Today with richard stengel, the author of information wars how we lost the global battle against disinformation and what we can do aboutbl it which was published earlier this month. The subject of the book is one rickl knows well. From. From 20132016 he was under secretary of state for Public Diplomacy andnd Public Affairs n Barack Obamas state department. No one has served longer in that post in american history. From 20062013 he was a top editor at Time Magazine, the publication where he worked on and off as a writer and editor dating back to 1981. His previous books include the bestseller mandell is way, and youre too kind, a brief history of flattery. [laughing] more in new york, rick is a graduate of Princeton University and studied english and history at oxford as a rhodes scholar. Please join in welcoming richard stengel. [applause] rick, it is great to have you in austin. Thank you so much for being here. Great to be here. Congratulations on the book. Its an interesting and c it cod not be more of the moment and thats where you want to start, with a part of the book that feels like he rode it knowing where we would be sitting here today. Like Everything Else these days, all roads run through ukraine, right . [laughing] back in early 2014, this is a very important part of this book, the beginning of the sty of this information is told anns crimea, Vladimir Putin lies about it and the next thing we see in your words is tsunami of disinformation. And then Hillary Clinton calls. [laughter] take it from there. Yes, by the way one of the great heros of contemporary journalism is evan right here. [cheers and applause] thank you. Counter to disinformation. That borders on disinformation, what you just said. So tell us a story of Hillary Clinton calling you around the time that russia annexes crimea and everything goes to hell. Yes, we all hear from Samantha Power, Samantha Power it took me 9 months to get confirmed which is a vast amount of time in those days and i got confirmed on a thursday and i wanted to start work on a monday and i called samantha who had been ambassador at the un, can you swear me in new york where im from, but the story was that evan said, in february of 2014, russia annex crimea for all kinds of bad reasons right, putin lied about it, he said there were no russian soldiers in crimea, crimea is the most southern part of ukraine, ukraine is incredible by part of the modern world and bridge between east and west between russia and europe and and so i was in the office and i just i didnt know what to do about it. I thought im head of communications, what can do i about it, i can tweet about it and i tried to get everybody else at the state department to tweet about it too which was not very successful because Foreign Service officers dont like to put their heads up and and get on social media so i started tweeting about it very bland tweets, you know, i was in government, when i was in media i didnt know very much and i tried to make as much controversy as possible, when i was in government i tried to make as little controversy as possible. The tweets were like putin needs to do the right thing about crimeas part of ukraine and i started getting hit by these russian trolls and boots and calling me every name in the book and names by the way which they couldnt spell properly and and so it was sort of new to me even though i had been in media my whole life, i hadnt seen architecture of disinformation and about 3 or 4 weeks into the job after samantha had sworn me in i was home on a saturday and i got a phone call from the state its the entity of state that coordinates where everybody is and says can you hold for the secretary, i thought my boss secretary kerry was calling. You thought it was john kerry calling you. And i picked up phone and it was secretary Hillary Clinton and i thought she was, and ive known her for a long time, she knew i was going to the state department, i thought she was belatingly calling to say congratulations. But but i picked up the phone and she didnt even say hello, she said the russians are beating the heck out of us on social media, people dont understand how they have a big engine and we have a small engine, she went on and on, i was holding the phone like out here, and her final line was Something Like putin is rewriting history and we are still releasing press releases, you need to do something about it and she hung up the phone. [laughter] the irony, of course, 2 years later she knew more about this than anybody and she became victim of it and shows insidious that even Hillary Clinton was aware of it wasnt aware of what they were doing really until the very end. Knowledge of it is not enough, that doesnt equal protection from it, you can know about it but its a significant problem. I want to understand from you the difference between disinformation and misinformation. So disinformation is deliberately false information that is meant to deceive or mislead you for a strategic purpose, misinformation is something that is just wrong and can be wrong by mistake, it can be wrong for all kinds of reasons. I mean, you and i have been in Media Business for a long time. You make mistakes. You make mistakes. Thats misinformation, a lot of people use misinformation in a different way, the third category which is controversial is propaganda and propaganda is information which may be true, may be false thats also used for strategic purpose, not necessarily to deceive you, there can be good propaganda and good propaganda, the word comes from the propagation, the church, 15th century. The