So early on today, script that it was just it was David You who is British Academy professor and a visiting professor of
intelligence and international security in the Department of War Studies at King's College London.
Prior to joining Cassio,
David was associate professor of history at the US Military Academy at West Point and history fellow at the Army's Cyber Institute.
He's also director of the Cambridge Security Initiative and is co-convenor of International Security and Intelligence Programme.
He is a former CIA analyst and operations officer and remains a senior officer in the US Navy Reserve.
David also holds advanced degrees from Georgetown University and University of Cambridge.
I love that he's a friend of mine. He's been a good friend, CCW over the over the last few months and years, actually last just six months ago.
I think it was. You build a site with an event where a speaker dropped out, I think, two days before he stepped up to the breach.
So I was very grateful for that. And it's a great pleasure to have you speak to us today on Russian strategy in the social media battlefield.
All right. Well, thanks Will. And I don't think I've ever done a standing room only or, you know, and I feel like the Rolling Stones or something, so.
Thank you very much for four for coming today. OK.
A bunch of thank you's first to will and CCW for having me here today.
Very much appreciate the kind invitation. Thank you to the British Academy publicly for funding my project and letting me be here.
Thanks to King's worst ideas for hosting me. And then, of course, thank you to the Army Cyber Institute at West Point for letting me go.
So and I was like, Hey boss, can I go for four years? And they were like, what?
And then I explained it and they bought into it. So that was that was a big thank you.
But everything I say is my own research analysis.
Opinions. Nothing to do with the U.S. government. OK, so from Sun Tzu to Machiavelli to grasim of information in warfare, information,
in conflict, information, in pre warfare, I think is absolutely critical.
So you have you all know, the songs you quotes win one hundred victories and 100 battles is not the acme of skill.
To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill anyway.
To conquer without fighting is the idea to bend the enemy to your will before the force of arms is necessary.
Machiavelli in 15th century Florence meant discontented and desires of change are able
to open the way for the invasion of their country and to render its conquest easy.
Carmen Clausewitz pursue operations that have direct political repercussions, right?
So not just on, not just on the battlefield.
And today, I think, you know, just thinking about the Ukraine crisis at the moment to disrupt an opposing alliance or to paralyse that alliance,
a wonderful thing to do to favourably affect the political scene.
OK, moving on to today and I want to talk about Russia today.
Obviously, there's a lot of folks in the information environment. There's domestic actors, which we can talk about in Q&A if you want.
There are other actors, obviously besides besides Russia, I happen to focus on Russia.
I think they're the best at it. And we can sort of fight over that claim a little bit later, if you like.
But here's general grasim of information. Operations can be employed to defend and advance Russia's national interests beyond its borders.
Are we not seeing that today? The role of non-military means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown
and in many cases have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness.
Good to have information backed up by some hardware, though, as well.
So, OK, so we now know that information is critical.
I'm mostly interested in disinformation.
That's not misinformation where, you know, it's just sort of your uncle and, you know, Christmas dinner spouting off about whatever.
Nor is it mal information, which is often considered true information.
But for malign purpose, this information is essentially made up.
It's false and there's an intent here. It's deliberately intended to deceive, applied to Russia in particular.
This can be lumped under the broader measures of Russian active measures, covert action, forgeries, assassination, political warfare.
You know them all. The Russians are very good at it, and they use it for a reason.
So no offence to Michael Caine and Batman. I can't remember if this was the Christian Bale Batman or not.
But the idea is not just, you know, my buddy Vlad wants to watch the world burn, right?
There is actually a strategy here. You know them, but let's go through them to a certain great power status.
It's a matter to be respected, right? Who doesn't want them in in Putin's view?
International politics is a zero sum game. So if you gain, someone else loses, and if someone else loses,
you get to preserve the Russian sphere of sphere of influence in the near abroad particular.
And as again, we see in Ukraine to keep NADO and keep the United States out of it.
