I will apologize, a heads up that our colleague will go first, but i am happy is that ok . If that is all right. Ok, so it is not the program, but [laughter] my distinct honor and pleasure to introduce david porter, assistant section chief with the Foreign Influence Task , counterintelligence division. He is joining us today from fbis headquarters. Thank you. [applause] sorry about that. Good morning, everybody. I am david porter, i served as the assistant section chief of the f. B. I. s Foreign Influence Task force. I appreciate the opportunity to be here this morning to represent the men and women of the f. B. I. , men and women who are working tirelessly on behalf of the American People to protect the integrity of our democracy, to include the 2020 elections. 10 minutes is not a lot of time,. O im going to get right to it what i want to do this morning is streaked to three different things. First i want to define what we in this space refer to as the malign foreign influence threat. Secondly, i want to articulate some of those objectives and p p tactics, techniques and procedures pertaining to the threat, and lastly, talk about what we do in this space and how we mitigate this threat. First, to defining the malign force influence threat. I think whats important to do is to draw a distinction between normal foreign influence activity and maligned foreign influence activity. So the former would be normal diplomatic activity carried out every country, usually conducted through diplomatic channels. The latter, maligned for the malign foreign influence activity, it is actions by a foreign power to influence u. S. Policy, distort Political Sentiment and Public Discourse undermine confidence in the , democratic processes and values and this is a fun for us because it is the focus of our investigative efforts at the bureau and with fitf. It is the subversive, undeclared criminal or coercive nature of these activities that serves the basis for our investigative interests. Our adversaries frequently use a whole of government approach year. The vectors, including the official awkwardfacing component of a Foreign Government intelligence , services, cyber actors, state businesses close to government officials, and social media actors. There is a Broad Spectrum of foreign influence activity. When a country moves from normal and official diplomatic thisement to conduct in subversive undeclared criminal or coercive conduct, that is when we see the malign foreign influence activity. It can show itself through economic coercion, bribery, honeypots, covert placement of media reports social media , exploitation, blackmail, to name a few. So to move on to the second point, objectives. Object objectives in ttps. There are two main objectives for foreign malign influence lets say china, use fwluns activities driven by priorities ssociated with their National Development or stability. For example, chinas primary to strengthen and perpetuate the rule of the communist party. Ensure also seeks to sustainable economic development, protect against statesed threats to its sovereignty, territory integrity stability of its system. Al second objective and one well talk more about is to dissession and muddy discorporation. We revolver to something called confrontation in this space. Operations seek to weaken an adversary from within. Countries like russia use confrontation to arget the perceptions of their adversarys population. In tz odds erode confidence and ratic values institutions to encourage negative sentiment and apathy and mistrust of government. Election interference is one of vectors in this and institutions space. Its designed to degrade very ence and the foundation of our Democratic Leaders ability to govern. Weaken theesigned to adversary from within by existing political and social issues and driving wedges into those fracture lines. O amplify them, through online manipulation and disinformation, n an effort to create an environment of permanent unrest conflict. Its also designed to undernine ublics confidence and the credibility of an established free and independent news media, create an environment of public mistrust in the narrative traditional news organizations. Then nvironment is exploited to push consumers oward alternative social news sources where, of course, its uch easier to introduce false narratives. Its also designed to sew doubt nd confusion about true narratives by exploiting the media landscape to introduce story lines, undermine credible sources of saturate the D Information space one reliable narratives. To be clear, the goal here is to to think r ability critically and to separate truth from falsehoods. Primary objective is not to create a particular version of but rather to cloud the truth and erode our ability it. Ind creating a sentiment that no be ative or news source can trusted at all. S in this space wont necessarily come as a surprise to you but were into thebout intrusion u. S. Government networks and political organizations. Operations k relating to compromising information, cyberattacks against our voting infrastructure. U. S. Persons or elected officials by social edia disinformation, suppression of voter turnout by spreading misinformation polling and voting. Manipulation of media through stories, ion of false and news reporting, and then subsequent amplification of to shape public discours discourse. Sorry about that. Here are a few overarching similarities regarding the manner in which our two principle adversaries, china and these two cute objectives. Of countries use a whole government approach. They use sophisticated and aggressive efforts to advance their national priorities. However, of government there are clear differences in the space as well. And russia vary in extent of their aggressiveness and risk tolerance. We see russia is willing to onduct more brazen and disruptive influence operations because of how it perceives its with the west. N some ways, however, china contains its maligned foreign influence operations to its developing a s of modern National Economy and building its geopolitical be respected as an equal, if not superior rival in eyes to that of the United States. In this space,y, ussia wants to watch us tear ourselves apart while it seems china, on the other hand, would rather manage our gradual economic decline over the course of generations. Rt in this space . O the director established the fitf for the Foreign Influence Task force in october 2017. To bring together the f. B. I. S National Security and raditional criminal investigative expertise under one umbrella. Counteract and maligned foreign influence perations targeting Democratic Institutions and values. At the time, we were primarily maligned the Russian Foreign influence operations. Expanded since then to address other global adversaries. Iran, and north korea. Bears some e resemblance to the f. B. I. s oint Terrorism Task force, which exists at f. B. I. Headquarters in very large of ion but also in all 56 our field offices. In this work side with details with other agencies, our infrastructure is little different. Instead of xwising from across specialists, ing professional staff, cyber, counterterrorism, and divisions, our multidivision task force has the mandate to bridge all f. B. I. Programs and equities threat. T this in addition to investigative intelligence broad sharing with our state and local fitf also works hard to build strong artnerships with the private sectors and academia. Fitf team meets regularly with social and media tech companies. F. B. I. Ropriate the provides actionable intelligence to social Media Companies to abuse of their foreign actors. Working in this area one thing thats very important to us ofticularly on the cyberside things is that attribution is key. We do not run around chasing addition to having a host of First Amendment issues, that approach would be and ineffective. On what the s actors say. Concentrating me on who they are. Attribution is key. Were able to identify and track foreign actors as they use their nd infrastructure and mature their online presence, fitf works with Media Companies to lluminate and disrupt our adversaries activities. Including at times through by the taken entirely companies themselves, to thattarily remove accounts violate their terms of service agreements. Out of time so ill just say that our adversaries engaged to influence Public Opinion and our electoral process. It is our responsibility to take evolve ourseriously, methods of disruption, and aintain our fierce determination and focus. Thank you for giving me the time to speak to you today. [applause] moderator ive already you. Oduced thank you so much. Good morning. Name is madeleine and im the principle director of the in the officefice of the secretary of defense. Were responsible for