Our event today its not just democracy, integrity and elections but in the 2020 elections. Wewe have a time horizon of 14 months. I think michael put it off very well, in terms of what the scenario looks like, its sort of a butterfly ballot on steroids, if we have a close election, if we have a contested result and even just a couple of counties and there has been a Disinformation Campaign that is exposed that may have skewed the results, what i worry about is i dont know how we quite survived second election here in the country, a second president ial election that comes into serious question and at pan america we come at this at slightly different angle, we are freespeech organization and we see guardians of open discourse and of truth and we are not digital specialists, we are not election specialists, we are an organization of writers and journalists and editors and publishers and people who are invested in the quality of our discourse and our ability to sort facts from falsehood and all of that we see as very much at stake in this debate, so we are delighted to be partnering with the fec today and as we move forward, for us just one other point, for us the International Context weighs very heavily, our traditional work is work on behalf of imperilled writers and freedom of expression around the world and so to see and recognize these dangers here in our own country and the kind of alienation from the truth, sort of sense of resignation that ellen invoked in her early quote this morning from gary to even contemplate the idea that that could be in our country is a new level of alarm or new level and sense of urgency for us as an organization. Susan and others said the first session theres no Silver Bullet, thats obvious. And the hurdles to solutions, you know, weve already begun to explicate and i think theres serious of things that make it even more complicated, one is the time horizon that we face, 14 months away, so many things we heard about this morning, you know, longterm endeavors or getting past political impact, you know, we havent really talked about the politicization of these debates and the fact that when you talk about platforms taking down content, you know, that becomes highly politicized and we have seen that just in the last week on the issue of abortion. Questions of principle and viewpoints of neutrality, firstamendment precept in this country that really comes into play but they are discretionary in the midst of collective of how to draw the lines and reconcile these principles, you know, and yet we do it with a ticking clock, the tactics are not necessarily technological sophisticated and thats true but i think cull culturally are sophisticated. We never imagine that russians could target a Small Community of people in texas and get them to show up to a rally and figure out what to amplify and what to turn down tune down, micro targeting and invisibility of the tactics and the fact that, you know, solution that outlines is compelling but theres also point about how much of this goes on on messaging platforms that do not see the light of day where nobody, maybe equipped to identify, each identify what is going on and then the commercial, someone asked the question, where the Media Companies, there are some representatives, a lot of media covering this event which is great and invited quite a lot of media representatives to speak to us as a group and, you know, we didnt get many responses, you know, it is its a difficult issue and when weve had conversations about this question of the Mainstream Media amplifying stories, are they prepared to deal with Something Like the wikileaks data dump and email dumps during the 2016 election and what would be different, you know, we havent gotten a really compelling answer, i dont think that think asking far along, i know amy will talk about some of the work that shes is doing, so many hurdles to mounting an Effective Response particularly in the next 14 months but im glad to say we have a terrific panel lined up to talk about this, i will try to keep time so we have a chance so you can come in with questions and comments, we will hear from representative Stephanie Murphy of florida who is a leader on the issues and outspoken voice but the thought leader and legislative leader, we have director of strategic projects for microsoft, democracy program, spencer boyer, Washington Office at center for justice and former National Intelligence officer, amy who is fork Bureau Editor for first draft and aclu and press club, lauren, democracy, work to go counter efforts by russia to undermine Democratic Institution and tera, contributor for New York Times and producer of the podcast and media representative, we look forward to her remarks, i will turn it over first to representative murphy and then the rest of our panel and we will open it up, thank you. All right, good morning, thank you, susan, thank you to the host of this event, im really honored to be here and to offer perspectives from congress, there are roughly about 40 Election Security bills pending in congress right now and during the Panel Conversation id love to talk more about it and talk about a bit of the prospects for success of some of the bills and hopefully surprise pleasantly some of the most pessimistic folks, the audience today but what id like to do is open with broader themes right now, you know, ive i really try to take a leading role when it comes to protecting our democratic processes for personal reasons, i have a National Security background having worked at the department of defense under george w. Bush and at the time the main threat that the country was facing from other nations was potential use of traditional weapons of war, as knowledged evolved the nature of conflict has evolved as well, so today our adversaries are more likely to use malware than missiles to advance their interest and undermine ours. The security challenges we confront will only become more complex, for example, son they will be able to spread misinformation, disinformation through hyperrealistic but forged video and audio and we are just beginning to understand that threat but we are here today because one of the favorite tactics of our of autocratic governments is to use cyber tools to chisel away at foundations of our democracy, the free and Fair Elections, they seek preferred candidate and undermine voters confidence and or on the claim that democracy is the best form of government and we know that in the runup in 2016. And they proved in some cases, Computer Networks of state and local Election Officials and this they were in a position to be able to alter Voter Registration databases and perhaps even vote tabulation system and that leads to the second reason im passionate about this issue and thats that i represent the swing part of the swing state of florida. Florida was a focus of russias effort in the 2016 election and the state will likely continue to be central to any foreign effort to intervene in 2020, our country has a target on its back and florida Election Officials and voters are the bulls eye, for me its an issue that hits home. After all florida is the home of misprinted ballots and other, other very challenging situations when that state is always so narrowly captured. Finally, i believe that politics is the art of the possible and as pragmatic democrat from the moderate wing, from a moderate district with National Security credentials im hopeful that my voice will resinate and that i will be well positioned to be able to work with republicans towards legislative response to this threat in addition to working with my democratic colleagues, i think our goal should be to enact into law the best of the bipartisan Election Security bills that are pending in congress and, you know, some stuff we should take ourself evident, Congress Must provide federal, state and local agencies to harden infrastructure and agencies should hire cyber tech to fight against threat. You know, the assault on our democracy in 2016 not unlike the 9 11 attack exposed gaps in our defensive that adversaries exploited. The difference in the home game away game and they used the differences and authorities in the setup how we defend our country and exploited the cracks in the system, so we have some work to do there. In addition, i think congress has to reduce the barriers that make it harder for information to flow between government and state and locals responsible for infrastructure, one challenge is that these officials often lack the required security clearance, so we need to streamline that process. Robust resources, better personal sharing across Government Agencies is necessary but thats not sufficient to produce the kind of comprehensive american strategy that we are looking for, we need a whole Society Approach in which the private sector and regular citizens comprehend the threat and commit to do their part to combat it, for Tech Companies, you know, their platforms have become the battlefield in this bloodless conflict and i spent years in the private sector and believe that Corporate Social Responsibility should include a sense of corporate patriotism and the firms can do more to mitigate the problem without congressional mandate and without compromising american values, they need to help us enforce the laws that exist and our laws prohibit foreign dollars in our elections and if that means a modest hit to their bottom line, i think its a small sacrifice for a larger purpose. And ultimately we need to recognize that when it comes to information warfare, it is the 215 million eligible voters in this country that are in the front lines of this fight. Its their vote that foreign powers are seeking to influence through false online content and stolen data dump, its their ability to vote and risk if foreign actors penetrate Computer Networks, a key component of our strategy should be to arm voters of knowledge of the nature and severity of the threat they face and the best defense against disinformation is accurate information. When our enemies seek for confusion, we should speak with clarity and canned candor and i think there are two real reasons why Civic Education hasnt occurred to the extent that it should and both are within our power to fix, the first is our National Security establishments sort of tension for secrecy, its culture of classification, its default position of not sharing detailed threat information with the American People and in the context of other National Security challenges when youre talking about kinetic warfare, kinetic action, it might make sense, the tendency of the government did he feel defeating, how do we expect to take seriously russia going into 2020 when we dont release detailed information about russia, what russia did in 2016 until 3 years after the fact and then only in heavily redacted report published not by federal agencies but by special counsel which was oneoff event in Senate Committee report. Those are the two sources of disinformation and continues to be difficult to get that information out to the public, so simply put while taking caution not to jeopardize, our government should air on the side of telling citizens more and not less when foreign powers interfere with our democracy. Our citizens can then counter the threat by scrutinizing the information they view online by checking Voter Registration data to confirm it wasnt tampered with and by Holding Accountable state and local officials who failed to protect election infrastructure and that leads me to the second reason why Civic Education has fallen short and also key factor to explaining why congress hasnt passed more Election Security bills and this would be my final point. The problem isnt the topic of Election Security, the problem is that the topic of Election Security has been poisoned by partison politics and this is a bad thing, but