And the message exist but the first question is how do we get access . Thats a very important question. Right now we have no access to this data however there are initiatives of an industry Academic Consortium with this communication data and having trouble getting access. So in the past two weeks that not only does facebook read delay releasing the data that the projects approved they are planning to pull out by the end of september if facebook doesnt release the data they promised to release. So facebook has responded they are having difficulty releasing in a timely manner because of concerns of individual Data Security and privacy. This essentially brings up the transparency paradox. That these platforms are producing tremendous pressure to be more open and transparent how they are affecting our democracy. We do speak to the only way. The only way is to thread the needle of the cross paradox and become more secure engines apparent at the same time. What does that mean technically . Using techniques like differential privacy to anonymize the data before its released to researchers to analyze what the effects might be on our democracy. Host Maggie Muller of the hill newspaper covers cybersecurity and is here to help us explore these issues. Hello, professor brad thank you for being with us today. You noted that social media platforms need to spread the needle of securing data for making it more transparent in the lead up to the 2020 election how has social media pot forms such as facebook and twitter done in terms of addressing this vital balancing act . How are they prepared for 2020 . Guest i will tell you two things. Number one, we dont know enough about what is happening internally at these platforms to prepare for 2020. There hasnt been enough transparency simile and terms of policy. Forget releasing data but we dont know what preparations are being made behind the scenes to prevent this manipulation and to protect Election Integrity in 2020. Point number two is that it is a difficult problem but one that can be solved and i think that what i hear from a spark is that the people that are responsible for giving data to social science one are working around the clock and had people and Computing Resources dedicated to it but having trouble doing it in a timely manner. That having been said i will say im aware of more people, for instance, at google who have been researching differential privacy and then i was ever aware of Research Going on at facebook. It could be that they are behind the curve on that particular front. That having been said i dont have inside information about their preparations and there hasnt been public declarations about here is our plan for protecting 2020. You note in your paper that legislators need to be careful when drafting privacy legislation as several committees on capitol hill are currently working on in order not to limit the amount of analysis that could be done on the data from social Media Companies. What would you recommend that lawmakers keep in mind as they come back from recess and continue to pursue this topic . Guest one message as they pursue regulating social media platforms Going Forward and that is consult experts. I watched Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of congress and i watched many other instances of congressional testimony where the tech platform sends representatives to the hill and the legislators are illprepared to create legislation without consulting experts before they do it. I will give you two examples. There are a tremendous amount of important tradeoffs that need to be managed in pursuing any type of regulation of the social media platforms or the tech platforms in general. I will give you two examples. One is between privacy and Election Integrity. Obviously we want to explore reasonable privacy legislation and im an advocate for privacy legislation and do think we need to have legislation how private an individual data is used and that is an important right that emanates from from the constitution but at the same time a broad sweeping illegitimate Data Retention makes it very difficult to audit what social platforms do to our democracy and society in general. We will want to be able to audit those things Going Forward. The legislation has to be designed in a way that protects individual privacy, perhaps through anonymize asian but also retains the ability to also secure transparency at the same time. Another important tradeoff is the tradeoff between free speech and harmful speech and we certainly want to prevent the Live Streaming of mass murders or terrorist attacks on facebook but we also want to protect free speech in this country. There is a clear tension and tradeoff between regulation that would require platforms to quell speech or to chill speech and free speech itself these types of tradeoffs must be carefully thought out before the legislators act. Host proffesor aral is a professor at the institute for data systems and society at the Massachusetts Institute of technology. Hes also a professor of management they are. Professor, if you could would you go back and define again differential privacy. Guest differential privacy is a technique from Computer Science that anonymize his individual level data such that it cant be backwards created and you cant discover who the person was in a data set of individual level data from the data that you have. It is a a set of techniques that guarantees with some confidence the inability for the possessor of the input information to figure out what any individual identity is. Host is it your goal to explore what happen or prevent that from happening in 2020 . Guest we are much more interested in preventing it from happening in the future but i think that what we need to understand is that we have a broad conveyance of an sweeping instance of manipulation in 2016 that is ripe for study. In other words to understand how it was done in the past will help us to understand how we can prevented in the future. I think that the goal is to prevent it from happening again and it is not about doing a retrospective on the 2016 election but about understanding how to harden our democracy from future attacks and to protect Election IntegrityGoing Forward. Host and a sense are we fighting the last war . Guest what do you mean . Host we are fighting something that happened in 2016 but havent techniques moved on . Guest yes, indeed. You are completely right and that the german ablation attempts would be different, more sophisticated and perhaps more broadbased and sweeping and they will certainly involve more innovative masses of misinformation. For instance, synthetic video and synthetic audio deep fakes which is very troubling to me because this technology is advancing rapidly becoming much more convincing and they say seeing is believing for a reason and its the potential for it to be more convincing than actual misinformation and its great. Things