Good afternoon. Welcome to the Heritage Foundation and the louis laman auditorium. Of course we welcome those that join us on the heritage. Org website and those that will be joining us on cspan book tv. We would ask a courtesy to see the mobile devices have been silenced or turned off and for those watching online you are welcome to send questions or comments by simply emailing speaker at mac heritage. Org. We will post the program on the website following the presentation for everyones future reference as well. We do encourage you to consider purchasing copies of digital war available on amazon and im sure the author would be glad to have good support as we come into christmas. Welcoming our special guest is the Margaret Thatcher hello and center for freedom. Before arriving at heritage he was a Research Fellow at the policy think tank in london and testified numerous times before congress as well as provided evidence before the Parliamentary Committee is examining the wall and the governance of britains intelligence agencies. He received a masters of science and Foreign Policy at the institute for the study of the Americas University of 110 and earned his bachelor of arts in International History from the university. Please join me in welcoming robin. [applause] thank you and welcome everyone to the Heritage Foundation is a great pleasure to be able to invite back today serving as a chief Strategy Officer for the Global Media Agency and a scholar for diplomats policy with a special focus on digital strategy, countering violent extremism and media engagements. Recently served on a policy planning staff for the u. S. State department he teaches at Georgetown University and a member on foreign relations. He served as the senior Harvard University fellow and the political economy of the william j. Fulbright fellow at Harvard University president ial scholar and Public Service for. Hes here today to speak on his fascinating new book Digital World war extremists and the fight for the supremacy. So, with no further ado, the floor is yours. [applause] well thanks so much absolutely thrilled to be with you today. Its not thought about in terms of how to keep the u. S. National security. I want to start off with a sto story. For my book i did a lot of interviews and my background is in the sort of datadriven approach, s so i built a databae detector if you think about the nicest factors, and i wanted to think carefully about what are the reason young people are attracted to this type of propaganda and what are the things that sort of makes them the get up and either buy a ticket or join online in a way to support the ecosystem. So, i was i send the gold interg a young lady that was a defector and she had come back recently. It was asking her early on in the interview give me one word of identification when you think of isis and in my head im ready to take notes in front of the answers you and i would give like her in her i horrendous. She started listing off the oneword answer identification and the word that came out was identity, belonging, trust. I did one of those things i said trying to get a good sense i wanted to make sure this is what she was saying and it struck me because how do you describe this disconnect . When i think of them i dont have strong opinions about what it is but how is it that she came to a very different conclusion and what that led me down the path is that there was if you think about the propaganda and communicating with young people, when i read and did research for the book on this ecosystem that has been builhad beenbuilt online, i reat they are saying one thing in arabic and something very different in english but let me to what i want to talk about today to get some key insights from what ive explored in terms of what the group is doing and what other groups like them or s it that we can do together and harness in terms of a blueprint to fight go and fight back on this battlefield. So the first key insights from the story i just told you about is on the segmentation. Content is king in the distribution is clean and she wears the pan handling and if you think about that, the way that i like to think of isis and others is that it is working in a content for when you think about it on this information battlefield. And they really understand what i would say is the Customer Journey. They understand how to reach these audiences and that its bigger the impact. For a lot of people, we read a lot of the isis material in english. In my research i found that it wasnt even in the top five languages. In the social media and other ways to get their message out comes. Its arabic russian, russian, fd other languages and so when you start thinking about the way they are reaching out to people then you get a very different picture. Another misconception i stumbled upon is the messaging goes far we think in a lot of ways isis is selling this medieval narrative as a very sort of almost four upward of 80 of it is what i call positive messaging. So they are saying that stuff in english often times to instill fear but what we find is the. So when they are reaching out to people, they are talking about the arab spring and political grievances and offering a narrative that is aspirational in terms of their identity so when you think about that and say thats why when they put this social media they put a picture of a bushel of apples in th so you get a better sense f the propaganda. Other things that struck me is who are the key influencers that are part of this ecosystem and often times help scale up