significant percentage of Republican Voters dont believe russia interfered at all. Those who dosome dont seem upset about it as others have pointed out, the u. S. Will never muster a whole of Society Response if the whole of society doesnt first acknowledge the problem. In order to close the partisan divide, republicans and dental contracts in congress have to Work Together to reframe Election Security as nonpartisan issue, for Republican Leaders what this means is that they have to publicly endorse our intelligence communities conclusion that moscow meddled in our elections in 2016 and will do so again in 2020. It means clearly stating that u. S. Elections should be contest between candidates, ideas and values decided by our citizens in accordance to laws and means pointing out that american patriots of every political stripe should view attempts by foreign power to manipulate democratic process as an attack on our security and sovereignty, period. As for democratic leaders, we have to stop relitigating the results of the 2016 election and publicly accept that donald trump won. And im hopeful that this would give republicans the political space they need to accept that russia interfered in the election without fear that such acceptance will be pounced upon bipartisans determine today question to president s legitimacy. If leaders of the two parties fulfill the respective responsibilities i think it will facilitate the passage of bipartisan Election Security legislation and that has to be the overwriting goal, we have a narrow window of opportunity to create the space to be able to do so. Thank you. [applause] your comments are so logical and coherent and make so much sense and i hope in the discussion we will come back to exactly how you think that can be operationalized and sequenced and which pieces of that we might be able to accomplish in the months ahead, spencer blare over to you. Well, thank you, susan and thank you to all the cosponsors for having me, ive been asked to open thing up on my end by discussing lessons learn from my time in the Intelligence Community or as we call it the ic that might be applicable for news organizations and social media forms trying to figure out how to get a handle on disinformation as we head towards 2020 and i think its a great question because actually no one has ever asked me this before, so let me just do 3 things in my allotted 5 minutes, no more than 6, one described what Intelligence Analysts actually do compared to policy analysts to get us on the same page, two, discuss how intel analysis is impacted for good or will by political and policy leaders and 3, how this relates to what traditional and social media organizations are grappling with today, so given that i was a Deputy Assistant secretary of state for european and duration affairs right before coming the National Intelligence officer for europe in the National Intelligence council which is part of the office of director of National Intelligence, i experienced the policy versus intel role firsthand in short order and the bottom line is this, if youre a policy official and, again, some of you may noticed but to get everybody together here, your job is to figure out what needs to be done in regional and context and implement, when you are an intelligence official your job is to report the best analysis of the fact that is you have so that senior policymakers can make informed decisions and hopefully the best decisions on a particular issue. So in other words, your job is to report the most relevant information either in written or oral form and then to shut up which is very, very hard to do, ive learned from my own experience, you might see policymakers about to make a terrible mistake, but its not your job in the Intelligence Community to say, for god sakes stop, dont do that, now, might be clear from the intelligence that option a is the best option available but everyone in the situation room is coalescing around option 2, youre not being paid as an official to try to convince them otherwise, also in the National Intelligence council which is like the think tank of the Intelligence Community, your job is to try to integrate the analysis of the entire Intelligence Community in your particular area, so a rough analogy should be impartial news veteran that is trying to give information so others can make informed decisions for themselves, policy official is more like an oped writer or commentator who is trying to figure out the trusted information but then figure out how to digest it and make use of it and get it out there and have a specific agenda. So in an ideal world the two lanes would obviously be separate but we have seen what happened when the worlds collide, we saw the white house signaling what kind of information they wanted in the leadup to the 2003 decision to go to war with iraq and we saw the ic buckle under pressure and go too far, i think, in pleasing senior policymakers, afterwards that was a real reckoning within the ic in an attempt to get back to basics with better trade craft, through better training, better channels of communication for those who felt pressured and more of an emphasis on the transparency of sourcing and argument aentation, from my own experience in the ic from the beginning of 2014 and mid2017, a bit over from the Obama Administration to the Trump Administration that emphasis was very much still there and actually the common complaint was that perhaps the pendulum had swung too far and intel had become too bland to water down so what the the similarities and challenges by social Media Companies and the ic when it comes to sorting through the veracity of information, a few thoughts here, while the ic has some of the best data and analysis around because of the expertise of many serving within the ic and the depths of sources and methods available to it, senior ic officials can still have bias based on background, their analytic framework, home agency and all the agencies, 17 intelligence agencies if you count or deny, they are all different cultures and the media theres the same issue, even the best reporters have biases based on their experience, the loyalty to various sources who view things in a certain way and historical strength and weakens of their own organization, one way the ic deals with this is do collaborative efforts such as ic assessment that is hash out differences, attempt to attempt to find consensus on issues noting areas of disagreement. You know, the one thats best known is the nie project, the flagship of the Intelligence Community and medium and shorterlength futures as well, this is harder to do in the media world especially given the lack of incentive to cooperate with other news outlets and the race to break stories first. But you could pick for a world in which theres more transparency regarding sourcing and argumentmentation and one noting of differences of Expert Opinion as opposed to noting the differences in Public Opinion or the differences and views of doctors who have clear agendas. Policymakers also dont like hedged and vague predictions, like theres a good chance the sun may or may not run in the east sometime next year but they also dont like specific intelligence prediction that is dont pan out, so this is a challenge i think with the general public and the news media, folks often want to have information thats actionable in their minds, they want to have some direction and know what to do with so many things going on in the world, thus they turn to news outlets and social media sites that are edgier an not shy on giving opinions, so policymakers will sometimes attempt to get intelligence officials to be bolder in their prediction than maybe warranted, the use of confidence levels and confidence level terminology, for example, high, medium and low to helps whether analyst, Intelligence Analyst is confident in information, analytic judgment is something to be considered as well by the outside world, im not sure it would fully work and then final let me end by saying, you know, many of the Election Security bills that have been referenced here today by senator warren, congresswoman murphy and others that deal with finance transparency, dekeptor practices, you know, are probably best bet in short run to deal with some of the challenges of 2020 but do i think its worth looking to the ic for best practices at least in the medium term, i will stop there. Thanks very much spencer, really interesting reasons and experience in the arm of our government that is most practiced at distilling and sorting throw information though albeit imperfectly nonetheless, a good segue, National Security background to her work on russia thank, its great to be with all of you and great to follow not only the panel this morning but these two wonderful marks, i will be pretty brief and i will try to be practical on solutions that i think we can we can take, given the frame of the conversation, i would say, though, that a lot of these are not solution that is will be Silver Bullets between now and november of 2020, while i realize that that may be frustrating for everybody who wants to have a simple answer, i guess i would say that i think its really important for us to bear in mind that even while we are, of course, sitting at sec and having the conversation in the election frame, when we look at the strategy that our adversaries are using and this is something that congresswoman spoke eloquently and elections are not actually the end goal of the operations, to quote one of my colleagues who put this in quite nice terms, elections are not a starting point or end point, they are a flash point and i think that its really important that as we look at policy solutions we understand in fact, strategy thats coming at us and that things didnt stop after 2016, restart for 2018, stop after that, restart going into 2020, not a question of any foreign governments coming back or launching a new attack, these nephew stop and theyve been ongoing and they build on successive operations in Campaign Plan and i dont mean campaign as in candidates, i mean, Campaign Plan and thats exactly what is happening, so in fact, in many ways we are more vulnerable heading into 2020 because of the on going attacks on our Democratic Institutions that we have been experiencing from at least 2013 according to most of both declassified intelligence estimates and special counsel mueller reports, so i think thats really important for us to bear in mind that even though i dont think theres Silver Bullet solutions between now and 2020, even if we get everything right in advance of 2020, the threat is not going to go away and, in fact, it continues that russia is not the only player in the game, we can list a whole other actors that are engaged in the operations, the technology continues to evolve as weve heard from others, so this is an area where we are going to have to really continue to stay on our to toesd understand that the resilience of them will be ongoing piece of not only our defense of our institutions but in these operations going forward. So what can we do . First, identifying malicious actor, manipulative behavior requires new information sharing that we have not done well in the past. This requires new information sharing within government, murphy spoke to, new structures to share information to ensure its integrated since im following spent spencer i will reference some of the things that we need to do internally which is using opensource information, one of the reasons that we missed this in advance of 2016 that we were not looking in front of our noses for a lot of activity, there are issues of authorities where Intelligence Community can look at some kinds of information that involve american citizens, those are things that i know that congress is looking at, ways that we can make adjustment that protect privacy and