the belief that these dictators use political power wisely and benevolently, that they were kind. this is most important, they bridged the gap between theory and practice. >> for more of the schedule go to booktv.org. >> hillary clinton and met ronnie former campaign managers teamed up for a cyber security product they hope will serve as a first response system to foreign governments to try to interfere in u.s. elections. join them on a panel to discuss ways to combat digital threats to democracy. this is about 90 minutes.they >> good evening everyone, thank you for coming out to

the forum. tonight we have a great group of guests to talk about the digital threat to democracy or the threat to the digital democracy. you will see the group we have gathered are literally the leading experts in a very complicated field. we're lucky they were willing to copy or and talk about all the things that make up a digital democracy and the threat to it. those are things related to the fourth amendment and the first amendment and the systems that underpin the technology and our electoral system of democratic government. like to briefly introduce myself. i'm the codirector of the center for science and

international affairs. i've been here in cambridge about six weeks, i just moved from d.c. where i was assistant secretary of defense and in charge of all things cyber at the pentagon. to me this is an issue that resonates strongly in my heart in my gut and in particular because when i was there i saw a lot of bad things unfolding in the bad guys going after our democracy and it felt bad. once i was out, i thought to myself i'm going back to the kennedy school and if there's still a role for people outside government trying toec address this issue because it still is an issue. my deepest fear actually is that all the bad guys around the world saw what happened in 2016, that bad guys were

going after our democratic system of government and all just rubbing their hands together getting ready to go back after the u.s. with that is an introduction. i want to introduce you to a cast of characters here today. all of them are doing something about this. different than in some parts of harvard, they're not only great thinkers and strategic thinkers, but they are literally doing practical things to try to address this issue. i would first like to start right here and i'll start with molly. molly is very interesting, j not only because she's a journalist for politico, but she has been in info war expert for a long time to the degree that she's also a special advisor torn governments around the world who deal with this issue in a very personal way. she just got back from some of the baltic states and she will talk more about that. kurt watts is a fellow at george washington, but he

knows something about this in a very operational way. he is a formal special agent from the fbi where he was working on fiber issues, knows how this works operationally and in a past life was also an army ranger and knows how to keep people safe. s then we have here, heather atkins who is the director of information security and privacy at google. heather, like debbie who i will introduce later is literally a pioneer in the field of cyber security. heather was the first person at google working on cyber security. if you can imagine, she has seen a lot over the years in the way things have evolved and she knows how to run cyber security operations and knows a lot about both the technical and information side of things. then we have robbie look who is a star in his own way and very popular around the kennedy school. a few little groups of people

following, he's got like a cult. his most well-known because he was hillary clinton's campaign manager and he is one of the hardest working guys i've gotten to know. i'll tell you about that story later. sitting next to me, believe it or not is a real live republica republican. he is a real republican. he's not a republican in name only. was this is matt rhodes. he was mitt romney's campaign manager and so the story about how and how and why he's willing to work with robbie to prin protect the digital democracy is something we'll talk more about.y he's a great guy, a very effective guy and one his helping in the project we started to navigate the complicated politics. last but certainly not least is debbie who, at one point was one of the most senior people in the national security agency, and if youu

want to talk about someone who has seen the bad guys go after your network, debbie was responsible for all the cyber security for the national security agency and at that time the department of defense. i think it goes without saying. this is a very complicated issue. then it's a little bit of the private sector today. i don't have to tell any of the kidney school students but this is a complicated mix.

i'm asked debbie about some of her ideas on how you can defend digital democracy. f let's start with you robbie. >> your fresh off theng campaign, obviously a little painful, and there's a lot of things you can do for a campaign like that. some of them involve burying your head in the sand and pretending than whole thing never happened.

why defend digital democracy considering all the other things you could be doing. talk to us about that. i was very upset about what happened and concerned about our campaign and a lot of democratic campaigns were vulnerable to these attacks. second of all, i was really concerned about how part partisan the issue is becoming. frien

it's a small club were in, very exclusive group of campaign managers. [laughter] we were talking about this. i learned that rodney's campaign had been attacked in 2012. matt really understood what a problem this was, but i think we all had alignment around this issue that this could become a mechanic or republican, otherwise we are basically going to be inviting foreign powers to attack our adversaries and that wasn't okay. the last piece, i just wanted to understand what you said and what's been great about the space you've given us to do this project. at the end of the day we want to know that we made campaigns more secure and we've done more help to scope out the bad guys and keep

them out of our campaign. i was talking about other ex- obama appointees and how much it was really bugging me. i've been buried in the pentagon working 20 hours a day, seven days a week. the center you hillarys not campaign manager. he told me about this guy matt rhodes, real-life republican who also thoughtou this was an important issue. tell us about your thought process. >> i want to thank the kennedy school for hosting us. robbie kind of stole my thunder. publi it just didn't get as much publicity because it came

down in a very public way.did a i was notified that we had been attacked by the chinese. what it did and how it impacted our campaign was that we had to use vital precious primary campaign hard dollars, money that we needed to win back in new hampshire and iowa to upgrade our campaign. >> matt, your campaign was hacked, robbie's was hacked too. we want to spend a lot of the

time not just re- litigating the past, what you worry most about. what i worry the most from a campaign standpoint, i don't i worry as much about the presidential campaign in 2020. that's not to say they aren't targeted. i worry about the next barack obama or george w. bush, two candidates you can see coming a mile away and having some hacker decide they want to change the course of history by hacking in to some rising stars e-mail and targeting someone close to them and having that candidate just stop on the launching pad. that's what worries me when it comes to these campaigns. on top of that, from an election standpoint, i really worry about some states

getting hacked on election night and we live in a very very polarized world rightn now. whether a democrat or republican came out on the short end of the stick on election night, even if that secretary of state was able to verify the results with hard hardcopy ballots, i just think in the polarized world that we believe in -- live in, no one would believe the results and it would create absolute chaos. that's what these foreign entities are doing. they're trying to create chaos and get something for the media to cover, they're trying to get guys to hate each other so much and bebe even angrier than we already are and not even be able to sit next to each other at events like this and that's what really scares me at the moment. >> robbie, we've been talking about this project, some of

us here are working on it. tell us a little bit about that. what is the idea of trying to get a group outside government working on a hard issue like this. >> we are trying to be very practical and outcome oriented. i think it's very easy to say this is what the government should do and our government is kind of struggling to do things quickly about it.t. what we've tried to do is focus on all of the resources in the private sector, i don't want to speak for anyone here in the private sector but i think they're really eager to help with this problem and get those connected to the campaign. first of all were trying to create a playbook andd debbie's been really active with this that can walk the campaign through sort of the basic things you can do, not to get yourself completelyly secure but pretty darn close, and put that in language that someone like me or matt can actually understand.