developing todance and providing advice the secretary of defense about what the department of defense and be capable of in cyberspace. Im here to speak to our federal government partners and the encountering foreign influence in supporting elections infrastructure as well as state and local partners. Viewpoint, we frequently talk about supported and supporting. N the context of defending elections, the department of defense is principally in a supporting role and that was why important for me, for you colleague from the f. B. I. First. Want to jump right in. Its been concluded for the past offset our military superiority, our adversaries are increasingly using actions below force to undermine our National Security and national interests. True than this more through cyberspace where we see coordinated, ing long term campaigns of malicious harm the United States, our allies and partners, undermine international order. Their objective is within is and in the ut war, end of conflict, to leverage heir access and capabilities prior to hostilities in order to achieve strategic advantage. Russia, iran and north korea are using and will our sicyber adversary is also seeking to influence our citizens and to Democratic Institutions in order to achieve that strategic advantage that allow them to win for their national interests. Intelligence community assesses that they are capable of and may seek to interfere in process. G the infrastructure that we use r to covertly influence our citizens in order to achieve an outcome. Department of defense has now determined, at the president s direction that elections in end an Enduring Mission but were art of a broader whole of government effort. An unprecedented level of oordination, and in that way the department of defense is playing a complementary and role to our domestic partners. To his way, were looking leverage our specific comparative advantage and to defend forward. Just as the department of defense projects power in the on land, sea ns and air, where we seek to adversarys r activities, to shape the environment and to address threats before they reach the homeland. Were seeking to do the same things in and through cyberspace in support of our election. Building on our activities in 2018 in defense of the 2018 election, the department of defense is conducting in lementary activities support of civilian led efforts defending forward in order to first e insights, generate insights about adversary intentions and activities in. This way, were collecting and analyzing data about foreign threats. This can take any number of methodologies. T includes things like identifying malware and networks, culvert influence to better and understand whats happening states. Of the united partners, with throughout the global environment. Second, were enabling our better partners to defend election. This includes sharing those insights that weve generated outside the United States with our domestic partners to enable their Network Defense activities. Example would be in 2018 we conducted what we call hunt operations but what is, in fact, partnered Network Defense operations with our allies and partners to gain insight about how our using their re malicious activities in other countries that can, in turn, be to better defend our own networks. When nally, thirdly, appropriate and authorized, the department of defense will to uct military operations degrade, disrupt, or defeat or culvert rference influence. This can take any number of forms but it includes operations that would seek to put the sand in the gears of our adversaries y attempting to accomplish their outcups. We can do this, for instance, malware xposing their or their Network Threats indicators. Date, u. S. Cybercommand has publicly exposed eight different are les of how adversaries seeking to conduct malicious cyberactivity against the united enhances our overall defense. We can also take other operations that seek to slow down. The department of defenses efforts to defend forward and to spearheadedions are by u. S. Cybercommand and the National Security agency. This enables us to combine our nique comparative advantage, expertise, capabilities and capacity. Their efforts are also the dod withacross india pacificu. S. Command, National Guard bureau, all prepared and ready to our dhs, f. B. I. , and appropriate state and local authorities. Thank you. Moderator thank you, madeleine, and thank you, david. Just listening to what we heard, it was really, i want to highlight a couple of things i say. D david that, you know this idea of mistrust of the government, and actors, threat malicious actors attempting to o this, pushing consumers sources,lternative news soeking doubt and confusion narrative. True how does that happen . Ill step back for a minute and tep away from elections and talk about data and the world we in. E we are surrounded by sensors everywhere. Everything we do, were carrying around. They are embedded with sensors. We have fit bits. Every environment in which we exist has sensors. Say, maurice dy talked about, hey, alexa, what are the news results . Employee sensors. We have health and fitness automobile sensors, smartphone sensors, they are all connected to satellites so were physically tracked. So much data is being aggregated us. T i just want to give you an example, a good perspective for audience. This is from an actual Patent Application from walmart for data, via sensors on a walmart shopping cart handle sensors would give heart rate, temperature, force against the handle, cart speed in your walmart shopping cart. Weisenberg anks to for alerting me to this. Intersects how this we know we have sensors that are us. Rding everybody has their fit bits on, their apple phones. How these sensors are interacting with all of our aps and that were downloading we have numerous companies, private companies, buying, selling, aggregating data and its intimate data. Im not just talking about who is in this room right now, which being aggregated, but really, can be used to manipulate our choices. Clouding mistrust. Foreign actors. Part of that is ourselves and part of that is all the content allows us to be so easily manipulated. Just a screen shot here of facebook. On facebook makes it easy to find the right people, capture their attention and get results. Do that on any budget. How does that happen . Is it effective . Because its use and sale of for microtargeting ads. E understand microtargeting advertising. Its an ad just tailored for you. The Technology Makes it cost ffective enough that literally one person in this room could receive only that version of an ad. This is right ff of facebook and facebook isnt alone here. They just happen to be always such a prominent user of your data, so audience insights, your audience like never isnt alone before. Aggregate information. Facebook is collecting information from all of our aps. An example is, some women to track use aps their cycles. Womens aps track cycles without letting them know. And so what does that matter . That be used politically and why do i have a picture up here were talking about periods . That information is shared with facebook, and so what does that mean . Where does that take us . Well, lets think about something weve heard about in or at least women have heard about and are aware of, on feminine hygiene. So lets think about microtargeting for a minute. In a particular period or time in your cycle, you might more strongly about seeing which states tax your period. Ou might be really much more susceptible to content like this, and this content can come ability to the manipulate you based upon very intimate details about what oure doing, what youre experiencing, where you are, and so again, were not just talking contacts are,your very intimate information. So we see politicians take right . Ge of this, we have one representative wantedg out about how he to be charged by the house administrators because he wanted feminine hygiene items for his staffers and people visiting his office. Taking political, you know, use of this as an advertisement. Yes, thats absurd. Thats not considered a necessity for women. But it raises this question. When youre getting messaging, real . S so we heard from david porter selling of now, the mistrust, and part of that is we question of how do determine whats real . We have so much information media, t us on social right . Our news feeds. Its even worse on your mobile phone. Shows youre going to scroll through your mobile feed much more quickly. Question of whats real, the technology continues to dvance and that takes us deep fakes. So we now have an indian politician who is using deep voters and how did he do it . He didnt speak a particular anguage for part of the population so he just used a. I. , and had ng technology, his, you