speakers at an event examining russia's strategies for interfering in u.s. election. it should get under way in just a moment.

good afternoon, everyone. i'm president and ceo of the atlantic council. and it's my privilege to welcome to you the council's exceptionally well timed conference. pulling at the strings kremlin's interference in elections. i didn't know whether to thank vladimir putin and donald trump for timing the summit so well, to drive more attention to what we're doing here or whether to campaign they drowned out our news today but i think i'll thank them instead, because i think what it does it really focuses attention not only on the national challenge we're

facing but what is truly an international challenge. this event brings together members of congress and parliaments from both sides of the aisle and both sides of the atlantic for discussion of the kremlin's interference in democratic elections and the challenge our institutions and society face from cyber attacks. speaking of cyber we're live streaming today's events so warm welcome to those of us joining us remotely. we encourage everyone to be part of the discussion by using the #russiafactor. let me take a moment to extend a special welcome to our partners in this endeavor, transatlantic commission on election integrity and the office of mark warner for making this possible. as many of you know the transatlantic commission on election integrity formed by anders rasmussen the former prime minister of denmark and former secretary again of nato

and michaichael chertoff who wa previously a secretary of state. we'll hear today from two of the commission's members, ambassador ilene donohue former u.s. ambassador to the u.n. human rights council and current executive director of the global digital incubator at stanford, university. long time friend of the atlantic council, natalie juresko who is also distinguished fellow with our eurasia center. let me also take this opportunity to recognize and welcome back to the council our keynote speakers, senator mark warner from the commonwealth of virginia. and senator marco rubio from florida. we always love it when we have bipartisan showing from congress, from the senate on an issue of this importance. so thank you for your

leadership, and for bringing your valuable perspectives. i also would like to thank senator amy clo klobuchar from joining us earlier. i want to thank those from italy, sweden, uk, canada, european parliament and poland, ukraine, the ambassador from latvia, czech republic, uk, minister from estonia and canada incredibly impressive group of legislators. so thank you all for traveling here, some from quite far away to share your knowledge and

experiences. for years russia under vladimir putin has engaged in activities aimed at destabilizing democracy in europe and the united states. the kremlin leverages an asymmetric arsenal that includes cyber attacks and misinformation campaigns to influence the outcome of democratic elections and operation of democracy more generally. its meddling requires western government, civil society and the private-sector to take concerted and coordinated and on going steps to build resilience and resistance against disinformation campaigns and election interference. that's highly relevant since in this year alone elections will occur in georgia, latvia, sweden, and brazil among several others, not to mention our own mid-term elections in november, u.s. mid-term elections. we've convened a distinguished grouch leaders to discuss long term strategies and tools that we together must use to begin to

implement resilience of democratic nations to future such actions. very briefly, let me tell you what the atlantic council has done to track and expose the kremlin's influence since 2014. we've done reports like hiding in plain sight which used open source information to expose russian soldiers in ukraine's east and democratic defense against disinformation which laid out recommendations for governments platforms and civil society to fight back. the kremlin's trojan horse series exposed networks in france, germany, greece, spain, italy and uk and done transatlantic convening including last year's forum which we will host again in october of this year and then we did a berlin 360 open source summit where we brought together citizen activists and journalists from all over to train them in the skills that we've developed ourselves. particularly through our digital

friends at research lab, the council's most cutting initiative which works 24/7 to track, expose and explain this information through the work of digital sherlocks. earlier this year they teamed up with facebook from text election integrity across the globe. in addition last month our eurasia center watched an interactive online guide to learn about the kremlin's disinformation guide. the portal features 30 partner organizations and 125 experts from the u.s. and europe further cemented our comment to this set issues. it underlines what the atlantic council is really about on everything we do which is we're stronger working with allies. this work is helping us understand the challenge we face, from maligned state actors and not just russia so we cannot only counter it but build bridges to a more resilient future. so to kick us off, i have the

distinct pleasure of welcoming senator mark warner and senator marco rubio to our stage for a discussion which will be moderated by joe doherty. simulator mark warner, senator marco rubio, come up here as well. thank you. senator warner has served in the u.s. senate since 2008 and established himself as a leader on a great number of issues including this one. he's the vice chairman of the senate select committee on intelligence and a member of committees of finances, banking, urban affairs. we had several phone calls and chats on this issue. we thank you. i also have the pleasure of welcoming back senator rubio who was first elected to the u.s. senate in 2010. he's a member of the it? select committee on intelligence as well. also serves on the committee's foreign relations, appropriations and ageing.

prior to his election to the u.s. senate he served as speaker of the florida house of representatives from 2007 to 2009. leading today's chat is jill doherty who as a foreign affairs correspondent for cnn over three decades including a decade as bureau chief in moscow which i think is pertinent for today. she currently hangs her hat as a fellow as the canon institute where she's researching russia media and soft power. so with that, the floor is yours. >> so can everybody hear me i take it. okay. what timing. i'm sorry? [ inaudible ] >> okay. so if you can keep phones down. here we go. what timing as fred said. incredible. i think maybe what we ought to do is start with the breaking news and then go into the larger discussion, which is really the

important thing long term. what can to be done with all of this sequester finterference. beginning with the news conference, essentially for me what stuck out was president trump saying that he did not side with u.s. intelligence. he basically accepted or let that denial by president putin stand, which is no, we didn't have anything to do with it. so just taking that point, could you give us a couple of minutes of your reaction to that, senator warner? >> i think president trump's actions today were outrageous. the president of the united states siding with vladimir putin over the unanimous assessment of the american intelligence community, over the bipartisan conclusion of the

senate intelligence committee, over the acknowledgement of facebook, twitter, youtube, social media platforms that russia manipulated their platforms. and sided with, again, putin over our allies who came from canada and across europe to share how we can prevent this kind of russia interference on a going forward basis. i think in the coming days it will be time for all of us to stand up and say which side are we on? i'm hopeful and confident that the senate will continue to follow this threat, continue our investigation, and make sure that the american public gets the whole truth. it was a pretty remarkable day. >> senator rubio? >> i would add what the president said is not accurate. the intelligence community has assembled probably an

unparalleled amount of evidence about russia's interference in 2016 but ongoing to interfere in the united states. many countries have been affected by it and are represented here today by elected officials in those jurisdictions. i won't comment on the press conference. none of us were in the meeting. we don't know what was addressed in the meeting or what was raised. all i can speculate is that there's an effort under way to sort of figure out if by being nice to vladimir putin there's a way that we can establish a better working relationship which in a perfect world would not be a bad thing between two nations that possible he is 90% of the world's nuclear weapons. the flaw in that, which i think goes to the heart of this very issue is that vladimir putin is not interested in a better working relationship with the united states because he views the world, he views geopolitics as a battle between the strong and the weak. he believes at the end of the

cold war the west and in particular the united states that was strong took advantage of a weak russia. he in tends to re-establish russia as a global world power on par with the united states and he doesn't believe in win-win scenarios. the only way to make russia stronger is make united states weaker. you have to understand that. any policies not built on that reality and any rhetoric not built on that reality isd destined to fail. so we have to take the partisan -- this is not partisan interference. this is to what happened has happened. two years after the election still having this issue dominate and divide us. this is their goal. primary objective of vladimir putin was to sow permanent instability in american society and culture so we're so busy fighting each other we don't

have time to take him on as a threat. >> let me just add if mr. trump wouldn't stand with american and western institutions and stand with his own intelligence community assessment in public, who knows what he might have agreed to in private and one of the reasons why so many of us felt that making sure that he pressed this issue, that he needed not to have a one-on-one meeting but needed other americans in the room so we could get an accurate read out in that over two hour session. >> let's stands back. if he did that. if he at least publicly is saying i don't agree or i can't really say, the president of the united states has all of the information that any person in the world could ever ask for. he has intelligence, he has any type of fact that he wants, he can get. so let's forget about him for a minute and just go back to what

you two gentlemen know as senators. is there any doubt in your mind about the interference and i know that some of it you cannot share with us because of security concerns, but do you have an understanding of the, let's say the size or magnitude of that interference? >> i take you back to october of 2016. i was running for re-election and wikileak issues were coming up and i wouldn't talk about it because it was the work of a foreign intelligence agency at the time. we're aware of who it was. we're not clear how that would be classified. but i never had any doubt. as far as the scale and scope that's an ongoing effort. it's broad enough, large enough and impactful enough for us to sit with you here today in my view and mark would agree not to tell you it happened but to tell you it will happen again. whether it's an 18 or 20 years in the future, this is not the last time we'll have this.