Again, not all of it is directed at us.
I think every so often we sort of have this victim idea where everything that that Putin does is against America or is, is that Britain, right?
Some of it just has nothing to do with us. Some of it is for his own political goals.
And again, as an American, I'm certainly not going to say that that doesn't happen at home.
It also compensates for Russian conventional military shortcomings.
The military is not half bad. I think we know that, but they have significant shortcomings.
Cummings vis-a-vis all of NADO. So just take Ukraine out of it for a second.
Russia can't compete. This is a wonderful way to hit, to hit the West with an asymmetric approach and frankly, to compete in an area short of war.
We are great at war in the West, in the United States.
We're good at it, but we don't know what to do up until that point, right?
We just sort of flail around in the sort of contest of ideas. That's where Putin can make his money.
And there is a long history of this. The historian in me doesn't like the term unprecedented.
I think I hear that a lot. I don't know if you hear that a lot. Oh, this is unprecedented. This is new.
No, it's not. It doesn't mean it always works.
So if you take Operation Infection, which was the claim by the Russians that the U.S. was responsible for the AIDS epidemic,
according to Oregon State, 15 percent of Black Americans thought the U.S. had deliberately targeted them with AIDS.
Obviously, that's not true. But there's there's a great example.
There was also a rumour that CIA was selling crack cocaine in L.A. It was going to be a movie about this journalist somewhere.
Also, not true. Reagan means war. The idea to paint Reagan as a warmonger big full page ads in 1984 newspapers in
the context of the election with the presidential election with Walter Mondale,
Soviets tried to paint Reagan as a warmonger didn't work.
Or maybe it did, but that he won in a landslide or 1984, when the Soviets forged a white supremacist KKK letters to athletes coming from Africa,
warning them that if they participated in the games in L.A., that they would be essentially killed or were the like.
That didn't work. And so the idea that disinformation, I believe, is a really powerful tool, but it's not checkmate.
And there's plenty of things that we can do, right? Just because they're doing it doesn't mean that, you know, we're owned by them.
That's not the case at all. And in fact, most of the stuff doesn't work.
Some of it does. And so we just happen like Pink Floyd to know the best hits right.
We don't actually know everything that's going on. I want to.
So there's an overt approach here. I love to watch Artie and ask you guys like Russia today.
My wife is always like, Why are you watching that? I sort of hate watch it, but I just want to know what they're saying.
Know there's Sputnik. There's overt channels and we can talk about those.
But just as a way to kind of limit my own research, I'm more interested in the hidden hands.
And so in particular, that's the Russian Internet Research Agency now called the Lock to Internet Research Agency,
where the trolls from ghetto in St. Petersburg and there is, they're building.
So I want to take you through so I've can you the strategy. I want to take you through some of the tactics.
This is mostly from 2016, but then we'll update it for 2020 and beyond.
And then I want to talk about some things we can do about it. I think the IRA and this list keeps growing, by the way.
I think the last time I maybe had five, but I keep adding things.
I think the IRA identified seven great cleavages in American society and got to work dividing us by targeting us and by weakening social coherence,
by increasing polarisation, resentment and mistrust.
This is going to be US centric. But this you can give this presentation from Germany, from France, from Sweden, from Estonia, from Finland.
There's a lot of perspectives I just happen to know the US won best. They are guns and Second Amendment issues.
The meaning of patriotism, religion, immigration and cultural identity issues.
What we might call values, issues, race and racism.
The establishment and elites versus real people right the coasts versus the rest of us, at least in the states.
Veterans issues in the civil military divide are particularly interested in that.
And what do I think of them? Well, I think they're long term. They're participatory, right?
We share. We retweet. We feel something when we encounter this kind of stuff.
And that's the purpose. They're emotional. I think they're tribal.
They appeal to our sort of tribal instincts. And in my view, I think they're very clever.