>> is actually very practical issue. when we were worried about the our campaign, you have absolutely no framework for understanding what that even means. and then the other thing i've learned during this, the private sector has done a lot to organize itself better, share information about threats that are out there and confront theirom adversaries. we want to bring some of those best practices into the political space so the parties can take advantage of it. [inaudible]he >> if you have to realize these campaigns are not all presidential campaigns.f youn the a bunch of young people who come together, bringm their laptops from home and someone gets assigned to be the digital director/it director and there told it's a ripe target for anyone to

hack into. hopefully they can do some decent things to help these campaigns. >> i just wanted to mention again, the fact that you see these two guys sitting next to each other and working on this together, it's a prettyhi rare thing nowadays.lves it's not easy for either of them, quite frankly they are taking a lot of personal risk putting themselves out there right now in an environment where it had about cyber security, maybe the russians or other bad guys, they get a lot of flak for this.en i'm very appreciative because moving the politics is one important aspect of this and they've really been doing a great job. we are happy about that. thank you. next, back in a previous life, i got to know and see in real life action and shee really is one of the people who i would say are a handful who i most admire for everything she has done. j

when you are in charge of defending anaphase network, that's a pretty hard job. we call debbie up, we set hate debbie, we have this funny project and she didn't even think twice. i talked with debbie a little bit from your perspective about some of the things campaign folks could do to raise security on their end. >> certainly to be here, i felt like it had at the core of me as an american. i want to know our democracy is protected and our

democratic process is our. i think it's important that we all join forces and protect it. for the campaign, the weakest link, not just in campaign, but at large, are people. the first thing i think we have to do is to have some type of training for campaign personnel as they are coming into a campaign. it doesn't need to be complicated, it does need to t be frequent. you have to frequently remind those who might not normally have been exposed to of things they should and shouldn't do in terms of campaign time and resources. the first is to address the human factor. next it needs to think hardt about what they need to protect.

the things that need to be protected need to be protected in the appropriate way. using the cloud for securityg and virtual private networksks as needed increased the infrastructure at large to change the landscape and make it more difficult for someone to want to get in. >> we been talking about the cyber security angle.everal there are a lot of other things that have been going on over the last several years but last year in particular that are about more than just pure cyber security.

what are the things we should keep an eye out for. >> elections are largely run by states and they have different procedures. i think to some extent, that's an advantage from a security perspective because you don't have one method s that is used across all states. the flipside is that at some point, almost all of the state election data is networked. it's put on some sort of electronic device or electronic means.nd more it might change the resultscan

or the protection of the results that would cause the populace not to trust the outcome. i think that's the biggest concern i can think of. >> we've heard the political perspective, a little bit about the technical perspective, and in the class that i teach on these issues, i say you always have to think about policy, politics, technology and also the threat. molly and really have been up close and personal to the bad guys in different ways. molly, in particular had just got back from estonia. she is a pretty brave person. when you're going out there and you're essentially advising other people on how to protect themselves or mitigate risks of russian attacks, usually the russians go right after you. : stories about that. she writes for political. , she saidis year

hacking the u.s. voting systems would be uncomplicated. -- sometimes security is the best form of complexity. -- complexity is the best form of security. on one hand it made me want to pull my hair out, on the other hand it is easy to figure out. it is simpler than hacking voting machines to hack people. what did you mean by that? inthe weak link is people any of these systems. when you are thinking about the side, hacking and leaks is one when you're talking about a information, that's a very different space and that's not really something you can cipra

cybersecurity or find a great firewall for. i think in this last election sunday there was attention to the way that information moves i and finds a life of its own the matter where it is generated from. and that information is a tremendous tool for chaos which is very much the goal of the kremlin when looking at its policy towards the united states of the west writ large. when you have information, that's a tremendous tool for chaos moving across social media which is an excellent means forr moving information like none of us has ever seen before, giving information really a viral speed in terms of what it can do. when you have information on social media backed by incredibly powerful data setsme that are sculpted in verywerful specific ways using new psychometric targeting, and then you have campaigns coming out like the trump campaign and bragging about how they are

almost individually targeted content towards people, whether or not they did that is a different story. but it is possible to scope these different landscapes of information and i think the way you're the trump campaign talking about it after the election, they very much said there were three different groups of americans we were targeting heavily to keep them from voting. black people, young women, other women, there was another group i can't remember but they were running voter suppression campaign to keep groups of people from voting that they believed were not going to be helpful to their ultimatetimate outcome. the technology they are using is not something specific to them. it's difficult by private sector companies. it's for sale. anybody can buy it. when i'm in countries that are looking for different technology

tools to monitor, track and fight russian information warfare, most of what to use and stuff they bought from guys, canadians, american intruders, whatever. i'm fine with like the lithuanian information ops guys having that. i want to bet that and find with the stone is having it. not fine with the russians having it. i'm not fine with some guy sitting senato seller who boughf hee shelf having it. i think we're behind an understanding the power that social media and algorithmic challenges have given to the spread of information in new ways and how that affects us. the core of what a lot of this is is just marketing. there's no special sauce, you're all these data companies talk about their magical algorithms d or whatever.it basically very simple psychology marketing techniques but convincing you have an idea is that the much harder than convincing if you want a pair of shoes and we are really far behind and understand that. if you look at what was happening during, when you saw -- i'm sorry for the long