the message. Not just the storyboarding outlets that the outlook of key influencers that help the double date elevate. I would guess most of us here probably havent read much of who he is and even in the region is people readily come across. Hes the most popular person in the middle east on twitter. If i ask who is the most popular they will say maybe came to that ibutif hes an extremist cleric based in saudi arabia with over 20 million followers on twitter is not just prolific on twitter, he is on snap and it is the and yet he doesnt violate in terms of service that it complements what they are doing and young people are watching him, over 30 of the youth in saudi arabia follow him and he has a huge following across the gulf and across the world. If you look at the 100 most followed people he is right after Hillary Clinton and after ed shearon. She has a huge constituency and platform and if you think about how to combat, look at the charisma and how people get up and do something based upon other things he says so that is the first point i want to leave is we are in this content war. The headline for me is what we find that othe with other groupm is they are perfecting their pitch like any good marketing strategy, theyve tried certain things like what works on younger people. But its social media each day it was 25 or 35,000 duplicate the whole ecosystem of change based on their audience and perfect even before the holy attack and after you saw how they were monitoring and looking at what we were doing based on a statute of liberty and how they are taking credit for things so you see how they are reaching out to people. Thats an important thing is that feedback and, they set up the state they can win those on the physical battlefield and they can information battlefield to turn the narrative of a grand coalition and the Global Coalition that is taking them on. The third thing is this idea that the platform agility matters in terms of feedback. So one thing they are skillful at that adds a lot and makes them more influential to estimate is v. Ability for the use those platforms for certain thing. It is the owner 12 countries its surpassed snap chat as the most downloaded and it was developed by an entrepreneur to provide the end oldschool High School Bulletin Board t in terms of people to give feedback to colleagues and its also been used for a hand if he switched to and. If testifying on the hill and censorship plays to take them off their ecosystem. We are discussing it so the. So that is in the important two recognized. My point again is the platform agility. Somebody that is practitioner and spent about ten years in the middle east, thats where i want to start the audience today. In terms of how they evolve quickly into the plot technolo technology. When we saw. There is a lot of research on how they raise money. So on. The their impact when you hear that work on the counter narrative as it is this idea of backfire effect. When you think of this caliphate that is bountiful sometimes we can get into this trap of backfire. How do you tell their stories. That is the idea behind this is how do you tell the stories. It is a jen to that is fantastic. This new media, animation, drama, music you have to think about if it was one of the best examples of groups that are combating them with millions of views. It is the number a lot of thin things. They are very influential. One of the most popular spaces producing a love again organic content. There are a lot of these potential vehicles. If there is a computational propaganda there are a lot of interesting ways of how you tackle them using sort of the new technique. Its the other targeted ads so what they do is google will look at what searches people are putting in to say you might put in a search to say how do i traveled to syria so theres an athere is anad that comes up whh the. Theres other ways to do that in terms of diluting their content, but again a whole basket of these technique is. Its a little bit like a counterinsurgency approach. If you think about the way it spread, it is modeling what we see in the spread of like herpes for example, it spreads to intimate contact. In my research it shows you can calculate the replication on how something spreads the. We have a lot to learn from publichealth about how to. You think about the networks and neighborhoods and to the foreign fighters it is highly localized. So one way we think about that is local. 80 that came from tunisia came from a neighborhood in a majority came from the neighborhood in the southern part of brussels. We are coming up with a more robust way to think about the interventions. They may not jump out a at us bt to me that is a very interesting and fruitful way to think about the intervention. Its how you scale up content and of coordinated campaigns because all of this matters on the information battlefield and it cant be understated. We are left behind in this battle cry. Thanks very much. thank you. Fantastic presentation. And i will use my position as the chair on the first question. Some of your solutions to talk about local factors and the response of being somewhat localized wondered if you could apply some of the solutions you talked about in a case like mohammed and i should also say. You point out in the book also the saudi government. It is used for times an example how they manage for their own purposes. It is a very pernicious influence. How would you go about approaching that kind of probl problem. I would say a couple things. One is understanding how. So on the face of