PassW0rd – 10th May 2017

Speaker A: This program is brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM. If you like what you hear and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm.

Speaker C: Hello, I’m Peter Warren. In this month’s Password, we explore the fake news phenomenon which targets voters with untrue stories about political candidates and different versions of events. We’ve been used to politicians lying down the years. Or should I say it in more parliamentary language, Mr Speaker, being economical with the actualité, as the late Alan Clarke MP put it. What’s different now is that artificial intelligences or bots can generate the lies automatically. And so can enterprising social media users who don’t know or care anything about politics. They just want to make a fast buck by creating a viral post and cashing in on the Google and Facebook revenues. These new actors, human and robotic, join the foreign state actors who try to manipulate public opinion in what is now known as hybrid warfare. John Pike, one of the world’s leading experts on defense, space, and intelligence policy, is the highly respected director of GlobalSecurity.org He says that disinformation now pervades everything we are told and involves those at the highest level in a secret conflict that is being fought out all around the world.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, there is a disinformation war. I can give you a couple of examples of that, 3 examples of it, if you’ll bear with me. This X-37 space plane that’s been flying around, do you know what it’s for? Do the Chinese know what it’s for?

Speaker C: I have no idea.

Speaker B: I would—

Speaker A: No, they don’t. They’re just as bewildered as everybody else, and that’s the whole idea. Okay, that thing had already been paid for before its original sponsors, NASA and the Air Force, lost interest in it. And so DARPA picks it up, and it’s just part of their disinformation program. They’re doing it to keep the Chinese bewildered because the trick is the Chinese can probably come up with about 3 or 5 different things that it could be doing. And the Chinese are going to have to develop countermeasures to everything that it might be. It becomes the sum of all fear, a Rorschach on which they project their worst nightmare. I’ll give you another example. DARPA, right? Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. This is a $5 billion agency, which is not much by DOD standards. Their budget document, the PDF they put out every year, it’s 1,000 pages. Who’s going to read that? Well, all those people over in Red China to try to figure out what the Americans are up to, to figure out what they need to be doing. It’s that their budget document is disinformation to bewilder the Chinese. I’ll give you a third example. Some years ago, DARPA funded a project to develop a hafnium bomb.

Speaker D: H-A-F-N-I-U-M.

Speaker A: Hafnium. Hafnium is an element, OK? And the claim was that if you could produce a sufficient quantity of an isomer, not an isotope, but an isomer of hafnium, the difference being that the isomer has to do with the electron states, whereas the isotope has to do with the composition of the nucleus. If you could develop, get the right isomer of hafnium, you could develop a bomb that would be as small as a hand grenade, powerful enough to blow up the Pentagon, and there’d be no fallout. Gee whiz, wouldn’t that be fun? That’d be great. There’s only one problem: it’s physically impossible. Well, why did DARPA fund that work and advertise the fact that they were funding it? Did they do it because they were stupid? No, they did it because the Chinese would read about it, and the Chinese politicians would call in their scientists and say, well, what about this? The Americans are working on it. What are we doing on it? And the Chinese scientists would say, we’re not doing anything, because it’s physically impossible. And the Chinese politicians, not knowing any better, would say, well, look, the Americans are some kind of smart people. Maybe they’re smarter than you. You need to go work on them. And every one of them that was working on the Hafnium bomb would not be working on something that might actually make a difference. So no, there’s a massive deception war going on.

Speaker C: Which there always has been.

Speaker A: It’s a lot more than it had been. No, I mean, the Americans were never this worried about deceiving the Chinese.

Speaker C: I mean, that’s taking advantage of two things, isn’t it? One, it’s taking advantage of the fact that the Chinese have always soaked up information and have always seen that as a way to make up for any deficiencies that they have.

Speaker A: That’s right.

Speaker C: So steal information. So in a sense, it’s culturally taking advantage of them.

Speaker A: That’s right.

Speaker C: Two, the Chinese have always been very, very diligent about reading everything.

Speaker A: That’s right.

Speaker C: So as you say, to put together a 1,000-page report is probably a good thing, though I would have thought, though, that the Chinese would have said, hang on a minute, the Americans keep secret the stuff they really want to keep secret. And the only stuff that they would release information about, they’re probably not really doing or they’re not interested.

Speaker A: Yeah. On the other hand, the Soviet slogan was show the best, hide the rest. You know, it’s a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

Speaker E: Yeah.

Speaker D: Okay.

Speaker A: And so, you know, I mean, Joe Stalin had all this intel about the Manhattan Project, and he didn’t believe it until, uh, we bombed Hiroshima. And that was the other— it was only once we bombed Hiroshima that he was convinced that, uh, the program was real and not just a massive effort, uh, on the part of the Americans to deceive the Soviets into wasting war effort.