I don't like it when people just sort of dismiss it. I think they're pretty good, actually.
It starts in 2015. Well, people start things.
Different kinds of places, but I think it's a good case to be made that Jade Helm,
which was a U.S. special operations forces exercise, was a Russian proof of concept.
Here we have a special operations soldier. And and so this is going to happen as I'll show you here on this map.
And so we train, you know, where we live. A lot of the times.
And so in this particular case, this was the area of operations, quite a big area of operations.
And these are various soft things that you don't need to know about the military.
Put this out. It's for public release. And red is hostile.
And so this is actually a real it's a real thing made by the Pentagon, but red is hostile, Texas is hostile.
And there became this idea that this is the guys under which the Obama administration remember it's 2015 is going to come into Texas.
Take your guns, take your Bible, take your religion, take all your stuff and sweep up the enemies.
And so every time, for instance, a Humvee passed an empty Wal-Mart.
There is there were claims that these were the jails that were they were they were going to keep everybody you can.
YouTube is an amazing place. Spent a lot of time on YouTube. You can Google what I'm talking about.
And so the governor of Texas still him, by the way, Greg Abbott said,
What we're going to do is we're going to have the Texas state guard monitor these federal troops coming in.
And this has all, you know, this is, you know, civil war echoes right of the north,
coming down to the south and telling us how to live the civil rights or FBI showing up,
telling us, you know, how to live, how to do civil rights things reconstruction right,
those federal boys coming down and telling us how to live our lives. And so there was an outcry.
And Greg Abbott said, we're going to call it the state guard that he controls if we're going to monitor these
special operations forces so they don't actually start arresting people and taking their guns.
And you think this is ridiculous? And the Pentagon is like, just so we're clear this is an exercise and we're not actually here to take.
I mean, could you imagine the Pentagon spokesperson, right?
Like, you're now addressing the press and you're saying, Well, we're actually not going to take over the United States.
It's not why we're here. And so they find themselves in very bizarre territory.
But the the problem with with Greg Abbott, according to General Hayden, and I agree,
emphatically fell right into the trap by legitimising conspiracy theories with official state action quote.
At that point, I'm figuring the Russians are saying we can go big time. This is not Russian, by the way.
It's just the idea that Americans will believe this sort of stuff if they want to believe it at worst, where we can go big time.
And at that point, we're going to play in the electoral process.
Russian bots in the American media convince many Texans that Jade Helm was an Obama plan to round up political dissidents.
Right? OK. And sure enough, that's exactly what happened.
You can. You can see this wonderful sorry. It looks like today I cut off a little there.
Six January 2017 is the document that you want.
The director of National Intelligence put out the unclassified version of what happened.
And here are the key judgements again, you can go. This Russian efforts to influence 2016 represent the most recent expression of
Moscow's longstanding desire to undermine the US liberal democratic order.
Significant escalation blah blah blah hurt Trump.
Sorry, Hillary, help Trump. And so I want to show you some of those things.
This is a wonderful document. You can you can google it publicly available. So let's check out what they did.
There's a couple of different mediums I try to collect. Some of them use a lot of them have been taken down now, so I kind of kind of hunt for them.
Here's a great one called Defend the second, and I'll I'll spoil the suspense for you.
Defend the second is not a Second Amendment rights advocacy group.
It's actually the Russians from St. Petersburg, and they put out this one.
Why do I have a garden? Because it's easier for my family to get out.
Get me out of jail, then out of cemetery. Now you'll note that due respect to my British friends, it's at the hospital.
The future. Know why you guys keep missing this, though. No American would ever say What would you say?
Would you say out of those cemetery? Is that one of those ones where you miss it?
Yeah, OK. I don't know. You guys say, well, in future, like you mean in the future.
Anyway, the point here is that so the Russians have to come up with some of this stuff, they have to come up with their own content.
I'll show you why that's important in a minute. But suffice it to say, there are certain tells.
