This op-ed was originally published in USA TODAY on July 12, 2018

The Senate Intelligence Committee issued a report last week concurring with the U.S. intelligence community’s unanimous assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a massive influence campaign aimed at the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The attack included the targeting of election infrastructure, email hacks, weaponized leaks, overt propaganda and a covert, large-scale disinformation effort on social media feeds like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

In many ways, this threat is not new. The Kremlin has been conducting information warfare or “active measures” against the West for decades. What is new, however, are social media tools with the reach and power to magnify propaganda and false information with a scale and precision that would have been unimaginable back in the days of the Berlin Wall.

The Soviet Politburo could only have dreamed of the capability Russia now has to target voters directly in the U.S., Europe and other democracies with propaganda, misinformation and disinformation. Twenty-first century social media tools have the potential to further erode public confidence in western institutions and undermine the shared sense of facts that is supposed to be the foundation of honest political debate.

In 2016, we were taken by surprise. In 2018, there are no excuses. We must be ready.

Message to Russia as Trump meets Putin

That is why we are teaming up with legislators from Canada and Europe to sound the alarm. Following this week’s NATO summit, parliamentarians from across Europe and North America will meet Monday in Washington, D.C., the same day President Donald Trump and Putin meet in Helsinki.

Our goal must be to demonstrate to the world that the community of democratic nations does not intend to accede to Putin’s or any other authoritarian’s view of the world. We will resist Russia’s aggression. As legislators, we have a responsibility to address that threat — particularly on social media.

First, as elected officials, we have a duty to use our positions to shine a light on Russia’s actions and capabilities. Utilizing our investigative tools and public platforms, legislators must expose the full scale and scope of Russia’s schemes to weaken democracies.

The two of us are currently engaged in a bipartisan effort in the Senate Intelligence Committee to uncover Russia’s activities during the 2016 elections and publicly detail its array of asymmetric capabilities. Similarly, our colleagues in the British Parliament, led by Damian Collins, are conducting an inquiry on “fake news” and how it was used by both foreign and domestic actors to influence the Brexit vote.

But it is not enough simply to shine a bright light on Russian aggression. As legislators, we also are responsible for crafting and passing laws to protect our democracy while also preserving freedom of expression.

More: Donald Trump is right to question NATO

Don't call it 'meddling.' The Russians attacked our democracy.

Blame social media for making us more hasty and emotional. Can we fix this?

There is little doubt that our own government and our laws have not kept pace with technological change. The magnitude of this challenge is poised only to expand with improvements in artificial intelligence, machine learning and related advancements like “deep fake” video manipulation. This technology can literally put words in someone’s mouth, creating a false narrative that can spread across the globe in minutes.

As our committee’s work has helped to establish, a key goal of Russian disinformation is to fracture the ability of open societies to reach social and political consensus — an objective significantly furthered when Americans can no longer "their lying eyes." If we hope to stay resilient against these threats, we’re going to need laws that keep up.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has put forward several bipartisan proposals to improve election security and ensure that the intelligence community does a better job of tracking, sharing and responding to efforts by any foreign power to influence our elections, including through social media.These include making clear to adversaries that we consider attacking our election infrastructure a hostile act and will respond accordingly, and to states that they should replace outdated and vulnerable voting systems as quickly as possible.

As stewards of oversight, we also have a responsibility to ensure our respective governments are ready to track and attack the ongoing threat from influence operations. In the U.S., we are not convinced that the national security community is currently organized to adequately rise to this challenge. 

Informed public best defense against Russia

Finally, we have a responsibility as public officials to raise awareness and ensure that the voting public are fully informed of how our adversaries are trying to manipulate us. At the end of the day, there is really no better defense against Russian aggression on social media than an informed citizenry — a voting public that is fully aware of the Kremlin’s attempts to divide us from within and rejects them.

But social media companies also have a civic responsibility to prevent abuse from proliferating on their platforms and to inform users when they’ve been exposed to it.