answer, but the infamous testimony this year which so many of you sort of bot news on and you mentioned beginning of summer 201 2015 as sort of an uk in this time when you saw russian information operationson accelerating in u.s. information space. now, what happened in the beginning of summer 2015, there was this bizarre chemical factory hoax that the russians sort of put on social media. that was alabama but some random chemical factory and its output of the story there were simply, some terrible things could happen but it is a test to see how you can mobilize people. you can create fear and panic. it's not just information. it's not just convincing you. it's provokes a specific response. if you look at that as sort of the starting point of a longer landscape, coming up through the election in the united states as the beginning of a of public opinion, you had in that time

just on three key issues the republican base shifted 35 points on free trade, 20 points on their views of vladimirmerica putin, and about 30 points on their views of the ability of the media to act as restrictive on political leaders. the same time, no ship in democrats. if you have three issues that basically say more isolated america, more russia with more leaning toward authoritarian tendencies and leaders in which there was a 20-40 point shift in u.s. public opinion within a specific political party and a greater time, when people try to come out and say the russians that suffering elections with information and it happened to fail all the stuff that's on the trump campaign people are doing, but it is an effect on income -- -- it is no impact on the outcome of the vote that is false. when you're on he'l hill talk to

people, talking to congress, there's still this hangup where those cyber and other and this other thing no one wants to look at, and even if we do not prove our election infrastructure was not physically hacked, which i think we don't know because no one wants to look at it, this hacking at the information space which is about influencing how people think happened and we know what happened. it was documented ray well, and we have yet to discuss thi his inarticulate way to figure what the response needs to be, or tell americans and a clear senst this whole idea, people like me and clint and the private sector where they want to contribute trying to find solutions to this but we are not a government and we did our government talking to you clearly about this the way some of the baltic governments and others do. but we don't have a strategic center of the subject and we are leaving up population vulnerablw to attack by a ford adversary.

>> there are a couple of things, i wouldn't be kennedy school professor if i didn't explain the differences between causation and correlation. and so one of the things we're also just like mali said really working hard on is trying to help people understand all theen facts associate with this. and like you said come have a candid conversation about it. the fact that the russians acted against the united states to try to influence the election i think it's pretty well established fact. there are i think objective intelligence reports that saye e that. were there not, that's what tipped the scales is where in my class i would say you have to decide whether that correlatedrs or cause, almost only showingst conversation is a very difficult thing. so just one thing to keep in mind i think. because there are a lot of variables to use walk spea spear

boehner impacted whether or nott the russians influenced like that. -- walk speak. what's important to understand, clint even work on this for a long time, too. is the russian mindset and what they are going after. you like mali had been studying the russians and a lot of otherr bad guys, not just them in terms of what they are trying to accomplish. talk us through that part. ultimately if it's the russians, it could very well be the north koreans next time. why are they doing this? what's the ultimate interest? >> i think the biggest thing, i'll give an example. the first charlottesville nightmare protest that we saw, one of the first lines they chanted was russia is our friend. i grew up in missouri and we played war in the cornfields and that's i ended up in the army. and we wanted to kill communists. i mean, rocky format was all

about this, right? imagine in 1981 a group of men showing up at a protest and chanting russia is our friend. the second shows the protest, there was a guy talking about, he has the bashar al-assad bombr making factory, and was chanting about syria has it right and those sorts of things. russia's goal is two parts. one, it's a strategy of devolution, to break up unity of all unions wherever they're at it. that goes from level. i think you seen the exit, just the last week, a lot more detailed analysis but also in terms of two primary adversaries for the russians which is nato and the european union. if they can break up those, that allows them to go one-on-one with any country. then they have strengthy in t diplomatically in terms of information.

military, even economically with the gas and oil reserves. beyond that it's to push their agenda, their foreign-policy view.ir they've already won. it is over, folks. they have one. in three years the greatest influence campaign in history of mankind has just been pulled off. they now have influence over a nationalist, not a global list, a that stretches from russia through germany through france,, through the united states. they have influence over audience segments that agree with them, their anti-immigration, anti-refugee. they are pro-nationalism, they are anti-globalism. this. this is a theme or so when you're democrat or republican during the campaign. that was a target of theme. didn't matter if you work marco rubio on one side or hillary clinton on the other. the other thing we really need to understand is, it is anti-democracy through and through.

we might've hated the soviet whenever i sat in the cornfields running around playing war, but at least they believed in something. they had an ideology theyy believed in. what does the russian regime believe in? it is a core toxic sea. i it is against human rights. it is a country that is now controlling information. wikileaks, which is a proxy essentially of the russianta government that talked about transparency, it is promoting a country that has zero transparency. there is 100 100% internet survs and probably by the end of the summer. vpn is the new legislative agenda of putin. i think what we need to understand is we are in an era that is national security in a world of audiences. it is not defined by the borders of our country. wwe've lost that in the united states at this point. there are audience segments that

don't believe in the system which we have in this country right now. they don't believe thatm elections are true and they don't think everyone should have the right to vote. they also don't believe we should have unity and they are okay if you look at just the public opinion polling, they arw okay with democracy may be being replaced with other things. they don't know what that is, but examination isn't always their strong suit. when you look at it the things are advocating and believe in is what we fought the cold war for. it's what we fought as a country for her it was what were founded on. we no longer have our values and to think our biggest problem over the longer term in thisn te digital era is what does the united states become if we are not united? gerrymandering and this digital disinformation matchup really, really well. we live in two countries right now. we have some districts where republicans fight republicans for seats. of the day six were democrats fight democrats for seats -- >> just on cyber --

>> right. >> you're opening up a whole new can of worms. >> this is important. they look inside were not about influence and information here it is one bubble. people together and we all share and the same information sources. hacking is for novelistic influences fo remasters and the russians of master that in the information space for anyone with enough resources can master it as well. it's a two-part failure of our company going into this election. we didn't understand that hacking powered influence. that's what they were doing hacking for a maneuver that it would happen to us, and it happened all across europe. i know that we're trying to segregate this out of cyber but there's no difference when 80% of your news comes off of social media feeds anymore. we are in a bubble, to bubbles. >> liquid to talk more about why this is something bigger than just the u.s.

mali had -- >> follow-up to what clint said which is really important point about gerrymandering essentially. right after this election this year there were all of thesese stories about how divided we become, divided like democratsv, only watch these new sources, refocus on what these new sources and there's these great media charge of the twitter verse of the red vote in the blue book. they are totally separate. i think that the core of that was we as americans a chosen this. the piece were missing and method people have been choosing from this is also being done to us by the way the information moving out the reasons the cherry what you think you wantiu to see, by the targeting ofar information through data and other means. i think that's the piece that really needs to be discussed is this is not just people choosing to see what they want to see. it is the way the internet is not giving us information, helping to create these divides. >> matt?