it, he hasnt violated any service otherwise twitter would have taken him off, so hes able to maintain it because he goes up to the line but doesnt necessarily cross the line. He will do things where he uses the road not taken and he will just show a picture of that suggesting that there is another path to success on the road not taken. Does he violate any terms of service, not necessarily that when people are reading it they get motivated by some of the things they say and draw their conclusions about the support and he is rallying people and essentially saying dont stay at home, dont just sit there. People want to go out and do something so often times when im in discussions with people and a lot of research there is a role for taking content down but we have to think that is not going to be the panacea of assault because you see new groups that are using coded language so the point is that there is a role for taking the content down but they are evolving faster so understanding how he is successful and number two, we have to think about this sort of ego chamber who are both sort of anti. So theres another piece but merely as high on the followers list. How do people support or build building a Civil Society build ecosystems to help support the messaging because it is almost like he is bringing a gun to the fight and we are bringing a knife to the fight, so how do you match the intensity thats how the social incubators or important thing being about again i mention him as a cleric that the vast majority are actually on the front line you just never hear about them because we dont have a platform but they are not good at using social media. He was a sort of thirdgrade teacher whos never gotten a job in the urban area but he realized he could understand social media in a way that could lead to a path of a start up some who are the sort of people fighting against him if there are many that are very briefly on the front lines but how does one amplify what they are doing i think this is very important and number two, you have to think about responding to some of the narratives so people are looking at the content and the narratives that hes using to attract people and sort of combating those narratives than the part robin chimed at shows you his influence in this version of the saudi sopranos in the last month in terms of a lot of changes the leadership made. He is one of people that its not curtailed in a certain way and shows you the outside influence because if he was there even more backlash than there is now. Its coopted by the establishment and recognizing a lot of the messenger that may be associated with the regime may not be the best method for do have the top cleric, he may be seen as part of the state establishment so you have to figure out who has independent organic voices and society that can combat the message. Could you talk a little bit about what Institutional Capacity the United States government either has or needs to have in order to effectively address these problems . Thats a great question. I think there is a couple things. One is that i talked about being nimble, the speed, part of this is a network approach. It takes a network to defeat the network. They have set up an entity that has the structure to try to tackle the Global Engagement center. Its congressionally mandated to tackle this type of propaganda. I go back to what i said, you need a Manhattan Project. Its earliest incarnation was about 40 years ago and now i gets up to around 40 million. God bless our military but our military been has a budget of about 400 plus million. I think about whether or not were putting enough resources enabling those structures to be successful and part of it is increasing the recognition that this is the battlefield. This is the new wave, its not just an ancillary Information Warfare or something sort of on the backend but this is the new sphere that we call ar. This is the new arena we have to protect our National Security. Thats one. Two is a think were only as good as our partners. When i think partners its enabling, it cant be government alone. Its about enabling the private sector and to me this is the tragedy of common because how do we motivate all these desperate, different stakeholders to come on board. Everybody can contribute. Something i talk about in the book is the 1990 model. When you think about the battlefield, 1 are key influencers and the ones that create content. They are kind of the game changers. 9 are curators of content, they share content. These are like the soul pancakes of the world. 90 are passive consumers, consuming that information. The idea is how do you get that 90 to move and be motivated. Thats why talk about this Manhattan Project blue parent because thats where a lot of these organic stories are. Thats the content war and thats what you need to mobilize. Had a question about lawenforcement today from dhs all the way down to local law enforcement. What parts of this do you think they are getting and what part do you think they could improve themselves at the local level. I think theres a recognition in terms of what are lawenforcement and i have a lot of respect for field agents that the cases theyre dealing with tend to be very immediate. If i take part of what i said is a Public Health approach and a highly local approach, it really is a city, we have to think about this in a citywide model. Its not a cookiecutter approach nationwide, its about city to city in a lot of ways. I think the strong cities, the example of a project that has worked really well is