Cspan is brought to you by youe or satellite provider. The communicators looked at technology and its impact on voting and democracy recently with speakers at the state of the net Conference Held in washington d. C. Heres a look. Host katie harbath, is the Global Politics director for facebook. What does that entail . Guest being the Global Politics and government outreach director means that myself and my team who are situated across the world work with governments, elected officials, candidates on how to best use facebook to communicate with citizens. And then we also help to work on facebooks overall efforts in elections which includes protecting the integrity of elections on our platform whether thats through preventing foreign interference, fake accounts, etc. , but then also helping to teach people how to use their Civic Engagement tools so more people can have a voice in the political process. Host people heard you say what you did, and theyre going you didnt do a very good job in 2016. Guest theres certainly things that happened on our platform in 2016 that shouldnt have, and we take a great responsibility of making sure that we can, going forward, take the steps that we need to prevent interference on our platform. We did a lot in 2017 with elections in france and germany, for instance, and we are more than doubling our team here in 2018 to be looking forward to the elections not just here in the United States, but italy, colombia, mexico and brazil. Host so, katie harbath, recent headlines from a blog post on facebook, tell me if these are fair when it says that facebook admits social media sometimes harms democracy. Is that a fair headline . Guest i think what we at facebook and what were trying to do with the hard questions blog is really bring outward the discussion of these sort of hard questions that we have to grapple with. Because like i said, things on our platform did happen in 2016 that shouldnt have. But theres also a lot of positive aspects that social media can bring to democracy. So we are trying to take a critical look at ourselves to understand where we need to get better, but also to engage the Broader Community because we know that we cant do it without them, and we want to make sure, too, that anything were doing is going to have a positive impact. Host but at what point is facebooks responsibility over and its up to the individual to figure it out . Guest i think its a lot of the Broader Community all has unique roles that they need to play when it comes to protecting the integrity of elections. Not just online, but across the board. Were trying to take steps to help people to better identify where there might be false news, to try to provide them different perspectives of where different parties stand on the issues. We do Public Service announcements to help people think through how they might be able to detect what is or is not false news. Also, like i said, engaging the Broader Community so everyone can do their part. Host is there a censorship issue here . Guest i think that one of the things were definitely trying to do is we dont take downfalls news. If people do down false news. Even if people go through all our warnings, they can still do so on our platform. So we are trying to strike that right balance here. Its more helping people to be more critical consumers of news and information versus us necessarily being arbiters of truth ourself. Host katie harbath, can you be a candidate in todays world and not be on facebook, have a facebook presencesome. Guest theres certainly candidates that do, and i dont think facebook alone can be something that helps people win elections, but it certainly has become a critical tool for candidates to speak with their citizens, to engage with them and get their message out. Host what are you doing here at the state of the net conference . Guest were on a panel about discussing internets role in democracy and having a lot of the same conversation that we had here today. Host and what was your main point that you wanted to make in your presentation . Guest that we are taking our responsibility seriously about protecting thing beingty about protecting our integrity. Ing. Host what is one of those products . Guest our perspectives products where if somebody clicks on a link about the election, we havent launched in the u. S. , but we have overseas. People will get to see where the different parties or candidates stand on the issues, so thats something were hoping to potentially to bring here to the United States for the midterms. Host we look forward to having you back on the communicators. Guest thank you so much. Host and now joining us on the communicators is dr. Candice hoke who is with the Marshall Center for cybersecurity and privacy protection. Candice hoke, what is that . Guest we have an interdisciplinary cybersecurity and privacy research, and to some degree, an Advocacy Center on top of our educational role. We are trying to provide a range of services to the business, legal and educational communities to understand the needs for greater cybersecurity and the sort of mechanisms by which better security and privacy goals can be achieved. Host and this is marshall is a law school in cleveland, correct . Guest yes, it is. Host whats the connection between cybersecurity and the lawsome. Guest well, the law has become rather late in coming to the cybersecurity table. We perceived a gap in the understandings that lawyers needed in order to be able to properly advise and support