Right? And so sometimes Grammer doesn't exactly translate well.
And so here's that's an easy tell. But here's here's an easy one. I have a garden because it's my own last resort,
and I'll just figure it out later in the justice system because I don't want to be alone in the dark, in the rain, by myself.
You know, whatever the whatever the theory is, one of my favourites is the army of Jesus and.
I would love to be in like an IRA creative when they're doing this stuff.
You know what, if we had an army of Jesus? Right? And they have no idea is too outrageous.
So Satan, if I win, Clinton wins. Jesus, not if I can help you.
So we're going to have this massive, massive wrestling arm wrestling match.
Wonderful stuff. Also, they wanted to suppress the African-American vote in the United States,
and a good way to do that was to develop something that you can't see here on the bottom.
It says blacks did this, and the black to this news were intended to basically say Your vote doesn't matter.
You shouldn't vote to keep to keep it down. It's not to both.
Things can be true. We can both want to hurt Hillary and help Trump write.
Some things like this are just patently false. But they play on an old narrative, right?
The suppression of of civil rights and voting. OK.
The problem with disinformation is the scale. So remember how I said before that I don't like things that are that are unprecedented.
Well, I will grant you that in the Twitter age and the social media age, the scale is simply unprecedented.
It goes at crazy speeds. A misleading article about Hillary Clinton's health, which you may have seen.
She had a microphone wire that was showing at the box, was kind of tucked on her back belt under her suit,
and then the wire came up and people like, What's that wire that wires?
You know, she's hiding something from us.
So there's this article reaches eight million people and The Daily Beast, which is a journalism website, it was like, Actually, that's not true.
Well, 30 30000 people saw that once the toothpaste is out of the tube.
It is an enormous problem and it's not going back in.
These are just telling you what to think. What if we actually had a way to mobilise people off of the computer in real life?
And so being patriotic again, I'm going to ruin it for you.
It's the IRA decided that they were going to have an event, and I'm not really sure the New York City was the best place to have.
I mean, Hillary's going to win New York, right? Like this is death, taxes and Hillary winning New York or things that we know.
But on July 23rd, they decided they were going to have an event.
And the point here, which the IRA figured out, is that you can actually get people off the couch, right?
Not just tweeting, not just sharing. You can actually get them to show up at a certain place and time.
If you tell them to write things like the marionette right from from the Godfather for the moment, you remember that.
Or you can have a heart of Texas rally. Part of Texas again is an IRA.
It's an IRA front. And on May 21st, 2016, we're going to have a stop the Islamization of Texas.
There's this dalawa centre here, and we don't like it.
So on Saturday, May 21st, two oh one Travis Street in Houston, we are going to have to stop the Islamist Islamization of Texas.
So the heart of Texas puts this out. People were like, That sounds great.
But the United Muslims of America shares their event. United Muslims of America also an IRA, a platform.
It's only been a month since the library of Islamic knowledge at the centre in Houston is open.
Save Islamic knowledge. May 21 12 p.m. Star Centre Travis Street By the way, the actual data centre had nothing to do with any of this.
And here we are. Right, Colo. Co-located rallies, right?
So people, I don't know what this flag is, by the way. So buying a cup of coffee or a beer, if you know, I'm sure it's a welcome to America flag.
I don't know. I have no idea what it means. I like to kill yourself here.
So it's a lovely social discourse. And again, so what we see here is the IRA just tells us not only what to think, but where to be.
And then they set the conditions for what you see here.
By the way, Texas is what we call at home an open carry state,
which means you can have a weapon basically where you know you can bring your your bazooka in the subway and and get a sandwich.
And so, yeah, there are some people who thought that it was hoped that in Texas, this could actually devolve into into Americans killing Americans.
So Texas might have been a strategic choice there due to the governorship anyway.
So again, just playing us. All right. Muller, in 2019, we finally concludes what everybody knows.