enable us to protect security as much as we did after 911 to deal with terrorism threat, but also a need for better kind of information sharing between public and private sector, the way i think about it, the government, Law Enforcement community has a particular set of information thats data that has access to about foreign malicious actors, activity and ip addresses, et cetera, the social media forms are the the ones who best know and in some instances the authoritys reasons, frankly for constitutional reasons our Law Enforcement agencies can and probably should look at some of that activity, we need to have new models to bring that information together in order to identify the threats on a much more systematic way, stop playing and go with this in a much more systematic way. There have been steps taken by dhs, fbi and others to build linkages with the social media forms over the past 3 years, i welcome those developments, they are largely ad hoc and have not gone nearly far enough. We need to have robust on going and permanent mechanism that is protect to enable sharing of that information. We also need to take steps to address the vulnerability that is we know have been exploited in the past that we have basically just let lie open wide, so spencer mentioned, we know this is not going to be a Silver Bullet solution, most using political ads that were paid for, organic content, we know that they used political ads and we know that that is a vulnerability that we can close off and we should, some of the companies have taken their own steps to to ensure transparency and disclose around the ads thats welcome but they are using different kinds of standards and when youre relying on disclosure regime that is putting the burden on citizens to use that information to understand what they are seeing and you have different definitions by Different Companies and different standards by Different Companies it makes us more vulnerable about confusing the public rather than having uniform standard, exposure of manipulation is absolutely critical to reducing effectiveness and to deterring it and others have spoken to the role of social media forms and disclosing these kinds of information, government has a role to play here, we have seen some of this through both the Intelligence Community assessment as well as some of the indictments from the department of justice and the mueller report, the department of justice has spoken to an ongoing strategy of exposure around the operations, i hope to see much more of that actually happening and i think this is, you know, not the continue to harp back on conversation but its an interesting one here because theres a natural tension between Intelligence Analysts or operators who basically want to baseball to continue to watch the threat and gain information and policymakers who want to do something about it and i know that theyre ongoing conversations within government now about to what degree exposure actually compromises our ability to see whats happening and i think its an important conversation, ive come down firmly on the side of need to go expose these kinds of operations both from the government and private sector, last point is that i think that we need to understand that Information Operations are one part of a larger operation, larger strategy to undermine our democracy, again, the congressman spoke to this, these are tools that are used in combination, we tend to silo on the issues and thats how we tend to miss these kinds of things, i know that congress and the executive branch have been looking at a number of different pieces of legislation and changes to be made that would enable more integration across the government and i think thats absolutely the kind of thing we need to do and we need to understand that while we are talking about information integrity today, things like secure elections act which should sure up the integrity of our election systems will make our democracy less vulnerable to an attack and information attack that basically seeks to create the impression that our election was manipulated with because if people doubt integrity of the election systems themselves, they are going to be more vulnerable to an Information Operation that claims the election has been altered. And i think that we need to understand, again, how the different pieces fit together and look at comprehensive solutions, thanks. Thank you so much, lauren, i want to in the discussion i hope we will come back to just kind of exactly how, you know, representative murphy talked about what our government should be doing, what would be logical, what makes so much sense and what happens and yet unusual environment where many of those avenues for the moment to be closed, so i want to hone in on what ch are open, to move in a different direction but also very practical and operational [inaudible] better . I like what you were saying about flash points because if you look at 2020, its not just the election, think about every primary and caucus state, the census which is about over 2 months, we have the convention, theres also the olympics, election day and whomever wins because whoever wins theyll be issues on both sides thrown a couple of hurricanes, Mass Shootings and i think its going to be a crazy time to be a journalist and probably just be a witness in the public but one of the things that my organization does is trains journalists all over the world, we train them to monitor disinformation, we teach them to verify that information that they find and then we teach them or encourage responsibility reporting once they find the information, so its about not amplifying and calling things what they are instead of talk masculinity and those kinds of things, one of the things that we were alarmed by and will be talking point wherever we go is that 15 of journalists in the United States have been trained on how to report of misinformation, in terms of journalists getting hoaxed, they are sitting ducks for this kind of content, we want to try and bridge that knowledge gap and at least make them aware that there are things that are possible to check to see if that photo was taken where it was and by the person who said it was. So one of the things we launched last week was Campaign Together now, 10 trainings all over the u. S. , monitor information and to report together hon a collaborative, collaborative way, maybe something that you were talking about, what we want to do not just have journalism, Research Intelligence people as well as topic experts, so we can have experts on the platform and then deal with long lines at the booting voting booths, we can have an allright expert, cross check that we used in election projects, we have done this before, weve had open collaborative project meaning we sent out reports to the public in france, brazil and nigeria, we do close projects as well, we send subscribers and part of that is sending information that we says is coming, we can identify that there is charlottesville going to happen six weeks out, we can also identify things that that we want journalists to think about strategically before they report it. So these are the places that will have our events, what we want to do is go into student to student universities with journalism programs to have that as neutral training grounds and by local and hyperlocal reporters in that area and region so that we can train them altogether, then we would set up somewhat of a bureau there with the students, with faculty supervisor to send us signals that theyre seeing in their area, things that we might not see and things that they have questions about, there was some Facebook Post or event post that were written in english and send in teams in gastonia, they say its russia obsessed or russian information or they can confirm it. Thats how we intend to work across borders. So one of the things that we teach during our trainings is this information, what you see in professional media is sometimes owned in the anonymous web, and that was something, that was the case in charlottesville that was the case and we knew things were happening well in advance and if we could alert news rooms to this with the caveat of dont amplify this, hasnt reached what we call a tipping point, then we wont always be on the fact foot when it comes to understanding how donald trump start tweeting about south african farmers, we can explain to people that that is yearslong Conspiracy Theory thats been reactivated through the food chain, breitbart, Tucker Carlson and then the president s twitter profile. We are talking about the tipping point. We dont want to create rumors, we want to explain them and to, again, fortify news rooms with this information that they that they should check further back to see whether this information has landed, often times, i mean, 25 of all verified twitter users are journalists, once something hits on twitter journalists want to write about it. So we will do inperson trainings and reporting booklets and checklists on disinformation, we will continue the training support with webinars and also a couple of summit that is we will have next year to Exchange Best Practices and often times people who are working on the disinformation beat are in news room and dont often have support from other colleagues in the news room to to think about best practices and supervising editor who can push back on the reporting and really challenge what theyre working on, we will do a Certificate Program so people on the platform can be identified on basecertificate holder, digital, certification of excellence and they will be part of the crosscheck community. So, again, we can all Exchange Information and best practices. Looking forward to discussions on your comments, to what degree theres highlevel buyin in terms of taking a different approach to questionable information, you know, i think information about a candidates health thats unverified maybe disinformation or maybe not and that decision about how to treat that information, you know, one that gets made in realtime and can be consequential, you know without necessarily knowing whether youre dealing with the disinformation or not. Over to you jenny, thank you. Thank you, the good thing about being second to the last is you tend to repeat information, that makes me more believer so i find advantage to this position, so thank you. One of the comments that keeps coming up is this concept that i think susan brought up first around Silver Bullets and i think we are all on the same page, theres no Silver Bullets but there are things we can do collective by to work towards a solution, we as people and that can be mankind or americans, have tackled seemingly impossible problems before and, you know, the good news is you all have here, overflow space, people care about this, we are working together. To coming together and resolving issues. Panels like this are great, but some of what laura was referring to before is probably whatpushes us more towards success which are a lot of those agreements , how we all talk to each other, Work Together collectively to push real results. How we work with congress and others to achieve that so first is the multistate approach, the second is i think we all know we are dealing in a real dirt in our main institutions where there was trust, it has been eroded over time in part due to campaigns such as the one were here to talk about. The trust in our governments are not quite as strong and certainly theres not any kind of consensus. It was interesting to hear senator warner refer to trust people have in their social media platforms which is such an interesting way of putting it when you think about the fact that trust in those companies doesnt seem to be as strong as it once was but there is a trust platform and i thought it was an interesting way to think about it. It got me thinking