Speaker C: Britain’s GCHQ is warning that the general election campaign could be distorted by lies against a background of reaction to fake news. GCHQ staff themselves are training the UK political parties on how to counter an information attack. A cyberhack hit new French President Emmanuel Macron during his election campaign. Germany plans a new law that will force internet companies to remove fake news and hate speech or face huge fines. And American intelligence agencies believe Russia’s Vladimir Putin used social media to get Donald Trump elected President of the United States. Commodore Patrick Tyrrell, a former naval and military intelligence officer, points out that although it’s facilitated now by new technology, None of this is exactly new.

Speaker F: Information is part of the defense, whether it’s a military defense or a social defense against attack. And where you have an opposition that tells you one thing which is false, this can affect your ability to defend the nations that you look at. It’s nothing new, I have to say. The Duke of Cumberland’s men, when marching into Scotland in 1715, there was a famous occasion when they invested the Highlanders at a battlefield and by all the normal criteria lost the battle. But the Duke of Cumberland got to Edinburgh and printed lots of handbills with English victory, and when this got circulated amongst the Highlanders who were still where they had their victory, they looked at it and said, oh, we thought we’d won, and then decided to fade away up into the Highlands. So fake news has been around and has been used by armies before.

Speaker E: But that’s just propaganda, surely. Are you saying propaganda has real value?

Speaker F: Oh yes, propaganda undoubtedly has real value, and you can call it fake news. I mean, you look at Korea, you talk to people in North Korea, and they are convinced that their way of government is the right way and that they have, they have a perfect life.

Speaker C: For Professor Andrew Jones MBE, the Chair of Cybersecurity at the University of Hertfordshire, propaganda is a legitimate element in the military arsenal used by all national powers. And yet the term is regarded differently in different parts of the world.

Speaker E: The Chinese have a very different view, as do the Russians. And the Russian view, which is probably the one we’re most concerned about, is they’re on— they believe it’s perception management, and that encompasses all of the forms of basically psyops in the conventional sense, psychological operations, right? So it’s not just hacking your computer news, it’s about trying to affect the perception of the people and the decision makers. So how do you do that? Indications are that we’re seeing some fairly good examples at fake news, believable stories that are not founded in fact, or that at least raise enough doubt in the end user that they don’t know which is real and which isn’t. What value is that then? It changes their perception. Earlier on you spoke about the Trump election and the view that it may— fake news may have influenced that. And that’s exactly the point. You try and affect people’s opinions and feelings.

Speaker C: Let’s take the example I quoted earlier of the 2016 presidential election in the United States. On day one of his presidency, the outgoing Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, presented Donald Trump with a dossier from all of the US intelligence agencies claiming to prove that Russian agents had secretly intervened in campaigning. President Trump rejected the advice, but Commodore Pat Tyrrell believes the American secret services.

Speaker F: If you look at the recent American election, I think that it was felt that the Russians would rather have had Donald Trump coming in because he seemed be stating that he wanted to work with the Russians in all sorts of ways, rather than having Hillary Clinton, who would probably have continued the former American view of the Russians as being unhelpful and having been involved in illegal actions in the Ukraine or Crimea. Now, I don’t know whether the Russians will think that interfering in the British general election is at all worthwhile. After all, as you say, the Russians would like to see nothing more than Europe becoming a busted flush, and we’re already leaving Europe, so we’re actually doing probably that which the Russians would wish us to do, because the departure from Europe is going to undoubtedly weaken Europe. So they may not interfere at all.

Speaker E: Unless they could see that the forthcoming election it turns into a second referendum, then, then they might be quite interested.

Speaker F: Well, yes, they might, in which case one assumes that it would be in their interest to make sure that Brexit does occur rather than the people who don’t want Brexit triumph in the end. I don’t know. I suspect the UK now is small beer as far as Putin is concerned. He’s much more interested perhaps in the German election later on in the year, and even the French election, where of course there is the possibility that he has been supporting Marine Le Pen and the National Front over any of the other candidates.

Speaker C: So the Liberal Democrats shouldn’t really bump up their cybersecurity at the moment?

Speaker F: Well, I think that it would be quite useful if we don’t have any interference from the Russians in any way in, in this particular election. So I think that everyone needs to make sure that their cyber defences are up and running, even the Liberal Democrats.

Speaker C: And Professor Andy Jones, author of Global Information Warfare, another former intelligence officer, believes that even a few well-aimed social media posts can have a big effect on the outcome of an election.

Speaker E: You only need to influence a proportion. You look how close the US election was. OK, the UK election is not anticipated to be close when it happens. I’m not so sure about the Germans. A small shift in perception could have a significant effect on the outcome.

Speaker C: Shifting perceptions, of course, is what politicians and governments must do if they are to remain in power: subdue their own dissidents and defeat their external enemies. In the old days, they would drop leaflets from aeroplanes, but now Nothing so crude is required. In the 1930s, the Labour politician Aneurin Nye Bevan opposed German rearmament and later went on to become the founder of the National Health Service. He had a neat little phrase to sum up the craft of political persuasion. He said, “This is my truth. Tell me yours.” Dr. Tim Stevens, lecturer in global security at King’s College’s Department of War Studies in London.