they will get better at it. >> we know three things. we know russia tapped into both political parties and then released selected information on one party, on the democrats to try to help trump and hurt clinton. we know russia and russian agents scanned or penetrated over 20 states electoral systems. and we know that russians and their agents manipulated social media in ways that literally hundreds of millions of americans were contacted, mostly fake information distributed by fake accounts, just try to sovereign w dissension. as mark said they picked one candidate in 2016 but nothing about the russian efforts that favor one side or the other. they favor dissension in democracies. they favor undermining our trust in our open electoral systems.

and we got a back in the envelope analysis, and if you add up all the money the russians spent in our elections, in the brexit vote and in the french presidential elections you add that up together it's less than one airplane. so we're talking about conflict in the cyber domain and misinformation domain we're seeing the opening shots on what's an ongoing struggle. >> can we go into one aspect of this. we know rt social media, we know the military intelligence, the gru, but why would they go into infrastructure and especially the infrastructure of the united states? what is the ultimate purpose for that, because they appear to a have not done anything maligned specifically but they got in there. >> i think the thing that the russian attempts to penetrate are limited just our election

infrastructure, trying to penetrate all of our systems. we're looking at protections of our judicial system and power grid system the vulnerability we have in the cyber domain where we seen the power to interfere and shut down a power grid. i think in our election system, and remember we have a very bifurcated, trifucated election system. people go they didn't change a vote total but at the end of the day you don't need to change the vote total. if you go upstream and look in america 90% of all voter files are controlled by three companies. what happens if they pen trapt those companies and certain people are left off a registration list. you simply need to actually seed distrust and faith in the accuracy of the system for russia to accomplish its goal. remember, again not to sound partisan but i never heard prior to 2016 election any american

presidential candidate from either party before the election even took place be willing to question the legitimacy of our voting process. those transparent words that mr. trump said during the election process which frankly comes right out of the russian playbook. >> let me add to that. i'm from florida. some people might recall not that long ago, less than 600 votes determined the presidency of the united states in florida. imagine now sort of an effort in a state decided by x number of vote that would involve some of these things alone. you can get to inauguration day with a significant percent of the country believing a certain individual was not legally elected because of irregularities. i'm not saying that happened in 2016. but irregularities they were not aware of foreign presence. that's an asymmetrical capability that's a powerful tool. imagine for a moment that the

u.s. and russia winds up in some sort of conflict some part of the world and successful able to shut down electric power and keep parts of the country, the capability to do that would trigger all out panic in the u.p.s., distract us from what we're focused on and imperil our ability to engaging conflict or resolve it. it's a powerful tool at their disposal that could include our banking sector. it can involve all sorts of critical infrastructure which used to be vulnerable to nuclear attack or conventional attack, now a couple of clicks away from being a tool you can use against a potential adversary. >> we just passed a budget for america spending over $700 billion in defense spending. russia has 70 billion. we're buying the world's best 20th century military when conflict in the 21st century in

this asymmetrical rem, misinformation, we have to up our game. >> after that news conference i was thinking vladimir putin goes home. how do you stop this? can you even stop it? and just in a very specific way senator rubio, i you know have this deter act with senator van holland. can you explain how that works. >> it puts in place sankss pre-existing. you don't have to wait for donetsk view the terms have a long winded debate. it creat as mechanism by which the director of national intelligence could surmise that, in fact, there's an effort to interfere in our elections and once a determination has been made sanctions would kick in. it puts in pri existing consequences for doing this, raising the bar on the costs versus the benefit. one of the reasons why putin pursue this route is he figured there was enough deniability

around it and the costs were low compared to the benefits of being able to do this. and so our hope is that to put that in place so any potential adversary in the few of, could be russia, another foreign nation would know that this is the price you will pay if you do this ahead of time. and built that into the cost benefit analysis. i'm not arguing that alone will be enough but it's better than what we have now which is still sort of an unclear response. we don't have a broader cyber policy as a nation which we desperately need but when it comes to our democracy and republic there's no pre-existing built in reaction what will happen. we know what will happen if you attack us militarily. we don't tuned crisis if you attack us this way. >> i wanted to ask you, senator warner. in the old days you had mutual shared destruction for nuclear weapons but it was inconceivable that anybody would attack

because we would all be destroyed. that doesn't exactly -- that's not the rationale of cyber weapons. how do you deter? >> a couple of ways. one, deter is a good one. other bipartisan legislation that would also up information sharing on an election system and our committee and others supported $380 million into the federal budget that will help states upgrade their voting machines to make sure you have an audible paper trail. that's all steps in the right direction. but we need a cyber doctrine. this is not a critique of trump. this goes back to obama and bush as well. we've not had a cyber doctrine that will require some sort of collaboration with our partners around the world. some of these cyber attacks are, in effect, so beyond the pale that we need to have some common norms and if a nation then

intervenes in that kind of attack, i'll draw the analogy to chemical weapons or land mines you might have more standards in terms of being willing to strike back. when there's some low-hanging fruit, we all heard of the internet of things, 10 billion devices connected to the internet. we'll go 25 billion devices over the next five years. just here in america that are connected. what of a basic security protocol for those devices that are purchased by the government not some massive government regulation but no embedded password codes. some ability to make sure these devices are not hackable. a basic security concern. that's a step in the right direction. we need to articulate a cyber document that not only talks about defensive side capabilities but what use of cyber capabilities. >> like rules of war. >> norms of behavior in a world where any nation state or for that matter even smaller group

of dedicated individuals can inflict asymmetrical damage not based upon how big your army or navy is. these tools are extraordinarily asymmetrical and our vulnerablist and candidly we have not done a good enough job on the security side of warning the private-sector of the extent of vulnerabilities we have. >> can i go back not to talk about the cold war too much, but with nuclear weapons we had discussions and negotiations with russians. president trump has raised an issue which i don't know the details of, i don't think anybody does at this point, of some type of talks with the russians about cyber. do you have any more clarity, what is he talking about. is it a good idea? >> well, i'm not -- nuclear weapons we both had them. we both said we had them. and sfland purpose of having

them. the problem here is, in elections in putin he doesn't have election. he denies having done it. so, i would imagine you could talk about it and so forth but i'm not sure what this produce. this is a calculated plan. he won match his aircraft carrier with aircraft carrier. but he figured one way to weaken america is by driving -- they showed a great understanding of nuance. i heard people say on television it wasn't very sophisticated operation. i would disagree in some respects. they did as the effort went on showed some understanding of nuances of american politics, sort of understand what the fracture points were in society and try to exploit and drive them. >> maybe better than the democrats. >> but beyond it, it's an ongoing thing. you see it in virtually any sort of situation that aruizes domestically. people pushing narratives to pit

us against each other. understanding how to pilot is that, understanding frankly that the media like sensational stories and if you can leak information the story will be about the information, potentially not about the soufrs it. i think understanding the political candidates that this world of opposition research is a critical and built in component of american politics and if you could provide that to a candidacy you can take your hands off and let them do the rest. they understood these sorts of things and participated in it. that's ongoing. i don't know how you confront it other than internally acknowledging it. hardening infrastructure in terms of our voting system. there's a role to play for government in all of that but there's also an understanding among political candidates, society at large and the media that without infringing on the first amendment some understand that sometimes the source of the information may be something in a way to decide whether to use it or not. one thing that russians have done in other countries they put

out incomplete information, altered information or fake information. and if it's done strategically it could impact the outcome. i talked about fake deep state. imagine producing video that has me or senator warner saying something we never said on the eve of an election. by the time i prove the video is fake even though it looks real that's too late. people are doing for fun with off the shelf technology. imagine in the hands of a nation state. we have a lot to think about here. we'll have an election here very soon and another one after that and another one after that. >> it starts also with the acknowledgment of the problem. >> right. >> and there's a lot of lessons we heard from our swedish colleagues today, from some of our ukrainian colleagues. some of these nations are further along at educating their public about the information they receive over the internet. over half americans get their "daily news" from facebook, it's hard to say that within the

realm of social media they are not media companies in of themselves. there's a whole host questions we need to ask in terms of should you have a right, for example, to know to being contacted bay human being versus a box or automated account. should you have a right to know geoaccount where it posted. if it pops up it's not originating in miami -- >> florida, st. petersburg florida or st. petersburg, russia? >> one of the main laws, however, in supposedly protecting americans from fake news goes back to 1938, and nazi propaganda. foreign agent classification, which rt the russian broadcaster has been forced to acknowledge that it's a foreign agent. that seems like, you know, 200 years ago. it's completely outdated.