linking cities together around religious leaders, getting lawenforcement and youre trying to expel some of the miscommunication because part of it, they have to work in tandem. In some places it works better than others. I think the recognition of it. The one thing i would say is we are still a little sideload in the sense that we still think, theres no borders. The way were broken up is that we have a group thats focused on the homeland and we have a group thats focused on looking at our interest abroad, and to me, theres no border anymore. When you think about this battlefield, there has to be stronger and there used to be, i will most think if you think of a nerve center, that really harnessed some of the work and thinking about that further, thinking about it much more, i should mention combining the question working at the broadcasting board of governors, i think a lot of the content that we are producing is on the front line. As i talk about content wars, we are producing tv broadcasts a day and 60 countries. We are coming out with a new boko haram documentary that tackles them directly in terms of narrative and were looking at this content and finding ways to produce content in a variety of important and key linkages because to me as i was mentioning, we dont need a country model anymore, we need a language based model because there are no borders. My name is thalia. What is the biggest impact that islamic extremist and cyber supremacy have on government, politics and institution. Can you relate this to economy and capacity . Its a very good question. Just make sure i understood it right, how do extremist change. I would say a couple different ways. We often times in the world of diplomacy, we have been used to dealing with state actors and you have the rise of nonstate actors. Given that these nonstate actors that is unfamiliar at times but our Intel Community has been following this for a long time but part of it is how do we deal with, theyre not looking necessarily to govern so in a lot of ways, lets think about devices. Isis wanted to govern. Part of what they wanted to say was different about them that al qaeda was that they wanted to actually, they were interested, they wanted to be able to govern. You will find, over time, 2. 0 and threepoint oh, they want to be entirely virtual. It is about the information battlefield. Theyre not going to want to be controlling any physical space. Se. Their entire modus operandi will be on this information battlefield. That changes that i damn i can in terms of how do you interact within an actor that can be found anywhere easily. We are set up in a way that we attack and do counterinsurgency, we are set up in a way, just recently our Cyber Command in august finally became a full unified command. Thats just this august if you think about that in terms of the way, we sort of understand this battlefield and deal with the rise of actors that are competing on a very different data fields. I was wondering if your book goes into the information wars in terms of winning peoples hearts and minds, but what about how these groups are using social media to target attacks, a little bit more dangerous. Is a great question. Im glad you brought that up. Youve seen them, this is part of the idea that youve seen these groups planning these things and go to these end to end encryption. They are able to plan so you are able to see them using this more than getting that information or recruiting but planning, plotting, post planning and so it makes it tougher. One of the benefits is that theyve moved off open source platforms where you can see and there are people who are in dialogue as they moved to a deep and dark web it becomes a lot harder to see what they are planning and where are there footprints in this space. I think it makes the job tougher and its why we have to be even more prepared. Do you think it is worthwhile to ramp up spy network so we know what they are doing from within on social network or if they are making money on big coin, do you think thats worth while to do . I think its worthwhile in terms of tracking a lot of things in ways that we can garner intelligence, but i keep coming back to our collective action so how do we leverage, the Civil Society actors that are the key messengers. How are we building up that network. We have all the assets and we actually have a lot of information but how do we execute . To me, if we were to point to one area, how do we bridge that gap. That to me is where you get places like uturn, a week where the next uturns going to come from. If there are ways we can support or amplify or encourage or young people coming up with Creative Things and developing things, there will be ten new apps like that in the next two months and how can we get ahead of that curve of young people who are passionate about this hateful ideology. Can it be private sector driven primarily. Where do you see the role of government . Is it seed money or where you see that. The government plays a key role, often times they can help overcome the collective action problem and often times they do this in smart ways, almost like a venturecapital approach of ceding money to small efforts and seeing if they get scaled up. A lot of the most successful Public Diplomacy efforts that are run from the state department are giving out small seed grants to groups that scaled up, did well and ended up getting money for the private sector and other international partners. The thing is with the u. S. Government can do is we can take chances on projects when no one else, i