difference between disinformation and misinformation has to do with intent. Right. The deliberate use of falsehood. Misinformation is accidental. You refer to President Trump as the disinformationist in chief, right . Yeah. Is he just wrong all of the time but it actually [laughter] it gets not to whether its right or wrong but whether theres an intent to deceive and that lands back on the bucket of disinformation as you see it. I guess if there was some kind of a excuse it might be that he doesnt know the difference between facts and fiction and what he says is how he wants the world to be rather than the way it is. Right. Thats the most benign explanation, theres actually much more nefarious one and and the thing is one of the things i wrote about in the book is the eerie similarity between how putin lies and how trump lies and the kind of history of russian lying which they call active measures that goes back to the cold war, think of the things that they do, they use projection, whatever you call them and they call you, they use what aboutism, hey, you invaded crimea, and they will say look what you did in iraq, does that sound familiar . All of the techniques that trump mirrors and even during the campaign, he mirrored a lot of these strange philosophers and thinkers who are around putin which we can get to later, but i dont know what the connection is. I mean, here is how i define collusion. Collusion is if somebody offers you help in this case the russians and you accept the help, thats collusion. So stay with [applause] hands for collusion, thats great. Applause for collusion. Tshirts made. Stay with putin; you said putin lies, often when we hear about disinformation from russia, internet agency, we hear about people outside of putins office say, but you make the point in this book that these attacks are coordinated, and thats what they are, they are attacks, right . And its not just the ira but its typically everybody in the russian government, this is an effort on behalf of and on the part of the entire government. Yes, so the russians are opportunistic and we do things and we think theres a grand strategy and in Foreign Policy people putin checkers player or chess player, now, you know, compare to trump who is a gofish player he seems like a [laughter] like a chess player but i think hes i think hes just chess player and the agency created in 2013 by the crony of putin and i dont think it was done because putin knew he was going to annex crimea but when he went aan exed crimea they went into overdrive creating all counterdisinformation and what was different about creation of disinformation that they do and even whenever, you know, everything that we try to do, they its hold of government for the russians. I mean, weve never seen anything like that and everything in between, russia today, all of the russian state organs, they all Work Together in a way that is is pretty powerful and hard to combat, once upon a time in the old days when they did active measures in the cold war, it was a lot harder because what did they do, they had to bribe a reporter at newspaper in india to write something about the cia creating aids and then russian state media would pick it up and they would hope it would seep in the blood stream of european and american media. Now, theres no barrier to entry, they can do that on twitter in a second. Very quickly, it occurs to me that i should ask whether theres any doubt in your mind that russian is the bad actor that russian si seem to remember up until about middle of last year, the president had to be dragged, kicking and screaming that russia had done what people know on his face russia did, russia may not be the only bad factor in terms of disinformation in the world, russia did it, theres no question. Yeah, absolutely indate mutable, the mountains of evidence, even the ip addresses and they bought time on american servers so it would look like they are american, they stole american handle. Anybody here went to heart of texas . Heart of texas, somebody must have, it had 400,000 likes. Right. Created by the Internet Research agency to be a conservative texas skype, heart of texas base, content talking about how bad Hillary Clinton was, they organized demonstration in houston and the title of the demonstration was the islamfication of texas, this was all done by people in st. Petersburg russia. We have seen evidence in president ial campaign, same song, different verse. Bipartisan reports richard burr is the chairman, recent report a couple of weeks ago said that the russians have done more in the u. S. Since 2016 than they did during 2016 and theyre also on platforms that we hadnt realized. Only like a year after the election, you think with like nothing, you cant you lose nothing in the internet age but yet nobody realized for about a year that they did more on instagram than they did on face book. There was an announcement that they came back targeting joe biden specifically, right . See, its hard to say, this is why its so insidious, they mask their identity, its hard to know at any given time what they are doing, i mean, they are doing something right now while we are talking. Im serious. We are not necessarily aware of it. Yeah. Same kind of russian trolls that attacked me, attack me now as im speaking, you dont necessarily know that theyre russian or americans, by the way they could be americans too. Even Mark Zuckerberg allude today this that the russians and other bad actors are renting facebook and say, hey, youre not using your name, let me use it, thats really impossible to