their business as well as personal clients in achieving their goals now that so much business is run either on the internet or through computerized information systems. So theres, there are huge issues that lawyers need to understand. Host has the law kept up with cybersecurity . Cybersecurity, you say, has gone ahead of the law, but have lawmakers been proactive when it comes to cybersecurity . Guest insufficiently. Insufficiently, and in part its because many of our lawmakers are lawyers who were not trained in any of these technical subjects, and also i think the view has been that perhaps its better for the law to have a light touch rather than interfere with the innovative capacity of our business sector. The problem there is that the market has not adequately addressed Security Issues or to some degree privacy issues as well, and there really is a role for informed government policy. So we need the policymakers to be better informed, we need the lawyers to be better informed. And truly the commercial sector as well as sort of the live ares of average americans will be better if we foster greater cybersecurity and privacy protections. Host so specifically here at the state of the net conference, what are you speaking on . Guest election cybersecurity, which is my area of specialty. Elections and Voting Systems. Host are Voting Systems, is there an unhackable Voting System . Guest there is very good question. All Voting Systems that we have produced thus far are hackable to some degree the if theyre based on computers and software. If we use paper Ballot Systems where the voter marks a paper ballot or directs a a machine, even one with software, to mark a paper ballot, voter can look at that ballot, affirm these are my choices. It can be counted by softwarebased machines, but then we have that paper record to check to see if the machine has cheated, if it has been hacked. Unfortunately, large numbers of voters in this country are using softwarebased Voting Systems that have no paper records or no votercreated paper records, and so the machines can cheat. And presumptively, they are cheating because its easy to cheat, and its almost undetectable in many cases. So part of what senator klobuchar was speaking about at the beginning of this Conference Today was the importance of our recognizing and redressing the problems with the election vulnerabilities and particularly Voting Systems, but also the larger Election Office problems. Because weve never funded our Election Offices at the level thats needed in order to protect them from hacking, whether its from cyber criminals or nationstate actors like russia or just domestic partisans. Host now, dr. Hoke, you said that presumptively these machines can be hacked or have been hacked. Do we have proof of an election outcome based on hacking . Guest another very good question. Part of the trouble are our laws that prevent the ability to look at election equipment to see if it has been hacked. In fact, there have been lawsuits including in 2016, jill steins lawsuit, for instance, which sought forensics evaluations in several different states and were blocked each and every time. Now, these laws were very wellbased before softwarebased equipment. But our Companies Know that they must be able to audit and forensically evaluate their own equipment to see if theres been a counting error, whether theres been hacking against their databases, whatever. And were preventing our own election boards and our election equipment from being evaluated. Now, in some cases we would be able to discover whether hacking had occurred, but many other cases some really smart hacks hack with no, leave no trace or very little unless theres a very sophisticated hacker. So, but as senator klobuchar was saying in her earlier talk today, we have proof of nationstate, particularly russian, attacks on particularly our databases in 2016 and before. We were looking a little more then in part because the department of Homeland Security contacted me in early july of 2016 and wanted to know what should they be doing. And i sort of laid out different kinds of problems that i thought they should be attending to. And so that was im very happy that they did start paying attention. Host what were some of those recommendations that you gave to dhs . Guest well, i said you should be watching russia in particular, and you need to Pay Attention to and set up operations that would allow you to be able to discern whether there are probes or attacks on Election Offices or election networks. We really need to be able to know early enough so that we can put a stop to it. We dont have that kind of capability in most states and certainly not for election jurisdictions. They are so underfunded, and theyve never had the Security Operations that, say, a Large Company would have that has significant, well say, attractiveness to hackers. Now, banks, of course, are highly attractive for all sorts of cyber criminals. So are Health Care Institutions because the Health Care Records are marketable at a very high dollar rate. Most people before 2016 kept denying that elections were attractive because they kept saying things like theres no financial value. And we would say meaning my colleagues in the Election Integrity movement would say, come on now. The u. S. Economy and the u. S. Military and the u. S. Budget, the largest in the world, this is not value that someone would want to control through manipulating our investments, excuse me, our election systems . Why would