a bit more about the concept and trust in the media, again, another Vital Institution thank you for the work youre doing and i look forward to hearing your comments about how the media is approaching this because thats a big issue and then third is again something that was mentioned previously which is education. And the idea that the public and i mean that to include anybody in this room. Myself too, we should go back and listen to the presentation from lisa earlier. Weresusceptible to believing the things that we already believe. To be reinforced. So this is a collective problem, its not just those other people dealing with this in the middle states. This is something we all are grappling with and are all susceptible to so when we think about education, we should think of it holistically. Some tangible things though that i think are since this is the Solutions Panel, hows it going so far . Are we feeling better . This is the Solutions Panel lets talk about some of the things that are being done that are creative, innovative, maybe breaking through. Im a fan of the work that the team around educating information, they had a recent campaign that i still havent heard about talking about whether pineapples belong on pizza and what was so creative is they were able to identify, they also have flag which is very innovative. You should get those stickers, their great but the idea was how do we find an issue that divides us already thats not political, thats not going to cause us to go down any radical radicals in this question of whether we should put pineapple on a pizza seems to resonate. I am strongly opposed to pineapple on pizza. There are others who will get up and yell at me right now because they feel strongly the other way so what they did was to this concept and put together in infographics to show how our adversaries identify these issues and start to drive wedges between us and the stages they go through to build out a Disinformation Campaign so the wedges are already there. We already disagree on pineapple on pizza but what they do is find a way to manipulate an issue like that and really divide us further so that was one creative thing you wouldnt necessarily expect to come out of government that had a little bit of a moment online. I think taylor swift tweeted about it from what ive heard so it did generate some interest and it was just i thought onesmall example of how people can think creatively around this topic of education. Switching gears a little bit, we talked a lot or have heard some people prefer to this idea of blind spots, essentially we were sitting ducks in 2016. We didnt see this coming and i see though we pretty collectively. What is that thing for 2020 . What is that thing wherenot seeing that the evidence is right in front of us and perhaps were not sharing information properly in a way to identify . It does seem like a lot of us are in front of the idea of defects, the manipulation of media, synthetic media and theres really great progress on that. Its something to be curious about, the solutions not there yet so dont get excited but the idea is that companies and academics and the government are all running lots of great initiatives to try and solve this problem of how do you identify the video as notreal and its really a factor to that second point of trust. Lets say where it even technically do it, how do we convince people that its not real. What does that look like so lots of questions around that as well. So ill reserve the time for questions but those are the ways that wevebeen approaching and thinking about this issue of disinformation. I see also we work a lot on Election Security more generally so im happy to get into those conversations as well. Thank you so much jenny. For an upbeat and forwardlooking set of comments and last but certainly not least, tara swisher. Im not upbeat. Im going to take it real down low. But its nice to your happiness from microsoft, isnt it . Years ago theywere evil. Not today. And i recommend you reading a book by the president of microsoft, toolsand weapons which i think discusses this. Thanks for endorsing it. Its a great book about the fact that the internet is a weapon and technology has turned into a weapon much the same way a knife would be or anything else and is a great book to talk about this but i bring you know solutions and only problemsso let me go through a coupleof things. And then will talk about it. One , the fact that there are 40 bills in our legislative body and none of them has and what has occurred is an appalling indictment of our legislative system and our government. I think its really astonishing that the russians could do so much damage in the short time or at least take advantage of our vulnerabilities without Immediate Response from our legislature and the executive branch and i think we have to think hard about what that means. In this country. First of all, the russians lost the cold war. They lost it. Prettycrappy country , full of stuff that they just did, they lost it but their winning this war. Its cheap, its easy. Its easy to be sneaky. Its easy to use the tools we created in Silicon Valley and we went on most of the nature, Technology Tools have been created in this country and its something to be proud of but unfortunately its been used by other countries to undermine ours which is ironic in some ways but entirely true. They lost the whole war with machines. They lost it to the military, lost it with missiles and now they have all kinds of tools that we build and are usingit against us which i think is somewhat ironic. Its built on the reason why its so easy to do this is the company that have been built in this country like google,facebook, amazon, you can name the whole sector and theyre not as a group , every company is very different. Microsoft doesnt have a lot of culpability in what happened because they fail that social media but thats another issue altogether. But thats good. , its factual, im sorry. But google and facebook are the principal problems. I think most people agree on and some others. Especially all the various different sites like reddit and others the fact of the matter is these companies have no regulation. The 10 richest people in this world if you make a list, that are the 10 most powerful companies, most of them arent companies. I think the list came out and most of them are Company People and the companies themselves, the first trillion Dollar Companies are all Tech Companies, amazon, apple and google might have come in close at least. But none of these Companies Even as the most powerful or richest on earth have no regulation. Our Internet Companies have no regulation. I have regulation that helps them. Its akin to 30 of the communications which protects their behaviors which is a great thing and it can be a great thing. But it really doesnt get them brought immunity from any kind of behavior that they have to deal with so here we have an industry and if you thought about wall street or Chemical Companies or cigarettecompanies , about any substantive regulation is somewhat astonishing at 20 years into this our legislature should not have been able to begin to understand their impact and at the same time it grows in an enormous impact on the 20 years in ways that were still trying to grasp and i think all of usunderstand that the companies are in charge of our future right now. In many critical ways, not just related to elections but related to our children, are related toour society, related to partisanship. Humans are humans but these companies have been able to use these tools they built, some of which are astonishing, most of which are astonishing of them allow them to become weapon eyes via amplification and enrichment. They have created platforms that encourage engagement, what a terrible word, engagement. Engagement now is an arrangement, that is really how the tools have been architected and how theyve been built. The reason you react the way you do is there going to be indicative andbuilt to enrage you and pushhere over anything else , fear and anger. When you put a, the recent President Trump is so good on twitter , hes playing into exactly the way the architecture was built which is to create anger. Create fear and once you do that, i think its 18, 19 percent more likely to be angry will be retweeted over any way, a video although i like a videomyself. But the fact of the matter is the way these things have been architected, they been architected forengagement, for virality and for speed. Something architected for context, accuracy and other things, they have a different result so the way theyve been designed most of them as not been in a way that encourages anything else and how does this relate to elections . Autocrats like the internet, they dont like the open internet, they love it. Its the ability to use propaganda indiscriminately, the ability to confuse and distort an upset. It placed perfectly into their ability to create a population that cynical and angry, addicted and unable to understand how trust in the institutions they long thought were trustworthy. The addiction is not a small thing. A lot of people say dont look at your phonewhen people walk down the street. I can yell the run behind people and scream at them. Look up, see what happens. The fact of the matter is these are addictive thingsand they create a perfect situation for autocrats to use them in ways that are dangerous to our population. Slowly but surely take away our ability to think good things about the really amazing institutions of democracy. None of this sounds really great but i think what you have to imagine is we got, you want to come up with solutions, washington needsto do its job and begin to regulate these companies. And lots of different ways, theres all kinds of ways to do it. There is no National Privacy bill, theres no True Protection of elections and political sales. The fact that this, this is the most benign of things like dont do cheating ads, okay. Its really astonishing. As i said, what relates to is something im thinking about writing about four times this week. Is water under the bridge corruption. It happened, we let things happen. We let the russians go by. We let it occur and then its water under the bridge. We cant do anything about it and then the corruption takes hold and thats the new reality. We have to think very hard about how we are not angry about this. How were not incensed of this fact and get our public officials, excuse me, all of them on both sides begin to do a number of things to include much more stringent regulation of these Internet Companies in ways that do not take away their innovation but also, but does protect thepopulists. Let me end on, i hate to do a negative but i am. The representative talk about corporate patriotism. The patriotism they have is towards their shareholders. Its just that way. The Business Roundtable which now and again find this ethics and they will lose them very soon by the way. Talk about that there are more people involved in the company andjust the shareholders that we should start to think about. All the stakeholders in the Company Including employees, including customers and society. We have to get back to that aspect which was a long time in this country that there is more to these Companies Just there, just the bottom line, just their value. I often went idle after these companies a lot, they tell me one thing they tend to do, is telling two things and then will talk about it is this is really hard. This is really hard to protect, this amplification. This is like an arsonist telling me that they dont know how to build a downturn. Its really hard, you should be the smartest people on earth. They shouldnt have collected all the billions of dollars they had and should have done the responsible thing and not taken the money and not created systems that