will be different in the future however, its also the case that we can learn from the past. Those who dont are doomed to repeat it. In terms of deep fakes, professor, this is an issue being discussed by legislators on capitol hill and what can be done by congress or at least the social media platforms to try to mitigate the threat of deep fakes ahead of 2020 . Or is it too late to start to prevent this . Guest i dont think its ever wise to advocate that it is too late and we should throw our hands up. That is not the answer. Again, you face tradeoffs. I dont think its appropriate to chain down this technology. There are tremendous benefits to technological innovation. Synthetic videos and synthetic audios and Synthetic Data federation, realistic data generation, is used in highenergy physics experiments and used in medical testing and training. There are all sorts of legend with allocations to that technology and we should not shackle the technology in a way that prevents the innovation. However, we should be regulating uses of the technology that creates harm. The ways in which we do that have to be sensitive to the tradeoffs between not preventing technological innovation on one hand but preventing uses of the technology that are nefarious and harmful. We know that it will be used in little circles, in elections but we also know that its being used for commercial fraud. There have been instances that the semantics ceo has aborted multiple clients being conned into transferring millions of dollars through synthetic audio that is used to mimic the voice of the ceo of a company calling the cfo requesting large sums of money be transferred immediately and that has been successful in the past. There are commercial threats and democratic threats and we need to regulate it in a way that does not shackle the technology but controls the nefarious uses. Another potential threat was highlighted a few weeks ago when twitter ceo jack dorseys account was hacked and importantly anti semitic post were on there briefly before being removed so what is the threat in terms of disinformation to accredited users and those who are verified by twitter or on facebook being hacked and spreading news that may not be true . Guest i talked about this in my upcoming book which is about how social media disrupting our world and it was ironic that at the exact moment that jack dorseys account on twitter was being hacked i was on television talking about the danger to democracy from digital manipulation. The issue here is that there can be broad ramifications for a society that we may not even be thinking of. For instance, in 2013 syrian hackers hacked the twitter handle and put out a tweet that said that barack obama had been injured in an explosion, two explosions in the white house, that day. What happened was automated trading algorithms that trade on the sentiment in social media or in an automated fashion observing the sentiment and started selling stocks because that is big news. If the president had been injured in an explosion inside white house thats potentially a destabilizing force and accreted a market crash which lost 140 billion dollars of equity value in a single day. The threat from mimicking or inauthentic packs of individual verified users accounts israel potentially much greater than simply the damage to the individual. In the case of jack dorsey hes the ceo of a Major Company and when that fake news gets out it can damage the reputation of the company and create downward trends in the stock price and so on. It is difficult to theorize about what all the potential harm would be but we have several examples of serious harm that could come from these attacks. Host professor, i want to go back to what you said earlier but are these social Media Companies helping in this effort or are you finding resistance . Guest i think they are genuinely interested in helping but i also think they have natural incentives to drag their feet at times because you know theres a lot of potential exposure to commercial harm to them from being transparent. It takes a motivation on the part of the Senior Leadership team to understand that the impact of these technologies on our society are more important than the potential commercial harm of transparency and or any given disclosure. Obviously, they have a need to protect individuals private data and i do know some of the people working on this at facebook and i believe they have tremendous integrity and i believe they are genuinely interested in enabling research on this point but that is not the Senior Management cxo sweep of the company. Those people, Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and so on, they have a response ability to the shareholders and also puts them in a tight spot about how quickly to be how transparent. Host 90 of our conversation has been about facebook and twitter. Could we be including anybody else . Guest everyone else. We make this point in the paper that facebook is the poster child for this conversation at the moment and twitter but there are a number of other platforms that are involved and are important in this conversation. For instance, messaging services are important because a lot are encrypted. Take for instance whats app or a telegram, these encrypted services could be spreading and we know they are by examining public whats cap messaging groups and spreading misinformation that has been linked to genocidal killings in india and fake news in brazil and oxford study noted that a full third of the information before the swedish election was false and misinformation. So, we have to think about all potential platforms. Each one has a different role to potentially play in this. I describe many of them one by one in my book and describe why they are important to these problems. When does the hype machine come out . Guest fall 2020. Hopefully in september or october right before the election. Disinformation is part of a wider debate among Election Security that has been taking place on capitol hill since the 2016 election. Quite a heated debate and dozens of bills loaded on various aspects of Election Security, including the honest ads act sponsored by senators clover chart, warner and graham and that would mean those who buy ads have to be transparent about who they are and why they are buying these advertisements. Do you think alleged agent like this or any type of legislation that congress can push through prior to 22 date will have a major impact on disinformation efforts . Guest i do things over it i think the honest ads act is a step in the right direction and think california is making stops in a similar and right direction. Let me make a broad statement about legislation which i think is important. As you say, there are dozens but at least for bills that are in front of congress that have to do with election reform. It is rising to me that the discussion of these bills is even being blocked by the majority