Speaker B: I think my concerns are broadly those that are shared by other people in my position as academics, but also in the media, in politics, and of course in the general public, which is that somehow we’re being inundated with news that isn’t quite as truthful as possibly we would like it to be. In fact, we’re finding it very difficult sometimes to determine the exact sources and political biases of stuff that apparently presents itself itself as news. And of course, the implications of that are significant. If we believe that what we read in the news somehow influences our political opinions and therefore our voting intentions and therefore the sorts of governments that we choose, at least in democracies, then I think we’ve got a very serious problem on our hands.

Speaker G: Okay.

Speaker E: Now, how does this work? A lot of people would say, how on earth can a lot of trolls or, or people operating on behalf of Putin affect an election in America? It beggars belief, doesn’t it?

Speaker B: It does. I think the thing we need to remember is that in terms of the intentions of whoever may be behind these kind of activities, they are fairly conventional in a sense that states have always tried to influence electoral outcomes in other states.. And just at the moment, the thing we have is that it has become increasingly transnational. So in terms of reach, it is much easier, say, for Russian operatives or whoever to have a putative effect in another jurisdiction. But it is also a matter of scale. Because obviously fake news, and I put that in inverted commas, is being consumed all around the world by various persons. But that does raise this question of actually what the effect is, and it might not necessarily be specifically to throw the results of an election, but as in the case of the US presidential election at the end of last year, one of the things that seems to have been very successful in terms of fake news is just creating a situation of uncertainty. And Trump himself in his campaign was also playing that game. So trying to bend the way that we perceive reality, trying to mess with people’s heads in common parlance. Just to try and subvert and destabilize the very foundations on which we normally build forms of public knowledge. So introducing uncertainty, not just into the electoral cycle or the electoral situation, but also into the very nature of how we relate to media and indeed to government.

Speaker E: Okay, so that is why you have been famously quoted as saying cyber warfare of the future may be less about hacking power grids, more about hacking minds. Is this what you are talking about? Shaping the environment in which political debate takes place?

Speaker B: Yes, shaping perceptions, influencing personal psychologies, and through that influencing collective psychology and of course decision-making. So this was the kind of thing that I was referring to. I didn’t expect when I think it was 2014 when I think I wrote that,. I didn’t expect 2 years later to be seeing it writ so large across global headlines. But there is certainly this aspect of persuasion and propaganda that although we are very familiar with it in a more conventional state form throughout history and particularly during the Cold War of course when both sides of the USA/URSS relationship were doing this not only with respect to each other’s populations but in countries all around the world trying to bring populations on side to their particular ideology. But I do think now we have a very different set of tools. And of course, it is not being directed necessarily by some black ops outfit either in the D.C. periphery or somewhere on the outskirts of Moscow or indeed inside Moscow. This is This is a very distributed activity that to a large extent is being conducted and maintained and forwarded by all manner of different groups, one of whom of course is WikiLeaks.

Speaker E: Okay, now it’s interesting that you mentioned the word propaganda. What’s the difference between fake news and propaganda?

Speaker B: Well, fake news has a much longer history than perhaps we think about. I mean, it goes back to classical antiquity, in fact. Look back towards the end of the 19th century when we had something called yellow journalism, which was very provocative, clearly made-up stories. We can look in our own time at something like the Sunday Sport. This is very, very clearly fake. A London bus was not found on the moon. Anyone would know that. These days with the fake news issue, it is precisely because it is not always so made up. Because it has a ring of truth, and particularly if it resonates already with particular recipients of whichever particular media platform or channel is involved. And the fact is that if it resonates, once you have got that message in there, it doesn’t have to be fake in the sense of completely artificial. It has to be fake in the sense of not quite as authentic as it might be. And if you just get that message in first, any kind of rebuttal or critique of that initial message is very hard to get into people’s minds.

Speaker C: That was King’s College’s Dr Tim Stevens. NATO and the EU are investing in a new centre of excellence based in the Finnish capital Helsinki to combat fake news. Especially from Russia. According to Janis Sarts, the director of NATO STRATCOM in Riga, information is now a key part of an attack on an adversary.