called first mover advantage. We can take advances on projects where the private sector wont fund it and then that way we are certain of an early stage investor. To me its like how we find those projects. We have fantastic officers in the field in almost every country so how do we leverage, its a most likely think about your media network, they have the best sense of whats going on on the ground in terms of what theyre thinking, what things might work so how weve better leverage some of their insight. [inaudible] i was wondering if you would share your thoughts regarding the dual use of what policy should be regarding the double edge sword of encryption. Many of the groups that we hope to empower rely on encryption to be able to get around repressive governments. At the same time, terrorist groups also exploit those same technologies. If we help breaking that encryption, we are also therefore risking undermining those other policy objectives. I was just curious as to how you saw the tradeoff. I appreciated your remarks about the 1 and the 9 in the 90 , the creators, the curators and consumers. It reminded me of the importance of writing to influence and persuade. Americans have become so caught up in thinking, reading, researching and analyzing and writing to inform that if we are fortunate to get to a point of writing to evaluate, we never seem to reach writing to persuade which seems to be the cultural battle that we are fighting is capitalizing on a dominant competitive advantage. I just thought i would toss that out there and see if you can run with that. Theyre both good questions. Its a tough issue. I tend to lean that we have to protect freedom of speech. I have is the work in an organization, we have journalists that are in jail and have been killed and are under constant threat all of the world and help we can protect storytelling is key because other governments dont share that idea with censorship and wanting to control what those stories are. The technology is moving so quickly that even a few broken through your encryption, i can tell you, having studied this and gone through very carefully, there are, they are working on new technology that we cant even pronounce, we know in corruption, but a lot of things theyre working on, its kind of like the way i think about censorship. Yes theres a role in facebook just came out with Monica Becker who does fantastic work running Global Policy for facebook and talked about the recent data on Artificial Intelligence now in terms of taking content down, its improving exponentially in terms of recognizing isis content and taking it down before it even gets to a wider audience, so there are improvements to be made but the way i think about it there is a role for that but its still content more. I almost want us to put more focus on getting the stories or the scholars were creating the new where people are motivated by tackling this in their work in terms of innovation and developing new platforms. I think thats where theres a lot of low hanging fruit. I tend to think yes, the technology side, we have ways, say domestically where the Tech Companies are served a search warrant or certain legal and often times they cooperate with lawenforcement and i think thats, in those certain cases does work well, but again i think the focus is on this other side on the content wars and how do we enable news stories and others that are not being heard. Great point on this idea of informing, because to me with that strik strikes me as as the Customer Journey and really understanding, part of what i try to write about is, even in my earlier books, how do you understand why as young people would do Something Like this. If you can try to put yourself in their shoes and you start reading the propaganda, you see their disillusionment and how to tackle it. Too often we think of counter narratives and that is very real and find ourselves in those mines up. I think its important not to fall into that which is actually the direction we should be headed in. Im sorry to ask a second question produces terry muller with Heritage Foundation. Are there any partisan differences in approach that hamstring this or is there pretty much a bipartisan consensus about what needs to be done. I tend to think, i was on the policy planning staff, i had worked for the state for many years. I think its a bipartisan approach. Keeping a safe, working every day to sort of think about ways, i think we are just not, we havent thought about, were not set up ideally to tackle this information battlefield but theres so much willing interes interest. You wont get any close doors. A lot of my colleagues on the military side, they are ready and willing, they have always been very open about working and doing partnerships together, a few of my old colleagues, we used Work Together on informational countering extremism in south africa when i used to work at the embassy so to me, same on the intelligence side, whos pulling this all together that to me is the bigger thing we need to unlock. I think thats the key. As we wrap up ill leave you, interviewing a lot of defectors when you see things happening in syria and you see the hollowing attack and other attacks in the massacre in egypt in the perfect tragedy this past week, it can be very depressing and it can really get you down. Im always reminded, i think back to my days in south asia theres a famous poet and had a great line. He said dont get frightened by the furious, violent winds, dont get frightened by the furious pilot wins out you go, they only blow to