We in the U.S. have much to learn about Russian tactics from our allies across the Atlantic who have been, and continue to be, on the front lines of Russian information operations. Vladimir Putin wants to divide us — both internally, here at home, and externally, from our transatlantic friends. Next week, legislators from across the NATO alliance will send him a strong and direct message that it won’t work.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., is vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., is a member of the Intelligence and Foreign Relations committees. Follow them on Twitter: @MarkWarner and @marcorubio

On March 1, 2018, Senator Warner delivered the keynote address at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's launch of the Global Russia Project. Video of the speech and text of Senator Warner's remarks, as prepared for delivery, are below:

Historic Context

After the Berlin Wall fell, the United States reached out to the “new Russia” under Yeltsin and attempted to bring it into the western community of nations. We, perhaps naively, assumed that Russia’s eventual integration into institutions like the G7 and the EU was both natural and inevitable. Many of us imagined that, after the failure of communism, the allure and the success of western, free-market democracy would attract and breed success further east. At the same time, we watched as Russia’s conventional military capabilities atrophied and its economy stagnated, and concluded that the Russian threat was reduced.  Facing this changed world, we declared victory in the Cold War, and moved on. 

We turned our focus from superpower rivalry to counterterrorism, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the challenges emanating from failed states. We worked to track, chase and kill terrorists around the world. This was a logical and understandable transformation, given the 9/11 attack, and other threats to our security posed by failing states. However, there was a cost to these decisions – and we took our eyes off the re-emerging threat posed by Russia.

What we did not imagine at the time – and perhaps we should have – was the resentment many Russians felt at the economic uncertainties of the free market… the chaos and inflation that wiped out life savings… the corruption of a small clique of oligarchs… and the loss of the Soviet Union’s superpower status.

These feelings fed directly into ordinary Russians’ desire for stability and their disenchantment with the Russian experiment with democracy, ultimately entrenching President Putin’s authority. 

Meanwhile, Putin continued to nurse a grudge against the West. He called the demise of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” He used his growing control of television, the press, film, and popular culture to stoke and encourage Russian disillusionment.

Putin relied on these powers to boost his standing with the Russian public and breed a new Russian nationalism. And he began an ambitious program of rearmament – all with the aim of challenging the United States and the global order.

So while our gaze shifted away from Russia – which we began to write off as a “regional power” – Russia never really lost focus on us. Its geo-strategic aim remained squarely targeted on the western liberal order, and more specifically, on what its KGB-trained leadership still views as the “Main Enemy” – the United States.

So Russia diligently honed and updated its toolkit for a different kind of Great Power rivalry. They couldn’t match us in the old Cold War paradigm, so Russia needed a strategy that would allow them to compete with us on the new emerging battlefield. Russia’s Chief of General Staff, General Valéry Gerasimov, gave Putin exactly what he needed. 

Gerasimov and Hybrid War

General Gerasimov outlined a new security doctrine for the Kremlin – one that was more suited to the type of fight they could win, and one that could bring Russia back on par with the West.

He recognized a “blurring” of the lines between war and peace in the 21st century. He emphasized “non-military means” … “informational conflict” … and measures of a “concealed character.” Gerasimov outlined a vision for Russia’s military doctrine that relies not just on the conventional military, but on asymmetric means.

In Gerasimov’s vision, hacking, cyberattacks, information warfare, and propaganda would be the weapons of choice. He painted a vivid picture of a fight in the shadows – a type of “hybrid warfare.” It is a fight the Kremlin is intent on winning. 

Putin quickly went to work implementing the doctrine across the border in Ukraine, employing “little green men” and information warfare to create a state of perpetual chaos and instability. He also targeted Estonia and Georgia, and continued to invest in the types of deniable, asymmetric tools that would help him overcome the West’s more traditional advantages. He has now aimed those weapons directly at the United States, and we are inadequately prepared to defend ourselves.

Today’s Asymmetric Weapons

In recent months, Senator Cardin and the Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee delivered an extremely well researched report on Russia’s asymmetric assault on European democracies. They outline a comprehensive array of weapons in the Kremlin toolkit, including the use of organized crime, corruption, energy security, and even the Russian Orthodox Church to increase Russian influence. We don’t have time to get into all of those today, but I recommend that everyone read Senator Cardin’s excellent report.

What I do want to address today are the three main avenues of attack that Russia employed during the 2016 election: the targeting of election infrastructure; the hacking and weaponized leaks; and information warfare. The Senate Intelligence Committee – on a bipartisan basis – is intently focused on each of these three areas.

First, the beauty and curse of our voting system is that it is fragmented and decentralized. But that thought is less comforting than it might seem, since non-national elections can often come down to a few hundred votes, and even Presidential elections can be decided by a few thousand votes in one swing county in one battleground state. 

And even the threat of potential Russian incursions is enough to undermine public confidence in our electoral process. The Russians have tremendous cyber capacities, and we still have much work to do to ensure that our elections infrastructure can withstand anything the Russians or others might try. 