know, had a deep fake in a self speaking language he didnt speak to tune into an audience. Weve seen these deep fakes. We heard about pilosi, we heard about obama. This and its f not just something thats coming in the future. Its here, ready or not. Is the law handling this . We heard a few people mention First Amendment. Is, is this on protected speech . Right . Are deep fakes, disinformation or misinformation, are they protected . Is this protected content . Is this something that were our first y, amendment . No law shall abridge the freedom of speech. No law shall abridge. Lawyers, a little plug for the profession there, recognized that the irst amendment isnt, in fact, omnipotent. Its not that all speech must be protected, so whats interesting era, the preinternet this was so much more clear. Were w that publishers libel for content that was defamation. Something about someone thats not true and it causes harm for their reputation could sue you. We know that First Amendment nd there are court decisions, its hard to do this in a flash talk but hate speech is not protected. Burning a cross on someones protected by the First Amendment. Insightments to violence are not protected. Putting pictures of physicians who work at an abortion clin thats not irs, rotected speech and so invasions of privacy were also recognized as a bar that we can when it was rivacy violate. We had a reasonable expecting of content. In remember, this is important. Publishers were liable before came along and then something happened. And all of these platforms that are Interactive Computer Service providers, have a shield now, and so if we think about that source, your information and weve heard a lot about Pay Attention to credible sourcing, something in the New York Times, you knew, im reading this in the New York Times or the wall street a publisher, they ould be libel for things they repeated. So if there was defamation or had an ech the Law Enforcement mechanism to get rid and then along came something thats the real amendment the first and thats the Communications Decency act. Section 230 of the decency act bars Interactive Computer Service providers, i. E. , facebook, google, twitter, from liability third tent posted by parties. It destroyed liability as we knew it. Destroyed the ability to control speeches as we knew it. So we see this often referred to court, opinions, this wild west. That happens online. Hese are platforms where content is being posted, and completely immune from liability. Couples, cda de coupled that historically recognized iabilities, from publishers in this case, interactive commuter content. From online so as a litigator who has dealt cases, ng time with cda where people are victims of revenge porn or horrific other content, the cda means sorry, you can go to facebook, you can o to twitter, you can go to tumbler and say, can you take down that fallacious photo of who didnt authorize this to be there . No, sorry, Third Party Content. Liable and you cant make us take it down so we saw the law come along and try to revenge porn but at the end of the day its allowing invasion of privacy, misinformation and the deep that i talked about. If a deep fake of someone is online and it makes it appear that they were doing something they werent doing, they would have a recourse against precda era, right . Prior to that. Is, the nteresting platforms, though, are permitted to make money off of this a lot of money is made off of misinformation. Made,not just money thats though. Weve heard from how much were actors that ed by are putting content out there thats not real. Quickly, we do have states, as i mentioned, revenge porn law. Evenge states said were going to pass laws to protect victims of revenge porn. We now see california and texas trying to jump in and address deep fakes. Of both states just passed law that is went into effect in october where they are making it a criminal offense, if a person with an intent to injure a or influence the results of an election creates a deepfake video, causes the fake video to be published or distributed within 30 days of an they defined how do deep fake . Very simply, they are trying to address something that will cover a wide net. A video created with a. I. With the intent to depict and it appears to a real person performing an did not occur in reality. We see states trying to jump in thats, this void, and i think, part of the conversation that i look forward to hearing from our panelists coming up next. Further adu, i really am excited to introduce nthony robinson, who is a professor at penn state, and hes his maps and work with im going to let you talk a little bit more about that, nd if you want to introduce maria so we can keep it moving. Thank you. [applause] thanks very much. My name is anthony robinson, im professor in the at penn t of geography State University and im happy to talk to you today about mapping in the u. S. Elections. I want to thank everybody who helped to organize this meeting. Its an important gathering for us to consider. For the next few minutes ill to you about mapping. Raphy. Caring to i want to talk about why some maps go official. Aps are central to Public Knowledge and engagement in or elections but not all maps are and no matter what maps are all simplifications of our actual complex world. There arent any a hundred percent truthful maps that. You. T come as a surprise to public trust in what maps can do is perhaps greater than ever. Of that, one of the reasons that i think this is the case is that millions of are interacting with navigational aps. We get from point a to point b verified by is that. But election maps are messy. Maps tell a story about data map makers refer to as thematic maps. Election mapping is filled with mapping. Its not as simple as navigating from point a to point b so my employers n state what happens when public trust such be misplaced in a map as the thematic maps that come out in an election, iowa being a example of that recently. Sorry, john king. For example, shortly before the 2016 election, a statistician hypothetical Electoral College map exploring what might were to only women vote. What i noticed is that this map seemed to spawn the creation of hundreds of other maps all peoples attention and frequently coming with completely unknown sourcing. The example here on the right was not created by this person on twitter but it was shared by omebody with a blue check mark who has a sizable audience. Ature silvers initial map caused hundreds more to emerge in the days that followed. This is an example of about 500, voted maps blank that i collected from twitter, there were hundreds more that i collecting. Ept particular that went viral on its own and generated multiple stories was this one. Of digging on bit my part to figure out the creator. And claimedlog post sure where was not it came from. To make images like that one and from,stand where they come to know whether or not they are derived from previous sources or if they actually represent something new on the internet. The results here show partial matches to the original viral googles tected by cloud vision platform. One variation simply asked the question i had, where did this come from . The others here appear to be accurate translations of the other l into four languages. But its not hard to imagine an translation and it would be easy to change the text nd message that the map conveys. Platforms reverse looked at other maps like this one. I wanted to know a lot more background. P in the i made the assumption that someone in the campaign or white house had borrowed the underlying map from another source. We found not only, yes, fromlying map was borrowed other source but that it had used in some previous memeking, a couple of years prior so it was possible this more recent map was by some predecessor maps. We also noticed what many in the is there were some counties colored red that arent supposed to be. This is a subtle thing in the most readerse that probably didnt notice but really small changes in map lead to huge changes in how they are interpreted. It would be easy to share a map hat shows different primary results, maps that show the wrong locations for polling places, and for a lot of readers mapts very hard for them to tell when something is misleading them. And understand the maps their counterparts, we have a prototype called map reverse. It brings together 10i and cloud image which does a reverse identifyd helped to us potential source materials for viral maps. Look at ets us derivatives downstream from viral mapping. Now, welcome to try it its at mapreverse. Org. Map we were able to build an overview which showed dozens of related map images. Review some details about where and when those things were shared. Indexed, wehey first can explore how they