you say our banks but not our government . Why would you say not our elections . So unfortunately, the deniers had control over the Decision Making until the information came out in 2016. Host so the commonwealth of virginia returned a complete paper ballot guest they did. Host and took off their guest they did. Congratulations. Host congratulations. Is that the future . Guest yes, in fact, that is what most Computer Security specialists and the voting Security Specialists would say, that is exactly what needs to happen nationwide. Because no matter what happens in virginia and many other states that have moved to this system, there will be that votercreated paper record that can be audited as a which can on the Voting Systems. As a check on the Voting Systems. We just need to make sure were going to have statistically valid auditing built in as a routine, not as a result of litigation. It needs to be we need to understand just like business entities and now the government as well, we must audit our systems constantly. We must to determine whether they are cheating on us, whether they have been programmed to cheat, whether they just have a malfunction. You audit. Thats why we have big auditing entities in the nation right now and legal compulsion for businesses to use auditing, internal and external auditing. We need to do this for our elections. Its just basic quality assurance. No one should be fearful of auditing elections and to build it into our processes. That is a security, that is a transparency for the american public, for the Voting System vendors so that they can show which ones are actually able to count correctly, for the Election Officials who are charged by law to deliver honest, fair, transparent elections. So, yes, that is the answer. We dont have to completely ditch computerbased election equipment, we just have to use the proper checks on that equipment. And then we also have to invest in our election systems, excuse me, our offices so that they have the kind of equipment and Network Architectures inhouse so that they can prevent cyber hacking to the greatest degree possible. But if it occurs, theyll be able to discover it and recover. Thats the resilience aspect. Senator klobuchar was mentioning the bipartisan bill that senator graham, Lindsey Graham and she are sponsoring, and they have a similar one in the house. That seeks to fund the paper Ballot Systems in all the states that dont have them with the audit plus the Election Security consulting to upgrade our Election Offices. Its a travesty that we could think we could run Fair Elections in this day and time without those two components. So why arent we doing it . [laughter] so im very hopeful that we will be addressing this problem. Host and finally, dr. Hoke, when you see at blackhat a voting machine hacked within minutes guest i was there, i was a speaker, yes. [laughter] host do you have suspicions about the 2016 election . Guest i have suspicions about any election equipment and elections that are run without the auditing capacity and routine auditing. Why . Because as ive said previously, thats basically saying to the world of hackers come here, hack us, we wont be checking. We are a piece of cake for you. So you can hack our elections completely undiscovered. Now, thats ru for the largest true for the largest voting jurisdictions in pennsylvania, whole states like georgia. Why would we allow this . Why would any state, why would our nation allow our election systems to basically be run at this level of, say, ineptitude . Of denial of the threats . Its a National Security issue, its a fundamental democracy issue, its a fundamental fairness issue. So, you know, we need to redress it. [laughter] host candice hoke is the founding director of the Marshall Law School center for cybersecurity and privacy protection. Guest thank you so much. Host and now on the communicators we want to introduce you to ambassador karen kornbluh. Ambassador, where did you get that title . Guest ah, i was ambassador to the organization for can Economic Cooperation development which is a Multilateral Organization in paris, france, and i did that in the first term of the obama administration. Host your background, though, is rather varied, and we want to talk to you about some of that digital background. Guest yep. Host how could you use that over at the oecd . Guest so ive been working on internet policy for about two decades, and when i got to the oecd, i knew that it had been parking lot of the process part of the process of taking the u. S. Framework for regulating the internet and social using it overseas. But that consensus, that International Consensus was starting to fray as russia and china and other countries were coming in, and they wanted more heavyhanded regulation of internet by some of these countries that wanted to have more authoritarian control. So we used the oecd, and we did oecd internet policy making principles that said we need to have a free flow of information across countries, but we need to have individual countries be able to do their own policy making whether its Consumer Protection or privacy, that countries can do their own regulation but across country there needs to be free flow and respect for human rights. And we got 34 countries to sign on to that. That was an interesting time. I think well be talking today about the fact that at that period of time, 2010, 2011, we were talking about internet freedom, we were seeing the internet being used to disrupt countries