Russia interferes in a sweeping and systemic fashion, but let's update this for 2020.
The hard part about this information is coming up with content that you've got to keep feeding the beast.
And so the Russians thought, What if we just set up a platform and people who think what?
We want them to think? Well, already right for us.
And so what they did here with the platform called peace data is they just they got people you want to you want to.
Complain about Yemen, I've got an article for you there. Child trafficking got I got an article for you there.
I like this one over funding the girls, the U.S. military driving climate change and white supremacist culture of war crimes.
Right. I mean, I've seen I've seen the money it's wasted for sure.
But but that's not what it's doing.
So anyway, so piece data, what they did was they they went on various recruitment sites like H.R. recruitment sites, and they said, Hey,
would you like to make some money as a freelance journalist and the freelance journalists really sure I need to get my name out there.
I need to get my stuff out there.
So they set this platform called peace data and any anything you want to write about it sort of, as is a far left type approach.
And the Russians would pay you and they would pay you, I think, PayPal or for a couple of ways and they actually paid.
Right? Imagine getting getting money out of other newspapers.
So this got shut down, actually, because the FBI found out and went to one of the hosting things.
I forget. I forget which one and say, like, Hey, this is, it's actually a Russian front.
And then we go, Okay. And so it got shut down. But the point is, you're using real people on the right as well.
So if you don't happen to be ideologically aligned with peace data, no problem.
Here's a newsroom for American and European citizens. I think this one might even still be up.
It is a news organisation and a news aggregator site dedicated to bringing you uncensored news and discussion around this idea of uncensored,
free speech and the reason we're here. You're globalism.
The failures of modern liberalism, right wing politics, globalism, freedom restrictions, blah blah blah.
They don't put political correctness above commonsense, and they're inviting real people to actually get in touch.
Right? Why do I have to come up with all the content if you have a particular bugaboo from the far right?
Hey, you can publish here, right? There's a home for you here and there's a home for you here, so they don't have to do it all themselves.
Hmm. A quick case study how to target veterans.
Number one pose as as an American veteran, create what looks like organic content.
This is actually real content. This is why we salute the flag. This is why we stand for the anthem.
This is a Vietnam veterans. I will not ruin anything by telling you Vietnam veterans is up to the Russians.
Yeah, I mean, that's a real thing, right? I mean, that's that's hard. No two ways about that.
Step two Create a following in the military veterans community with agreeable images like If you were proud to support our veterans,
right, you have sort of a multi-generation potentially cross racial, you know, little feel good, right?
You know, Hey, hey, kid, go go shake hands with the veteran, right? That's that's nice.
OK? Veterans come first. Also, Russian Step three ad misleading images.
Here's American veterans again Russia on Instagram, and this is a scene from an honour flight in honour.
Flight is one of the remains of a U.S. U.S. fallen coming to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware,
and then they are repatriated to their home wherever their family wants them and actually been on an honour flight.
And it's very powerful. Know the pilot says, Hey, this is an honour flight.
Please stay in your seats and the family is going to meet the casket and then it will open the doors after that.
And so you basically just, you know, sit there for a second. So this is veteran's us.
And so they have a super post. Hillary asks quote, what difference does it make?
Now that is a real quote, but it is taken out of the circus.
That was the Benghazi hearings. It has nothing to do with this.
And so what they've done is they've taken a real image of an honour flight and a technically speaking, real quote.
It's true, and they've overlaid it to see if two true things that were overlaid create a false impression.
And that's that's what they've done here. So follow veterans underscore us if you know the difference.
Fifty three bucks, OK? Step four Stoke anger and resentment in the military veteran community to drive to the civil military wedge even deeper.
The ten 10000 Syrian rebels. How about taking care of fifty thousand homeless veterans instead?
Right. So now we finally get to the nub of it.
They don't want US forces to be in Syria because, you know, we're having a little proxy war with the Russians in Syria, right?