what do we do about it, do you fight fire with fire, do you become the thing that you despise . Do you fight this information with disinformation because certainly we are capable of doing to them what theyve done to us. Evan, i think you put your finger on the scale, dont you think with your question. What do you mean . Seriously, what do we do . We dont fight disinformation with disinformation, one of the themes of the book that after having been in government for 3 years and content in terms of creating content. People in government dont like to do it. A theyre notgood at it. If you look at government content, its just not the answer. Were fighting state actors but those are autocratic and authoritarian system its out of sync with our values. Even if it were in our power to do it, its not something we should do even if we could do it. I agree wholeheartedly. Its terrible for the brand of america. We talk about freedom of expression, but part of the book is about countering isys messaging which i did. We thought about creating the equivalent of a factory that isys had Something Like 12 or 15,000 of these digital jihadist. We thought about doing Something Like that but everybody decided no, thats not what america does. Our country is about trying to be truthful about things and we do that as part of our Foreign Policy andthis is not who we are. You mentioned nonstate actors. An interesting point in this book as it relates to the role of government in this conversation is the information war is not a war of the state or of the states exclusively. Y. There are nonstate actors, there are regular old people involved, its a lot more complicated. Its not government versus government only. In the information war has a hard end and a soft and. The heart and is cyber terrorismand malware. The hard end is Chinese Government stealing information from the office of personnelmanagement of 14 Million People. The hard end is the fact that the Defense Department announced a few months ago gets past 30 million times a day so the quantity of this kind of stuff is unimaginable and thats the hard end. The softer and and you know its not very soft is disinformation which is hidden in plain sight , that camouflages itself in a way attack an attack on a server does not. As the pentagon servers are hit that many times, if its known to you, its known across government that we are susceptible, vulnerable and maybe even through our capacity inviting these kinds of attacks. His government situated technologically to rebuff these attacks . I think about Government Technology asdotmatrix printers. Social media to people in government is probably friends to her. The people were talking about our way behind the curve technologically and i wonder if we have the capability technically to rebuff this stuff. Its this big questionand i talk about in the book about how oldfashioned the computers were that we had at the state department and i had a blackberry for my first two years. I had to wait 10 or 15 minutes every morning for the computer to boot up and that wasnt even the high side computer. The classified computer takes Something Like 45 minutes. How much is the american taxpayer paying for me to wait for my computer to boot le up . When it comes to the hard end, congress has appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars to secure election systems. The agencies, the Defense Department , they spent a lot on protecting themselves. The state department gets attacked hundreds of thousands of times a day. I dont know how secure they are but i know theyre aware of it and on this other end, the softer and government doesnt have a role and i talk about except for this idea oflegislation, i dont know if i should jump in. So you guys are riveted, now im going to bore you with something. The communications and decency act of 1996, section 230. At the underpinning of all of social media and it was passed by congress because they wanted to optimize the rise of these new kinds of Media Companies that use thirdparty content, content you and i created, user generated content. As a thirdpartycompany, youre talking about facebook. Aol did and friends are andnapster and all this stuff. They wanted to say we dont want you guys to be liable for the content on your sites the way the Texas Tribune is, the wayTime Magazine was. It would then put a damper on the rise of that content but you have complete immunity. Maybe that was a good idea in bl1996 but the idea that facebook is not a publisher and has complete immunityfrom everything it publishes is crazy. Facebook is the largest publisher in the history of the world. Just because they dont list professional content doesnt mean they shouldntbe liable for the things they do publish. [applause] so facebook and the other Platform Companies which you say are really more apt publishers, their Platform Companies should be held accountable for disinformation, for deep fakes. For content thats provably false. They should be required to take contentthat is provably ,false on their sites. I think thats true. And you also make the point importantly that heat speech is something that should be policed more and these folks should be held accountable for having it on their platforms. [applause] by the way, the truth is which these sites dont promulgate this very much but if you look at the announcements that facebook made last week, but does take off a speech in their terms of service which is their constitution it says speech that attacks people and insult people and attempts to hurt people according to race, ethnicity, color, you