Speaker H: We here in the West would say the technology is ours, the marketing powerhouses are in our countries, yet we are having this discussion discussion against the feeling of being pushed, against the feeling of being pushed by different actors. Russia, I’m sure it will come up a couple of times today. Daesh, one can name also China in more subtle ways. But we are having the sense of being pushed. Why is that so? In my view, it is because the opponents have identified the weakness or ability to influence our societies directly through different means and different actors so that pursuing specific policies or being able to disrupt specific policies is becoming much more easier possibility. Just think of a couple of examples, namely, one can name Germany, one can name the Baltic States, there are quite a lot of interesting things going on in Scandinavian countries. So, they have thought about it in this context as I would say not being able to compete with us in a pure technological sense, sense, but understanding our need by the construct of our societies of taking our public opinion with us for whatever policies we pursue. At the moment you’re able to influence that, you can have a backdoor entrance onto the outcomes and the behavioral outcomes of the given societies. If I look to last week’s news, a couple of very telling examples 2 examples come to my mind. First, Russia has put up the military exercise Kavkaz 2016. And one of the great news they come back from there, they’ve been practicing information confrontation as a part of a military exercise. In an interview given by Deputy Defense Minister Gerasimov, he’s saying That is one of the new ways of mass influence. Well, in Russian, the direct translation would be mass destruction. I would attune that to mass influence. So, they say they have that structurally embedded in all military districts across their military. So, that’s the way they see it. In some of the— Research we’ve done recently, we’ve seen them also training their ability to understand the audience through all the modern means of communication, including Facebook and others, understanding how audience thinks. And that is not about us. That’s how they look at that phenomenon. So what is there for us? I think I still believe by and all we are the stronger party. We’ve just not awakened to the challenge.

Speaker C: Janis Saart of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre in Riga speaking at the Royal United Services Institute in September of last year. You’re listening to Password on Resonance FM, and after this you can hear A World in London with DJ Ritu. Now NATO is tackling propaganda coming out of Russia with its own version of the news distributed through online means. But with a hostile state like North Korea, where only a small proportion of the population has access to the internet, other means are needed. Andrea Little Limbago from the cybersecurity company Endgame in Washington, D.C. Explains how governments adapt their tactics in a case like this.

Speaker D: He’s so good at controlling what goes on domestically that even some of those failures, when the local population doesn’t hear about them, or they hear about them as a success, so it almost doesn’t matter what happens from a domestic perspective and from a population control perspective.

Speaker E: I mean, it is a psychological operation, isn’t it? What you are trying to do, given the fact that there can’t be that many people who actually do have access to the internet in North Korea, so those people who presumably do are going to be relatively powerful. What you’re saying— Oh yeah, for sure. What you’re doing is trying to put into their minds the idea that you’ve got something into their technology which will make them a little nervous about using the technology just in case it blows up in midair above them or turns around and—

Speaker F: Oh, for sure.

Speaker D: Well, not even that. Just probably the surveillance that goes on through it, I would imagine. Anyone who actually does use internet within North Korea, if they’re any kind of activist or whatnot, they’ve got to be taking every single possible precaution and still assume that they’re getting some sort of surveillance.

Speaker E: So in a sense then, even going to a US news site like that of the New York Times wouldn’t look very good for you.

Speaker D: No, no, it wouldn’t. And that’s— I mean, so that’s when you can see that perhaps you can find some of their workarounds to get some of their information either, you know, perhaps through some mobile means and some encrypted information. But any of that’s going to be risky. But that is what activists have to do within these kind of countries.

Speaker E: Which would also suggest that all of those people who are actually working as hackers will be under an incredible amount of surveillance themselves because basically they would be able to get out if they wanted to or even hide what they were doing from those people who would like to know what they were doing. Yeah, I know, exactly. It’s all smoke and mirrors, isn’t it? It’s a wonderful world, this world of hacking, because it’s brilliant for intelligence agencies, etc., etc., because Nobody knows what anybody’s doing really.

Speaker D: No one has the full picture. I guess that’s how I would think about it. I think everyone knows some things that other people are doing, but they’re also keeping their cards close as far as letting other people know that they know what they know. And so it is a huge cloak and dagger as far as what information you reveal that you know about what other people are doing. Because say you find out that some group is— but the way that you found out about that was through some tool that you don’t want other countries to know that you have. Sort of showing that you know that someone is there is a giveaway to what your capabilities are. And so you have to be very careful along that, that you don’t want to be giving away what your own capabilities are. So it’s a lot of, like you said, a lot of smoke and mirrors in that area. Everyone has some idea what other folks are doing. They’re not going to be willing to reveal everything they know.

Speaker E: It all sounds positively Rumsfeldian, doesn’t it? Just one final question. Do you think that American cyber ops teams are inside the North Korean ballistic missile program?

Speaker D: Oh, so yeah, I would say I don’t have to even speculate on that. You know, what you want to be doing is you’re looking at past behavior, look at what’s been going on. It— even when you look at, you know, some other Some other attacks that have been going on, the U.S. government has not publicly acknowledged participation in those attacks. So it would be hard to say. At the end of the day, I’d be surprised if— like you said, I’d be surprised if a variety of countries have not infiltrated various aspects of the program.

Speaker E: It would seem to make some sense, wouldn’t it? I mean, obviously, What one would want to do is actually get into the system’s targeting mechanism so that you can actually bring any missile that’s launched with a ballistic, with a nuclear warhead back and land it on top of Kim Jong-un’s palace.

Speaker D: That’s the objective. Well, I don’t know about that. I’m sure there are a lot of hypothetical scenarios that would make a lot of people, that would be of interest to a lot of people. I’m not sure. We have to, you know, the other thing I’d keep in mind is that the infiltration for these systems within the government isn’t just the technical, right? And some of it, a lot of it combines the human element with the technical.