make you fight higher. My role is to think about how we can put together this new Manhattan Project because is not just important for today but future generations. [applause] thank you again. Its not very often that you deal with counterterrorism and, with any sense of optimism but i think a suitable optimistic note to end on. Tank you all for being here. [applause] , one. Heres a look at some of the best books of the year according to amazon. They argue that liberal democracy is threatened in the retreat of western liberalism. In the last castle Denise Kiernan reports. [inaudible] tom nichols, National Security affairs at the u. S. Naval war college argues that due to the spread of the internet and 24 hour news Expert Opinion is now being accounted. Wrapping up our look at amazons best book of 2017 is betsy the essay on her upbringing as the daughter of indian immigrants in canada. One day we will all be dead and none of this will matter. In my eighth grade biology class my teacher gave us a checklist of dominant versus recessive to teach us how babies come out looking the way they do. The subtext from this particularly nationalistic teacher occurred to me only years later that we would all end up looking darker and more vague than we did in the past. She wasnt exactly unhappy about it but she did express some concern regarding the eventual loss of the blue iron natural blonde. We were paired up with someone of the opposite so we could compare genes to see what our potential child would look like. Let me drive this home. A Public School teacher in suburban calgary told her teenage students to pretend they were going to have sex with each other and their biologically likely babies. I was one of the only ethnic kids in the class. My jeans were steamrolling everyone elses. My partner eric, a white boy personified and went on the checklist with me. When we arrived at hair on fingers or knuckles, i looked down at my hands which felt like the very first time. Standing up for my knuckles were soft black strands of hair. I was horrified. How had i never noticed such a grotesque feature. I always knew my legs were hairy, my upper lip bristled enough to catch flies but i didnt realize this new barbarity. Some of these authors have appeared on booktv. You can watch them on our website booktv. Org a familiar face on your screen, ed henry of fox news, we think of you when it comes to politics and the president but not Jackie Robinson. Or baseball or anything else. When i first started putting together 42 pages, while the world did you write about baseball. They kind of want to cookiecutter and say we know you for one thing. I believe you have to have a passion for something else. I. E. , drink and sleep politics. We love cspan. You have to have another passion and baseball is something that i love. My father and instilled in me. And i thought i was going to get some. [inaudible] they served pigeon and i thought it was disgusting. I started to open it up and there were little bones in. This woman said you can eat those its not pigeon. Its a delicacy. I turned to this woman and i said i will leave early and go watch the world series. My late father fatherinlaw had a history and baseball but the story was never told you i sat back down. I said what he talking about. Her fatherinlaw was a minister in brooklyn in 1945. The manager of the dodgers knocked on his door in despair and was secretly thinking about pulling out of signing Jackie Robinson. The point is no one had ever told the story so i set out as a journalist at the end of this 45 minute and we will sign jackie. I needed to be in her presence, i needed to be in gods presence to know is right thing to do. That gave me chills when i first heard it. I set out on a journey to confirm it was true but also dive deeper. Theres been a million books about jackie. Civil rights, baseball, all of that. Its all wonderful in the movie 42 which was a big hit in 2013 but we call it 42 because as i was researching and writing it i was thinking about paul harvey, the great radioman who would say now you know the rest of the story. There is baseball here, but i think faith was the secret ingredient that help jackie overcome. Different generations, different parts of the country people have been reading it and hearing tha that. Its a story about coming together. Is Jackie Robinson becoming part of the dodgers . Was it politicized at the time wasnt carried on the front pages . What i was struck by his it wasnt necessarily politicized because they researched it and not that many people really noticed it at first. Some of the early gains, you now hear people saying there are millions of people who say they were at jackies first game. I think the attendance was Something Like 25000 people, opening day, Jackie Robinson, april 15, 1947, who wouldnt want to be at that game in the great cathedrals of baseball, but wasnt even a sellout. As they researched it, there were other players who were rookies and 47 got more writeoffs. They would say well, there was also this black player who might be the first, they were really sure if hes going to make it. And boy did he make it. He wasnt just about baseball, he is somebody who changed america for the better. At henry, thank you for a few minutes. I appreciate it. Good evening everybody. Welcome. Thank you for joining us. I hope everyone is enjoying the free airconditioning outside. First and foremost if i could get you to turn off your cell phone, that would be wonderful. Dont forget to go to our website. You can get up idea of all the events we