name it, that is not tolerated. They do take that off but they dont like to tell people they take it off because when they take it off congress is going to go you must be an editor if youre taking down content like that. They are editors. Algorithms are editors. Algorithms are the fastest and biggest generators editors in the history of journalism. So they do take that stuff off. Or they attempt to. The exception that he talked about the other day is political speech and in the Supreme Court, the history of the First Amendment, political speech has a higher threshold than regular speech. He made the argument that a political ad that contains a verifiably false treatment should still be published because you, me, everybody in a democracy should make that judgment. And we believe in free speech but you make the point that facebook and the other platforms are not government. Again, people dont always get is that the First Amendment applies to government, not the private sector. What arethe first five words of the First Amendment . Congress shall make no law. Companies can decide if youre wearing a red shirt you cant even post on our site. I hope you can because its a beautiful lovely red shirt. They have terms of service and if you violate the terms of service, they have the right to police you t. I think they should be held liable for not fulfilling their terms of service by taking off a speech, demonstrably false content, things like that. I appreciate the applause but hepart of that is everybody has to register that with people. Youre on all of these platforms. You need to tell them thats the way you want the rules of the road. There are plenty of other things i recommend like the transparency of advertising. You should know why you got a political ad, no who pays for that political ad and are moving in that direction but two weeks ago, the Senate Republicans rejected the honest ads act which has a lot of bipartisan support and which explicitly says that all political advertising has to be transparent. That was voted down and was held by mitch mcconnell. Back to legislation for a second and the question of what we know to be happening to us. Attacks coming our way from bad actors elsewhere. We know that the 2016 elections were compromised in some way by outside forces. If we know that, why has there been resistance to the kind of legislation in congress that would insulate us against those similar attacks in 2020 . It seems to be a basic ocprinciple of democracy, there are no bipartisan things in the world anymore but doesnt everybody want elections to be uncompromised . Shouldnt congress be racing to step up, not limping towards but sprinting towards some kind of legislation to protect our elections and yet werenowhere near that. Whatsgoing on . There are a bunch of democratic bills including the honest ads act that havent been brought to the floor. There has been funding for the harder end of Election Security to help states and localities solidify their election integrity. The reason our system cannot be attacked in a kind of global centralized way is its not centralized. Your votes are not on the internet. There are 14,000 different election districts in the us, none of which are connected to each othersits so , its such a distributed oldfashioned network its hard to attack. I want to transition in the last couple of minutes before we opened it up to questions to the question of journalism and how all this relates. Do you think the social Media Companies are undermining traditionaljournalism . Im kind of a journalistic exception list and i think yes p. Obviously social Media Companies have gotten in the way of traditional journalism in part because you can get content from regular people so i dont know, do you still need to have a paris correspondent if you can read harris newspapers onyour phone . You need it if people in france are posting about demonstrations . Technology in oa has made traditional journalism, some of the strictures unnecessary. Tnot even just the foreign example but ive heard you say in the old days the reason there was a paper in kansas city is because you couldnt read the chicago paper. But you were using examples that papers cropped up in smaller areas because you did not have access to the bigger city papers. Now we all can read the Chicago Tribune on our phones. So does that mean were going to see a dwindling of more local news sources . Is journalism going to be underminedultimately by these advances in technology . I think the future is a combination of paid journalistic entities like the New York Times and the rise of type or local journalistic entities like Texas Tribune. Its one of the things i say in the bookis that you dont have a fake news problem, we have a Media Literacy problem and what do i mean by that . Its that people are not good at all kinds of people but particularly older people on facebook which is the largest growing cohort of people going on facebook telling the difference between whats back and whats fiction. How to figure out the provenance of information, where it came from, whatsthe secondary source . I think one of the proposals i make is that Journalism Online has to become much more transparent and show all those things. Show the text of the interview you did with the governor, show the reading th and the notes you took on the history of the Governors Office so that people can see what makes up a story. Then they get a sense of this is reliable. But there are also other things to be done. I think the big Platform Companies should be contributing hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars to teach Media Literacy in school. How to be a critical consumer of the information you receive. So theres Digital Literacy and Media Literacy and in that announcement facebook made last week, facebook which makes i dont know, tens of billions of dollars a year, earmarked 2 million for Media Literacy. Its really interesting, i agree. You agree that journalism should be more transparent and i think about David Farrand holds reporting in the Washington Post which one the pulitzer on the trunk foundation tweeting up pictures of his tablet. Like a fifthgrader in math class he was showing his work and when trust in the media is at a low, its probably a good idea for us to be doing that sort of stuff anyway because if people see for transparency the process that we go through , theyll have less to distrust. Hundred percent, i love what hes doing and he also uses the wisdom of crowds. He says im doing a story, about crowdsourcing. About trump employing documented immigrants to work in his golf clubs. Anybody seen one or talked to one or did you play golf . I think thats a great thing to do and it makes people invested in the stories. Its a weirdly oldfashioned advance. You and i were both the editors of glossy magazines once upon a time. I stopped that 10 years ago, you stop that seven years ago, its a differentworld as far as that goes. We are kind of dinosaurs i guess. Id love the world of magazines, i always thought of magazines is a beautiful thing, it still is a beautiful thing but people have to adapt to technological change. Information has adopted to technological change and content was on paper because paper was the best Delivery System we had for acouple thousand years. It no longer is. The internet was invented 150 years ago, there wouldnt be any print newspapers or magazines because it can be delivered to your phone instantly. Im also a digital exception list. Someone asked me the other day you think theres more disinformation relative to information now in 2019 and other times in history its a good question and it made me think on the podium. I drew a blank. But the more i thought about it, the amount of true information, factual information now is exponentially greater than any time in human history. And our access to it is so much greater. But our access to this information is greater to. I talk about Cognitive Biases in the book where we see got information we agree with and reject information we dont but theres something called the availability arrested which means how easy it is for you to pull the information, the more widespread you think it is so the fact is if we can find this information easily , we think its more in the bloodstream of the ecosystem of social media. Im not sure theres more of it now and there has been in other times in history. We have a microphone down front and we love to bring your questions into it. Im going to put a marker down and say no speeches and no bullshit. [applause] are going to police thesequestions so go ahead. Thank you very much for joining us today. By the way, that is protected free speech. Youre allowed to do that. Go ahead. I want to thank you for coming to austin texas, i ama reader of your book. So ive read your book, i think the state is very frustrated with losing the information war to russian antroll lots and isis media and even donald trump and so forth. And you have solutions for it and one of those solutions is a crackdown on social media and that the government is going to help out by doing this. S, what do you say to a person who says to you why should we crackdown on social media when theMainstream Media , you work for Time Magazine. Your Parent Company holds the rights to those up router film. What is your question please . The question is Time Magazine bought the rights to those up router film which proves jfk got shot in the head and not the back and they sat on it for 12 years and never sold to anybody. What is your question please . Can you hear me . We can hear you but whats your question . Rs why should an average person believe the Mainstream Media over alex jones or a russian troll lot. Is the Mainstream Media any more trustworthy than socialmedia or any of these alternative sources of information . Just a point of clarity, the zip router film was bought by a correspondent for lifemagazine, it wasnt bought by Time Magazine. Time life is a holding company, those are two tseparate magazines that n,compete with each other. The other thing about your question, one of the many false premises of it is about for example isis messaging and what can we do about that western mark do you know what we did about that . The Obama Administration led by john kerry and people like john allen brand brett mcgurk assembled an antiisis coalition of 80 nations that inexorably defeated isis on the ground. When you kill those guys, when you remove them from their caliphate, that hurts their messaging. That was a lot better than anything we ever did in terms of countering their messaging and that was an incredibly successful policy initiative by the Obama Administration which was continued by the current administration. I think the thing is, the site that you mentioned info wars, russian trolls, they dont have any of the infrastructure of truth that mainstream journalism does. They dont check their facts, they dont have copy editors, they dont spell things correctly. If thats a disqualifier, were going to have to expand this conversation i think. You can correct that on the internet, by the way. They dont have multiple sources for their