in the middle east and bring democracy, so there was that kind of attitude. And now we see something, a very different attitude. Host lets go back to that era, and that was the arab spring. Guest exactly. Host but we also saw where egypt could essentially flip a switch and cut off internet traffic to that country. I thought the internet was borderless. Guest thats really interesting. It can be borderless, but what weve seen is and the thing that i think we really need to focus on right now is it turns out that this medium that we thought was going to give voice to the voiceless and in many cases did and power to the powerless can also be used by dictators, by terrorists, by dark political money to undermine democracy, and we have got to address that problem. Host do you think that the 2016 election was undermined . Guest well host via the internet . Guest we now have a lot of data. I mean, just right now we got some data about on twitter there were russianlinked 200 million bots. On facebook ads, russian ira one of the troll factories in russia was responsible for 146 million ad impressions. We only have 138 million voters. I mean, the small of this is quite amazing. And when you look at what that means more our democracy, you know, whether it made a difference or not i think is an interesting debate, but what it means for democratic debate. The example that really sticks with me is there were two fake groups set up in texas. One called, heart attack says it was a is secessionist group, another called united muslims of america. Both fake group withs set up on facebook groups set up on facebook by russian trolls. They organized dueling rallies, the russians did, of americans on the same day in may in houston in front of an islamic center. That doesnt sound like democracy to me, it sounds like something we really need to address. Host historically, could you compare whats happening on the internet today to the advent of television and Television Advertising . Is there a connection . Guest its thank you for making that connection. Its really interesting to look at the history of television. There are a lot of differences, but we did as a society have debates about how to make sure that this new technology was not going to undermine democracy. So all kinds of things from the scandal on radio where radio disk jockeys were being paid off of by musicians or managers to air their music, became a big scandal, and it was the decided that on broadcast you had to say who was paying you for content if the content wasnt organic. We havent had that kind of a debate on the internet. There was a decision that if you were paying for ab ad, you had to disclose who you were. So theres all kinds of searchable information on whos running an ad on television. And most people dont realize we dont have that same transparency on the internet which is shocking, because the internet was supposed to be this medium that was going to bring more transparency. Host is there a movement to make that transparency more readily available . Guest absolutely. There are some really interesting proposals. Theres the honest ads act which senator warner and amy klobuchar, who spoke here today, have been championing. Theres efforts that people are thinking about to work on bots. Theres already a bots act that senator blumenthal got passed that just deals with bots in terms of ticket sales. But if you can regulate them in terms of ticket sales because its really consumer fraud, so can you in other areas. So there are some really interesting conversations going on. Host you began at the fcc. Guest yeah, exactly. Host and what kind of work were you doing there . Guest so when i got to the fcc, Vice President al gore had said that he wanted to make this new information superhighway be able to enable a girl in carthage, tennessee, be able to read anything she wanted in the library of congress. I got to the fcc, and they said figure out how to do this. So i had the pleasure of working with a whole bunch of educators and technologists and the people at the fcc who knew how all this regulatory policy worked and members of congress, Olympia Snowe and ed markey. E markeys now a senator, Olympia Snowe is now retired. They championed the erate that was named by oh, sorry, i was going to say senator rockefeller was involved as well. And it became a 2 Million Program that helped fund we had a situation where if you were a teacher in a classroom, you had no phone. A kid was sick, you had to go to the Principals Office to make a phone call, leaving your class behind. We now have Internet Connection in 98, 99 of all classroomings. So that was probably the highlight of my career. Host you were recently quoted as saying that prior to 2016 there was an internet utopianism. Were we naive . Guest i think maybe we didnt keep up the policy dialogue and thinking what bad things could happen and how do we prevent them from happening. And i think a bunch of people figured that out, some bad actors, and we now need to have this societal conversation. And what im afraid of is theres a red herring that says that everything that happens on the internet is free speech. But some of what were seeing is fraud. And so i think we need to really, you know, put on our policy hats and figure out how to address this. But before we with, you know, one thing i want to say is the platforms themselves have power to do some things. And it would be better if they could do some things on their own before we get into regulations. Host such as . Guest such as more transparency along the lines of the honest ads act, such as bots. There was im sure you saw there was a New York Times piece just yesterday talking about how one firm in florida sold 200 million fake followers to people on twitter. I mean, you can crack down on things like that. Host overall guest yes. Host the internet, positive for democracy . Guest i think host in your view . Guest ing i think that story is still yet to be told, dont you . I mean, i think its done a tremendous amount of good. Im still an internet optimist, but i think we have to be realist too, and i think we have to make sure. I think we cant just hope that this new technology is going to be good for democracy. We have to make sure it is. Thats not an option. We have to make sure that it furthers democracy and isnt used to undermine it. Host is it fair to call facebook and twitter and google searches the New York Times, the new abc world news . Guest you know, its really interesting. So edelman, the pr firm, they do this trust barometer every year around the time of the World Economic forum x and they just came out with one that showed remarkably that trust in the platforms has gone down to almost a sixyear low whereas trust in journalism has gone up. And thats very, very interesting because i think in general the proliferation of news outlets and the propaganda that disguises itself as journalism has brought down trust in journalism over the years. And i wonder if people are starting to separate that out and starting to realize what real journalism is. And i think one of the things we have to figure out how to do is make that distinction. You know, what is real journalism that does fact checking, that has a masthead so you know who wrote things, that does corrections, you know . We have to make a distinction about what that kind of journalism is so Something Else cant pose as that and get our implicit trust. Host karen kornbluh, one of the critiques of todays world is that weve become more tribal, and thats in thats one of the things youre talking about today at the state of the net conference. Guest yes. But i dont like that description of whats happening because im afraid its blaming humans, people, voters when for sort of naturally using social media and breaking into groups. Whats really been happening is manipulation. All these fake pages that send out ads and get you to follow them, and it sounds like, you know, theyre telling you real facts or that theyre based in america, and theyre actually overseas. If you look at whats happening in myanmar, you realize this isnt just us, and this isnt just about russia. In myanmar theres a genocide thats been furthered most people get their news from facebook, and there are these hatefilled news items that are going out from the military, from some radical clerics attacking and saying that theyre doing things that theyre not and really manipulating people into terrible acts of violence. So i do think theres a problem with tribalism, but thats not my number one concern right now. Its this manipulation thats happening thats forcing us into bubbles. Host what are you doing today . With your profession . Guest oh, im a senior fellow at the council on Foreign Relations for digital policy. And i run a round table there on politics, digital politics. Host karen kornbluh, former ambassador to the organization for Economic Cooperation and development, has been our guest on the communicators. Guest thank you. Host so, miranda boeingen, what do you do for a living . Guest i work at upturn which is a nonprofit based in washington, d. C. , and we work at the intersection of technology and social change. We research and look at issues where technology is driving the forces of social change and where that can impact certain communities more than others and especially communities that dont have a voice in how thats governed. So we try to make sure policy conversations are really grounded in how the technology works, but also the people that theyre going to impact most. Host give an example of how technology is affecting social change. Guest so technology plays a role in so many Different Things in society. In particular today at the state of the net were talking about elections. So when we log into, lets say, facebook, what we see is a stream of content that comes from our friends and our family and news outlets we follow and organizations that we support. Theres so much cop tent, theres content, theres so many messages being sent online that we cant possibly see it all. So what these platforms do is basically decide what they think that well be most interested in. And theyre using technology, theyre using Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to predict what were interested in and to show us more of that. And it turns out that seeing things that we like and things that we agree with are not actually that great for democracy because were getting stuck in our own little communities, were becoming more polarized, and we dont really have a shared narrative about really important policy issues like discrimination, like immigration, like voting rights. We really need to debate as a society and make sure were not going backwards. Host well, were all pretty aware of the balkanization and how we get into our own little tribes sometimes. Two things, how is that affecting those who arent creating the technology, and whats the, whats the possible change that could be made . Guest so in the early days of the internet, there was