>> i just want to add, my former boss in 2012 on the debate stage with barack obama said that russia was a greatest national security threat. he was right then. people didn't necessarily agree but he was right. he's right now. w when you look at the election results, i have to respectfully disagree on a few points. one being if you look back at the exit polling data, hillary clinton's unfavored at 15% on election day. put that in perspective, in the 2012 campaign on election day, barack obama was at 44% and mitt romney was at 45. 58% is an amazing threshold. that said, and i certainly agree with clint, the point he made. there are outside entities that trtried to create chaos in our country. mitt was right in 2012 but that's not why she got the 50%.

you can go back and look at hillary clinton long before she hired this guy in 2013, she one of the book tour back in 2013 and you could see her unfazed slips and slipped and slid. so just to point to an outside force entity to try to explain why hillary clinton lost, i just disagree. on top of that i was involved in the 2012 and the 2008 primary, and some of the popular issues that you're talking about, trust me, they were burning light brightly and quite hot all the way back in 2007. trust me, mitt winning the nomination in 2012 wasn't as easy as i think some people thought it was. i just want to put things iniven perspective and be bipartisan. >> i'm going to make one quick addition.. real quick.

i don't care about donald trump or hillary clinton, okay? i worked in the u.s. government, so we work over, under and around politicians to get thing. done. my point for you is that if you believe in this country, democracy, we got to get out of our bubbles.s.we d we don't have debate right now really. this is why digital is important and why hacking is overrated. it's about how information is maneuvered and use in terms of influence.e. i was trained on this because i was working counterterrorism and this is what we did. we would go over and do an assessment. i don't need anything to influence you. i can do with a laptop and it's amazing product called microsoft excel. you might have heard of it. i can do all the analysis right there. this doesn't take any sort of tricks to do it. you g once you get the core down from

this is influence is, the data that's available to do influence now gives you such a huge advantage that once those witht resources, once those with a desire and motivation, those without rule of law and any limitations on their intelligence services, you can maneuver any audience that you want and that could be a a corporation or a marketing sort of organization. that could be a political campaign. the playbook is out there and so anyway there is democracy right now, if i was an authoritarian regime and is going against the democracy i would use the same system of whatever social media or information platform is out there. i didn't want to get into thethn republican/democrat thing because i just don't care a whole lot. my job ultimately is to go after things i think threaten democracy whether it be terrorists or the russians both recently. this is not that advanced, and anyone could target in and influence waiver simply.

>> i think this is really important. it doesn't matter how good the russians are, how good the chinese are, anybody is. they can't create this. you can make it worse and that's, the places where russian influence operations on the most successful is when it's in the baltic states, for example. yes, there is a russian speaking population.ye you can make them worse. there are people who hold pipe was using the united states or who believe in white supremacit views or whatever else.nees you can inflame those can give them a bigger platform, make it worse. they are not very good at reading these divides but i can really use them ineffective ways. so use what's here. >> expand a bit on the point clint made, we are not talking specifically about hacking for>> info ops but it's that very potent mix of the two together which of a typical of the hybrid warfare that the russians use. not just for informationussian operations but the two together are very potent whereas you hacw

into real target, get some real info, mix it with fake information, put the two together, it's an even more potent mix. i will take one issue with clint. you said the russians one. i'm an old army guy, like you, and i'm not sure i'm ever going to admit the russians would have been us anything. definitely not that they want. to make the user were to conceal them a bit. because you wrote earlier this year that putin lost in france but still has a chance in germany. tell us in france just were briefly what did the french do that was different than the u.s. government in terms of reactingn to it? again just to underscore the point they make, this is not just a u.s. issue. this is an issue for democracies and so we want to think about that, and countries not just the russians going after democracies other than the u.s. but france in particular is really interesting and a know i

you worked on that, to help us understand that and how it worked out better. >> its two parts, cultural and structural. let's talk cultural first. it's much harder to compromise a frenchman that an american they rist don't get upset, right? [laughing] people have mistresses. no big deal. if you don't have mistresses, it would be odd if you're running for office. le pen actually shows up with putin at events. she doesn't try to hide it. and so they don't, they are not as affected by compromise. the other part is they don't get their information digitally as much as americans do. it's about half as much.as that will change over time but the only absorb the news but half as much digitally which makes it much harder to do influence. this is why active measures to do work in the cold war. you have to set up a propaganda newspaper and run agency to payments and all these things. >> active measures, that's the old school term for russian soviet info ops.

>> that part is much tougher to do in the european context. they also had the luxury, after our election rather than before. every time you run the playbook it comes easier to defend against. structure we do things for duncan bird of the country. terms of our elections. one, it's a much shorter run up space.in we now run elections every four years for four years. we are already talked about 2020. like he mentioned before, we could have a candidate stand up and get knocked down in 60 days by a hack. we provide a huge ramp to sort of set out the answers together thing is the distance between primaries to john election. if you notice they had a runoff, many candidates. if you are russia, if you take out of the top adversary, most of these notes will do what works going to follow to ever the replacement is and is only a two week time frame. that's very tough to influence.k what the french also do is a

media blackout which is probably good for everyone's information diet in general. particularly in the u.s. space. 48 hours before they don't takel that information to they also use some tricks. they email accounts setting up a dump sites, putting out false d information mixed in with two information which is all effective but that is a waste for the political campaigns. at stake at the time and capital.time i ultimately though they were very wise to what was going to happen or what could potentially happen, and it also didn't get shot by. they stayed with traditional media outlets.th they went with the newspapers if they went with friends and family. they have actual discussions rather than virtual ones and shouting fax on facebook with family members. it's a different political scene. it will be so much what we see in germany which is coming up just in the next ten days or so. [inaudible]

