attack right now we can threaten uh to use kinetic or even nuclear response options as well as cyber to inflict unacceptable costs on adversaries should they attack what would an information operation look like as an additional arrow in our deterrence quiver in order to uh discourage information attacks by those who hide behind who cower in fear behind the great Chinese firewall that is a great great place to end let me end on a couple of thank yous as well I wanted to thank in particular the Kings College London communications team Danny and Lizzie for their help in crafting the the announcement and tech support and all the things that they do behind the scenes I wanted to thank the department of war studies and the cyber security research group in particular also the army cyber institute at West Point for their partnership here of course our paper author uh Paul Stockton many thanks to you for for for getting your ideas on on paper on many papers uh 212 papers or something like that uh so some some serious reading uh thanks to Maggie and Joe as well for taking the time to to to provide some really good thoughts uh thanks to the British academy for the global professorship program that lets me be here and and do these kinds of fun things so with that uh thanks to all of you uh in zoomland and for your good questions and uh we will see you next time thanks very much out here bye bye