in the senate, Mitch Mcconnell has received a lot of negative publicity around his desire to block this legislation. H. R. 1 which is a sweeping legislation for election reform may be controversial in the sense that it has lots of elements that people disagree about but surely we can is things like the fire act, secure democracy act or cyber system or Cyber Security voting act, i dont remember the exact name but these are short bills with very limited scope that have to do with reporting contact by a campaign or for an individual that is trying to manipulate the election and making penalties for foreign individuals that are trying to ablate the election and securing the voting systems themselves but surely we can have a discussion on the floor about these bills. I dont know the poll numbers but my guess is a large swath of americans would be supportive of Election Integrity bills that are narrowly focused and not as sweeping as h. R. 1. You noted that these bills are languishing in the senate and the senate has passed a few smaller measures but surely should get signs bills signed into law prior to the 2020 election but what does this mean for Election Security headed into 2020 if we not pass meaningful legislation to address some of what happened in 2016 . Guest no, i mean let me be clear. If we dont make more moves on understanding what many ablation does to our democracy which we lay out in our paper in science last week and if we dont pass legislation simultaneously we are essentially doing nothing and find life. Now, i think a huge mistake because voting is a foundation of our democracy. Its the bulwark that protects all of our other rights. If we are not satisfied with the way our government is protecting our rights the only recourse we really have is voting. If that system does not have integrity then i think it really does cut at the foundation of democracy itself and i think for that reason its important that we be more active and proactive, both in legislation and in terms of the science around understanding election and ablation. Host proffesor aral, the states have most control over voting would not talk about them yet. Guest i think that certainly there is a federal Election Commission which has been largely inactive and also you know there are federal level voting not just legislation but legislative systems that deal with voting at the federal level. It is true that states have power and this is an instance where federalism is strong, in terms of states rights. Unfortunately, Mitch Mcconnell has used that argument as an excuse for inaction. That is a big mistake at the federal level. My point about the difference between the states and the federal government acting in this case is that we need both. There is no reason why the action of one should prevent the action of the other or why we need one but not the other and why they should not be acting in concert and both sides being proactive. Host does our decentralization of voting systems make us more vulnerable or less vulnerable . Guest no, our inaction makes us less vulnerable. I dont think decentralization necessarily makes us more or less vulnerable but a decentralized system can be secure in a centralized system can be secured but an inactive and system that is neither centralized nor decentralized will not be secure. You mentioned the federal elections commission. Recently they went down from fourthree commissioners meaning they are not able to take votes on anything in front of them. What does this mean in terms of Election Security and what is the impact of this . Guest i think it is a big problem. The major body that governs elections for that overseas elections at the federal level of the United States is inactive because we cant have a quorum and i think that is you know, its very troubling is what i would say. You close your paper by noting that being aware of social media and ablation is a core civic duty. How do you raise awareness amongst the public about this threat and how to keep that going in 2020 . Guest i think the point of our paper is to do exactly that. The net goals, my colleague at mit who i wrote the paper with, we did feel that it was important to not only write the paper but to come and talk to you on cspan and try our best to speak to the press and make sure the message gets out. Legislatures have a duty, civic duty and a response ability to keep pushing, both in terms of making the issue front and center but in terms of pushing legislation. The scientists have a civic duty to continue to pressure the platforms for access to that data. The platforms have a civic duty to do what is right and to create plans to protect our democracy in 2020 and to be more transparent while being more secure to release the data we need to understand the threat of many ablation and i think lawenforcement needs to do the same thing. Its all hands on deck and i do believe that we need to continue to trump the message that this is an issue that has to do with the foundation of our democracy. Host proffesor aral when will we see an update from you and mr. Eccles . Guest great question. Anytime we have movement we will certainly update public and if we get access to data or hear a denial in terms of not getting access to data as social science one either progresses or does not progress, im happy to talk about that as well. We intend to be public whenever we feel that would push the issue forward. Host proffesor aral is a professor at mit. His article is in Science Magazine and you can find him on the mit website, Maggie Muller is with the hill. Thank you both for being on the communicators. All communicators are available as podcasts. For 40 years cspan has been providing america unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the Supreme Court and Public Policy events from washington dc and around the country so you can make up your own mind. Crated by cable in 1979 cspan is brought to you by your local or cable or satellite provider. Cspan, your unfiltered view of government. Cspans washington journal live everyday with news and policy issues that impact you. Coming up tuesday morning, former florida ruffled again progress men Bill Mccollum will join us to discuss the politics of president ial impeachment and nancy former Clinton AdministrationNational Security official talks about the National Security applications of the ukraine phone call. Executive director will share the findings of a new market poll on public understanding and opinion of the u. S. Supreme court. Watch cspans washington journal live at 7 00 a. M. Tuesday morning. Join the discussion. Next, a discussion on threats to the u. S. Political system. Topics include the impeachment inquiry, president trumps use of social media and the role of the courts. From the Brookings Institution this is 90 minutes. I would like to welcome you to our panel on impeachment, foreign interference and Election Security in 2020. It has been