>> robby had to throw another job in. >> the fact we only have -- makes it much easier to target. >> another thing that french did we had specifically to defending against information type attacks is when they found out that thee were under attack, they went public with it. so they said look, here's the information that has been b hacked, here's what the russians, and they named to explicitly, are trying to do.s,d here's what they say, here's what's the truth, and they then let people understand what was going on. w i think one of the things at least to take out of this is a sophistication of understanding what the russians or any other bad guys trying to do, and making hard decisions about public attribution of that is something that has a deterrent effect and also mitigates a lot of potential impact. so that's one of the things i think you can take from the french elections.

the germans are thinking a lot about this. they have an election coming up soon and they are the target of some of this effort. now we'll turn to heather who, after a long, super interesting conversation, we're going to talk about the private sector aspect of this. you heard clint and others talk about the private sector role in this. heather is not due to talk about all of the private sector nor defend all of them, but that role i think that the private sector place in all this is really important to build our infrastructure, election infrastructure, aggregate news come all the things you all know about. heather, talk to us about the private sector perspective on this. you can't speak for everyone so could just be for google. g what is the private sector thinking? what are some things you to drink in the aftermath of theeir recent elections to either get better or address some of the

things that come your way? >> let me say first that i think i would not be alone in the private sector to say that i cannot believe i am here talking about this topic. most of us who got into this field did so through scientists and not through any sort of political or economic perspective. i think the reflection upon what we have built is therefore not as robust as we would like it to be. i'm going to tie the, smalley made into the comet that diplomate together. in the physical space, you haveh your five senses that tell you when you're in danger and when you should feel fear. you do not have a sixth sense to tell you that online. there is no digital sense, no digital fear.

this manifests itself withf was cybersecurity issues, and with info ops, operations. if you think about it the way went to solve it is very similar. similar. t to we have to give people t technology that allow them toen since was going on and to make an educated decision with what to do. i'm very, very lucky to work for google. with hundreds and hundreds of people who work on cybersecurity issues and we have built fores ourselves incredibly robust infrastructure. one of the things we have started doing as of march was to start giving back to campaigns. and ngos and to elections, monitoring people. we call this project to protect your election project. there are simple tools. they are free and they should help combat some of these problems such as how do you as t small campaign without funds and

without experts, how do you protect your e-mail? you can use computer using gmail we will help protect you. we'll give you -- we will givee you tools to protect you against phishing such as password alert and will even protect the website upon which you put your information with project shield, which prevents about of service attacks and we do this effectively in places like king and the netherlands to keep information online for people. i think the other aspect will we really need that digital sense is for information. so recently in april we announced that we will start to the best of our ability to apply a fact check label to a piece of information that appears to be political in nature. appears because this gives people the wh rrtunity to learn for themselves what the real facts of the situation might be. an example we give is a claim

that their 27 million enslaved people in the world. you might believe that. you might not but if you put that search query into google, we would try to also provide a place where you can do the fact checking for yourself.actu that label should actually take your digital sense to think wow, i wonder if i check this fact. i think maybe i should come and so i will try to find extra. information. so i think that the human element, going back to it debra said is incredibly important. because we're trying to protect 73 people on the planet and we need to educate them. sometimes the best time to do that is in the moment when ther are actually making that decision and action. for themselves.s i kn >> this i know is a hard question, but you saw facebook i think just last week, they came

out and essentially admitted that in doing further analysis, they found that a lot of paid ads have been paid for by foreign government, the russians in particular. a lot of the unit is set upis nowadays so that firms that are built to make a profit should make a profit, but it can skew the way which information flows. so my question is this. how hard is it when you're working at the firm like google or a facebook or a twitter to match up what is the right thing to do against what shareholders expect you to do and face made against what your commercial interest? how difficult is to sf for the senior people in google or other places? >> i would not can speak on their behalf, but let me say that the only reason you probably use google is because it's reliable. it's fast and we pride you think that are relevant and interesting to you. if we suddenly changed our ethos

to not do that you might not use our product, and we would make the kind of money we do. the open free web is incredibly important, and we believe that. we try to preserve that, try to make that the basis of what we do. we are no stranger to fraud on ads. we've had actors in cyberspace try to use as to deliver malware pickwick people trying to make an economic came off of ads through quick fraud and spam. where no stranger to the idea that you can mix revenue alongside malicious intent. so we try to the best of our ability to use technologies to solve these problems. we are not 100% perfect. there are no silver bullets in this game. we are still very much learning what kind of technology and what kinds of strategies work but we

think there are some veryhere interesting ones and we have commissioned studies and were trying hard to push this on the forefront. tho >> it's been i think interesting and kind of refreshing for me just like you can see matt and robby want to band together to something about this. the tech sector has cut a stepped up to this challenge, recognizing in some way that they have rule also for democracy and doing something that is important. it's not easy, just like it's not easy format to stare down all the republicans. it's that easy for the tech sector to admit that they may have inadvertently had something to do with the things that havee happened in the past. i think that's good. there's a long way for everyone to go, but that's important. this is a point at the form in which you have now a lot of information. you have a lot of questions, and one of the best things about being in the form is you have

really smart people who can ask really interesting, if not sometimes crazy, questions to real experts. so here's the way we go. you all can like that. there are four microphones, andd remember when we say ask a question, if you have a general point at first, no more than two sentences, followed by an interrogative which ends with the question mark that's the general definition of the question. and then what i would like in this case, just tell us who you are and where you're from so if a sense of that, then specific question for one or two specific people just so we can keep things orderly. the person first up is this gentleman right here.l go ahead. >> i am a graduate of harvard kennedy school, russian. [laughing] so you know, i was going to gors -- usually you call people like