a lot of excitement that this new technology, this platform was going to give people a voice who didnt have one. And i think what weve seen in the past year, year and a half is that thats certainly not always the case. Because even if you have a platform, there are so many forces that can really drown out those voices. There are malicious actors that are trying to overpower the voices of communities that are trying to fight for their rights and also governments are coming in and trying to react to some of the problems that we saw in this past election in a way that can really backfire. So, for instance, after the hubbub about fake news and a lot of concern about hate speech online, there are moves in government in the u. S. And also in the u. K. And in germany to enact laws that will force technology platforms, social media platforms to proactively police the content thats going up online and to take down content that might be fake or that might be hate speech or that might otherwise not comply with these laws. And what these companies now have to do to comply with the law to do so fast enough is turn to Machine Learning tools, to Artificial Intelligence to flag what content might be problem mat you can. But the problem is problematic. But this technology is still in the very early days, and so what happens is it sweeps up a lot of people who might be having might be voicing legitimate dissent to governments, and thats especially a problem for communities that havent had a voice, and their content, their messages might be getting taken down, and they dont have any way to fight against that. They dont have any way to make sure that theyre not being actually targeted by governments to make sure that their voices arent heard. And so were really trying to think about how the dynamics of the internet and how as Technology Advances it gets even more complicated, how were making sure that those people who really need to have their voices heard and fight for some of the civil rights protections that weve already granted as a society, that we dont let those protections erode. Host is there an element of censorship in there . Guest i think there is a risk that the demands of government for platforms versus content might get too close to censorship, and i think were at the risk of cutting off the nose to spite the face here, you know, trying to tamp down on misinformation and malicious actors online. We might be suppressing speech which is really critical for the flourishing of democracy. So i think its a tight line that we need to walk here, and we dont want to tip too far in either direction. Host miranda boggen, whats an issue that upturn concentrates on . Guest so upturn does a lot of work many areas like criminal justice where technology is starting to be used to make predictions about people to decide who stays in jail and whos released or to tell police where to focus their efforts in a community. And we think this is really problematic because the tools that are being used are based on Machine Learning which learns patterns from the past. And we know that there are patterns in the past that we dont want to be repeating, we want to be fixing. And by turning to Technology Without appropriation thought, without appropriate governance and oversight, were going to repeat patterns like racism, like discrimination of certain communities that immigrate to this country or to receive credit. And were going to push those into the future in a way thats going to be even harder for us to disentangle. So we try to make sure that policymakers and local governments and National Governments are really thinking through how these technologies are being used, what the purpose of them is. If we agree that thats an appropriate purpose for that technology and making sure there are safeguards so we dont inadvertently hurt the very people that were trying to help. Host if people are interested in learning more about upturn, where do they go . Guest we have our web site, its www. Teamupturn. Org. We publish our research and reports there. And we also publish a weekly newsletter or called equal future where we put out a collection of weekly news clips that really highlight how civil rights and technology is intersecting in all different areas including the economy, including online civic life and including criminal justice, and thats how we keep track of whats going on and also share with Civil Society organizations, our partners and with anyone in the public who wants to keep uptodate with these issues. Host teamupturn. Org. Miranda bogen has been our guest on the communicators. If youd like to see more of cspans communicators programs, go to cspan. Org and look under the series link on the home page. Cspan, where history unfolds daily. In 1979, cspan was created as a Public Service by americas Cable Television companies. And today we continue to bring you unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the Supreme Court and Public Policy events in washington, d. C. And around the country. Cspan is brought to you by your cable or satellite provider. Wednesday morning were live in santa fe, new mexico, for the next stop on the cspan bus 50 capitols tour. Former new mexico governor Bill Richardson and House Speaker brian egolf will be our guests during washington journal starting at 9 15 eastern. Next, former representatives Russ Carnahan and donald manzullo, from the National Archives in washington, this is an hour and af
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