Second, the Kremlin has gone to great lengths to foster one of the most permissive environments for malicious cyber activity in the world today, including hacking and weaponized leaks. While Putin maintains some of the most prolific state-sponsored cyber capabilities, much of his active measures have not been state-led.

The Kremlin is able to employ, co-opt, and at times, compel assistance from a detached corps of non-governmental hackers that Russia has nurtured, and now harbors from international law enforcement.\

Rather than being always government-employed and taking direction top-down, these hackers are generally free to engage in criminal activity and money-making endeavors around the globe… as long as they keep their activities focused away from the private accounts of Russian oligarchs.

When it suits them, Putin and his cronies are able to utilize these capabilities to further their own active measures campaigns, while allowing the Kremlin to deny any involvement. Putin himself has trolled us here in the states by denying meddling during the U.S. election, but allowing for the possibility that, quote, “Russian patriotic hackers” may have done something. 

Hacking is obviously not unique to the Kremlin; however, weaponizing leaks from those hacks is a growing part of the Russian playbook.

The truth is, we should have seen this coming a lot sooner. Recall in 2014, when a bugged phone conversation between then-Assistant Secretary of State Toria Nuland and the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine made its way onto YouTube, where it caused a diplomatic uproar. In retrospect, we should have seen this incident as a test-run for the types of attacks and leaks we saw during the 2016 Presidential campaign.  

Third, the Kremlin is also making an unprecedented investment in 21st century information warfare.

During the Cold War, the Soviets tried to spread “fake news” that the U.S. government was involved in Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, and that the American military had manufactured the AIDS virus. Much like today, their aim was to undermine Americans’ faith in democratic government. 

But the widespread use of social media has allowed Russia to super-charge its disinformation efforts. Before, the KGB had to go through the tedious, time-consuming process of starting a newspaper in a neutral country, or crafting a dubious forgery that would ultimately be seen by a very small audience. 

Now they have instantaneous access to hundreds of millions of social media accounts where propaganda and fake news can spread like wildfire. While we all recognize the power and value of social media platforms, from the viewpoint of a hostile intelligence organization, they are nearly ideal vehicles for information warfare. 

The rise of new platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube has reshaped our entire culture, and the ways we communicate and access information. But while we marveled at the new opportunities offered by this technology, our government and the companies themselves were slow to appreciate the ramifications of offering free and almost instantaneous access to millions and millions of Americans, and the degree to which these platforms could be abused.

Tracking the impact of Russian disinformation is inherently difficult. One 2011 Russian operations manual suggests that disinformation “acts like an invisible radiation,” silently and covertly pushing you in the direction that the Kremlin wants. But you don’t even know you are being attacked.

That’s how the Russians were able to target and co-opt unwitting Americans into spreading their content online. They even succeeded in transferring these efforts from Facebook into the real world – at one point, spurring a pair of dueling rallies at an Islamic center in Houston. The Russians succeeded in pitting Americans against Americans from a troll factory half a world away.

The Threat Continues and Expands

These active measures have two things in common: They are effective, and they are cheap.

We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on national security, and in this arena, we’re on our heels. The Kremlin is spending pennies on the dollar, and wreaking havoc.

Worse still, they haven’t stopped. The fact is, this threat did not go away on Election Day. Russian operatives remain active today, stoking hate and discord online.

We saw Russian-linked accounts pushing hashtags on both sides of the NFL national anthem debate. We’ve seen them attack the President’s National Security Advisor. We saw them push the “Release The Memo” controversy. More recent reports suggest that they were even stoking anger on both sides of the gun debate after the Parkland shooting.  

And now that this playbook is out in the open, we have to worry about more than just the Russians.  These tools can be used by other actors across the board – China, non-state actors, and terrorists.

What Can We Do?

Unfortunately, there are no easy answers in this space – no single counter-measure that will stop this wave of attacks from Russia.

As the premise of Carnegie’s Global Russia Project notes, Russia seeks to take advantage where it can to amplify internal divisions. It is focused on boosting cynicism and tearing down Western institutions from the inside.

In response, we need to start right here at home. We need to recognize the threat, expose Putin’s game-plan and inoculate our society against these efforts.

In order to do that, we need to understand the Russian playbook and deliver a thorough accounting of what they did in 2016. This is why our Committee investigation, as well as the Mueller inquiry, is so critical. We have to get to the bottom of what happened, and we need to do so in a bipartisan way. Politicization will only undermine the American public’s understanding of the threat.