weresafe. It can to Chemical Companies being allowed to dump toxic waste, maybe theyre allowed to do that now but not being allowed to spew toxicity into rivers. Its the same thing and has a more profound effect so i think we have to think hard about the relationship between Tech Companies and government which has been irreparably harmed by the snowden revelation. That really created a rift at the worst possible time before the 2016 election and we have to think hard about taking responsibility of all of us for allowing these companies to become public squares when in fact they are private squares owned by billionaires. We have to think really hard about what that means. Theyre not here in our best interests. Theyre in their best interests and we have to press them really hard to sense significant amounts of money on putting the systems in place and sometimes i think they spend more time thinking about their intermittent fasting schedules and on how to protect our elections. So perhaps we could give them a sandwich. Tell them you need to fix whats broken within your company. Thats it, i think im done. [applause] thank you tara. Before any of us get a sandwich, were lucky that we have half an hour for questions. Ive heard, id say what i count as kind of six categories of action talk about in this panel. Theres new regulation, legislation. Theres stronger enforcement of existing law which representative murphy touched on. Theres information sharing. Therespublic education. Theres Mainstream Media responsibility and accountability and theres tech Company Accountability and what i hope we put on all of that as we open up the floor and please get your questions ready and will be coming around with my but i also want to triage because it seems to mefor much of this , the only answer is a free and Fair Election and were not going to get a lot of these things done unless we can have also free and Fair Elections in 2020 so just thinking about what is the art of the possible between now and then and how do we solidify a longterm agenda around these priorities . Name is danielle, i work with a place called marvelous ai and my question is actually more i think for the representative meeting for some other panel as well. There are 40 bills and legislatures doomsday at this point in time and it seems like none of them will pass. Even if they do pass, how rigorous are you going to be about making sure that those regulations are actually enforced . How realistic is it if some abuser restrictions on Tech Companies or increase disclosures at those companies have theability to release that information . Considering earlier remarks around information sharing and being able to part your data between platforms and howimpossible that is , it seemed like it would be difficult to not only get something passed actually realistically have the implemented prior to the 20 20 election so it may not have any impact. Representative murphy. Just to clarify, i was in past one piece of legislation into law in 2018. We operated 380 million Us Election Assistance Commission for grants to local and state Election Officials. That is not nearly enough when we have spent this morning talking about the scale of what needs to be done. But that has been done. I think there have been attempts to add additional funding in the fy 19 appropriations cycle. And yes, yet we run into some troubles there. But i will say is that of the 40 bills that are out there, some of them are duplicative, some of them are companion bills so there, its not as many as it sounds like that are languishing and actually, about half of those 40, 15 to 20 are bipartisan bill so if you have i think the ability to move forward, and then i would give you a little bit of both on what candidates have. So often Appropriations Bills are the few vehicles that actually make it all the way into law so thats where a lot of if you want to get something done, you put it in there but theres another place where i think not a whole lot of people are aware of but that is a key place for us to get some of these efforts Election Security in the law and thats the annual National Intelligence authorization. It has about a different significant Election Security provisions. They covered, many of the things we talked about here about reducing the silos betweenthe agencies. So basically requiring the federal government to streamline state election officers, getting them security clearances. It has some pieces in their around the Public Disclosure so when an election system past and releasing that information when appropriate to the public , it has some Public Disclosure around the specifics and unclassified version of what happened in 2016. Its as some language in there for hardening of systems. And this is where i think we might get the biggest thing for our buck is providing, hardening of systems for 20 20 and creating an accountability trail. So that we can do what i think works which is when there is, when they are able to get into your systems or when they are able to be a presence in the system, not to change the tabulations or change Voter Registration, that leaves people open and vulnerable to the Information Operations at the second wave of that so i think those pieces are likely to become law. They are, and the most important pieces in the short term i believe are probably the pieces that are election infrastructure and provide an , like a recount capability in the event that is necessary. The election hardening is most important, we just did a podcast and microsoft is working on interesting stop around that. The question is if you can believe this go back to some sort of digital voting mechanism followed by a paper ballot area paper is our solution in terms of comics crazy. But paper, something that you can recount or ability to do that is because these are so, theres so Many Companies in this space so little innovation in voting. But its certainly possible to do things that are much more encrypted into today for eventually people will vote from their phones which seems like a giant disaster it does. The fact of the matter is you can do a lot of things with backup paper ballots and theres really interesting things happening, its just not being funded. I think the 318 million has not been disputed or something. It has. So it has to get out of the stateand its got to get out to the state thats where the game is in the states , correct . It has been distributed, its just some states have expended or even requested the grant money, the grant program. The states are where the action is read and then the states and the county and the astonishing way we do voting. So how do you win the Election Assistance Commission which distributed the 380 million, oldest related last year to the state. I have until five years to spend that money. Most of them its done on Cyber Security and new voting equipment. And we need more. It should be billions. Just for you to hand out. In the back, first person, then will go on to the item. Thank you first to acknowledge the diversity of the panel, i appreciate the different perspectives. My concern is about local Election Officials for the most part, theyre going to have smaller jurisdictions with a few thousand voters not necessarily fulltime it support but here are some solutions about how they might be able to defend themselves, especially as some of the nationstate level tools and tactics filtered down to local races where someone might want to influence say a City Council Race but using a sophisticatedDisinformation Campaign or potentially now where like ran somewhere. I can some of the things that have been done. Those are ran somewhere and those are things, theres still a lot to be done from an education standpoint bill medications, harbored no presenter has done a good job , im sure you know about this. Harvard center had done a good job of bringing together local Election Officials, but essentially right after the 2016 election led by ronnie and matt rhodes had respectably won the Clinton Campaign and Romney Campaign and they were bringing together local Election Officials , the Tech Industry and others Start Talking about these problems and how to communicate and also gave them a point of contact so they now have a point of contact at dhs who they can reach out to who can often connect them with the right people so theres some work being done especially on this information on how they communicate. Theres also a playbook they put out that helps them identify when these kind of issues are arising and how they respond. Essentially what is their plan . You have a plan and this goes away from disinformation into Incident Response for a cyber event. Thats a huge step forward from where they were on election day 2016 but theres so much more to be done in part because of your point that they dont have the sophistication often from an it tech standpoint not to mention all of the other factors would go into responding to Something Like ran somewhere attack so i know that that is an issue thats been really happening a lot in local jurisdictions across the country, not necessarily affiliated with elections but has brought everyones attention to the fact that this could easily go down on election day and lock us up around Voter Registration systems and how we respond and theyre starting to be a response to that and working with Election Officials as to how they made it, how they have backups and considering going back to paper. Even when they have electronic bullets, make sure you have a paperback delivered it and gets locked out you still have a list of every registered voter is eligible to vote in that district on that day. Thats important though it may not be the most efficient method, its important people know that i have a way to ensure that theyre allowed to vote and theres always provisional ballots if something goes wrong area so its a lot, its similar to Cyber Security, its all about security and death and about having backups and plans ofaction if something goes wrong. I just was on the panel, interviewing someone where they can switch, they can get into the database of the databases of voters are vulnerable. Some of them are on really insecure powerpoint presentations or whatever. I dont use microsoft that much, whats the one . Anyway. Xl. So so what they can do is similar, they can switch someones address to say its 3 20, it can be 2 30 and then they cant vote. They can start to target voters just by switching numbers and doing stuff when you get to the polling place, theres confusion so theres all kinds of civil. Theres a whole world of election interference and Voter Suppression. But at the same thing area. A couple of points on that is that one, florida was a state where in two counties at least two counties had the russians be able to penetrate the system and be in a position to have changed information but there is no evidence that information has beenchanged. Which is the point of the russians. This is one of the reasons ive been pushing so hard for Public Disclosure of the two counties because what voter believes the government who just got that there didnt get changed area trust me, it didnt. So you have to give the voters the ability to rebuild their confidence going in and verifying your street address wasnt tweaked. And thats what ive been pushing the bipartisan bill with a republican representative called the alert which would require Public Disclosure. When your social media accounts or your Bank Accounts are, youre getting timely notifications you can take proactive action and theres no reason why voters shouldnt begin the same Authority Area the problem is that the fbi sees the victim not as a voter who stay up may or may not have been changed but sees the victim as the local election official. And then in turn, those local Election Officials decide whether or not to take help from the