shouldn't some of the laws be updated to protect americans. or can you even -- let's put it that way, in this world, this is not 1938, with sources all coming from all over the world how can you even begin to try to protect americans from fake news. >> you got to start is it an informed debate. when mark zuckerberg came to the congress recently i'm not sure that was a form of debate other than demonstrating how little my colleagues knew about the internet. we need to have a serious discussion. it's going discussion that's not just taking plains america. what we heard from our colleagues today our friends in uk and canada looking for a lot of these issues. and i don't want to knee cap any of these great innovative american companies. because right behind them there are chinese counterparts that have less restraints on them. but having a discussion about content in terms of what's called section to 30 exemption,

having a discussion about geo locating, having discussions about authentication, identity, having discussions about ability if you want to move from facebook to another social media platform, the ability to move all your data including your cat videos in an easy way called data portability. i don't have a clear cut solution set but this is a debate that's not going away. what my appeal to my friends in silicone valley you have to work with us. if you leave it to congress alone we'll screw it up. >> i don't have any cat videos -- >> i don't have any cat videos. >> but on the broader issue -- i mean we can explore what public policy can do, what these platforms can do internally, but there's a societal responsibility here, again which left us vulnerable to this and that's the increase segmentation of news consumption, increasingly more and more americans are getting their news

and information from sources that tell you you're right. so that growing isolation from one another and from society at large has left them, left us incredible vulnerable to news that may sound, you know, outside traem of the possible for one group but may sound totally reasonable for someone who gets news -- i don't know what government can do about that. we as society have an obligation as a bare minimum ask ourselves just because it's on the internet doesn't mean it's true. i do think it's something we have to grow up as a society find as well. >> literally we've seen from the platform companies the algorithms you read one story and next story is to be more outrageous to generate more clicks. we have to protect the first amendment but there could being a greater, even academic transparency into the

algorithms. the notion that this issue is going to go away, mark indicated we're talking about we're still trying to get our arms around what really is 2016 technology, somebody misrepresenting themselves with a fake account and when we move into deep fake technology it can move elections and markets and whole societies on a real-time basis is frightening. >> getting into an area that i think is really important and that's citizens. radiati education, making people more intelligent how they get news and how they get information and be more discerning, buyers of the information, consumers of information. you said maybe the government can't do this, but is there some way that let's say the government could lead and i know this is very difficult, but lead the charge in terms of saying we

have to stand back and educate all of our citizens, bipartisan into what is actually happening and how they, in some cases are being manipulated. >> i think there are, frankly, again examples in some of the countries that we look at today who are further ahead on those citizen education campaigns. i think we ought to launch them. we have to acknowledge and i think all of us whether we're in government, whether we're in civil society, or whether, you know, from the academic world and if we need to acknowledge there are certain things such as actual facts. we have fixing our political system that tend to dismiss anything they don't agree with as fake news or nonfact based when we have, i believe, one of the greatest threats -- i'll sound political here, when we have the president make broad based attacks against the integrity of the whole fbi and department of justice and in sense throw in a question rule

of law and in effect give license to people to start deciding which laws they want to follow and which laws they don't want to follow doesn't lead to a good stop. it starts with all of us stepping back both political and otherwise and recognizing whether you like it or not there are hard core facts out there that we have to acknowledge exist and not say everything is relevant. >> i think this ties into the broader reality that almost every major institute has eroded. it's hard nowadays to come up with sort of some authority that this person or institution spoke on something it would be assumed by everybody to be the case. and that's true from outside of politics, not justin political realm as well. there's a broader erosion of trust virtually in all of our institutions to the point where it's difficult to auth

authoritatively define. there's not a law that fixes it. the answer won't lie in two people or even a committee in congress. it's going to have to involve a broader societal collaboration over a sustained period of time to begin to answer these problems. but it all begins by acknowledging it happened, acknowledging it will happen and can happen again and describe to people what they did. to me it's very important to pull out the partisan element say in my mind and i think the evidence will prove to be very clear, president vladimir putin's object was not the end result -- he may have had a preference but his number one objective was to sow instability and doubt and sovereign w division in our society and i think that was goal and i believe that was the goal. almost two years since the election we're still deeply

divided and over each other's throat whether it happened and how it happened. if you're vladimir putin you have to look it cost me this little to get that much. so in my mind he'll do it more. >> let me jump into putin's mind for a second. one of the things that i hear when i'm in moscow how could little old russia interfere in the biggest democratic election system in the history of the universe. how could we possibly do that? how would you answer that? they say it's absolutely patently ridiculous. >> i go back again to what actually happened, the facts. they took information from the democratic national committee, information about clinton adviser john podesta and through intermediary leaked it out at key times during the election. they scanned or broke into an

acknowledged by the department of homeland security 21 states at least election systems. and in social media, while we initially thought that a lot of the attention was around paid advertising, paid advertising was just the tip of the spear. they created a series of fake accounts that facebook allowed which they acknowledged touched 140 million americans in the lead up to the election. now, that's all factual and what i think senator rubio and i are saying is the actual total budget for that on a relative basis is extraordinarily small and the obama smaugs was caught off guard and should have been more aggressive. the intelligence community was caught off guard. we can continue to relitigate 2016 and that's important to get the facts out but what's as important if not more important

is to make sure we make sure it doesn't happen again in 2018 and 2020. >> whoever it is that's saying that in russia, number one they were able to do it because it didn't cost a lot of money to do it. that's the first. the second is they've been dhoing forever. the only difference is the web has allowed them to get there much quicker when they used other method to spread propaganda passenger division. the third, i would say, it is consistent with the way putin has operated in other spheres. for example in the invasion in ukraine, they had these individuals, little green men show up in unmarked uniforms and vehicles but everyone understood who they were. it wasn't an open here i am. this is what made this method so attractive to them. one last point. they situate a wink and a nod almost to say how can we possibly be doing this. the message embedded in this is russia is powerful enough to get

the most powerful nation on earth to fight with each other without us spending a lot of money. >> that's what's so remarkable about what happened today. because the president of the united states and the leader of russia had a meeting and the president of the united states basically sided with the russian interpretation. that's stunning. if kennedy had accepted clu eed khruschchev's allegations that we had no missiles that would be a different world. i think today, i hope and pray that's not the case. i think today is the defining day so far at least in the trump presidency. i think the president came out on the wrong side. >> i want to make one observation, two observations about -- the first one is i think there's a misconception

out there that president trump has not also been hurt by all of this and whether his, you know, administration or people around him don't acknowledge it or not, this whole episode of what's happened here has basically plagued the first two years of his administration. it continues to do harm to his administration. whether someone wants to acknowledge it or not because it has impacted not just his ability to deal with vladimir putin it's colored a lot of other things. there was a telling moment. put, i have full confidence really prepares for these things, spend as lot of time understanding who the person is on the other side and what our political dynamics are in the country and at one point today when asked putin made it a point saying i wanted him to win. he clearly understood how that is perceived. he knows 50% of the country will hear that and say we told you so. that was not by accident. vladimir putin is not a spontaneous guy so to speak.