So the idea is if you can erode some support for the veteran community, bye bye from the Syria mission, right?
That's all to the good. And so that's what we're trying to do.
Create some real content, create some images that you might want to like and share, and then get your strategic message in there as well.
So are we helpless? I want to spend a couple of minutes just talking about things that we can do.
We don't just. I have to give up. I told you, I love ice hockey, here's Putin number 11, playing in a very professional league here.
And this goalie, Redick, the defenceman, is like, Take your shot. I'm not going to stop you.
And the goalie doesn't want to save it either. He's going to end up in a gulag so that Putin scored 11 points or something during this game.
If you're them, you're helpless. But we're not them. We are not helpless.
There are plenty of things that we can do. Lots of countries are doing this actually pretty well.
Take the Estonians, for instance. They have proper stop profit.
Stop is a is a website in Estonian, English, Russian and German.
And it just it looks at the the propaganda efforts that are better targeted at Estonia.
Aside from just, I'm not sure to tell you what to say it's to go to. But here's what they call it Information, space security.
We don't really even have a term for this, at least back home.
And I'm not sure that the Brits do either, because we think of it as cybersecurity, right?
It's not cybersecurity, it's information, space security.
It's a different way to look at it. Right. It's not, you know, is really with penetration testing.
Where is my is my network secure? Yes. No, right?
Is my information space secure? Yes, no. But that's it. That's a harder question.
And it's it's a different question.
In Sweden, they have another idea for the MSB is their civil contingencies agency, and they have societal information security.
Again, not cybersecurity, societal information security.
We don't have these these terms. They've they're thinking about this in different ways.
Information, space security, societal information security.
I don't really care what we call it, but it's not cybersecurity. It's something different.
The Swedes have put out this emergency preparedness pamphlet called If Crisis or War Comes.
And for those of you who are old enough to get the Yellow Pages delivered to your house, this is what the Swedes would do during the Cold War.
They would put out a little pamphlet and they would send it in the mail to every house in Sweden.
And after the Cold War was done,
I think maybe in the late nineties or 2000 something that they stopped doing this right because like, what's the point?
You know, Russians, you know, there are friends. We're we're not going to get, you know, nuclear winter here, so we'll just stop doing it.
In 2018, the Swedes restarted this effort.
So now this comes to your house. If you live in Sweden or you can get it on the internet, and here is a picture of it.
Emergency preparedness, false information right up at the beginning, I think the Swedes have this right, right?
I don't I don't envision, you know, I don't know what the Russian Spetsnaz, you know, parachuting into Stockholm.
I don't envision tanks. I do envision false information. Here is what Page Six says.
I think it's the most important page in all of the internet.
The best protection against false information and hostile propaganda is to critically appraise the source.
There are technological responses. I don't happen to know what they are.
I'm trying to hire a postdoc who can help me with that. But I couldn't tell you how to, you know, tweak an algorithm or what.
I don't know. There's legal responses, right, about the Communications Decency Act in the States.
Ofcom in this country, there's tons of things that you can do.
But I'm a historian and this is what I think historians can add to the sort of societal information security preparedness kit.
Is the information factual or an opinion. We don't do this when I was a kid.
You have to weigh factor opinion next to a statement. And my son, who's in year three, he doesn't do that and I don't understand why not.
You know, we have to teach kids, what's the fact and what's someone's opinion?
And I don't know where this stopped.
And if you do this or you have kids that do this, I I'd love to hear about it, but that's something that I remember and I think is missing.
What is the aim of this information, right? What's the intent behind it?
Who put it out? Is the source trustworthy? Is this information available somewhere else, right?
Can I check it? Is this information newer old? And why is it out there at this precise moment?
Why not yesterday? Why not last week? In a sense, it's almost like out of parodies, Sir Joseph.
This, you know, style cybersecurity. These are important questions.
Search for information. The best way to counteract propaganda and false information is to have done your homework.