The question of whether any Americans knew about or assisted Russian efforts in 2016 is vital. However, it is only one part of the important work our committee is doing. This is not about Democrats or Republicans – this is about defending Americans and our institutions from a foreign attack.

Next, we have to recognize that we have much work to do to strengthen our security against these asymmetric threats. Our strategies and our resources have not shifted aggressively enough to target these new threats in cyberspace and on social media.

Russia spends about $70 billion a year on their military. We spend ten times that. But we’re spending it mostly on weapons designed to win wars that take place in the air, on land, and at sea.  And while we need to have these conventional capabilities, we must also expand our toolkit so that we can win on all the battlefields of the 21st century. Until we do that, Russia is going to continue getting a lot more bang for its security buck. 

No one questions that America possesses superior technological capability. But ironically, our technological dependence makes us more vulnerable on the asymmetrical battlefield where Russia attacks us.

We must spell out a deterrence doctrine, so that our adversaries don’t see cyberattacks against us as a “free lunch.” The U.S. has often done too little to respond to cyberattacks against us or our allies. When we do respond, it has often been done quietly, and on a one-off basis. That has clearly not been enough to deter our adversaries.

We need to make clear to Russia and other nations, that if you go after us using cyberweapons or disinformation, we’re going to call you out, and we’re going to punch back.

We need to more quickly attribute cyber-attacks. And we need to increase their costs with robust sanctions and other tools. That should include the sanctions against Russia passed overwhelmingly by Congress, but which the President has refused to implement.

The sad truth is, we are handicapped in our response by a lack of Presidential leadership. We need a president who recognizes this problem, not one who sees any discussion of Russian election interference as an affront. We need a president who will lead not just a whole-of-government effort, but a whole-of-society effort, to protect our institutions. We need someone who will unite our country against this threat. 

We can’t let Putin and his allies succeed. We have to – as a nation – learn how to fight back and shine a light on this shadow conflict. We have to get our act together here at home. Otherwise, we’ll still be shooting blindly into the shadows.

###

by the Editorial Board

As Americans have learned since the last election, Internet ads can race halfway around the world before truth-squadders are even aware of their existence, much less who paid for them. But we now know that in the 2016 campaign cycle, at least 3,000 digital ads that ran on Facebook were linked to Russia, and more than 450 Facebook profiles were tied to Russian operatives, who spent an estimated $100,000 on those ads. And that Russians also spent considerable sums for advertising on Gmail and YouTube.

That’s valuable information to have, but it is scant comfort to learn it long months after the votes were counted. This country must do better to safeguard future elections.

The Federal Election Commission, never good at acting until it has to, in part because it often finds itself in partisan gridlock, has been caught flatfooted by the outside deluge of online ads. So, too, were the social media companies themselves. Embarrassed by post-election revelations, they are now promising to do more on their own to scrutinize ads, perhaps as a way to forestall new laws or regulations. Expect them to underline their planned ad-policing efforts when executives from Facebook, Google, and Twitter testify before House and Senate intelligence committees on Wednesday. But given their past asleep-at-the-switch performances and the too-little, too-late nature of those initiatves, leaving ad oversight to them is hardly a promising course.

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Now Senators Amy Klobuchar, Mark Warner, and John McCain have stepped up with a bill that would apply the laws that govern broadcast political advertisements to the Internet ad sector.

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Specifically, paid Internet ads related to campaigns or elections would have to have clear and conspicuous disclaimers saying what entity was paying for them, the same way TV, radio, and print ads do. Further, those ads would have to include easy access to the name and street address, telephone number, or web address of the ad purchaser.

Facebook Will Disclose More on Political Ads, Similar to TV (1)
Facebook Inc. said it will start disclosing more about political ads, bringing the social network’s rules closer to what’s required of traditional mediums like television.
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Additionally, any website with 50 million or more monthly users would be required to provide the FEC with digital copies of the ads from any entity that spends more than $500 on them and to detail the amount of spending, the audience targeted, the period during which they ran, the rates charged, the number of views generated, and the contact information of the purchaser. Those social media companies would also be required to make reasonable efforts to ensure that foreign entities weren’t buying ads on their platforms in an attempt to influence US elections.

“This would be a real step forward in providing transparency,” says Stephen Spaulding, chief of strategy at Common Cause. “It is not a panacea, but it is a critical step toward updating the law.”

The hope is that the proposed law would have two effects. First, by mandating more transparency, it should make foreign agents more cautious about attempting to interfere in US elections via digital ads. Second, by requiring greater information, it should give media outlets and other interested parties a way to discern who is behind those ads.