emerged over time and filtered by similarity which is really we can ing and characterize the key words that appear with them on different webpages so were trying to multiple s from different angles. Reflebtd on this, i would like think areck to what i some crucial points. First is that maps are always implifying our infinitely complex world and thats a fundamental power of mapping. Thats a good thing. Detail handle all the that were surrounded by all the time. We need to simplify it. Econd, maps have been used for disinformation for a long time. Well in advance of the internet era so thats not something new. Difference today, though, i its easy is that for somebody to create and share Something Like this and i argue thats potentially a good thing thing. As it is a bad n the past maps were made by professionals and shared by foreign media seniors. So disinformation or per swaying happening with mapping at least we had an idea of where it was from and the tocci to produce share maps is something accessible that very few people compared to the total number of readers. Today, its possible to quickly refute one happen with another. Cases this doesnt help and in other cases it can be helpful such as this example 2011 japan he earthquake. T shows the sea surface change from the tsumani was widely misused as a proxy for if you and it was a debunked by others who created a meme of their own as a countermessaging. This past week, on the outbreak several media sources published and shared a map that showed the olices that residents from wuhan had fled. This map was in fact a map from showed years ago that every Airline Route in the world. The bbc and others have published stories now to explain hat misleading map but im curious to know how it got into the discourse in the first place. Product of random social chatter or is that an nderlying intention behind that. So i would like to conclude here, for those of you in the room who either fund work or funding through legislation, to consider some of these areas as priorities. To make sources and moichgss can we make tools enabled with better to see whats underlying them . Can we identify organic information sharing versus more of berate acts misinformation . And whats going to happen in the future as it becomes easier for people to make their own maps and graphics . Im dealing right now with static things and its even more make something animated. The second half of the session my colleague will talk about eve in a broader s context. Mra [applause] hi, im a researcher at the research lab, and i want to off by highlighting something that anthony is not and that is a new phenomenon but what is ews is the source and modality of false news. The Interactive Media think traditional media. A source that delivered a message through a medium to our receiver. Now the receiver has also become the source. That . At do we mean with receivers can share, they can also ate but they can create their on content for dissemination among their networks. The question is do the people these differences . Do the people distinguish between a professional source at their friends tweeting hem and what we see is they actually dont. Another shift is media grammar. The for instance, newspaper. Labels ear sections and that distinguished opinions from news. Those boxes helped us to ifferentiate an advertisement from the actual information. And the same happened on tv. Ook what happened with social media. This is an example from my Instagram Account so you can see New York Times, sponsored content and a brand that i follow. The tly they look exactly same so we see an absence of the categories in social media but evaluate content in the absence of this category . Rely on that are triggered by forms of technology. Take, for instance, the triggered by the number of likes on your see shared social media. If the article is good, then it good for me, too. We tested this premise, an environment, half of them are real story and half of them a false version of the same story. Happened on social media is that when someone publish as eal story such as this one there is always someone creative false version a of the same story. Half the participants had the of likesh a low number and half with a high anybody of likes. What we found is that those articipants who received the false news with a high number of likes versus those who received he false news with low number of likes or real news with high or low number of likes were to comment e likely on share this particular news story. What happens is that when false a lot of eceived creates interest for people to share. Evaluating content on line answer is yes, yet another characteristic, is the is eption that seeing believing. We tested this premise in the context of india. Messenger hats up service and the exact same story to participant, either in text, audio, or video. This is what we found. Participants who saw the story condition thought it was more credible than those in the audio or text condition, likely also were more to share it more. Now, this is important with the where we can create a video and have anyone say whatever we want. In social media, we rely on characteristics to evaluate content. But we also know there are categories. In social our responsibility, as communication practitioners to more accurately convey these ethical s for communication practices and thats something that im urrently involved in, in a project where were creating an algorithm to classify the ifferent types of content that we have online so as a first something where we identified eight different types of content. You can distinguish these types on unique based features. So, for instance, here we see news. Res of real the features include lynn guess particulars, sources, structural features. K linguistic features are Something Like this. Ts an indicator that it is likely to be an opinion piece. This does not even exist. This is actually a false website. Also have structural characteristics. This seems to be an abc news rticle but if we look at tuscarawas rl, that co ending is give away that its a false website and finally we have network characteristics. Network hese information. All of these are unknown sources. Hand we have this abc news network. Here we have presence of an organization. More likely ion is to be picked up by news organizations. Do . Hat do we we have this feature and what do we do . E feed them into a supervisor vies learning module. We train it based on proofsly classified articles and they have been classified by organizations such as politifact, and then we test t e model and see if its able to false and between real news. Actually a is multiclassification, we want to but nguish between real also layers in between. Including advertisement. So this is a little bit of how our approach will work. A ant to point out this is probability calculation. No one indicator alone will be able to distinguish a particular content. So, for instance, here our lgorithm will first figure out that this article has been the answer is no. Route for to the next verification. If it has no verification it and so to the next route on until an actual categorization or classification reached. Now, furthermore, we also rovide a score which allows us to further assess the reciprocity of our classification. Answering, can we detect information . Ere currently working on this algorithm and we see some promising results and were hopeful we can share those as very soon. Thank you. [applause] going to go ahead and started. Call up our panelists for this next conversation about social im excited to introduce our panelists. Up, thatbody could come would be fantastic. Thank you. Make yourself at home. Yeah, youve got the mic. So, let me introduce our here. Sts i do want to thank, though, speakers that we just had. Particular, kevin and maria. I think you gave us such great of, im sorry, what . You gave us such great examples both how were being manipulated and things that data, that we think to see the rthy and work that youre doing at penn state to identify this in ways that are sophisticated, right . Not just short, you know. Impressive. So without further adu i have right. Itting to my shes general counsel and senior fellow for must american security. Nd she is a legal and National Security analyst with cnn. Also, shes an adjunct law ssion so at georgetown and shes a cofounder of checks dot. Org which is something governor ridge participates in. Alonso, ext to her is Free Expression project director for cbt. To emma we have josh. Who is the executive director nd visiting professor of law for georgetowns institutional im sorry, nstitute for constitutional advocacy protection, and we have yet another penn state monger next tovin assistant the professor of Political Science at penn state. To do this, the