-- i will just be a bad guy tonight. so everything that we know that happened during the 2016 elections is that there was an attempt to collude in a democratic party in order to sideline the popular but out of the system candidate bernie sanders by the friends and family of like the clinton family pics of basically everything that we know that it was how revealed. it was made public by someone. so it's like, and now i'm just surprised with all these sparks? it's really, it was a real issue actually. this event undermined democracy and this event undermined belief in democracy in the united states. this event, not an attempt to like punish someone who broke this bad news, these russians were somewhere else, i don't know. the basic o my question to you , why do you set priorities in

this way? why you do not care and do not see that this is really your democracy under threat in this way? why you try to attempt to shift this attention to someone who brings the bad news? >> okay. who do you think would be the best person to answer your question?er >> i'll take it.>> [laughing] >> actually, we're talk about to bad news. matt, do you might taking that went on? what you think about that? matt and robby. go ahead, robby. >> you're a bernie sanders supporter? >> i don't care. [laughing] >> i just want to leave russia alone.t [laughing] >> one think of this is a point, maybe i did make it as eloquent as i should have but to just point blame on russia and the chaos that was created come hillary clinton is unsafe and you can go back and chart of

them, started to rise to astronomical levels where many voters, including at a time she got to run against bernie sanders in the primary, where you would find in some democrat primary states that a majority of democrats found her to be dishonest and untrustworthy. that's just the facts come all right? i have my personal opinions. i've shared some of them tonight but i just need to step back and have a real sense of what is real and go back and look at hillbillies numbers over time. it started early. like i said well before robby was even named campaign manager. >> robby? >> look, i disagree with the premise of your question, for two reasons. one is the primary campaign i think sometimes people don't understand this, it's run by sectors of state except in o caucus states which berniee. sanders what overwhelmingly.

those caucuses are run by the parties and we only won two of them. we want iowa and nevada. we worked really hard to windows. but bernie sanders won overwhelmingly in every contest that was run by the party of the else was run by sectors estate. and second, one of the things i was proud is in that primary campaign was the work that i did with bernie sanders team. i voted for bernie sanders three times. i'm from vermont so i voted form bernie sanders or than most people. and there's three separate elections by the way. [laughing] and i was proud to do that, and i'm incredibly proud of the work that it did with sanders team during the convention in particular. it was really hard.er and they are good people, and so

i think there are people out there that are trying to make it seem like we're really far apart. we were really close together. i thought that platform that we created was really something to be proud of. and so for those two reasons ins just disagree with the premise of your question. i'm glad asked it, but i think what matters to is the future. we will have a lot of new candidates, and i'm going to be voting in that primary, too. >> thank you for the question. one other thing i want to say is i'm guilty of calling people bad guys all the time. i once backed russia for four months -- badmouth. amazingly, warm friend people had to stay in the house but president putin and some the things he has done, they're just at the bad guys in russia just like to write countries around -- >> like petroleum today, thanks to you.

>> i apologize to them. we can talk after this, too. okay. yes, sir. >> i a neighbor and thank you for opening this to the public and thank you for the really interesting discussion. i want to ask about a gaffe i heard in this talk. the focus start on practical things and you're putting together a playbook for campaigns, which is security 101 which matters. the whole other aspect that was talked about, information warfare, influence operations, et cetera.there there doesn't seem at least at this point to have anything formed that anywhere close to practical. you for certain suggestions like facebook should make every political ad that it serves up available to the public so

people know what's being done. i presume the same could be saie for google, et cetera. are you folks thinking about the same practical problems in that sphere? can you share these preliminary? ideas? >> i definitely can't take credit because it's a project that claim is running that is not a harvard thing but his work of something great called the hamilton project that just with that.ul i'd like him to talk about that. >> i think there's probably two things with that. thanks to a spontaneous room actually, we started this called hamilton 60 which is alexander hamilton, the 60th federalist paper noted we are vulnerable as a nation to foreign meddling essentially in our elections based on the way we arefo structured and that sort of coercion whether it be political or financial, whatever it mightt be. we have been watching these influence campaigns over about a two and half year timeframe leading up to the election and we documented that but we can

figure how do you inform the public of it. it was also a neat tool for us to understand what is the russian position. if we get a chance maybe we will go back to that point about what i am particularly upset about the russians.he the idea is if you understand what their emphasis narrative is you start with what they'red wht putting out. our dashboard puts out this is the state-sponsored propaganda that is put out by russian news outlets. the second part is these personas that we watched for many years that we can do routinely promote or amplify. a lot of times those are social plots that you see. the part about social plots that's important is that allows you to amplify your message to such an extent that you can change the way the media and five operates and you cause mainstream media to react to the story. it gives you an outward influence. i reference artillery because i came out of the army world.

it allows you to take information and shoot like an artillery barrage in a very timely manner to gain social media systems. the first part was the awareness that our dashboard what we try to show is there's two parts to a suspect the person you do is you infiltrate the ideas and to do that by mimicking them. you use your own organic content to amplify divisions inside tha, electric. social issues, religious, financial issues, whatever it might be. whatever divides people up and gets them fighting amongst each other so you can at the father. once you have it already is paying attention to you that's when you start to influence. that's really what we watched over couple year timeframe set the first thing and we're working on other versions of the dashboard. the second part into google is already coming doing but i think it needs to go and be more expensive is nutrition labels for information. essentially do you know what you are consuming? if you do you got no one to blame but yourself. it's not about is a propaganda

opinion or anything. or it's about how much fact of being put out for information.nt when you break the outlets like consumer reports did for products, you put over 17, 18 variables. you rate the information over a month. we could call it mainstream media suites, and you then get an icon on your facebook feed, twitter feed, whatever it might be one that news article comes up and says this has been rated by information consumer reportsh version number three as this much true, this much false. if you want this widget you can keep it on. we are not making you have. you can opt in or opt out pick y becomes like snopes essentially across all social media platforms. or if you choose to read junk information and you get by in fat and you have no one to buy but separate you are notyove suppressing free speech. anybody can continue to write and you're not suppressing freedom of the press. that's the other part that's there. we need to empower citizens to

make their own choices about information. that's were a problem comes with russia. they hacked into thousands of americans. i've been targeted by a foreignn government. they have stolen peoples information. they have shaped the information environment. you don't know what was sold and you don't know how many americans, many of them were in u.s. government right now that i know personally have been hacked by a foreign adversary. they hit a nato commander. they stole private seekers. let me give you a parallel example. what someone had broken into chairman of the joint chiefs colin powell's house and stole filed out of his house, taken them into a newspaper and publish them during the cold war? we would be talking about armed conflict, but because it happened in cyber we say no big deal that you violated our privacy, that you attack our military servicemembers with malware. that is the issue tickets up with the russian people.