Speaker C: So hostile states are playing bluff and counter-bluff with spies and double agents, as they always did in this land of smoke and mirrors. King’s College’s Dr. Tim Stevens believes the worst offenders when it comes to fake news are the governments themselves.

Speaker B: We are straying here into the realm, when we are thinking about major political collectivities like the EU, other transnational groups like NATO, we are getting into the realm here of strategic communication. And strategic communication is the set of processes which are basically what we might call propaganda in another age, in which you are trying, much like propagators of fake news, trying to get people to come on side or believe a particular worldview that is amenable to your strategic goals. And when we hear perhaps at the European level people talking about combating fake news with particular narratives and so on, as we have heard in the counter-terrorism debate as well, of course, over the last 15, 20 years. You, you’re basically playing the propaganda game. You’re entering into a conflict in some sense in that informational space. It’s very difficult once you’ve entered that conflict to know really whether there is any black and white, or it all becomes very, very gray indeed. And really, you can’t play distributors of fake news at the same game. And I do wonder quite—

Speaker E: surely the government is been saying that with, say, Islamic fundamentalism, that what they need to do is to get a different message out there. Are you saying that that different message is fake news?

Speaker B: I’m not, but I’m saying that that’s certainly the accusation that will be made if it comes branded with the stamp of a state. And we’ve seen this throughout the counter-terrorism debate in the UK when we have units within Whitehall that are specifically set up for counter-messaging, counter-narrative and so on. I mean, I wonder how successful they are, but you know, when you’re a government, you’re automatically at a disadvantage. One, you’re usually highly politicized, the nature of most governments, particularly in a first-past-the-post system like we have in the UK or in an authoritarian regime. If it comes stamped with the imprimatur of the government, it’s political already, therefore it is already biased in the minds of many, many people. And in a sense, they are correct because they obviously have a political motivation. It’s not necessarily fake news, and I think we have to distinguish here between fake news and news bias because they are not the same thing, as I mentioned earlier. But I don’t suggest— but I have seen the suggestion that people say we should be combating fake news with something that looks very much like fake news. It would be much better perhaps to combat fake news with fact news. And the interesting thing about the fake news phenomenon, of course, that it’s not purely an information/media undertaking. It’s also very much wrapped up in information technologies themselves. And of course, we’re getting into the realms of cyber warfare there. So when the American intelligence community reported on Russian interference in the US presidential election, it was very specifically talking about cyber-enabled hacking and so on, information operations, cyber-enabled information operations. So what you’ve seen is traditional information warfare, which is about persuasion, propaganda, communication, coupled with the whole information technology, cybersecurity, cyberwarfare piece coming together in 2016 in a way we hadn’t really seen before. So when NATO is talking about countermeasures against fake news, you would think logically that that’s not just about the media/communication piece, that’s also about defensive cyber operations, offensive cyber operations, about cyber sabotage, surveillance, and more conventional sort of intelligence activities as well. So watch that space.

Speaker E: I don’t know what their plans are. Do you not think that one of the biggest problems with this entire area, with this entire thing to do with cybersecurity security, this entire thing to do with information warfare, is that the ethics of the states are what is actually undermining everything. It’s that if you have Russia, for example, tolerating an extraterritorial hacking army and various different organizations in the UK who are also doing things like monitoring everyone’s communications or trying to undermine other rival states, that this perception that the states aren’t particularly behaving very well just seeps down into the hacking community at large. And so everybody says, well, it’s okay for us to do it because we’re not actually being set a very good example.

Speaker B: That’s correct. And I’ve been concerned about this for many, many years. About states undercutting their own moral high ground, as it were, and being— indulging in activities that in many cases are unconstitutional, in many other cases unethical, in a lot of cases are unnecessary. And as you say, if you want to take the moral high ground, you have to be seen to be leading by example. And unfortunately, from the perspective— and I’ve heard intelligence Former intelligence officers talk about this, some very, very senior indeed. And of course, post-Snowden, it’s very difficult now for Western security and intelligence agencies to be able to say, look, we’re the good guys here. In many respects they are, but some of their practices are highly dubious. And of course, being the sorts of agencies that they are, we don’t actually know what they’re up to at the moment. And, you know, thinking back to the NATO piece, what exactly will NATO operatives be doing? Under what legal remit? Under what ethical remit? And the problem with all of this is that given the nature of the information environment at the moment where security will never be perfect, where there are vulnerabilities in information systems left and right, it’s quite possible the truth will out at any time about what a particular group or agency your institution is up to. And I think that’s an even stronger reason these days for making sure that there’s an awful lot of oversight of what these groups are doing, an awful lot of accountability, and making sure that that oversight is enshrined in law and that intelligence agencies in particular are made to be accountable, which would enable states to some level to actually be able to retake the moral high ground in some respects and set a good example.

Speaker G: Example.