department of homeland security. So its up to them. Theres no requirement, for example in the aftermath of 2016 and known intrusion in the system, the hs offered a detection system. Only 66 of the 67 precincts of the districts decided to participate in the program and it wasnt until the member who presents that area , it was in the papers. And went to the local and saidwhy in the world want to accept this health. Theywent out 67. Participating in this alert program. To make sure that they can determine whether or not somebody is into thesystem so there are challenges. I want to pick up on something that councilmember mentioned in her remarks, before i think about these problems to which is that these technologies have changed the battlefield. It is our citizens, it is our voters who are on the front lines. And that requires us thinking about whole new ways of what does it mean to dissemination. We happy conversations after 9 11 and on a very different kind of that also pushed change in our government and i think the question from maurice and the responses your debt at different dimensions of the way the battlefield hasshifted and our capabilities both defend , deter and conduct our own offense of operations have not actually shifted with that shipping space so when it comes to Information Operations, it is each and every one of us and in fact targeted this operation really are the ones that are being targeted but we are not providing assistance for our local officials, we heard from amy about journalists. We need to rethink these concepts. We talk about resiliency which is hugely important and we are talking before the panel about what you can take away for European Partners and allies and dealing with the challenges longer than we have been and resiliency is one of the biggest pieces have focused on but what does that mean in practice . We talk about Media Literacy and all these things are important but there are more practical ways we can talk about this and that has to be the framework by which we come to think about these challenges. Listen to all of you the kind if you see something Say Something or a Public Health framework of kind of trying to inoculate realtime people to a threat like a zika or measles outbreak. It is their potential for a very basic simply messaged Public Information campaign that would put the voter on alert and so many of them are systemic social solutions that were not going to be able to connect over the next few months so. More on the campaign that jamie referenced was a brilliant one but we need more of that. Its not like one, we did a campaign and thats not by the way, they are thinking of this as part of a much longer effort so i dont want to imply other warehouse but those are the kind of things we need but we also need it to be coming from different officials. To get back to state and local , if we look at pulling , who do people believe are the most credible voices in our systems . Its their local elections, its their local papers which by the way are also all going under in this Current Media environment which is not great but we have to think about not just what is the message but who is the messenger, who is a credible messenger. Thats what i thought about in different contexts but for people who are religious, clergy are the most respected for many people, respected voices and are not seen as political area and how can we those networks in a much more creative way to help carrying some of theseresiliency messages . Giving them the tools that they need , but get it into the hands of people who are ultimatelyseen as credible. These training sessions we have will be in philadelphia for church leaders, librarians also hold a public trust and if i have it my way every night we will go to Senior Centers and train seniors because they were the big sources of disinformation spreading. Its full programs are nice but we need Senior Centers to pump the brakes on the sharing. Just wondered one comment about the trust part and i agree that the trust is everything and i also cant remember who said it but i think its importantnot to silo all these issues and say well, were just talking about disinformation , maybe laura mentioned this to the fact that you have working states that still have paperless Voting Machines and only 26 states require postelection body and things like that. Really you hurt the trust of people having the system to make sure things were fair and also with in the government itself, theres a lot that can be done on trust. I agree that the solutions will be whole society that include academic institutions, think tanks, policy ngos, executive branch, congress and so forth to figure out how to move forward on all these issues even when governments as i saw myself serving in different parts of government, theres a lot of lack of trust to for example state department and Intelligence Community for folks going with these issues. Some of the same issues in terms of clearances that were talking about with regard to state officials. And getting them ready into certain information. I think the same applies for different parts of government where we cant really talk to each other as effectively as possiblebecause somebody in the Intelligence Community has such a high level of clearance. Here in front. Alex howard, thank you for the opportunity to ask questions. Since cara opened over to the window a little bit, i wantto jump through. What do we do it on november 6, the president of the United States without elections are ready. 3 Million People illegally in this country voted for my opponent. Dont believe it. What should the media do . What should members of congress do . What agencies do, what should other stakeholders do mark i dont think this is a theoretical idea. We expected him to make that claim after the last election. One. Which i dont think even he expected. Certainly the transition implies that that was the case. But this isnt a minor issue. What do we do when the president of the United States lies to the public every day, using his platform on twitter and twitters response is to say we will add more context . What should the media andTech Companies in the United States government do when the president of the United States is the primary source of disinformation. Im trying to get twitter to shut itself down but its not working. That should have stopped. You should close them down to for that. You go see it unfortunately. Your eyes will hurt afterwards. Our country, really. Well, its interesting because hes going to do that. He used his platform beautifully, patrol in chief and twitter allows him to do so because they consider him newsworthy even though he violates the rules almost consistently and does just recently he wrote a column about how hes doing, hes governing my twitter essentially. There was a census thing where the commerce department, justice departments and one thing and he tweeted and then the Justice Departmentlawyers are saying i dont know, he just tweeted it, idont know what you meant. Its fascinating. Its like theres some people in Silicon Valley , a lot of really big names in Silicon Valley that believe we live in a simulation and this is the effect of these people of the future playing a game and this is amusing them that its not funny. I think the issue is these platforms being used in such a way that their abuse. So the only option is to throw them off of twitter. That would be one thing twitter could do. But then again that its in the hands of jack dorsey. Its in the hands of a private company and those people who run the company so i think we should fully expect the delegitimization ofelections to continue. Because it works politically for people. I think the only thing is that would be, because if you think about it just using him as an example but lots of people in the philippines use it, it goes around the globe. There are not many platforms that will work quite as well as twitter as the media is also there and it amplifies and amplifies but in facebook it doesnt work quite as well. If he goes on and talks news it doesnt go to as many people. The group on reddit called the donald is under a band right now and possibly has gone off for violence so its a question of putting our faith in the hands of the private citizen billionaires that only things so i dont know. What is the first device to a newsroom that to the wire and starts to go viral, what should in his room do that to mark. Its going to be news because he said that we would verify and make sure that was his account. Theres lots of other accounts around donald trump but the most critical thing will be the headlinebecause most people dont get past that. Often times the negation of what is happening is put in the last part of the headline and if youre on mobile cuts off of that will be critical but also narrow in brazil says i didnt say on twitter, i didnt say so he has totally over the newsroom and newsrooms will have to have no other response but to report the news thats happening. He says that hes arrested or whatever the protocols are, newsrooms reported. And thats whats about disinformation online. But you have to, think about it. Media is still living in 2000 and i dont know, five maybe. And politics is in 2019 and thats the problem, especially used by a lot of different people. He just happens to be thebest at it for the worst, however you look at it. Hes great but if that is happening, i do think that about how they choose to cover it. And it sort of just amplify what he said, hes not leaving or if we can cover it more wholly instead of just restating what trump is set. I guess, the times which i write for , that headline was insane. I dont know if the media takes its role completely in a lot of ways. One thing i would love to see is something similar to the releasable Intelligence Community report on russian interference in our election that came out in january 2017. Be ready for Something Like that right after the election , that the Intelligence Community of course doesnt have to wait until the day of the election to know what kind of manipulation may or may not happen in our system. And whether its the Intelligence Community or other parts of government as well whether in congressor elsewhere , could be more proactive in terms of getting something out afterwards, again i think knowing that there is at least a chance if not likelihood that there will be some type of confusionafterwards based on the president s statement. Just funny enough the president signed an executive order in advance of the midterms requiring dni and dhs each submit reports within i think its 30 and 60 days respectively or 6090 days respectively on the integrity of the election. Theres plenty of different requirements for the dni report and dhs report. These reports were submitted after the midterm, although there was a statement put out that there was evidence of foreign actors attempting to manipulate that attention. The order included that there becomes consequences for evidence manipulation, those didnt materialize over after 2018 but the reality is theres a foundation in the president on executive order which of course as an executive order can be rescinded at any time and is subject to any enforcement, but i think thats a good foundation. I think that timeline is too long. I think that there needs to be a shorter timeline there and i would tweak some of those requirements but i think it speaks to some of the Disclosure Requirements that the congressman was talking about earlier of the executive branch needs to inform congress in particular as well as the public on evidence of some kind of interference or manipulation so all that to say the foundation is there from the president s own actions and so i think that theres things to build on. You just said subject to enforcement is the point. That is one of the eight provisions that