they have their version of democracy as well. we are talking about crimes committed against americans. we're talking about the foundations of our country and what we supposedly believe in. the revelations about bernie sanders is people found at how the party system actually works. another way we could help americans out is to give thems. icivics education because they don't know how a bill becomes a law. [applause] they don't understand superdelegates. they don't understand these things. we can help provide them in and education. my problem with the russian government, i'm going to address this point even if you try tove cut me off -- >> okay. remember we are here for -- >> this is my issue. my issue is with the putin regime. essentially they not only launched an information attack. it's a form of warfare. he is winning through the force of politics rather than the politics of force.ics ra we knew to understand it's a threat to our democratic governments. that's what my issue with it is.

>> thank god we've got a school of government here in cambridge mass. that's more about the specifics.ge, it's about information warfare and shaping the next generation of leaders who take all this on. i'm so sorry. normally i would give you a follow-up but there are whole bunch of people waiting. up here in the green. go ahead. >> thank you each for spending the time with the city. i may cambridge resident and alumnus.nd my question is similar to the previous gentlemen. it's about legislation, about information dissemination. services like google and facebook count their users and billions of dollars. as much as programs like that hamilton dashboard or other wayh to rate the truth is that the news is nice. the headlines we saw last week about facebook selling hundreds of thousands dollars of bad stew foreign adversaries or other troubling headlines earlier this summer about searching for is the holocaust a lot suggest

real, several of the top results are as about the holocaust not being real. all of this is happening wayallf faster than any one person or entity can regulate. how does our government start to create legislation or regulation for these american businesses that are propagating this around the world? >> who do you think is the best to answer that? >> the folks either making the policy o are representing the private sector but no one specific. >> okay. real quickly, one sentence of the question itself. >> how do you regulate misinformation in the billions? >> i think it's an interestingn question. if we have trouble classifying what the problem is it's going to be very difficult to regulate it. as you can see we have some difficulty classifying the problem. i find you see this in thee cybersecurity space, it's difficult to regular something s

you can't describe and you don't know what the solution is. maybe it's a bit early to talklk about regulation if we ever want to talk about it at all. it you don't trust your information sources, we will cease to be a useful information source to you. i think that is actually aetter better motivator for us to find technology and people solutions to solve this problem versus regulation when we don't have any solutions yet. imagine a time when we had cars, like the early 1900s, had we regulated car safety before we can fit the seatbelt or the airbags or the robards, imagine what the car might've looked like. it might have had four weeks.gh you might've had to use a horse instead. i think we have to think about these things very thoroughly before we start talking about regulations. >> what do you think the odds of legislation, trying to regulate information, what are the odds

of that passing on vail? [inaudible] >> i also think to your point, i think the answer can't necessarily come from putting a guard in place that stops the flow. i think information will findn its way out. i think this is cultural. we need to figure out a way to educate people. [inaudible] i want to potentially were going to go back. i'm not saying -- i just don't know that we'll get a 100% solution.

anytime you try to stop information, the figure as a culture how to make ourselves more -- [inaudible] >> i'm just going to plug myself a little bit on thursday morning i'll be testifying for the u.s. commission on these issues of what we do about russian information warfare. 9:30 a.m. in the senate seat and watch it online.it it is like for parts, private sector, government, civil society, and systems. but has a role to play in what comes next. it is fluid and adapte adaptivee need to figure out how to put the pieces together much faster than what it is he of the market will bear a better solution. so yes. >> thank you. >> my name is jonathan. harvard law school, come in from washington, d.c., where the last year has been especially disappointed. i am addressing the question primarily to molly and heather but i would love a response to

anyone on the panel. earlier one of you may they would be the white in order for me to sell you an idea than to buy a new pair shoes. maybe think of a wealth of recent research in psychology and neuroscience suggesting that on the one of people's political views are fairly quite often, showing them present information ways that are conducive toat are emotions involving anger, disgust and taken seriously temporarily alter their political inclinations. on the other hand, there seems to be information suggesting people are often intransigent.at it can be difficult to change or even understand their political intuitions. often times the basic commute or identity-based motivations. the problem there seems to be a lot of the way information affects people political intuitions i wonder could be out of control of people are trying to structure the flow of information or in certain ways its presentation. for example, rating the quality of news online through platform like a google would probably be

useful for many people but i suspect there is a considerableb part of the population for whom that would just their antiestablishment intuitions.an how much of the broader underlying psychological context that disinformation presented you think can be affected by the information industry? how much might come down toon mr surrounding social, cultural, educational structure? >> okay, molly, they will go to another. >> it's both and it's all of those things. there is an emotional component and there is sort of the confirmation bias component. you can use them for different things. the easiest thing is to radicalize people within their own set of views, to reinforce everything you believe, continually until you're so cut off from alternative views likew the red and blue bubbles on twitter that they just never crossed over. you never see anything on the other side. the emotional factor is where you can change views.