Use more than one reliable source all of these.
It's not rocket science. And yet I think if we just, you know, took the steps, I think we could be in a better place than we are.
Sweden has just said you might you might have seen this.
They've just set up the Psychological Defence Agency to fight fake news and foreign interference.
I do not speak Swedish. I do not know how to pronounce that.
France, by the way, six months ago also created an agency to fight foreign disinformation.
I think if we are not doing this, we are behind the power curve and I'm not saying it's easy,
but I think setting up dedicated agencies to do this and I understand, right?
You know, the government is the answer to everything. No, I don't think that.
But there there is a place for this and I think that we have to compete in this space.
The Finns have decided to promote media and information literacy again, something that my kid is not getting in school right?
I would. I don't know why, but I would love to see that. And you know what?
Like anything else, you get out of it what you put into it, right?
If you want to run a subfour minute mile, get running. If you want to bench, press your body weight, get to the gym, right?
The idea that we can just we can just be like, Oh, well, you know, whatever happens, happens.
No, they they they are at the top because they have resources and programmes and an emphasis to get to the top.
It doesn't just happen, right? And I think we need to start.
I think sorry for those of you who were maybe Gen Z and don't know what this is, this is the Princess Bride.
Just wonderful movie and you should all watch it. But I don't want Facebook.
I don't. I don't want us to tell Facebook or Twitter or whatever that they have to have this totally clean platform.
That's only golden, you know, pure as the driven snow truth.
I don't think that's going to help us. I think we have to learn to live with the poison.
It's never going to be clean. And in fact, I don't want to regulate cleanliness anyway.
In this particular case, I'm sorry if you haven't seen it, but it came out in like nineteen eighty seven.
So if you haven't seen it in the last 30 years or whatever it's been. Sorry, I'm just going to ruin this for you.
But the point here is that there's this little iachini powder and they're going to have
a battle of wits to see who can drink the Ikeme powder and figure out which which glass.
It's it's in anyway. So this guy Wallace Shawn, here's actor.
So he dies, and it turns out there was poison in both classes.
But over time, the masked man developed a resistance by giving himself a little bit of irony and powder and a little bit of cocaine powder.
And pretty soon he could just deal with it. And I think that that's what we need to do.
I think we need to be inoculated a little bit. I think we need to learn to deal with it.
So. All right. Here I'm coming to my it's my hand. I think these are national security problems.
So sorry, if that securitised is them. But I think that's where we are.
I think that malign influence should be identified as a national security threat and resourced appropriately.
We've got to take this seriously.
I just wrote an article about this trend in the Journal of the National Defence University Law School parameters, and I argued in it that,
you know, every new administration, the U.S. administration, when they come in, there's like this is a grab bag of things that scare policymakers.
And it could be anything from climate change to terrorism to the Iranian nuclear programme to,
I don't know whatever you want, China, Russia, a great power competition and they basically just reorder them.
They put number two, number one, number three and number two, right? And they call it National Security Strategy.
And I think that's I think we're missing it. I think disinformation needs to be not only on that list, but arguably at the top of that list.
I think that can really hurt us far more than a resurgent China or whatever.
Russia is up to anywhere so that I just got I got shredded online as a woke West Point
professor who who wants Big Tech to to take over and tell people what to think.
So you can Google that. That's it as a crazy article, but I did tell my boss and like, so I'm not a West Point professor on the internet.
It's actually not even true as. OK. The Intercept. The Intercept that overlap in ways that challenged typical conceptions of national security.
Right? What do we do? We make the Modi deal with security issues. We make MI5 do about security issues.
We make 60 on security issues. This is an all of us security issue.
I don't think we're there yet. The challenges, legal authorities, right in the U.S.,
we have a very bright foreign and domestic divide this these these intersect and overlap in ways
that are challenges our legal authorities and the structure of our defence and intelligence.
I think with number one, social cohesion and critical thinking are now critical pillars of Western national security.