he knew why he would say that. he knew that would trigger -- probably been lost in some of the other stuff. but that was by design and gives new sight into his level of understanding of our domestic politics and how to touch certain pressure points. >> i think the second part why wouldn't we support mr. trump, because after all he said he wants to have good relations. very typical kind of putin thing. we have just a couple of minutes legality going back to breaking news. >> there's more? >> one thing but very intrigue. senator rubio you said putin comes prepared and if i understood it correctly what he was saying is, okay, if mueller wants to come to russia and question people who are involved

in the agents, the 12 agents, let him come. we have an agreement, it's not extradition, but let him come to moscow, if we can do the same thing and come to the united states and question -- got into bill browder, et cetera. what do you think of the idea of putin say mueller come over here and talk to these guys. >> if i was the ruler of a country where my opponents were either dead or in jail, i control the media, i control the elections, i control every political lever in the nation i would be comfortable allowing you to do certain things as well. i could control the outcome. i could control whether the people are alive for you to talk to them or whether they are predisposed so to speak. i can guarantee you that they will be fully prepped by the time anyone were to arrive. as far as coming, questioning people in our country, sure he

can come here and harass, we'll provide him the long arm. it's not a serious proposal but the ability to reach out and intimidate people in the united states. he can intimidate all over the world and here domestically. if you're one of these people taking on vladimir putin all over the world and every morning you wake up to the news that someone else who has taken on putin was found dead, was poisoned, strangled, fell out of a building's window that broke while they were leaning on it, it's pretty intimidating. there was a message embedded in that. >> senator warner, i'll let you have the last word. >> i agree with senator rubio. one thing that was powerful was to hear from our colleagues, our allies in canada, in europe, this is nothing new. if we don't find these common norms around cyber, if we don't find some guard posts around social media if we don't up our

game in terms of election security, then at the end of the day put written has been very successful in dividing our country and we heard similar stories of many of them we hold stories. this is a threat against open democracies. nato, for example, is more than a defense. it is good that other nato nations step up. i just wish we would hear from this president reaffirming american values rather than where it appeared today that he sided with putin over his own intelligence community. >> thank you very much to both of you. [ applause ]

>> the atlantic council is taking a brief break for just a few minutes. they're setting up a panel on the cell lip's tools and capabilities to -- kremlin's tools and capabilities to sfwyi interfere in elections. if you missed any of this conversation, you can watch it later today on c-span. while we wait for the forum to continue, a portion of a recent discussion on congressional partisanship. >> it was this past april where the house speaker paul ryan took to the podium and announced his

resignation. here's part of that announcement. >> you realize something when you take this job. it's a big job with a lot riding on you and you feel it. but this is a job that does not last forever. you realize that you hold the office for just a small part of our history. so you better make the most of it. it's fleeting. and that inspires you to do big things. and on that score, i think we have achieved a heck of a lot. >> and with that announcement, our next come says comes an opportunity. good morning. >> good morning. >> talk about the opportunity that you see here in light of that announcement. >> well, there is going to be a vacancy in the speakership. and there's going to be a midterm election in november which will, in all probability,

leave the two parties in the house of representatives pretty evenly balanced. if the democrats have a majority, it's not going to be a big one. if the republicans retain, it's not going to be much. a relatively small band determined reformers can help get congress back on track. right now, the congress of the united states is the dysfunctional branch in our constitutional system. it is broken. it is not doing its job. it can't do its job. and the reasons for that go beyond the polarization and discord between the two political parties. they have to deal with antique, obsolete rules for conducting its business, that make it almost impossible to get the people's work done, and we at no labels are out to change that. >> so with a project known as the seeker project, a little bit -- folkks put it online.

but what is this project in light of what you just said? >> it is a way of turning the speakership, the only constitutional house office, that is the only house office mentioned in the constitution. the speakership into an office that serves the entire house of representatives. so the speaker of the house is the speaker of the entire house and not just the majority leader. it's also a way of empowering minorities in the house of representatives to make their voices heard. obviously they can't overpower the majority, but they would have a fair chance to have their voices heard. it's also interestingly a way of empowering the speaker to act more effectively to put together bipartisan majority. ky go into details, but these are some to have objectives. we have lots of other proposals, as well. including punishing members of the house and senate who don't get the budget done on time,

including requiring members of the house and senate actually to work five-day workweeks when they're in session. these are common sense proposals that we think would make the congress of the united states a lot stronger. >> say there's a new congress, say parties are going to be empow empowered, a new speaker is going to be elected, what is the one thing that would change off the bat to promote more bipartisanship? >> stick with me, because this is a little bit complicated and involves a little bit of history. but the beginning is that the house of representatives reinvents itself every two years. unlike the senate, it doesn't have rules to grow on from one year to the next. every two years, the house gets together and organizes itself and it organizes itself by electing a speaker and passing a package of rules that will govern its behavior. now, what you need to know about the election of the speaker as

things now stand is that you need a majority, 218 out of 435. what happens if a handful of determined reformers from the majority party say, we're not going to vote for our party's nominee for speaker unless at the same time we pass a package of rules reforms. no reform, no votes. no votes, no speaker. >> again, senators warner and rubio give you a strong perspective. now we'll take a broader international scope. we have an excellent panel. you have bios in front of you. i'm going to ask eileen, who is a fiber expert, to frame the problem from a global perspective. >> great. first off, i want to join in thanking the atlantic council and the transatlantic commission

or election integrity for exquisite timing. i would say it's surreal. it's like we're participating in a spoof that should be unbelievable, but is very real. i would say following from the panel, from the senators we just heard, this is a moment of truth for democracy. maligned foreign actors are hacking our democracy, undermining confidence in the integrity of outcomes, undermining confidence in the feasibility, of adhering to democratic values, on protecting our society, and the big game is to win the narrative, the democratic governance is not feasible. the hard part i would say, one of the hard parts is this conversation is so unwieldy. even for those who spend our days thinking about this completely absorbs, we are

fielding input from all over the place on lots of different realms. so it is hard to get your hands around the topic, and it's hard to break through with the public, and so what i like to do is try to break it down, do some diagnostics, develop a simple frame of understanding that hopefully can yield some actional solutions. so i see this problem as breaking into three big buckets. the first of which is packing a machine infrastructure data, almost a traditional cyber security type problem. the second big bucket is the hack of discourse, undermining the integrity of the information ecosystem, and undermining the quality of discourse, necessary to sustain democracy. and the third big bucket is

really a hack on our confidence in democratic governance itself, the feasibility of adhering to our values and protecting ourself. these categories sort of lead into each other, as we'll see. but it's also useful to tease them apart. on the hacking of machine front, on the one hand it's traditional cyber security issue. on the other hand, as senators warner and rubio said, it's shocking how vulnerable we are in this regard. we have systemic society wide digital insecurity, and it is showing up in our critical election infrastructure. so this problem we can see, but solving it is going to take a massive amount of political will. we brought up the hack of the vote, the hack of the infrastructure, hacking into the machines without actually hacking the vote, and it did the

work. it showed the power to infiltrate. and that was almost the goal. similarly the hack of to testa's e-mail, the dnc, what's interesting about that case is that it shows how hacking of data and information leads into hacking of discourse and disruption of the ecosystem. and hear i would bake cli say the traditional media failed nus this regard, and they were somewhat hacks by becoming unwitting programs by getting fooled into thinking they had to report on every recipe in john podesta's e-mail as though it was news, and they too got manipulated. more on the hack of discourse is, again, very complex, multiparts. i would say this may be the

category that's hardest to get our heads around in democracies, because information and discourse is supposed to be the lifeblood of democracy, access to information. and here, information is being weaponized against us, and we were caught flat fooded in defending ourselves. all of us, our national security experts says though the security of cyber security is morphing before our eyes, i'll just mention a few parts to the disinformation approach of the russians, fabrication of personas, which mix in with awe then -- authentic discourse. much of this fabrication, the contempt was not illegal, and not even technically false.

but it was misleading and manipulative. also you've got inauthentic mechanisms, amplification tools. it's about the content of the manipulation. the third is the microtargeting tools. exquisite targeting of voters where it mattered. very potent and you put those things together and it ends up changing the discourse around the elections. the third big bucket, i'll just say a couple of words about, in some ways, this is the hardest to believe, if it is possible, that our confidence in democratic governance is really being undermined. the core beliefs that our values, our openness are part of our security is being hacked.

i'm going to mention two things here that are somewhat challenging. obviously it already came up. the hack of the rhetoric of the american president where the media is being called fake news, you know, the media is supposed to be the watch dog in democracy and it's being targeted as an enemy, our allies, nato, g7ings all being criticized, undermined. so it's sort of those this is happening before our eyes. his rhetoric is being hacked. and i would also raise another very challenging point in light of our relationship with our european partners and the wonderful conversation we had earlier at lunch. i have to admit there's a part of me as an american that observes the confidence of some european governments has also been hacked. in the sense that the approach

to combatting disinformation belies a loss of confidence in our ability to adhere to democratic values. i see this as kind of an effort to regulate content in the way authoritarian governments might. and i see it as a 20th century concept being applied to a 20th century solution. and i don't think that's the way to go. i think the focus should be on the mention -- mechanisms of manipulation. so bottom line, hack in every category. machines, campaign, civic discourse, the media, the rhetoric of our president, and to the confidence of democratic governance. and i think we really need to roll up our sleeves and get to work on this, and i hope the rest of our conversation gets to solutions.