stories t. If you analyze that story and go through it, you see these things are made up out of whole cloth as opposed to something in the New York Times or Washington Post that if you read the story is completely backed up with facts at each stage. So i just think theres no comparison and by the way, let people compare the two because if you compare them youll seethe traditional media is 1000times more reliable. An excellent and serious answer. [applause] maam. I noticed the media keeps confusing the term trolls which is a diminutive term to discuss both people who are trying to destroy our democracy , people who threatened to kill women online , white supremacists. Is there another word we can use to describe these people and can i challenge the media to stop using this demeaning term . Its an interesting point, you could call them information terrorists or Something Like that but the other point you bring is that saa troll isnt necessarily human. There are bots and there are humans so one of the things i propose that Companies Need to do is let you know if its something yourereading was created by a human being as opposed to a box. Part of the incredible echo effect that happened with the pro trump media from Internet Research agency during the campaign, what it came from bots. 80, 90 percent came from bots, not human beings. So people need to know that, you may need to know when you see something on your twitter feed that comes from a human being or a bath. And i have the technology that enables them to do that. Serve. Thank you. We know that you cant yell fire in a crowded theater because unless the theater is on fire which is an example of disinformation and you can prosecute that person. Would you all be opposed to see prosecutions against people who deliberately distribute this information rather than misinformation . The fire in a crowded theater line came from the shank case of 1919 which was originally a freespeech case. That has been outdone by brandenburg versus ohio which basically said that the one type of speech other than pornography or whatever that is not protected is speech that indirectly leads to violence. That is not protectedspeech. You cannot urge someone to violence right now and have that be under the rubric of the First Amendment, thats a good thing. I think as i was saying before that the terms of service of these platforms, they should be taking off speech that even indirectly leads to violence. One of the things that changed my mind when i was in government is that i dont know if people remember the Charlie Hebdo massacre, i helped the French Embassy to talk about free speech and lets see, Charlie Hebdo put pictures of mohammed on the cover twice before, twice its cause violence not only in france but around the world. When they put a picture of mohammed on the cover the third time, do you think its j not going to lead to violence . I heard you talk about when you were a journalist you had an absolutist view of the freespeech and overtime your view of what should and should not be permitted as default a little bit. I think that our standard, our freespeech standard is an outlier aroundthe world. I travel a lot in the middle east and went to all of our sunni allies, talk to the very sophisticated Foreign Ministers of those countries but each one would say why do you allow that wacky pseudominister in florida to burn a copy of the koran . I said its like the First Amendment protects us. Not just the ideas we love butthe ideas we hate but nobody gets that. That is an insult the 1. 6 billion people who dont necessarily understand what the First Amendment means. I do think states should start looking at hate speech statutes but maybe it goes up to the Supreme Court to be questioned but in our society is are so vulnerable i think we should be looking at hate speech legislation locally and in the states and counties. How are you . I wanted to get your take on the rise of these online satirical news sites which try to pretend like theyre like the onion and the funny but dont really make it very clear that they are a fake site and are really just spreading propaganda and fake news and trying to get people to believe one way or the other so its just spreading lies in disguise as a city revenue site. There was a story related to this where there are a whole bunch of fake news sites masquerading as real news sites and it was in the state of michigan. We dont have the ability to stop anybody from creating something they intend to look like a real news site whether its satirical or not. Theres nothing we can do about that and by the way, one of the other things the russians did hewas created a host of new sites that look like real news sites. They would use nbc, abc and cbs attack on a modifier or another word and make it look like those sites so that to me is content that needs to be taken down. The satirical exception is written about in history of the firstamendment legislation. I would protect satire but i also wanted to be funny. When satire isnt funny anymore, i dont know what you said. Good luck releasing back. Thats about the most subjective thing to have to believe but it does get to this question of among the other problems we talk about, there are people putting up sites designed to look like independent news sites that are not. But thats why i think the platforms need to be more liable for the content. Theyre posting it, theyre not publishing it. So i think the terms of service after applied to those things to. Im a part of generation b which is one of the primary users of social media. Ive been noticing more and more misinformation on the site of the liberals is concerning to me. Do you think that as a young liberal i should feel just as obligated to call out misinformation on a meme or something that rabout furthering Climate Change awareness if its notcorrect . 