panel as a conversation in the same way we did the other one going to try to hopefully have time as well for q a with the audience. Okay i start its with you, we heard from some of he speakers earlier a little bit about what were learning about, russian and other nation states influence. Us what we know about our elections from the Senate Intelligence Committee Volumes . Hosure. Absolutely. Hank you for hosting us together and putting together this terrific program. We nt to start out because actually deal with some information about the Senate Intelligence Committee Report the senate senate, select committee on intelligence in depth and an very comprehensive investigation the 2016 election interference. Bviously, recent news has focused a lot in terms of what in e previewing to happen 2020 and what type of election interference activities might place over the course of the next several months. Intelligence Committee Report has really done a us able service in showing little bit of a road map of what we could see again. And i think it hasnt gotten enough of a billing. So i just want to highlight a did. Hings that it move this. Sure. So, so far, three volumes of the Senate Intelligence ommittees work has been released. Those three volumes have been de classified and so their investigation, they are these volumes on a rolling basis, as soon as they finish the volume, they put it de classification has to go through the vancouver branches and the Intelligence Community and once its cleared for publication putting the volumes out. I think there are one if not two will come out at sometime over the course of the months. W volume one of the report focused on russian efforts against infrastructure. Really getting to a lot of the details that we heard about on earlier Panel Discussion today. The russian efforts in 2016 to election infrastructure the state and local level. Interestingly, the report says it says this several times which is why im focusing on it, it says there no evidence discovered that actual vote tallies were affected esults were by the russian interference effort. It it also says, and appears, this sentence appears several times throughout volume Intelligence Communitys view into whether that is the case was very limited. Things that i he hope we can think about Going Forward is whether or not there that we actually in the future could be able to verify that information. Doesnt so far eem to be an auditing capability. The second volume of the senate ntelligence committees report focused on russian use of social media. This is much of the information in our public domain, we forward throughout the special counsel muellers investigation, the activity of the russian intelligence the entity that they formed known as the Internet Research agency, which actually conducting online activities, disinformation, fake online , interacting with americans in the effort to affect the election and the election discourse. The Senate Intelligence ommittee describes the russian interference activities as information warfare, which is significant. Thatch of the conversation ive had in play teaching and in Public Discourse i intend to describe it more as an intelligence operation. A sophisticated one but the committee lligence report describes it as information warfare. The third volume, which ill and then well open the discussion, focuses on the to governments response the 2016 election interference ffort, and this is the area that im most interested in us doing better this time. In particular, from the comments of the f. B. I. Representative earlier, in his department of defense, just, and also just reporting, that there are certainly some types of activities being conducted by russia, potentially other we knows, but certainly russia, and, to play some role in interfering or affecting or taking an interest in the 2020 election. Of the what volume three Senate Intelligence report difficulty that the Political Administration in figuring out how much information should they public, and there was what volume three lays out is took ntense debate which place in the administration about weighing whether they should make information public making information public about the threats that were taking place and the aligned activities they were seeing, whether that would further undermine the confidence election. So those are the three things out so far. Id whats important about the enate Intelligence Committees work is that its a bipartisan report. Several members did write at the end of s the report, but its really critical that they have been their work in a bipartisan way, because especially now, in discourse, were starting to hear individuals question whether russia really election, in the 2016 or question what types of activities were seeing. Im grateful that the committee done this work in order to historical record. Cal so ill pause there and we can go from there. Me to take want r. [inaudible] he characteristics of the ubiquitous. Its anonymous. This information is normally without consequence. Identify ome time to then you cane was and attribute it. You dont have any dire consequences to discourage them use. Future but it does have consequences in terms of our electoral process undermining confidence in our democracy. Perspective, you have these content providers, irtually driven, youve got to the account, i think the they had an army of trolls, a ouple of thousand accounts on facebook and twitter. Democracy and technology. The First Amendment . In terms of o content . Regulate i think david did great job in saying, we want to get the source. Youe get the source we want post office day attention. Dont deal with content. Reedom of speech, First Amendment, if they are not yelling fire in a crowded theater but they are disrupting electoral process, how do you deal with that . Thats the Million Dollar question. That is, several describe tan particular crucially important questions and ill try to just do the three to five minute answer to that. But we can get into a lot of lot more. So there are couple of key things to think about when were about the role of law in all of this particularly here in the United States. Is this question about First Amendment and just how much rotection it provides to speech. I think particularly keep in mind when were talking about and kind of n political advertising misinformation is thats three four different kinds of speech that have maybe different backgrounds to them so, this question of commercial speech, commercial speech in the u. S. Does receive lesser degree of protection than, say, core but typically h when were talking about commercial speech were talking about speech proposing a transaction. This brand of toothpaste. Hire me to clean your house. Whatever it might be. Really not what we tend to be talking about when were talking about political advertising. Which, in fact, gets very high level of First Amendment protection. The citizens mber united case from about 10 years ago, where the Supreme Court that independent expenditures were, in fact, eally crucial in their view to people being able to form associations and promote their political opinions. However you feel about how the Supreme Court decided the Citizens United case its as ial to understand that like a very strong signal from the Supreme Court about how idea of they take the people being able to collectively pool money to view. Te a political that gets about as high First Amendment protection as, say, the press does. Also important to understand that even lying has ome First Amendment protections. False statements, if they are not intended to defraud, can receive First Amendment protection as well. There is a case, u. S. Versus which dealt with the stolen valor act which with you tryw congress had passed to to restrict people from being able to falsely claim they had Different Military honors or they had served in the military on the basis that that really kind of damaging to the agents of true military service. The Supreme Court found that applied only because it was people who were lying without any kind of defraud or receive military benefits or some other act, was to the unconstitutional. Just restricting someone from falsely claiming they had served impingenid tary just their First Amendment discretion. Thats a pretty significant set of First Amendment hurdles for misinformation particularly if we start diving nto the lines between slapted reporting of facts versus out frud lent statements of fac fact. A video fac fact. A video is loaded to youtube every minute. There are millions and billions of posts and tweets and images and videos uploaded on social media every day let alen all the other content. Our traditional publisher liability that ann was talking presentation really does not apply the same way in did, nline