Speaker B: On the other hand, I do not, and I’ll be very, very clear about this, I also do not wish to adopt the sort of Julian Assange view of the world in which radical transparency is an obvious public good. It is not. States do need a certain amount of secrecy to be able to perform their basic functions, one of which is security, like it or not. So I’m not arguing for radical transparency, but I’m I’m certainly arguing for improved transparency and definitely increased accountability.

Speaker C: Meanwhile, in Europe, there’s concern over the fake news being published on social media. So much so that the EU’s Culture Committee is putting pressure on the communication platforms to force them to control the content that they produce and process. It’s a pressure that EU Digital Commissioner Andrus Ansip opposes calling it censorship. “Fake news is bad, but the Ministry of Truth is even worse,” he said at the debate on the issue. That, of course, is a reference to George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, in which propaganda and pornography are manufactured at the Ministry of Truth, and the Ministry of Love is responsible for the physical fighting in perpetual hybrid warfare. In today’s online world, we don’t need a Ministry of Truth. Hundreds of thousands of vloggers and social media users are already creating viral content just to attract attention, because attention can be monetized through Google AdWords. And so-called social bots are doing the same. They are programmed to keep producing more of whatever brings them the most likes and shares. And train themselves to automatically pump out more of the same. An investigation by BuzzFeed found that pro-Donald Trump fake news was being posted on Facebook by unemployed young men in Veles, a small town in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. One of them, who asked to be known only as Boris, cheerfully admitted he had switched to backing Trump for economic reasons, because he could not make a post go viral if it favored one of the other candidates.

Speaker E: Boris—

Speaker C: take 2. I’m gonna move this chair. And so-called social bots are doing the same. They are programmed— take 3, there was some strange noise then. And so-called social bots are doing the same. They are programmed to keep producing more of whatever brings them the most likes and shares. And train themselves to automatically pump out more of the same. An investigation by BuzzFeed found that pro-Donald Trump fake news was being posted on Facebook by unemployed young men in Veles, a small town in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. One of them, who asked to be known only as Boris, cheerfully admitted he had switched to backing Trump for economic reasons. Because he could not make a post go viral if it favoured one of the other candidates. Boris explained this: “Bernie Sanders supporters are the smartest people. They don’t believe anything without proof.” With this toxic mix of state propagandists on the one hand, and on the other hand, the lone wolves creating fake news for money, the EU felt compelled to act. Here’s Mary Honeyball, MEP, who sits on the EU’s Culture Committee, with more on the European Parliament’s initiative.

Speaker G: On the part of everyone, I mean, no one wants wrong information to get out there. And I do think also that the social media companies and others involved in the whole internet communications area should take some responsibility for this as well, as indeed we all should. And it’s becoming quite a problem, I think, with social media in that anyone can put anything out there. And we need some better means of verification. I know it’s, it’s to some extent an individual responsibility, and it’s obviously completely up to people what they believe and what they don’t believe, but I do think that we have a responsibility to make sure that at least what goes out there as serious news is in fact serious news. Correct, it’s not made up or the product of somebody’s imagination, complete nonsense or worse than that, harmful news.

Speaker E: Or, there was an incident a few months ago which was seen as incitement where a remarkably powerful YouTube blogger with a following of, I think it’s between 20 and 50 million, talked two Indian guys into holding up a sign which said, to all Jews, which they didn’t understand.

Speaker G: That’s pretty irresponsible. That’s appalling. I mean, that’s absolutely appalling. And I do think the major players such as YouTube do have a real responsibility for looking at what goes up on their platform and taking action as appropriate. I mean, nobody really would be allowed to publicly put up placards saying, “Death to Jews.” That would actually be a criminal offence in the United Kingdom. So we’re not making this up out of nowhere. There is already powerful legislation about this kind of thing in the terrestrial world, if you like. But we need, I think, to apply those same principles to online, particularly I think to the big players like YouTube and Google.

Speaker E: Well, this is the interesting point, isn’t it? Because People don’t really appear to realize this, but social media channels are— and Google and YouTube— these are public places. These are places that everybody can go to. They are actually very, very similar to the street, and therefore to actually put these sorts of messages out there is the equivalent of shouting out these sort of things in the street, and you wouldn’t be allowed to do that.

Speaker G: I couldn’t agree with you more. That’s absolutely right. Absolutely right. In some ways they’re more pervasive and more troublesome, if you like, than the streets because there are natural things which often will protect people in the streets, like other people who don’t believe in what you’re doing, people who think that what you might be doing is wrong. That doesn’t operate in the same way on social media where people can put anything at the moment, almost anything out there, and it often isn’t challenged at all. And if it is, it’s inevitably going to be some time after the event. So I think we do actually, as you say, need to start treating social media much more like we would treat people being outside with other people in public spaces on the ground. I think what we’ve seen as social media has developed, the idea that it’s really almost not part of our lives, it’s something different, it’s something— and that’s actually not true at all. Of course it’s part of what we do. And information that goes on social media is information which many people pick up and use. And that kind of information can be harmful. It can be very, very beneficial. Beneficial, and I think social media has been great in many ways, but we do need to make sure we monitor it and make sure it isn’t harmful.