then intel. I guess im sitting here excited as somebody whos family escaped communism, whose scene autocratic governments and to listen to a debate about what if there isnt peaceful transition of power in our democracy, made me a little sick to my stomach because that is at the cornerstone of what makes this country so incredibly special. We can have as robust and boisterous a debate in the runup to our elections but once the election has happened, as a nation democrat or republican regardless of who wins we have to accept the results and have a transition of power. Otherwise you struck at the heart of this country and what makes us so incredible and this experiment, this amazing democratic experiment starts to unravel. So i would say that a key part, because i think the question was asked what do members of congress to . As members of congress, regardless of whether youre a democrat or republican, you cannot allow people to question an election that was fairly conducted and the ability for us to know whether or not it was fairly conducted is for us to be able to do recounts. Able to create some accountability within that system. Just to point out that doesnt deal with the problem of disinformation. Youre right if we have paper ballots and we can identify the count was accurate thats some reassurance but if there was disinformation in a targeted way that affected the Voter Suppression or how to vote and there is credible evidence that indecisive counties as you know from florida that it might have made a difference. I think were in a very difficult position in terms of being able to stand by the results so thats essentially why were here. I want to take questions from the sideof the room so gentleman in the white shirt. Thank you all for being here, my name is john with new knowledge. My question for you all is is there a single Government Entity who is responsible for detecting, attributing and exposingDisinformation Campaigns or foreign influence while its happening in realtime . Know. Some people think there should be a department of the internet. It sounds crazy but its actually some people think there should be around enforcement and privacy and all these issues cause theres a telecommunications, theres all kinds of agencies dedicated to banks and the sec and the stock market so some people think there should be an agency to track these things. Itwould be an interesting, its an interesting idea. Because it is a major industry. This issue is reflected in congress to, theres not one committee that has exemption over this. Its spread across the house admin, judiciary homeland, foreign affairs. And some of those committees are busy doing other things. Not necessarily doing some of the work around providing left right guardrails for some of these big entities, the platforms addressing disinformation so i think that issue is reflected in congressional committees as well. From question from the common woman, thank you for yourleadership on this. My question has to do with civic illiteracy. And it just seems to me that even bigger dress than the russians. That is 40 percent of the people didnt bother to vote for president. A huge percentage of people dont know who their congressperson is, they have no idea whats going on in this room what it means so i was just wondering if you could give us some advice on that. This like him as a surprise but i think florida has a good news story in this. About 10 years ago in a bipartisan way, they launched a separate program wide that basically required Civics Education beginning as early as seventh grade. Very specific curriculums and so in the aftermath of parkland when all of those young people engaged their democracy, even though they had not yet gotten the vote but they understood how to engage their democracy. People tried to call them prices actors like how can they possibly know this fmr a lot of people credited to this education, the curriculum change in the state of florida with a focus on civics and i think that is a model for other states to follow as far as making sure that our young people have the kind of indication that enables them to be educated and engaged members of their democracy. Im getting judgment with a Company Called new start. My question is about the other end of the spectrum which any mentioned earlier. My grandparents were reading me crazy emails all the time and so many of the solutions that you talk about are either rooted in k12 education which obviously is important for tech but these are both things that in many ways might not be reaching seniors. So my question is if anyone has thoughts on that, especially since seniors are people will reliably show up to vote more than other demographics. I think one of the trainings is my mom and i, we grow up with Walter Cronkite and theres one source of news and because everything on anewsfeed on twitter and facebook is prioritized equally , the voters next to the breaking news all looks the same so there are news judgments is very different. My niece is a very different news judgments as well but shes able to discern what kind of looks like if theres a byline theres a website updated recently. But theres simple tricks like dont share something if you havent read the whole article. If you havent read the headline its not okay to share the digital citizenship that we need to teach them that, but we need to teach them in ways that resonate withthem just like we do when we teach younger people. We do with examples. We need to do something that resonate more with different age groups and its hard to work. Only somewhat real estate on your phone. Another example is the nancy pelosi effects. Later they put things, some people pulled them down which i think was the actually right thing to do was call them as much asthese companies can pull them down was the bible. Thats terrifically difficult problem as you saw in new zealand with the killer broadcast his murderers but what they do is they put these things next to it saying hes this video is not to be by reputable sources. Its an impossible design problem and i think unfortunately, they can clean up these emails. They can start to dobetter filters. In the hands of these companies, no question to do most of the heavy lifting and they need to spend the money to do so. Theyre making all this other money over here. And theydont dedicate the resources they need to to , thats whytheir stuff is so good because they dont have pots which includes the cost of doing their job. And so they can clean up a lot of that. They know where they come. Last one from google . Sometimes with google people, youre so poor all you have is money but thats fine. They caption our emotions and most of our family members want to protect us and to be safe in our communities though its in some ways shared out of love but then it really sows a lot of confusion. So one overarching comment about digital and disinformation education which i think is incredibly important including maybe exquisite for those or programming. So that they can about some of the implications of the work that they do with ai and so forth but i do think that its very important to think about making sure were not just playing yesterdays game is were doing all of this. And the evolution of ai and combinational propaganda and weaponization of big data and manufactured reality or defects that we talked about, some of the challenges of attacks on Critical Infrastructure and service of disinformation, all these things are coming area that we know theyre coming in so its hard for me to see that were going to be able to get our hands around this without especially dealing with a deep fake problem. I agree with senator warner when he was saying that its probably going to be some type of big thing that happens that makes everybody scramble to figure out what do we do that to mark two days before the election and you have some video that comes out that has either republican or Democratic Candidates doing something that is going to probably hurt them within the electorate and everybody trying to figure out how do we deal with it once its gone viral to main new sources and so on and its impossible to put back in the box. Were all obviously trying to figure out is the answer more transparency or disclosure or watermarks or taking them down and so forth, but i do think that we have to not just think about how to detect this stuff asit is right now. The evolution of this is coming fast and i think in a very short period of time its going to be just about impossible to tell real from fake and we dont have anything to deal with that right now. [inaudible] and give the panelists an opportunity to offer closing thoughts. Thanks for a great conversation, im from the National Association for Media Literacy and education and i think by focusing on disinformation were making a little bit of an assumption that people understand information. And we dont. So i fear sometimes that all were concerned about is not being duped because information is really complex and the great majority of information out there is not false information, its opinion. Most information out there is just people talking about stuff when you turn on cable news, when you look at twitter. So i think we have to be clear that theres conversations about bias and perspective and economics and the media system and credibility andrepresentation. That matter and its not just about disinformation while disinformation is so important i hope that eventually will be able to want more for society, that it just isnt about understanding things so that we dont get tricked. With that said, i do love the idea that the election is a flashpoint. I love what you said. My concern is some of this conversation, not in this room but just in general, that it leads to the action being the endgame and i want to make sure we dont do that. I want to make sure no matter what the results of the election, is that we still realize that these are issues that were going to have to battle with so i guess my question for you is how do we make sure no matter what happens in the election that is continuous and that we continue fighting these issues . Go ahead sir. Regarding the question of Government Agencies and obviously there are all kinds of complicated issues there, but theres an ngo that does information sharing and analysis organizations and theyre just about to announce that there will be a , well, the working title is a cognitive security ipo. Some people feel like cognitive security is not a good name because it sounds a little too orwellian. And thats actually holding up the announcement a bit but its an ngo that sponsors these sharon organizations so there should be something out there pretty soon. And i also wanted to say thank you for being hard on the Tech Companies. I used to work at twitter and i dont anymore. And actually kind of curious in the announcement about this event there were supposedly going to be representatives from twitter and facebook here and i havent heard anything about that so i was wondering if there were. I think there may be in the room, are there in the room, twitter and facebook . I dont know if they want to announce themselves area there are. And we had hoped they might take part in the panel but they are here, they have been listening and we didnt have questions specifically addressed to them, but im sure if you want to buttonhole them after this meeting. Come on, twitter. You all have so much to say. Twitter is not talking. My question is just why not participate . Nice job next twitter. Public policy from twitter and im here because i want to learn from the experts in the field and get their thoughts and comments so we can go back and continue to work to improve what were doing to prepare for 2020. Weve made a lot of progress since 2016. Weput out a report in 2018 , there should be january 2019 specifically