>> you raise many interesting points. i will come back to them. i want to let everyone on the panel first have a chance. eileen did a wonderful job frame thing in terms of large concepts. how do you see russian efforts in britain? >> so the very specific area of russian involvement in britain has been around brexit, and i think i agree on the previous panel, that i think the objectives in russia getting involved in the brexit referendum may not necessarily have been to influence the outcome of the election, but to sow massive amounts of discord. if the referendum has gone the other way, you might have seen continue ed efforts in underming the results. so the effort is in creating division, undermining confidence in the rule of law, and leading people confused.

the involvement in brexit, it's a bit like in the wizard of oz and the curtain is pulled back and you realize the great and powerful oz is just a man behind a curtain. we recognize there's a capability of important powers to target voters without people ever realizing or understanding what was going on. and at the same time, this is the consequence of the story about the data breach on facebook, is i think what people noticed is the fact that we freely give away enormous amounts of data about ourselves, they end up in the hands of the companies and they take more than we know, and can't keep it safe. and it could easily end up in

the hands of bad actors. certainly we would have never given our concept to have ended up there. so we've stumbled into this new reality, and we're trying to understand what's going on. i think very specifically in the uk, we've seen the russian interference follow a similar pattern to what you're dealing with in the united states. there's much more limited advertising that we know of on facebook, paid for advertising in a similar way, but i agree with senator warner, that is really the tip of the iceberg. the issue is really the way which fake accounts could be used to distribute hyper partisan content. and it's a form of misselling advertising fake accounts on your platform.

and you know most of the problem on the platforms are caused by fake accounts, not by ones linked to a real person. i also think it's not enough to say to a tech company -- if a bank has suspicions about money laundering, it has a responsibility to check out what's going on. we have laws that govern that. the tech companies are under no obligation at all unless there is a complaint. they have the capabilities. the facebook app checking team should have spotted these campaign ads in britain and the usa and they didn't spot it for over a year afterwards. they only spotted it very begrudgingly when they were asked to do it. and they've not conducted a wide enough really investigation of the possibility of russian interference in other countries.

we shouldn't underestimate the power of the official russian state news agency pumping propaganda out. there was a study done during the brexit referendum and suggested that sputnik may have had a bigger voice on twitter. if you look to the novichok poisoning and you searched for stories about that poisoning, the top ten results, you would get the top two bbc reports. after that, it would have been from sputnik. amplifying the russian version of the story to sow confusion and doubt. they donjust have to pose enoug

questions to make you disbelieve what the main stream media are telling you. there's a multilayered approach to disinformation, causing po doubt, and back to the brexit referendum. what were they talking about? it's a similar pattern to what you saw in america, as well. it is aggressive wedge issues on sensitive subjects like the immigration, like race relations being used to encourage people to support one particular side and also attempting to suppress voters. where the tech companies do have a responsibility, wherever they see wrongdoing happening, they should act to stop it. they should do that proactively, and i think they're developing to do that. what we're considering in europe is simply the most harmful forms

of content and disinformation, this is a tactic, and this is getting more sophisticated. we're going the need help. the question we have to consider in europe, if they won't interve intervene, what sort of l liability should there be for failure to act? >> thank you. you have also raised a couple of important themes, but i want to give natalie a chance. >> i would step back from this conversation and say that at some point, in the not too recent past, the kremlin identified that the liberal international order, established post world war ii, was a direct threat to their existence, and the system they would like to maintain. so all of this is about

destroying that liberal international order in every form it takes, most important our democracies, our elections and values. ukraine is a critical element of that, because ukraine is an example of the success that that liberal international order, those values have over the minds of people who are free. people in ukraine have shown their desire over 25 years to live by those values, and to live by those norms, those responsibilities. for that reason, amongst others, the kremlin has intervened in ukraine's free choice from day one, in its politics and elections. and the more clear it became over the past 25 years, that the ukrainian people were yearning for european and western values, but willing to fight and die to obtain those values that civilizational choice, it became more important to intervene. it started simply by making sure that political forces

represented russian interests, first in kiev, perhaps in the south, maybe in the east. then in the security services, maybe in the military. often it was financed by corruption until my government stepped in 2014 and ended the use of intermediaries in gas trade, the russians enabled billions to go straight to med rare dd immediate ra-- in 2004, the revolution, their innuance wflu challenged by a candidate who embodied a western vision, and russia provided political consultants, hundreds of millions of dollars, poisoned the candidate, and this was a foreshadowing, i fear, of what we now hear is happening much too often, whether it be in the uk or elsewhere, and it accomplished their strategy for the moment. and they created fear. they showed that they could

control individuals and ideas. from 2004 through 2014, all tools were used. gas trade, fake news, creating d disnance, and ukraine almost entering an association agreement with the european union, it was russia leashing all of the tools it had at that time to stop ukraine from moving forward. and still failed with the revolution of dignity. when the ukrainian people insisted on leaving that open, even a $15 billion offered bribe was not enough to stop ukraine moving forward with its trade agreement. so russia moved to other tools and techniques, illegal okayization and annexation of crimea, the war in the east that's led to tens of thousands of lives being lost, 2 million

internally displaced people in europe. loss of indigenous people, and 40 years tomorrow, the loss of some 300 civilians on the shooting down of an airliner jet. massive use of disinformation, and all along, the bulk of the international a community has looked tat situation in ukraine as being unique based on ukraine and russia's historical closeness. yet i guess my point is, this has nothing to do with that. that may be an element why it's so strong and physical geography helps, but this is an important testing ground for russia in its attempt to out the liberal international order, and i think the actions of russia in the upcoming elections for president

and autumn elections for parliament in ukraine need to be watched carefully. i'm crowd that the commission on transatlantic commission on election integrity would be working with the specific task force to identify the things that occur in these elections so that we can try to stop them, identify them for the population so that perhaps their vote will not be reinvolmoved, because th not about ukraine orrer russian-ukrainian relations. so i think we can expect massive use of disinformation in ukraine, social media, cyber attacks to create disruption and chaos. kinetic operations of all kinds. ratcheting up and down the war, of using the war to create more pain and more economic

dissonance. the assassinations that have occurred in ukraine will continue to be a tool. bottom line is, destabilize ukraine and promote a more ma mallable leadership. ignoring these examples outside the united states creates grave consequences. so i think they have to be used as lessons to be learned from. >> natalie, that was wonderful. i would hike to thank you for bringing up the international liberal order. while eileen did not mention it, in a sense, your discussion of russian hacking was all about the russians pulling at the vulnerabilities of the international liberal order. some very smart people have written advanced society depends on something called trust. everyone knows to depend upon

the rule of law, but trust is required for evidence activity. and what the kremlin has been doing very effectively is cutting at the trust of the international liberal order. so i would like you to comment on that. >> i completely agree. we should all be underscoring. that is the big game. it is the erosion of confidence in the post world war ii liberal democratic order. and i like to focus on this concept of algorithms of democracy. we use that term to point to the duty of the private sector, which is an important part of this conversation. but it really also gets to the responsibility of democratic government. that they are able to protect