speech as it say, in the newspaper publication days. That ann referenced, ection 230 that sets out the liability framework for hosting Third Party Content online was ctually passed for a very specific reason. Before 230 was passed into law in 1996, there were a couple of cases, trying to apply liability publisher to online speech. Dealing with the online ervices, you may remember prodigy and compuserve and they went in two different directions. Moderation of no the content on their service, and when they were sued for for having published statement, famatory court said youre just distributing this content, you didnt know about it. You didnt know it was illegal. Nothing really to do with it. You wont be liable. Rodigy, on the other hand, did moderation. They took down content comments that were off topic or in them. Rity they were trying to shape their message into something a little it more than just kind of totally open freewheeling environment. That meant, a court concluded they had more liability for the comments that were posted because they were acting more like a traditional publisher. It made sense of the way to apply traditional publisher any ine but it didnt make sense for the internet where we all know that if you have kind spaces, y unmoderated youre probably going to end up a lot of spam and other material that is maybe going to constructive communication. So ill stop there because i know weve got other things to get to. A little bit of a groundwork and not answering your question, which i hope we come back to in the discussion. Ill take it from there to ask josh a question. Something thats helpful that is re raising, that emma raising, the original purpose of encourage really to sites to call through for content. Particularly child important a real aim of s congress. Sites working t to take down unlawful content and somehow be liable. You know,d all about, the election infrastructure, infrastructure. Maurice gave us specific examples, as well as larry, what that doing to improve infrastructure but i really like i came m you have, that across, or that you emailed me about, about what are we doing as a nation to upgrade the ations cognitive election infrastructure . Do you want to talk about that . Happy to and be im grateful to be part of these conversations. In some ways i think about the threats to Election Integrity as roughly dividable into two buckets. One you might call threats to Data Security and one might call threats to discourse security. Im security, oversimplifying a little bit, as threats to the voter rolls. Changeebody reach in and that. The votes themselves, did somebody alter that . We heard a lot about how our heard a lot we heard a lot about our election infrastructure, there has been progress, bolstered by the expertise we had up here earlier, progress since 2016. Not as much progress or as fast as i think most experts would like to see, but there is certainly greater awareness of the problems and the threats and i think it is fair to say there is some work that has been done in some parts of the country to try to address this better. That is the election infrastructure. Then there is the discourse integrity, the discussion of candidates, their views, who they are, their histories, even discussion of who was allowed to vote, when they are allowed to vote, whether they should bother to vote. And that requires a cognitive infrastructure. It attacks vulnerabilities if people are willing to believe what it is essentially junk. Junk that has been tailormade for a particular audience and then microtargeted them to convince them that the pope and door stay particular candidate, aich of course endorsed particular candidate, which of course the pope never endorses a particular candidate. 2016, theer, in threat to data integrity was the one that seemed to have been probed. She used the word the Senate Intelligence committee used it was probed, but we dont see the data having been changed or manipulated to our knowledge now. But the discourse integrity was a mess. That is clear from the reports, from media reporting, it is clear going back and digesting some of what was circulating, especially online, but then other settings. I worry that the cognitive infrastructure has gotten worse, instead of better. Wide portions of the audience, americans and voting americans, but even other americans who talk to voters, they continue to digest and share and reshare things online that are not true. In fact, that material is in a sense Higher Quality or more appealing in 2020 than it was an 2016 because a lot of it is originating right here at home. Let me give you one concrete example. I was curious when the Inspector General of the Justice Department had released his long anticipated report on some of the 2016 activities. I was curious how that was being reported by rt, essentially a propaganda arm of the russian government. They will skew this in some way, but i wonder how. I looked at the rt story online within hours of the report being released. It began with a big block quote that did indeed skew what the Inspector General found. That big block quote came from the attorney general of the United States, bill barr. It was actually what he had said, but it was disinformation. It was not an accurate rendering of what horwitz had concluded. Where to our 2016, collective consternation we had u. S. Domestic actors amplifying russian create addition information, and 2020 we see a lot of russian actors amplifying u. S. Created disinformation. That strikes me as perhaps a more concerning cognitive infrastructure against which this will all play out this year and what we had for years ago. Four yearst we had ago. One of the specific recommendations was about education. And putting in place did you want to address that . Sure. I have a lot of thoughts on the transparency piece. Thereport focused on considerations that were being given within the administration about what information they should put forward. It was not until october of 2016 that the u. S. Government, the department of Homeland Security jointly with the Intelligence Committee released a public report that described what the election interference activity the russians were engaging in was put out, but october 2016 was late. There had been a lot of handwringing, frankly, within the administration about whether to do that or whether they could have done more. Their judgment at the time was that more information publicly would undermine confidence in the election. I tend to have a different perspective Going Forward. I think it is incumbent upon the Intelligence Community and u. S. Government more broadly to inform, certainly congress and then as much as possible the public about what it is that is their best assessment of what the threats are to our Election Integrity. That we seeon is what happened last week. Normally, intelligence oversight is conducted primarily behind closed doors to protect sources and methods. We have the Intelligence Committees of congress set up to do that. In the environment we are in right now, what we saw last week as we saw one of those closeddoor briefings take place. Immediately, bits and pieces of the briefing came out. And now i could not tell you sitting here today what actually was the truth of what was reported in that briefing from the Intelligence Community briefer to the members of congress. And so what i really have been encouraging is that the government be more forthcoming with information that is indicative of the current election threat. As much as im grateful for the Senate Intelligence committees report and this is coming from the perspective of someone who used to be a government National Security lawyer and usually would be in favor of protecting as much information as possible there was far too much information even in the Senate Intelligence committees report that are rejected. For example, key findings of the report are reacted. About theph heading is Intelligence Community awareness about what the threat was is redacted. That does not help us looking forward to 2020. Thank you. I might reserve based on my experience that there is a lot of overclassification of what is considered to be secret or top secret information that i think, unfortunately, it is a restraint on the kind of information the public needs to know and could deal with without compromising sources and methods. That is an observation ive made during my time in government. You are not getting off the hook here, pal. [laughter] i remember back in 1982 when i first ran we were going to target with a literature drop or radio ad or tv commercial, it , area of a large group geography. 