about what we did in 2018 for the midterms. When we testified numerous times before congress, we have a hearing tomorrow so we are out there area where doing a lot of work so i want to learn. I wanted to be anaudience participant. Please take a month. I think a lot of people here wanted to hear from you. You have a lot of data on how this works. Why not explain them to us in person when were all right here mark. Sure, we put out a lot of information publicly already. Weve released every single bit of information that we had on the operation campaigns. We have an Ads Transparency Center that hasdone many of the things discussed in this room today to increase transparency around a little and issue advertising. Research shows that platforming works. Im just saying. See back okay. I appreciate that kevin and i dont want to speak for my partners but you know we do think that one of the most important things is having the breath breath and prospective we have had and we are extremely appreciative to everybody who has participated but we also recognize theres some perspective that is fully representative so im sure well continue to talk about whether and how we can create additional opportunities to hear from some of the folks who didnt get a chance to hear from today and i hope those in the room to represent constituencies are companies that were not part of this discussion recognize the value of coming facetoface together and hashing this out. Its not easy. Im not sure if its the right answer necessarily for the platform donald trump in the moment because the outrage that would ensue for that you know might only fuel his play. Its a difficult question but as you know the Mainstream Media to confront all the time and attempts to discredit his own constituency and convincing them that a credible news outlet cant be trusted. You know i think what we take away is a really tough dilemma. There are certain kernels of hope and progress and it was good to hear from a number if you about what those are but also a larger sense of collective alarm that we are coming to grips with something that has the potential to shake our democracy to its very core. With that i want to thank the panel and you can stay in your seat panelists. Im going to turn it over to allen Ellen Weintraub for some closing remarks. Welcome to thank you. Im a little bit overwhelmed. Im going to go back and relistened to this entire event which we obviously there are live cameras there are live cameras in the room and cspan is going to run this at some point. Once you are on cspan that comes up over and over again usually in the middle of the night. I found when ive done hearings and cspan covers them i would get emails from friends saying i saw you at 2 00 in the morning to thank you for being here and we were glad to see you even at two in the morning but we also will have an archive in a place where people can access it. If you like me want to go back and relistened and we think we will try to make that possible. I want to start, im going to stick with me because im going to get back to the preface but i have to start by saying something cues. First and foremost to my extraordinary partners suzanne and eileen. This is the planning of this has gone on for months and people in different parts of the country traveling all over the place with a whole lot of coordination. Im so grateful to have such great partners and im looking forward to continuing to work with them going forward. In addition to them there were a lot of other people from penn america. Tom was unbelievable and indefatigable as well as michelle natasha lane and summer lopez. I have to acknowledge the fact that this caused a lot of construction here. This is not her usual tuesday so i must thank really everybody for putting up with this but in particular laura, alex palmer rebecca Andy RobinsonMaryanne BakerTiffany Carson kennedy Lisa Stevenson esther jory robert kahn and on my own staff this could not have happened without tom moore who has been handing the mic around to everybody and andrea martinez. Thank you to you and assisted everybody on the board of the fec. What spencer was saying a few minutes ago about the things that could go wrong for minds me a piece i read sort of a hypothetical piece the hypothetical things that could affect the election and if you want to terrify yourself go read it. Its so phenomenally important and im so grateful for the interest and for all of you for coming and participating in this. I warned you at the beginning that we were going to, but with all the answers. We faced a lot of really difficult questions and we reconciled our Democratic Values and our love of speech with an environment that no longer distinguishes between truth and falsity and even sometimes between human and lots. How do we ensure the tactics deployed by our foreign adversaries do not become the new normal of domestic political discourse . How do we the inauthentic content and means throughout our democracy. Factchecking works. We have heard various perspectives on this. How do we build Media Literacy and for whom . How do we distinguish between the rules that we want to see for the norms for mass media versus how do we address direct messaging and other private forms of communication and can we do that . How do we identify new threats in advance rather than afterthefact and its really key as we get closer and closer to the election. There are no easy answers. We know that all of us have a role to play in trying to find the answers whether we are legislators, regulators are in the News Civil Society academia Tech Companies or just all of us as citizens. What can you do . One thing you can do is go to the great web site spencers organization. They have got a whole lot of information, great Bipartisan Organization and a lot of the them from you will find is the information we alluded to today. Go there and read about it find the good ideas and advocate for it. One theme that has come out here is there are a lot of good ideas out there for both congressional and regulatory action i think. Its going to take efforts to get bad done. Its going to take a lot of pressure from citizens. Also the guy with the big float vote button. Everybody needs to get out and vote and get all your friends out to vote and get your cousins and friends up to vote. Really we want everybody to participate in our democracy and the more people that participate hopefully that will lead to a place where we dont have a really close election result which you know is going to make it much easier for people to trust that its really close. Every single election their recounts. I have worked on a couple of recount so i know what thats all about. Theres always a recalcitrant where. Once we had at the president ial level and that was pretty intense but you know as difficult as that process was at the end of the day if you go back to the bush gore recount, al gore was advised to keep fighting. There were a lot of people on his side the thought that the election was stolen from him and he should keep fighting and there came a point where he said to solidifier democracy im going to recent except the results and im going to stop now because we need to move on. I think that was an unbelievable moment in our democracy. We need to try and recapture some of that. We need to all pulled together for the good of our democracy. You hope we have a huge turnout at the next election because i do think that will help. This conversation is obviously only the beginning so let me encourage all of you people who are visiting interested in this make friends. Say hello to your neighbors, change business cards, keep in touch and keep the conversation going. With that, thank you all for coming. [applause] i just have to say that i just use the word hilarious. To me this feels a lot like your reaction to being in one of these manifestoes. Now you are of course not responsible for the words of somebody writing that document but i do think laughing at it is a real problem because these are real families that are impacted by this violence. I think our efforts towards talking about it has to start from a place of Mutual Respect which is what ive heard from the side of the table. The reason we dont have those numbers, i want those numbers as much as you do but the numbers dont show something is simply not supportive of the data. I have 38 seconds left if you want to respond within that time. Yeley thing i would add is that domestic terrorism terrorizes us. Terrorizes us in our homes. Terrorizes us in our schools and to the point made by via the panelists its proportionate, and impact on any individual life. You reject something that doesnt really matter. Absolutely reject. Every member has had two to members who have not so im going to go to the members who have not yet. We will give an opportunity to anyone who has not had an opportunity. Mr. Meadows and then mr. Jordanson. Ms. Owen obviously this is a gang up on you. We are giving these witnesses the ability to do a rebuttal on you so you know i find it unfair candidly for you to show Mutual Respect and to go after ms. Owen is not appropriate. You can have four minutes in four seconds to respond. I will yield. I believe ms. Owens when he used the word hilarious it was referencing the fact that no one had asked a question. Wasnt the subject matter of the hearing, is that right . That is correct. Perhaps its just not appropriate mr. Chairman for how witnesses are supposed to be in front of this committee now so think you didnt say it doesnt matter about the subject matter of this hearing. He said there were other subjects that matter as well and maybe we should spend some time in those. Is that accurate . That is correct in a matter much, much, much more and i said in my opening and i will say it again. You know the White Supremacy and White Nationalism ranks nowhere near the top of the issues in black america and the reason you are bringing them up in this room is because it is an attempt to make the election all about race. Not in my case. Mr. Chairman its my time. You got your time mr. Meadows. Every four years to bring up race and you knew exactly what i meant when i said hilarious. With the media does all the time to republicans to our president to get service which is try to manipulate what i said. I was not referring to the subject matter is hilarious but i said its hilarious that we are sitting in this room today and i have to doctors in the midst and no one can give us real numbers that we can respond to an assessed how big of a threat this is because you know its not as big of a threat as you are trying to make it out to be sega manipulate. The audacity of you to bring up the christchurch shooting manifesto and make it seem as i laughed at people who were slaughtered by a homicidal maniac in my opinion is absolutely despicable and i think we should be above that particular i do assign reality to the meaning of a homicidal maniac writing a manifesto which by the way let the record show that childs cartoon as a source of inspiration he also cited Nelson Mandela as a source of information. I dont tank Nelson Mandela has inspired mosque shootings. You would rather assign meeting to a homicidal maniac than to actually address that i said the things i said today that are actually harming latin america. Number one the Education System and the illiteracy rate. A Legal Immigration ranked high in abortion ranked high White Supremacy and White Nationalism if i had to make a list again of 100 things would not be. This hearing in my opinion is a farce and it is ironic that you are sitting here and having three caucasian people testify and tell you what their expertise is. You want to know what my expertise is . Ive been black in america it all 30 years. You have done the exact same things every four years their selection cycling needs to stop