democratic processes under the rule of law. that ability is being called into question. and i really think that democ t democratic governments have to step up to the mate and figure out how to provide liberty, security, and democratic process in our globalized, digitized ecosystem. that is the name of the game here. but we have to do it. protecting democracy has always been hard. it's peculiarly hard. the threats are somewhat overwhelming. but that's what we have to do. and i lake to point back to international human rights framework as part of that democratic order, that we cannot throw under the bus in the name of protecting democracy. the human rights framework

provides a universal basis for protecting citizens, liberty and security, and it is peculiarly well suited for our globalized, digitized ecosystem and that should be our starting place. >> thank you. i want to think about one point, which plays off of what natalie said and buttressed by eileen. what we've seen russia do in ukraine is not only about or principally about ukraine but about the community of democracies. this is something that was not understood until 2014 in europe. would you say it's understood today in britain? >> to some exextent. in the ukraine it would be. you go back to the russian invasion of the ukraine, you had politicians saying quite

extraordinary things. and during the brexit vote as well, saying the eu had provoked russia into doing this. and the sorts of people that were saying those things, you know, there is -- there is this undercurrent, i think sympathy with national politics that some politicians have. and the allies they seek across europe, we're seeing the most extraordinary wave of political change across europe at the moment. and i think what to me as we embarrass on this inquiry is something that is important to us, for us to understand the problems we think are a 2016

problem, are a lot longer established in the baltic states, in the front line countries in eastern europe, where they've been tealing wide this problem for many years. they believe that russia is sporting the capability by having agencies in venezuela, focusing back on spain. so i think there is a growing understanding of a widespread nature of the problem. but beyond the sort of countries like ukraine, i think that knowledge has been limited. >> the atlantic council has been leading the charge against kremlin revisionism for four years. and this is not just to give us a plug, but i want to pick up on

the points you just made. talking about this problem, talking about kremlin disinformation, we consider spain to be largely hostile territory, until catalonia. that opened a window for us that we jumped through. the same was true of greece. now we have seen reports that the greeks have declared persona nongrata. so now greece is opening itself up to this. would you say this phenomena of opening up to understanding is growing in europe? >> i think it is growing. but i think in a sense some countries you are fighting against a quite entrenched position that the russians helped develop and maintain, sympathy toward them and their political aspirations. russia hates the multilateral

world and the idea of continental europe being united, unable to rebut and withstand russian pressure or whatever it is. if you can unpick that and make countries doubt the value of our allies and come to their own terms and agreement with russia, the established narrative they have is to undermine public confidence in the institutions that we created in the post world war. and to say that those institutions are responsible for their unhappiness, and maybe even see russia as a friendly force. >> thank you. natalie, you offered a really interesting insight, which i think stems from the fight that you are both american and ukrainian. you talked about moscow having to use all of its tools to

prevent ukraine from making the choice any free people would make, to embrace the values of the west. i think that was spot-on, but not well understood here. here's my question. i was working on the post soviet space 20 plus years ago, right? when we thought we could have a good relationship with russia. and russian policy 20 years ago, 25 years ago was not bad in most areas, and the question that struck some of us at the time was, why does russia have no soft power in its neighborhood? in other words, why did it have the option of pulling ukraine or georgia or armenia to itself by the power of attraction? your thoughts and why therefore they had to move towards the hard power option. >> okay. i think that the way the kremlin

has managed post soviet economic history has not provided -- you don't see the kind of growth in the russian economy that you would -- that i think the russian people would like and deserve. they don't have the same types of freedoms that the russian people got a taste of and it was taken away, the illegality of most ngos, the restrictions on the freedom of media. they simply aren't enjoying as an example of free travel, which ukrainian citizens are enjoying in the european union because they met self-ov -- several, ov 400 conditions to get that free travel. when you look at young ukrainians who were at the core of the revolution, they were

being given a choice whether or not to push at the same the president, to continue down the path of the eu. those values, those opportunities, or they could look north to what was happening in russia, and they're calling their generation didn't have those opportunities. i think russia can't offer that with the current economic structure that the kremlin has put in place. i don't think that it was an absolute that that had to happen. but i do believe that is a system that's currently in place, and does not offer a future. i thi they can't outspend the united states on military. if this is simply -- the soviet union thought they could and failed. senator warner mentioned their budget versus ours on the military. if you can't win with military spending, they're no longer going around the world, selling

marxist ideology. they're not able to sell what they have at home, so they need to protect it from being infiltrated by those ideas and the strength of those systems. >> thank you. >> i feel like this is -- this conversation points to how confusing the threat of disinformation is to our framework of understanding this. you started by talking about hard power versus soft power. and that they lack the ability to attract through soft power. disinformation isn't attracting to them, but it is the means through which we used to think of soft power working, which is attraction to ideas and values. and so i don't know if people have heard about the work done by chris walker on shark power.

we need a different framework understanding how disinformation works. >> damian, in your initial statement, you spoke about the problem of social media stepping up to its responsibilities. what can be done, not just in britain, but perhaps by an international group to encourage social media to step up? >> well, i think having some sort of common charter or set of principles that we would ask the tech companies to work on, but i think the tech companies already said they're going to bring in transparency everywhere, i can understand where that could be done at a local level.

a community page that talks about where you live is being run by someone in your country and not by someone overseas. with that transparency, to be responsible 5babout where political advertising is being run from. whether you should be a registered organization to run during that period of time, full transparency and traceability as to who you are, and what messages we should look at. i think we should look at the ethics as well of individuals being sold by facebook. i think it's one thing to target with a message you know who they

are, and you might send them a piece of dark mail, i want you to find me another group of people like them. or i have a group of people worried about immigration, find me another group of people worried about immigration. i think we should question the ethics of some of these techniques. that's a dialogue we need to have with them. i think it's really interesting in germany. the german government has said, you will take our messages, the german hate speech laws, and if you don't, you the tech company will face massive fines. so it is -- i think --

to me what it underlies is whether or not you go down the legal route, if companies don't invest anything in monitoring what goes on, on the side and engage their own community guidelines. >> natalie? >> i'm looking to the experts on what the solutions are for social media, but i worry about it at the same time. i've seen ukrainian activists on facebook are continually removed by facebook when they do anything that is anti-russia. so i worry about how we leave these companies to their own judicious sense of what's right and wrong and what that means

for freedom of speech. i know we need a solution, because i don't like the problem either. but i'm not confident that leaving it in their hands and the person who does it on facebook happens to be of russian heritage. it's a question i find still -- we're going to be talking about how much speech should be free. and i'm worried about two we let make that decision. >> you anticipated, and i was going to say, because what we've seen is that in this part of the disinformation war, the russians have been proactive and effective. in germany, the netherlands and internationally, they've been quick to bring charges of an anti-russian sentiment . part of the problem we need to get our hands around. >> i would say that i really appreciate the efforts of

germany, other governments in europe to be proactive and concerned about the quality of the discourse. i do think, especially in the german case, they've gone after the wrong target. in fact, you referenced all those resources that facebook is putting out there, rather than bringing their attention to the manipulation of the discourse. the second big problem is it's basically handed over a judicial function to the private sector that's not accountable, for a law promulgated by the government. so i think that's problematic, and the third piece that bothers me is that we do not want to encourage a more expansive definition of what kind of speech is illegal. most of the russian's

disinformation was not false or illegal. so i think it's the wrong target. >> there are two important categories within that. there was some information, which i think is harmful and clearly lies, probably the pizza gate story. someone could have committed a criminal act based on false information. there was never a debate around hyper partisan messaging, which is based on people who have different views, that is less about regulating and transparency. that is a real person sending it to me or someone else? y

that it's quite clearly this is malicious material. self-policing works in large areas of the private sector already. and if they fail to do that, there is some sanction amied to them and there is incentive to keep it within the guidelines. >> damian, in your initial comments, you spoke about in effect the effectiveness of official russian media, in pushing out memes that become a major part of the public discussion. your sense as to how this issue might be resolved, or at least managed? >> yeah, this is difficult, and i think because they're not hiding the fact that they're doing it. there are still legitimate organizations. i do think that we should look more closely about whether they are operating in the in terms of

the broadcasting license they have to operate in the uk in terms of partial ity and balanc. but that is about a necessity for other news organizations and legitimate political organizations to engage through social media, as well. to make it harder for those companies to dominate. i think at least half the americans get their news by facebook. it was said in the referendum that 7 out of 10 people who hadn't decided how to vote got their news through facebook. again, for me, this is where i think the tech companies have responsibility towards the way contempt is shared on their platform. it's not a totally organic space where things are shared.