Speaker E: But that’s the other real issue about all of this, isn’t it? Because on the street, you’d find that people with these views perhaps, you know, that they would be outweighed by the majority. That if somebody started baying out significantly unpleasant views, that a lot of people would look at them and they would be able to see what sort of numbers that they accomplish. For example, the English Defence League when it marched into Birmingham, only had 100 people in its protest, which really is not significant. The problem with online is that you get mobs of like-minded people who shout each other down because those minority groups achieve numbers because like-minded people seek each other out on the web.

Speaker G: That’s absolutely true. And of course, the other thing is that very often, in fact almost always, people who do that kind of thing, those sorts of trolls and people who put out hateful and horrible nasty messages, do it anonymously. So there’s no danger that anyone’s going to find out who they really are. And of course that’s not the case if you do something on the street or in public on the ground. So I think that’s a real issue that people can get away with really, really, really nasty horrible criminal activities online and they can’t be traced very easily and no one knows who they are.

Speaker E: But that’s the nub of the issue that we’re facing, isn’t it? I mean, you’ve actually put your finger on it. It is the whole thing. Issue of attribution is the bogey bear of this age. Attribution, we were told by Hillary Clinton, or lack of attribution, was one of the wonderful things that allowed the Arab Spring to take place. However, the flip side of that is that attribution allows this unpleasant behaviour to take place as well.

Speaker G: That’s absolutely true, and Hillary Clinton was right to say that. And there have been the Arab Spring and other social movements which have been, have benefited from being able to get their messages out on Twitter and various other platforms. But I think notwithstanding that, I think we really do need to think about attribution and how it can be misused and how it is being misused. And work out ways in which people who actually do peddle hate speech and all the other horrible things that trolls do can be brought to book. Because we really cannot allow people to put out messages which are criminal often.

Speaker F: And intent without doing anything about it.

Speaker E: Now Mark Zuckerberg is proposing or is saying that Facebook will start to use AIs to review what’s happening on its network and bring those things to the attention of those people who should be looking at them more efficiently. But some people are inevitably going to say that that is censorship, that this is an attempt to cut down on speech and that this really just lays the door open for the intelligence agencies to do similar things. It is a very, very difficult line to walk, isn’t it?

Speaker G: It is, though I think we’re often in danger of exaggerating these things. I think you do have to have recognized ways of behavior. As we do, we have certain things which are criminal offenses, as is hate speech, as is sexual harassment.. And I think it’s actually very clear what’s right and what’s wrong in our normal everyday lives offline. All of this seems to break down when we get into the internet, to that ethereal internet space up there, when people seem to think that they can get away with what— anything that they like. So I don’t actually view this as censorship. I view it as trying to use the same sort of values and principles for internet communication as we do in our normal everyday lives not on the internet. And I know there’s a fear of the intelligence agencies. There always has been. And there are, I think justifiably, many more fears in some countries than others. I think there may be a case for a separate way of looking at intelligence gathering because it is important in these days of terrorism that we have effective intelligence services who can gather information against people who would be harming individuals and groups of people. So I think there’s a balance here and I would hope that what we could do now is have much more public discussion about this and about how we control the internet, how we make sure that behavior on the internet is acceptable and it’s not criminal.

Speaker E: But there is also this other issue too. A lot of the poorest behaviors does seem to come from some of the youngest members of the community. Those people who like to proliferate certain images do seem to be by and large young. I admit there are some very, very diehard and very unpleasant people, but those people who tend to set these hares running with ill-informed information do tend to hit a certain demographic profile. Won’t that mean that these attempts are actually seen as just those inevitable reprisals by adults who are just trying to ruin something because they don’t understand humour.

Speaker G: Well, I don’t think fake news is humour. I certainly don’t think hate speech is humour at all.

Speaker C: But perhaps the best defence is in our own hands, which are all too quick to like, share, and retweet a news bite or video that suits our political persuasion. Perhaps we should step away from the keyboard Go into the kitchen and take a large pinch of salt before we proceed to read it again. Check it. Think about who wrote it and why. Even digital natives who grew up with social media find it hard to tell fake news from real. Professor Sam Weinberg from Stanford University in Silicon Valley, California, tested 7,800 school and university students Professor Weinberg found most unable to distinguish fact from fake in photographs and unaware of the political agenda behind news stories produced by, for example, the gun lobby. Weinberg sums up the findings of the research study like this: Overall, most young people’s ability to reason about information on the internet can be summed up in one word: Bleak. Speaking on National Public Radio, he described how the tests worked.