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As the favored candidate of Russia and a man who can barely force himself to acknowledge the Russian election-interference efforts, President Trump can’t be counted on to play any kind of leading role in passing this legislation. That will be left to Congress.

The danger is that this will come to be seen as a partisan issue. It isn’t and shouldn’t be. In the 2016 election cycle, we saw a serious attack on American democracy. Efforts to prevent a second such occurrence need to be pursued with bipartisan determination.

by Rana Foroohar

If there was ever a piece of no-brainer legislation that should be passed by Congress, it is the Honest Ads Act put forward last week by US senators Amy Klobuchar, Mark Warner and John McCain. This bipartisan group is asking for online political advertising to be subject to the same rules of disclosure as ads on television, print, and radio. The idea is to make sure that foreign nations like Russia cannot use platforms such as Facebook, Google or Twitter to influence US elections, as they did in 2016.

The legislation is necessary for three reasons. First, it would even the playing field between platform companies and the rest of the media industry. This is long overdue. Google and Facebook together take roughly 85 per cent of all new digital advertising revenue. For years, they have come up with absurd excuses for why they should not be subject to the same rules as everyone else (online ads are too small to include disclaimers; it is too tough to figure out if ads are commercial or political, and so on).

Their reasoning does not hold water. These businesses have traditionally been just fine using the smallest of small print on privacy policies, so it should not be too much trouble to do the same thing with political disclosures. And if it is too tough to figure out what is political, play it safe and disclose everything.

Of course they do not want to do that, because opacity is a key part of what political operatives are paying for. That is reason number two that this legislation should pass — it would go some way towards cleaning up dark money and influence in politics.

Online advertising is hyper-targeted. That is the whole appeal. We get to see things that are meant for our eyes only. Rather than clear, broad messages that are put where everyone can see them, online advertising can play to the deepest fears of individuals, allowing them to be exploited with divisive or hateful messages that could be much more easily called out and debunked if they were, say, being shown on national TV or in a print advertisement in a major paper.

Indeed, as one political insider put it to me, it is not just the Russians, but our politicians themselves who want to keep their advertising in the dark. Consider, for example, the Trump campaign’s xenophobic pre-election posts on Facebook. The US president is somewhat singular in that he does not seem to mind openly dog-whistling. But others might well be deterred from taking the low road if they could be openly named and shamed for doing so.

The third reason the Honest Ads Act should pass is it would be a step towards reframing the regulatory debate around Big Tech. Large and powerful industries and companies that enjoy monopoly rents often like to portray themselves as “special” or “different”, and thus in need of a separate set of rules.

After a time, this idea of a separate playing field gets normalised. Monopolists also use complexity to obfuscate clear debate about what they are actually doing, and whose interests they are serving. I cannot tell you how many conversations I have had with fast talking financiers — and more recently, technologists — who try to throw as much jargon against the wall as fast as possible to see what sticks.

Yet the best questions are often the simplest ones. In the case of the financial sector, it was and remains: “What is the industry doing that is good for the real economy, versus what is good only for the financial industry?” We await a clear answer there. In the case of Big Tech, we might start with the question: “Are you playing by the same rules as everyone else, and if not, why not?”

The answer to the first question is clearly no. I hope that the Honest Ads Act will pass, and that lawmakers will move on to examining Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which says that platforms are not responsible for what their users post.

It is a get-out-of-jail free clause which has protected the industry from all sorts of legal issues that most businesses deal with every day, and is as outdated and unfair as the loopholes around political ad disclosure online.

Regulators should also look a lot more carefully at whether the M&A practices of the tech titans are anti-competitive. Consider Facebook’s recent purchase of tbh, a polling app aimed at teenagers, on which 5m users have posted 1bn questions since its launch three months ago.

As Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Open Markets Institute, a think-tank, tweeted: “Facebook is buying a competitor that undercuts its data-harvesting business model. FTC [the US Federal Trade Commission] should block this merger.”

I also hope that lawmakers will begin to educate themselves more thoroughly about the 21st-century digital economy. There are a handful of politicians who have done so. But not many.

I recently asked one high-level software developer from a Big Tech company, someone who frequently visits Washington, to rank technological understanding among not only Congress members, but among the Capitol Hill staffers who brief them. On a scale of zero to 10, he put that understanding at “negative 10”.

That is great for his company. But it is dangerous for the rest of us, because understanding Big Tech is now crucial to understanding not only politics, but the economy at large.