so they do have some responsibility. >> i'm going to add three years ago when i was up on the hill talking about issues with ukraine, more than half of the congressional representatives did not know that "r.t." represented "russia today." i can tell you a couple of years ago, people were not aware that was a,py return officiussia off network. people need to know what they're watching, and at the same time, we need to educate our own media information from those networks, to source it and say what they're doing. that's how it gets to facebook. it doesn't necessarily get in there through the attribution of r.t. so i think part of it has to do with following that trek, but

making everyone aware of what that trek is. >> i want to add, i don't think any serious person thinks the private sector has no responsibility, and i do think the private sector has woken up to their responsibility and i admit they were not on it, just like nobody else was on it. but i think just as though we do not want governments to be arbiters of truth, in a democracy, we don't want the private sector to. what we do want is them to focus on manipulation of their platforms, fabricated personas that are part of that. and they are embracing this concept of quality, the quality of discourse necessary to sustain democracy. the quality of discourse on their platforms. the quality of information that's shared. it's a subtle difference. but i think the way i see it is, it's about the manipulative

effect of the whole system. >> i think there will be some hard areas of content which you have to go back -- so if you see the home office in the uk, the only area where the program identifies a news report about the film rather than the filmhg itself. the challenge then for the british government will be to say okay, if somebody can do this, you can too. this is actually information that's inciting people to commit offenses. >> that's a fair point. >> i think you make the right distinction, incitement to violence is one kind 06 category. disinformation is a channel that democracies have faced for

generation, and those two types of content should be handled differently. >> i gragree with that. the company's responsibility is to -- there is another category. what if you have -- you know this organization is making very powerful fake films about politicians, and there should be responsibility to identify who is doing that, and maybe do something about it. >> damian, you raised a very good point about the jihadi recruitments. and it's understood. we know that when we had problems in ferguson, missouri here in the united states a couple of years ago, the russians were sending out inflammatory messages, both to white supremists on the one sidx and antifa types on the other

side. that's incitement to violence. would this fit in your description of violent activity or not? >> i think it depends on the nature. if it is inciting someone to join a terror group, that clearly would fall in that category of hard, offensive content. if it's misreporting of the event, sewing confusion and h hatr hatred, that is difficult. that will include some information that people find offensive, as well. we have to be worried5?rç about that.

wh i think we can make people -- >> certainly in the case that happened in the united states, black lives matter, one of them was not local. being able to identify whether it is a member of your community that is having that view, just identifying the source could be extraordinarily helpful. >> that is what is so insidious about these examples. it's causing democratic governments to know whether they can adhere to their own freedom of values. the identification of who is behind these messages rather than the content itself is what matters. >> so none of you would find a restriction on free media, a requirement that you might say the sourcing of any message would be there? in other words, the geographical location.

>> take the election in the uk. for election material and election periods, if it's paid for, there has to be -- it has to tell you who that piece of community is there to promote and who is paying for it. >> the paid for is the least of our problems at this point. so on the extremes, i think there's going to be broad agreement. incitement of terrorism, you can regulate paid advertising in general, political advertising. where the really difficult parts are, we couldn't agree on example by example is the nonpaid, the creation, the stoking the fires of differences in society.

>> there's also the challenge of a lot of fake accounts. that is against their policy to have fake accounts. they think 3% to 4% of the accounts are fake, which is a manageable number. but somewhat should you do to police what goes on in a platform more effectively. >> is restricting bots restricting free speech? >> no, not necessarily. >> free speech is the right of a human being. >> some people might argue that a person who happens to be a billionaire has the ability to project his or her voice far more broadly than a person who's not. so is restricting money a restriction on free speech? >> we should have massive party financing rules. >> so you're saying restricting

bots is like restricting money. >> that's right. >> so i would put a finer point on it. i think that bots have obviously been a massive part of the problem and the manipulation. i think a blanket rule that you cannot have bots online doesn't make sense, because there are applications of bots to do any kind of realtime updating, weather, news. there are positive applications of bots. so it's not blanket banning. it is bots that are fabricated personas and manipulating the discourse. >> if yoef to heir on the side of caution, give up our weather news for the bots that are doing damage. >> i think you're the only one on this panel that is technically competent in this area. is it possible to distinction

between good and bad bots? >> well, you mean under the surface before they're out there? in other words, you can make a distinction between bots -- >> and police it. >> so we all have heard this idea that technology can be used for good or ill, and that's how you evaluate it. it's how it's used. same thing for bots. what you can police it under the surface, i can't answer that question. it's going to be the same as determining whether or not some of this fake information is good or bad. >> here's the distinction. it's not the content, it's the manipulative effect. it's the same distinction.

sitting on the platform so they can help people out. i can't believe if they wanted to, they could identify more of the bad actors. there's a part of my constituency that tweets the weather every day. you know, that is the distinction i would draw. >> okay. i think we've come close to exhaust thing topic, so i want to raise something i think our folks here would find interesting. we've had many unusual things happen over the last week on the international scene. and one of those was president trump's slamming the germans. now, i found that -- i saw some advantage and some disadvantage to that. was that a pos bif contribution

-- positive contribution or a negative factor? >> so i'm thrilled that president trump has taken that position, because i also am against north stream two. but think different place. i think it comes from a place for president trump where he's interested in the competitiveness of the u.s. l & g market and having that pipeline in place is a negative element of that competitive strength that the united states has to ship lng going forward to europe. i don't think we should read into it as a foreign policy position. i think it's a very clear economic policy decision on the part of the president. in germany, what president trump says tends to have the opposite

effect. i think it was very interesting this came up and president putin used it to show that, you know, we're good competitors. we're not foes or enemies. i'm competing for the gas market and so are you, may the best man win. it's to be dealt with as a competitive issue between, you know, two different soft drink brands. >> go ahead. >> you talk about -- i think they're very happy to have trump go for the germans. it's likely they would go through the deal. there is something ironic about him criticizing other countries about the closeness of the relations with russia. given his own administration. i do think there is around issue

about the growing soft influence that russia has over politicians and decision makers in the eu. the real import of that comment was to embarrass angela merkel and going back to the idea of undermining our transatlantic alliance, undermining nato and undermining the post-world war ii order. that is what it is really b. >> i agree with that. and i would point out that the reaction in russia was several kinds. on the one hand, it was a visceral criticism of it. but then putin's reaction is the smart play. to turn it to a gee joe political matter to a commercial matter among friends is the line he is trying to sell. >> missing the entire point of norstream two. >> you look at this last week and say the ability of the president to pick up the phone to a leader in europe and say i really think you should do this,

i think it's really important, is diminisheded by the behavior this week. >> sad but true. >> all right. we have like seven minutes left. if anyone in the audience has a question, i think we have a microphone. we do have a microphone. yes. okay. we have three questions over here. we'll do one, two, three. >> hi, suzanne spalding. i was the undersecretary of the department of home land security, responsible for cybersecurity and infrastructure protection including election infrastructure security. i'm now with the center for stroo teethic and international studies where i'm looking at leading a project to look at all the ways in which what russia is doing undermines public trust and confidence in a fundamental pillar of democracy, namely, judicial system, the justice system. we know as all of you said that what we see here has been going on for quite some time elsewhere

and particularly ukraine has been a proving ground sadly for techniques against the u.s. and i'm wondering if you saw similar measures targeting the judiciary. we certainly are seeing them in hungary and poland and elsewhere. >> you know, i can't say that i v i think the judicial system in ukraine has been unfortunately most affected by corruption. simply corruption and lack of follow-through and rule of law. again, i will allow the russians to share the blame in terms of being often much of the source of the corruption. in ukraine but they're not responsible for corruption in u kr ukraine, ukraine is responsible for. that i think the judicial system, the biggest risk has been that not direct russian interference. >> okay, thank you. >> michael martel, cyber research with the national security archive.