21st century politics is about microtargeting. You can get down to the individual street or individual constituent. You get this microtargeting ability. Flowsormation specifically to that individual or group of individuals. That individual, not necessarily digitally very literate, not paying too much attention to the source, this creates a pervasive impact on that vote. I know you have been working in this area. I would like you to comment on this. Sure. I really like the term Digital Literacy. If you ask about misinformation, misinformation has always been a problem. Obviously, something is going on now, something novel. If we look at the postmortem of what social scientists have shown from 2016, there is really significant heterogeneity in terms of who was consuming and sharing fake news on facebook. It seems like people over 65 were 47 times more likely to share misinformation on facebook than younger people. A property of Digital Literacy. There are people who have been using the internet for their entire adult lives, for work and this kind of thing, but if we look at who is actually joining facebook in the years leading up to 2016, the group of people most likely to be joining facebook for the first time were people 65 and older. Right . So, what we have come to realize is that the internet and social media and all of these systems were designed for and by the young and tech savvy. If you were an early adopter of the internet, you happen to likely be the type of person who is very good at navigating technology. As the internet has penetrated deeper into our society, we are realizing that there are some people who dont have this capacity, they did not get the training, they are not embedded in social networks where other people understand how this works. I think it is tempting to put a lot of the blame on facebook and there are certain things they have done to make it too easy to access, too easy to share. They certainly moved too quickly and change the world to quickly, wholeare all their arrogant slogan of move fast, break things, we see that they have succeeded in that. [laughter] the internet and social media is not going to go away. What this represents is a novel information verification system. What we have seen is some of the legacy Information Systems more topdown and now it really matters who everyone on these spaces is. The bandwagon effect is really important to understanding how information verification happens in these spaces. Now that we have almost everybody in the u. S. Society on the internet and facebook, we are seeing that the presence of a small number of people who do not have access to highlevel Digital Literacy poses a significant threat to the Overall Health of our information ecosystem. We speak of these people in terms of their weaknesses in our collective verification of information. Education is what we have to do quickly. We would like to do some quick fix in terms of media literacy, Digital Literacy, getting everyone up to speed on what facebook isnt and how the internet operates. Moving forward, if we are going to have democracy and the fully matured internet we have today, we are going to realize we need to get everyone in our society up to speed and the level of informational educational inequality we have had in the u. S. Is not going to be acceptable from a National Security standpoint. One quick question and then we will open it to the group here. We bothe how do robustly embrace the First Amendment and address misinformation . So, i think the answer to that ultimately, who is the gatekeeper of truth . [laughter] just hould everybody no pressure. [laughter] is i dontt answer think you are ever going to get people to agree on who should be the gatekeeper of truth. That is the fundamental problem. People some of us might think absolutely no one should ever be that. Some of us might have candidates in mind. There is not going to be a consensus definition. I think that is probably what the First Amendment is trying to protect, the freedoms to form our own opinions. So much of what has been discussed so far has been about this question of what are the authoritative sources of information . Is it Senate Intelligence reports . Is it news reporting people can trust to be actually news reporting and not something that looks an awful lot like news reporting to a person who is just getting on facebook for the first time this month . I think any answer to this Information Online is going to have to be misInformation Online is going to have to be multifaceted. There is no silver bullet. You just put this label on content and everybody understands that label to mean the same thing, response the same way, and your problem is solved. The research we have seen in the past threefour years since the 2016 election has started to uncover a lot of different interesting and counterintuitive conclusions. Not to try to do an entire summary of all of that research, but there are lots of different contexts online. We talk about facebook even just is like one platform as one thing. There are hundreds of thousands, millions of different groupings of people on facebook who will respond to some of the interventions facebook is doing in different ways. Whether that is labeling of information as by a thirdparty fact checker, whether it is amplifying information or removing it, whether it is microtargeted ads. I think for me, the fundamental answer to how we start addressing or do better at addressing this information is actually more to the point on transparency and being able to get more independent researchers access to information from the different online platforms, so that Different Research studies can be done. They can be peerreviewed, cross checked, verified. I think absent that kind of true scientific inquiry into what is happening and what effect did different interventions have, we are still going to be at this point of saying, trust me, i know the answer to this question. Or trust me, this is the right intervention or outcome. What we have is a real lack of trust in society right now. To me, scientificallyminded, the answer goes toward more ability to do verifiable research on the dynamics and the impact of different kinds of proposed solutions. Thank you. Great answer. One additional thought really is i do think at least the major companies, facebook, twitter, in abe, are somewhat different ideological orientation from where they were in 2016 approaching 2020. Over simla fine for the purposes of this discussion oversimplifying for the purposes of discussion, they were roughly handsoff. First amendment does not apply to them. Section 230 does not require them to content moderate. They made an almost ideological choice to be by and large handsoff. That has not yielded them great applause, as we have digested what happened in 2016. My characterization of where they are in 2020 would be toe in the water. They have set up some rules and than they are trying to figure out how to apply those and whether those rules go far enough. That strikes me as something that needs to mature very quickly. They are multibilliondollar corporations. All multibilliondollar corporations make some decisions and get criticized when those decisions either look bad in principle or look bad in implementation. I think they need to hear from all of us about when they are not living up to it, but i do think they have at least inched a bit from where they were in 2016 to 2020. We will get to your questions. I noticed that when facebook was over in europe, they may decide in response to the european inquiries they may want to put a foot or at least up to the ankle in because they were basically threatened that if you dont do se policing, tried to be a little bit more aggressive to ff,e this misinformation ooff we may have to regulate you. The europeans have been pretty good at that over the years. Questions . He had his hand up. Right here. I work at the Carnegie Endowment for international peace. A recently launched Partnership Im really glad we are having a multidisciplinary, crosscultural debate here. Particularly as a technologist, it is good to have lawyers, political scientists. I wanted to ask anyone who would care to answer, where should our priorities be . The professor made the case that section 230 is causing a lot of this problem. Several of us believe authentication is a bigger problem because we cannot know who is saying what. Is there a third thing we should focus on first . What sense of priority should we have . To quickly describe what the third thing might be, i will point to a framework that a researcher and others have talked about, the abc framework of actors, behavior, and content. If 230 is about content and liability for content, can you make rules . That is extremely difficult to lie . Judge, is this a is this intentional misinformation . The texas law is very interesting. Content is kind of a known thorny issue, especially to evaluate at scale. Looking