Speaker I: We simply have not caught up to the way these sources of information are influencing the kinds of conceptions that we develop on a day-to-day basis. But the only way that we can deal with these kinds of issues are through educational programs and recognizing that the kinds of things that we worry about, the ability to determine what is reliable and not reliable, that is the new basic skill in our society. In many schools, there are internet filters that direct students to previously vetted sites and reliable sources of information. But what happens when they leave school and they take out their phone and they look at their Twitter feed? How do they become prepared to make the choices about what to believe, what to forward, what to post when they’ve given no practice in doing those kinds of things? And so consequently, what we see is a rash of fake news going on that People pass on without thinking, and we really can’t blame young people because we’ve never taught them to do otherwise. The kinds of duties that used to be the responsibility of editors, of librarians, now fall on the shoulders of anyone who uses a screen to become informed about the world. And so the response is not to take away these rights from ordinary citizens, but to teach them how to thoughtfully engage in information seeking and evaluating.

Speaker C: To help us do better than those American high school and college kids, we of course need more than just a pinch of salt to close this huge gullibility gap. As I mentioned earlier, the EU and the German government are already working on new laws to try to restrict the free flow of content on the internet in the name of combating fake news. Terrorism and hate speech. I’ve been talking to hackers in some of their forums, and they’re angry that attempts have been made to censor the online space. Dr.

Speaker B: Tim Stevens of King’s College London agrees that this is the height of hypocrisy. There’s two interesting things about the Google-Facebook argument. The first is that— it’s the age-old debate about whether they’re platforms or publishers. And both Google, Facebook, and other large companies flip-flop depending on which way the political tide is going as to whether they’re a neutral platform or whether they’re publishers. At the moment, they’re saying that we’re a neutral platform, but we realize we have certain responsibilities not to disseminate, accidentally of course, various forms of content. The other thing is that 10 years ago, we were talking about China. In this country and in the West generally and saying, look, the Chinese censorship system, the internet censorship system which we commonly call the Golden Firewall employs tens of thousands of people to censor the Chinese internet. Now, Western governments are effectively saying to their own very, very successful tech firms, you need to employ tens of thousands of people to censor the Western internet. And I wonder sometimes what’s What’s the difference there? And I also wonder, the government doesn’t seem, governments in the West don’t seem very keen on actually saying by what criteria Google, Microsoft, etc., should be filtering out content, except that it must be fake. But this is very difficult to develop criteria when you have the President of the United States, for example, calling the BBC, Britain’s publicly funded media network, the BBC, fake news.. So what sort of criteria should we develop collectively or at a national level about what actually constitutes fake news? Who should be filtering it out? By what legal measures should those be enforced? And that we really are going down the censorship road if we are talking about that. Or should we just be training and educating people about how to spot most of the trigger signs that most people, well, many people can spot? Can sense automatically, although apparently not the 80% of the young demographic you mentioned earlier.

Speaker C: Yet because technology has a way of answering all the problems that technology produces, a raft of new startups are now peddling software solutions to unmask fake news. Even Google has introduced a system of signals to show the source of each news item. Some of the new apps work by trawling the internet to find the origin of each news item or photo. The app Match Hamster, for example, based in Amsterdam, will show where your text originated and who’s copied it, and is used by newspapers, photo agencies, and universities to prevent intellectual property theft. Then there’s Politibot from Madrid. It will pop up on your smartphone with background information on any new political development in any of 7 languages. A more ambitious project is being rolled out from New York. First Draft News ran a comprehensive fact-checking service throughout the French presidential election. Among the stories they debunked was one claim that Marine Le Pen the anti-immigration candidate had won the support of the Congolese diaspora’s community leaders. Oh, and did you hear the one about former President François Hollande going to vote at his constituency polling station in his own private jet? First Draft News works on the principle that journalism is the first draft of history, so journalists should try to get it right. Here in London, they’ve been doing it for years at fullfact.org, the charity-run verification website. During last year’s Brexit campaign, Full Fact dealt with a flood of queries about the politicians’ claims, but unfortunately could not rebut the false claims on the side of the Remainers’ bus that leaving the EU would result in millions going to the NHS. Take 2. Here in London, they’ve been doing it for years at fullfact.org, the charity-run verification website. During last year’s Brexit campaign, Full Fact dealt with a flood of queries about the politicians’ claims, but unfortunately could not rebut the false claims on the side of the Remainers’ bus that leaving the EU would result in hundreds of millions going to the NHS. Because it’s now obvious that everyone considers social media to be the place to win hearts and minds and sway people’s decisions. The challenge now in the 21st century information war will be not who has the most missiles, but who has the most beguiling version of the news. Will it be the ministry, the bot, or the teenager with their finger on the keyboard? Perhaps the author of 1984, George Orwell, got it right when he said, “In an age of deceit, telling the truth becomes an act of revolution.” That was Password with me, Peter Warren. You can find out more about fake news at the Future Intelligence website, where you can also sign up for our London conference on the 24th of May, Living and Working with Artificial Intelligence. Password is a Future Intelligence production, and I’ll be back with another edition on Wednesday the 14th of June.

Speaker A: Thanks for listening and goodbye.

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