folks have been talking about transparency on the location of posts. it's fairly easy to spoof location on line using vpns. at a certain point we then have to target vpns which are human rights. you have to target vpns which are used in places like russia, china, iran. at times with american encouragement to be able to practice free speech of their own. so at what point do we decide that tradeoff is worth it for the west? >> anyone want to comment on that? it's a good question. >> simply say, you asked the right question. it really is a tradeoff. there are costs to doing that. and even though there are benefits just as with the bots question. so, you know, that's what democracies, democratic governments are supposed to do. they're supposed to address the hard questions, freedom, security, democratic process and rule of law. i don't have a complete answer

to that particular technical question. but that's what we have to do. we can't throw one thing under the bus in the name of protecting democrat sichlt we have to do it all. >> i lean towards saying we've got to save the democratic system first. so i would lean towards unfortunately dealing with the vpns. i've also seen that in many of the asia wakenings, people were targeted even though they were using vpns. so it wasn't the ultimate protection of their -- of them in those situations. so i guess i would say i'm on balance. >> i say we call them continuous. >> yeah. another question over here? >> hi. i'm lee block. i'm a student at american university. my question is as follows. i'm curious how multilateral

institutions, say the eu or the world trade organization can counter -- can counter russia as it uses corruption to -- as a method of soft power in the important followcy. >> there's a lot more to call out russian corruption than we do. we've had questions on uk and support money laundering and institute unexplained wealth from people who suddenly come into a lot of money in the uk. i think another organization you can mention is fifa. you know, football is -- soccer, i should say, is very open to money laundering and supporting the strategic interests of very wealthy individuals who seek to hide their money and move it around the world. the football transfer market and

that sport is a hugely successful tool for doing that. no surprise that fbi and the different investigating agencies are looking at money laundering in the caribbean. the question is whether you can get consensus among the multilateral organizations to take these things seriously. some people take it more seriously than others. >> we have to -- transparency and transparency. the imf has a rule in each one of the countries they're working on to make sure the transparency rules in the country whether that is auditing state owned companies in ukraine or putting the treasury of the country online, you can continue to do that throughout the countries that are working with the imf. you can have more and more transparency in the united states and in the so-called advanced countries with regard to the source of cash that is being used, especially in real estate markets. i repeat and said this earlier today, in london and the united states, the ability to buy through corporations, through companies that have been set up yesterday, real estate property

and hundreds of millions of dollars into the countries is a major source and lack of transparency. we need to practice what we preach. i'm not suggesting the imf tell this to countries that are having economic troubles. with very to do it ourselves. a lot of this can be resolved with transparency. >> question over here? >> thauctink you very much. i would just like to command your question why russia doesn't use soft power. >> one minute. >> yeah. yeah. there are a number of reasons. the main reason is corruption. money which can go for soft power to make the country a directive goes to the pockets of russian bureaucracy and that's

it. >> thank you. one more question and then that's it. >> i'm from foreign policy magazine. i have a question for mr. collins. in the u.s. and in wake of the russian interference and elections we've seen, this mueller investigation is indictmented and arrests. but in the uk, it's only recently coming into line. i'm just wondering has the uk been caught on the back foot by possible russian interference and what is the people plan ton doing to investigate it? >> good question. there are several investigations. my committee, we're part of the committee which is leading the parliamentary investigation and in terms of fake news has come to look at the issues to russian affairs as a consequence they're looking at the issues. it also has been the information commissioners investigation in data usage and elections. she said, for example that, is evidence that data and fb is accessed by people in russia.

so they can follow a data trail and see who is doing that too. there is -- with regards to individuals like our banks that, information has come out in a lot of investigators and investigative journalists identified that information and getting it into the public domain. they play an important role. i know the people involved in that have also shared that information with the national crime agency and so i hope they have the information they need to conduct their own investigations. as you probably know, the agencies in the uk tend to be less forth coming about what they're doing. and they tend to get update on the work they're engaged in. but that's why i think my position and the most important thing we can do is put in the public domain what we have. we hope that encourages the agencies to do more. >> thank you. i'd like to thank you all for being here this afternoon. just make two more points. one, the program we're going to be doing following russia interference in the ukrainian elections, we're doing it with the transatlantic commission.

and also we're doing an event on i think the 19th on russian efforts to corrupt american courts. so if you're interested in that subject, come back here in a couple days. thank you very much.

easterly i didn't rememberer today, president trump met with president putin in finland. the final leg of his week long european trip. you can see the events tonight at 9:00 eastern on c-span and c-span.org or with the free c-span radio app. >> tomorrow, jerome powell testifies before the senate banking committee about monetary policy and the economy. live coverage starts at 10:00 a.m. eastern on c-span3, online at c-span.org or you can listen with the free c-span radio app.

on wednesday, federal reserve chair jerome powell is also on capitol hill testifying before the house financial services committee about monetary policy and the economy. live coverage begins at 10:00 a.m. eastern here on c-span3, also online at c-span.org and listen with the free c-span radio app. and coming up thursday, the senate banking committee will hold a confirmation hearing for president trump's nominees to lead the consumer financial protection bureau and the export-import bank. live coverage is at 10:00 a.m. eastern on c-span 3 and then hearing also online at c-span.org and on the free c-span radio app. >> tonight it is my honor and privilege to announce that i will nominate judge brett kavanaugh to the united states supreme court. >> mr. president, i'm grateful to you and i'm humbled by your

confidence in me. thank you. >> brett kavanaugh of the united states court of appeals for the district of columbia circuit is president trump's nominee for the supreme court. >> and i'm pleased with the nominee that president has chosen and after talking to him yesterday morning, i look forward to supporting his nomination and doing whatever i can to ensure the bipartisan confirmation. >> if judge kavanaugh is confirmed, women's decisions to make decisions about their bodies, reform system and quality about our air and watt eastern much more will be at risk. >> frankly, i cannot think of anybody who's more qualified to serve as the next associate justice of the supreme court. >> follow the confirmation process on c-span, through congress as judge kavanaugh meets with key senators. the senate confirmation hearings and the vote. watch live on c-span, watch any time on c-span.org, or listen with the free c-span radio app.

>> alaska weekend is saturday and sunday. see featured programming on c-span. book tv, and american history tv. we'll explore alaska's natural beauty, history, culture, and public policy issues facing the state. starting saturday at 7:00 a.m. on c-span, washington journal will examine major issues in alaska including climate change, energy, and the alaska national wildlife refuge, alaska native issues and hunting regulations. on the communicators at 6:30 p.m. eastern, tina pigeon talks about how the company makes broadband possible for small villages across tundra, glaciers and mountains. then christopher detrick on providing health care through telemedicine to remote communities in alaska. then on book tv, the c-span

cities tour explores alaska's literary and historical scene with dermot cole. the president of the sea alaska heritage institute with her book on alaska natives, celebration, and stan jones, author and former anchorage daily news investigative reporter on the exxon valdez oil spill. and sunday at 9:00 p.m. eastern on "afterwards," mark adams talks about his book "tip of the iceberg." his experience retracing an 1899 expedition of scientistses, artists, conservationists and writers up the alaskan coast. on american history tv on c-span3 sunday at 2:00 p.m. eastern, the c-span cities tour visits the alaska state capital, the alaska native heritage center and ft. wayne wright army base and at 4:00 on "real america" watch four

documentaries on alaska. the silver millions. the 1949 film, eskimo hunters in northwestern alaska. the 1967 film alaska centennial and the 1944 film, alaska highway. watch alaska weekend saturday and sunday on the c-span networks, c-span.org, or listen ott free c-span radio app. >> at this house energy and commerce subcommittee hearing, members question members about horse racing and the doping of the support and proposal to set andy doping standards. the hearing begins with testimony from andy barr about their bill addressing the issue.