100 percent. Misinformation and disinformation isnt the province of just the right vafor conservatives. It happens on the left as well and i think to show your own ability, you need to expose it to. But what i would say about mainstream journalists and organizations, they do retractions, they issued apologies, making corrections. Info wars have ever done a correction . I dont think so. Breitbart doesnt do corrections. Part of it is one of the virtues of traditional media or our liberal media is they also expose their own flaws. Thats one of the virtuesand glories of journalism i would say. Thank you, sir. Thank you for coming to austin. In regards to information warfare, russia is talk about the most but china is technologically light years ahead where of where russia is so i was wondering if you could talk about how russian use of or how chinese use of disinformation and misinformation is similar to and different from the russian use. Its a good questionand one thats appropriate. So my information is a little bit out of date the cause se what im talking about this stuff that i knew when i was w in government so one of the things the chinese do and that the chinese are good at is the fact of intellectual property. I mentioned the theft of the identity of 14 Million People from the office of Personnel Management done by the chinese. Chinese attack corporations, they look for copyright infringement. This is something they do more than anybody else in the world. Ymy knowledge of what they were doing in the other realm on the disinformation realm comes from a few yearsago and they didnt do much in that realm. And were trying to influence point of view of people in america although of course you have hundreds of confucius institutes which teach mandarin that they use to influence people so unlike the russians which are not good at the hard and, the chinese were actually trying to do propaganda and disinformation in the us. That may have changed and one of the things i have read about in light of the protests in hong kong is there been a lot of chinese dates disinformation about the protesters which is where the russians started with the protests in the ukraine. That may have changed. Maybe youll find out the answer. Im afraid im being told its 3 45 and our session has come to an end. Please give rich stengel abig hand, thank you so much for being here. [applause] on our monthly author call in program in debt, journalists naomi klein discussed a range of topics including consumerism, freemarket capitalism and Climate Change. Here she talks about environmental activist greta thuneberg. There are many voices as well as greta who should be resonating and trying to get the worlds attention for a long time. Ive been going to un climate summits for about a decade now and there have been incredibly powerful moral voices coming from the marshall islands. There was an incredible speech made at the United Nations in 2014 by a woman from the marshall islands, a young woman named kathy jenner who wrote a poem to her ninemonthold baby and she read it to the assembled country representatives and it was an incredible speech that should have gone as viral as any of the greatest speeches so i think, i point this out. There have been other moments like a few years later when typhoon i am hit the philippines. At the very moment there was a un summit happening on Climate Change and the representative from the philippines didnt know whether his family was safe or not and he broke down crying in front of the entire assembly. That should have gone as viral as any of gretas beaches so to be honest, i think there is an issue around the fact that she is a white girl from sweden who, and thats part of why her voice breaks through when other voices who are really on the front lines of this crisis are living it and for whom it feels absolutely existential, as it does the greta have been ignored. I also think greta is absolutely remarkable young woman. I have so much respect for her. I think she is a prosthetic voice and i think these other voices ive spoken about before like the boys from the philippines are as well and i can point to many others, but greta is remarkable and i think theres something about greta and that she is so clearly is not forming anyone. Shes not looking for anyone to like her. Coming back to me what we were talking about earlier, we live in a culture where everybody is constantly performing a version of themselves. Everybodys interested in being famous,moving themselves. Greta could not be less interested and i know her and she is 100 percent focused on thescience. She talks about how having been diagnosed with aspergers, she says im not interested in your social games. As somebody on the autism spectrum. Though theres something about how on interested greta is in our upper mixer a very trusted messenger for a lot of people. Obviously she faces massive attacks and shes very clear minded about why he is being attacked by the likes of donald trump and Vladimir Putin and not to mention armies of trolls. Its because shes part of building a Global Movement that is growing with exponential speed. There were 7 Million People who participated in the World Climate strikes over an eight day period. Its unprecedented in the history of the planet so greta is part of an amazing