at actors, that is an interesting question, although when you start getting into ideas of regulation around limiting peoples ability to speak anonymously online, you have First Amendment concerns or Free Expression concerns more broadly. You also may run into the risk of crafting a regulation that prevents kind of regular people from taking advantage of the benefits of anonymity in line and the way that can allow people to express things that they might face reprisal for. But still those regulations still be circumvented by highly resourced, professionally foreign nation state actors to kind of circumvent those sorts of protections. That leaves us with b, behavior. This is an approach that all of the major social Media Companies have really taken up. Looking at what can you see among patterns of behavior online . I think facebook calls it coordinated and authentic activity. Twitter also looks at, drawing from their research and expertise around fighting spam on the platform, are there ways of information being disseminated that are characteristic that tend to kind of look more like previously identified patterns of misinformation spreading rather than kind of natural Human Behavior . A lot of this gets into the question of is this information being amplified by bots . Is this information propagating through networks designed for specific purpose and not a kind of more natural collection of people. There is the confounding element of how companies own algorithms for promoting and recommending content can play into that. You very much have a dynamic of bad actors seeking to manipulate those ranking and recommendation algorithms to get more recommendation amplification. A lot of it right now is around behavior. Agnostic to who is saying it or what is being said, is there something more discreetly measurable in the patterns of sharing of information that could be targeted . I just want to make a quick point. I give the background of the cda because i think that is missing from the conversation sometimes. People dont understand why the world is so different today than it was 20 years ago. I give that background. I do, to the researchers we have heard today, i think the reason we are having such an interdisciplinary focus is that it is going to take an interdisciplinary fix. That is going to require technology, it is requiring Significant Education of people of all ages. I guess if you are 50, kevin is going to teach you. I think that that is critical here. I think that it is something that we all have to make happen together. I want to make an observation, as well. This other angle. The majority of misinformation on facebook is financially motivated. So, that is an area where there is potential for regulation which does not run afoul of any First Amendment concerns. Who started the fake news website that started the rumor about the pope endorsing donald trump in 2016, he was an entrepreneur. He said, i was in california, it was hard for me to start a business otherwise, this was a good way to get on the internet and make some money. If facebook can put some more frictions in this process and be a lot more restrictive about who is able to make money from advertising, that seems like a relatively easy way to obviously not eliminate, but reduce significantly the amount of misinformation on these networks. [laughter] more questions from the audience. We only have a couple of minutes. Can you get that over there . She is bringing you the microphone. She will be there in one sec. Thank you. Im from russia. Im here on a fellowship at the university of maryland. Many people today mention russia sa an as an actor that interferes with american elections and democracy. My question is is there a chance to negotiate or address this issue with some russian actors, either in the government, in business, and Civil Society in Civil Society because the russian political system is complicated . [laughter] thank you. I will answer sort of quickly. I will pick up a point from earlier also. Certainly, there is space for government actors to have a role in this. I think a lot of our conversation is focused on the role of the private sectors, but there is of course a role for government. Think so far what we have seen is that from a diplomatic perspective, the u. S. Government role thatstimated the certain modest this comes out in the Senate Intelligence report modest diplomatic efforts toward russia could take in terms of dissuading russia from engaging in these malign activities. The efforts of the last administration were not so effective, to the extent that they took them. I think right now the public does not have a whole lot of clarity about what the Current Administration is doing to dissuade russia malign activities. To follow up on that though, i thing it is a very valid point that there is a role of government. One thing we can keep in mind when it comes to the role of the Technology Sector and the content platforms is that there are all sorts of other industries that the u. S. Government regulates. Ad takes on when they play significant role in the u. S. Economy or society. For some reason, and i think there are a variety of factors we wont get into here, the congress has been incapable of doing anything in this space. There are all sorts of Election Security bills pending in congress that have not had any action on them whatsoever. If we look at all sorts of other industries and activities of private sector activities, whether it is limits on abilities to prevent corruption and the way that American Companies do business overseas and im thinking about the foreign practices act we regulate the actions of companies to engage in activities overseas. When we look at the traditional telecommute occasions infrastructure in the United States. If we look across any other industry, we see that the u. S. Congress has been capable in the past of doing something about it. Lobbying . Might have a role . Next question. In the back there. This is the last question. We are going to take a quick break. There are box lunches out there. Governor ridge and some others are going to lead an open conversation that the odd against is involved in, working through solutions for today. I think you really looked at that well in the idea of, why arent we addressing this in a legislative perspective . That is part of the fix that is needed. A pointnk you made about being able to get information out in a timely manner with regard to election threats. Right . And being more forthcoming. Im interested in your thoughts on that in somewhat of a practical sense, considering the events that transpired last week. For folks who are in government, i think there are some really interesting questions and issues and im interested based on your background and perspective in sort of how folks ought to go about sharing that information and what that sort of would look like. I will give you one quick answer and some other panelists may have an idea. My First Response of something that can be done immediately is for the Intelligence Committees to schedule the worldwide threat briefing. This is an annual briefing that the Intelligence Committees do every single year. It is the one opportunity that the Intelligence Community leaders, so that would be whoever is the acting director of the day, plus the other heads of the intelligence elements and they appear before the Intelligence Committees in an unclassified session. There can also be a classified session after. They have to prepare a written statement, so that with the white house would not be surprised of what goes into the statement, which is part of what we heard about perhaps happened last week. So, there would be a vetted written statement. It would cover all sorts of threats, but threats to Election Integrity would need to be one of them. It would give members of congress an opportunity to ask these Intelligence Community leaders questions about the threats to the 2020 Election Integrity under oath. I was going to suggest two things. That was one of them. I think that is spot on. The other one, not mutually exclusive, i think it would become a mentor he, would be for either Intelligence Committee or ideally both be complementary, would be for either Intelligence Committee or meetings th to call 2020 Election Security. Points prepared by the rankandfile of the Intelligence Community, who i firmly believe continue to do their very best to identify and track these threats and help inform policymakers about how to address them. What can be shared at the unclassified level should be. We are all sitting here clearly wanting to know and deserving to know in the context of our functioning democracy. Ok. Thank you. [applause] ok, lets grab some lunch and come back on in
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