i was working on this project and the baltic states on russian language media, and we're doingi some analysis of russian state media propaganda targetingga baltic russians versus thelangua locally generated russian content. if you put the two stories in front of, my favorite focus group is a group of collegee graduate student level, kidss work in journalism and media really what informed, really smart if you put two stories and fund them with no labels they would look at say i know this is the propaganda story but i like it. it's more emotional, campoli. this other things like out of bounds, i don't care. i be the first paragraph and flip iphone to the next thing. you can use those and giveaways. that's that's what the emotionalism comes in to 40 pieces to really good propaganda, narrative, which ish why things are the way they are and sort of answering the questions of the world. and the storytelling which is the specific vehicle value get people to believe the narrative

and the three motion is really important for sort of longer form effort. confirmation bias is much easier to do. >> actually, part of our looking at how to solve this problem commission to study and then looked at about 14,000 people, and unfortunate i don't member of the top of my head, they were published earlier this year, and particularly we wanted to understand if people really live in a bubble online. there's some data that suggest while there may be a bubble they also do seek that information outside. having the platform to be open, free and able to find a variety of views are very important. i think when you look at platforms like twitter whether it is a voting component to it, seu are already seeing some of that. i am a twitter user and i follow both hillary clinton and i follow donald trump as well. i look at both sides anything

actually a lot more people do that than we realize.i and i think, or admit to. so i think it's important to recognize what you pointed out in the city point out our important. it's also important to realize it might not be the majority of people. it might be a microcosm that we're still looking to understand how it works. i think your idea around creating these sort of platforms that allow us to vote for our favorite news or new so we think is important is good. what are the changes we made ina google is to make it really easy to give feedback so that we can do adjustments in real-time. >> thank you. yes, ma'am. go ahead. m >> my name is sara angel and a missing at the college, from arlington virginia originally and my question goes to something that was said earlier

about imitations on american intelligence services that foreign intelligence services may not have.t i was wondering where limitations come from and whether it's from hi u.s. domesc policy, international agreements or some kind of a moral line we. draw for ourselves that will only go so far in spying on parsing what other countries are doing and what kind of information we collect and where we stop ourselves when we think we're going to far. i wish is wondering where the limitation comes from and how that separates of the u.s. from foreign intelligence services. >> okay. let, q what to take that when? >> one is the law. those laws come from things when the u.s. government is overstepped generally. church committee, whatever it might be. those provisions are there because were not comfortable with it. part of that is influenced in the u.s. audience space. this is always been a challenge and one of the reason why u.s. sucks that influence is that we

are always very cautious to not be influencing our domestic audiences. in a digital world it's very hard to know whether domestic ideas start and the i thrnational audience begins. i think the second sort of component of it and why we don't redo it is the "new york times"s test, which is who will stand up when these programs are put in place, and defend them. we had a good system for that. i don't mean to be facetious with that but ultimately inside government agencies, is always i great idea, hey, do you know we could do? somebody goes, i'm not signing up for that. because we know tha that is in e with our values ultimately. knoi i have never seen it at a pretty got a country never goes and hacks 10,000 peoples accounts overseas and dumps all the information on the internet. if we are did something like that i think our country wouldve

hate ourselves for doing it. we've seen that. even with the edwards no debate, we are very uncomfortable with it. i think it's too far. what is the legislative we've done but the other part is do we want to be sign up for filing peoples privacy or destructive malware attacks? we are not comfortable with thac and i think that's a good thing and i hope, we govern u.s. information agency during the cold war and we don't really have -- that's part of reason why we're so vulnerable to this and this did but at the same point hope we don't try to follow the pattern of our adversaries. the use government is slow to respond on this because maybe they should be the ones tounter counter this sort of disinformation. >> two quick points.firs first, in the most recent defense authorization bill there was a provision that granted new authority and $709 to the united states to do more active information type campaigns, which was a modification of existing law because i think there's a recognition of this.

second of all, when as in thei department of defense working on cyber and info ops, you do not want the department of defense doing covert action type things that you know me dipping the "new york times."rk so by law but we had to do even when trying to counter influenced terrorist began to, is list that it was the department offense that was provided you this information, which on its face, it will be discounted or anyone you are trying to influence because you had to explicitly say that. there are ways in the law that you can do it but like clint said this is a very clumsy process. we don't do it very often and there's a general level of risk aversion. so thank you. great question. last question that will head out. is there a last one over? yes, ma'am. thank you. >> my name is sophia. i'm a student here. my question is on the benefits of engagement on in the war and

digital security. i think it was molly who mentioned -- [inaudible] on political issues when there's a malicious movement. i wonder if you observe that trend if people are provided with some sort of information or are engaged in such discussion? thank you. >> and on the counter side of this, it's actually really, there's not good data. you were mentioning some of these programs that are being run. r a lot of it is contracted up so the defense department does nota put its name on it and there's $539 project for example, totoem counter violent extremist aired online, which as far as i can tell has been flushing money down the toilet, cannot prove it, has kept one jihadi from being recruited in the exit out of time, whatever the contract has been running that project. it's worth take a look at. the bigger problem is because some of the psychological issues

of this and other things, it is really easy to use, comparatively easy to use social media and online media to harden beliefs and radicalize people however you want to define that action for political views, for love of shoes, whatever it might be t might be. it is far more difficult to read -- re-radicalize people with the central. it requires a much deeper understanding of the purpose of information, how it is affecting identity.ions and i have yet to see a secret sauce version of the that brings us to the end of the evening. i was always taught the end of any class, where you're trying to help people learn and you summarize some key points. these are three things i think

you can take away from this. first of all, it is the information age. not just the united states but all democracies around the world. they are struggling with how people synthesize information, how it influences important things and it is extremely important for democracies around the world to figure out how you get to a state of ease with that and how much information can influence things. second of all, i think you see a lot of different examples, trust is a really important part of a democracy. whether it is a bad guy, my friend, the russian, the russian government, those actively trying to undermine the democracy. not the russian people. if they are able to erode trust in government or a diplomatic or excuse me, a democratic process it is really important. we ourselves as a country can be boasted that trust.when you have guys up there working together on that. third is something a little

broader than this that we did not talk about. i think it is really important that we, as a country, and other democracies send a signal that you can't do this to the united states. and that we push back and it is a visible response. that there is some form of deterrence that prevents or at least dissuade half of the bad guys in the world going after our democracy. and there are different ways that you do that. some of these are defensive, some of them are resilience. when you see a country itself is too strong and you cannot impact it. there are some things we did not talk about that are a little more aggressive. there was a three point i leave you with. first of all, thank you all for coming. more importantly, thank you to all of our guests for being here. [applause] thank you all. you may exit stage left.