That means getting it in the classrooms and means teaching civics. I mean, teaching history, that means critical thinking.
That means media literacy, things that I think we need to do.
post-haste the response of government and broader civil society will have a decisive impact on the preservation of liberal democratic institutions.
Handle with care. I'm not saying that we needed to have regulation deal with everything, so we just have to be a little bit careful about that.
I think I've skipped three in there. Sorry about that. We can learn from other countries.
You know, I showed you what these Etonians are doing to showing you some of what the Swedes are doing shows a little bit with the Finns are doing.
Other countries are tackling this. They're far ahead of the UK. They're far ahead of the US.
But each approach, I think, will have to be national.
We can't just take another country's approach and overlay it on our country and be like, See, now it's solved.
It's not that easy. And then finally, I think we you started this.
This got cut off. I think we need to develop some trust and cooperation between Intel and security agencies and Big Tech and journalists.
And I know that's hard because they hate each other and there's a mutual suspicion there.
But I think just as a for instance, with peace data and the ABC, which they needed to come up with a better name for that, right?
It's not just Americans that have to be sorry. It's not just the readers that have to be critical.
Journalists have to be critical as well. Big Tech has to be critical as well.
And I've actually been pretty impressed with what I've seen, for instance,
from Facebook, when FBI goes to them and they're like, Hey, this is the Russians.
They they get on it pretty quick, actually not saying the perfect.
I wouldn't even know what perfect looks like. The journal journalist is another one, right?
Hack and leak, right?
You've all seen how the Russians are weapon weaponize leaks of hacking the Democratic National Committee hacking of other politicians.
OK, good for them.
But sometimes I think journalists and I'm not even putting like the WikiLeaks in the Julian Assange folks, you know, into that category.
But sort of what I might call real journalists, mainstream journalists when they see stuff like this, this is good.
It might be good, but it's out there for a purpose. And so we just need to think about that.
So I think that might be the hardest bit. I grant you that the intense focus on foreign disinformation might be a problem.
I understand. I take that criticism. I studied the foreign aspect, the domestic bit.
Some of the some of the stuff works. Some of it doesn't. But yeah, the idea that it's all foreign, right?
And that we're being acted upon right instead of being proactive or domestic actors.
Again, I take it. I think disinformation unfortunately flourishes in fertile soil just as a, for instance, back home.
Pew has found so in the United States, we have three branches of government. That's what makes our our our system a federal system.
And Pew has found that 33 percent of Americans don't know that we have three branches of government and 11 percent of Americans can be proud.
They don't understand what's going on.
And so when they get told something, they don't have the cognitive backbone to say, Actually, no, that's not true.
And so it again, I think, you know, the situation can be ripe for it.
This is a this is a hard one as well. And to be honest, I'm going to leave you here.
This is my my last slide on a bit of a bit of a sort of, I don't know, a frustrated, noted, disappointed note.
I don't think there's a lot of silver linings, actually. And this one. Paul Gosar, by the way, is is a sitting US representative from Arizona.
I guess he's a doctor, but I don't know what it's of. And he put out this in 2020.
The world is better without these guys in power. Here's President Obama and the leader of Iran.
They never met. Actually, this on the left is the real photo.
And on the right, it was photoshopped. So here I am, droning on and on about citizens and journalists and whatever.
But yeah, I mean, if you have elected representatives who didn't do this kind of thing before,
you might remember he got in big trouble recently for the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beheading cartoon cartoon, right?
So he's I'm not going to say too much. Technically, I'm still a federal servant.
But but you know, I'm I'm concerned because I think that we need leadership at the top.
And I think we need it. We need to ask people. You want people to to respect the government right?
And do the things the government wants in Sweden or whatever govern well.
And then they will. So I'm a little bit disappointed. So I think I'll probably leave you there.
So thanks very much. Thank you very much for that.
That was a really fascinating presentation.