. again, i want to thank you for joining us here at this winter conference for the national suckers association of secretaries of the state and for our program today on election security.

it is my pleasure to introduce our conferences keynote speaker, mr. clint watts. clint is a senior research fellow at george washington university center for cyber and homeland security. he recently examined the rise of social media influence publishing his first book entitled, messing with the, enemy surviving the social media world of hackers, terrorists, russians and fake news. you covered a lot there. his research and writing focuses on terrorism, counter-terrorism, social media influence and russian disinformation. from 2014 to 20, 16 he worked with a team to track and model the rise of russian influence operations via social media leading up to the u.s. presidential election in 2016. this research led clint to testify before four different senate committees in 2017 and 2018 regarding russia's information warfare campaign against the united states on the west. before coming a consultant,

clint served as a u.s. army infantry officer and fbi special agent, as the special executive officer of the batting -- as an insult to the fbi's counter-terrorism office and the national security branch, the ntsb, to be completely alphabet soup? okay, good, and analysts supporting the u.s. intelligence community and the u.s. special operations committee. his remarks today concern election security, specifically, the threat actor behavior and counter measures for disrupting and defeating state and non state actors. please join me in welcoming mr. clint watts. . >> thank you to everybody for having me today. it is a pretty remarkable transition from when i talked about this topic in 2016, january 2016, no one was too interested.

not sure if you are aware, russia interfered in our election. we have not talked about that much for the last four years but today i will talk to you about something other than that. and i thought a good way to start, it off to kind of put some context on this and think about the dilemma that you all say this out there in each of these, states right? which has different interest, different political, interest social, interest financial interests, you have different populations that are looking now at different information sources and i think that is kind of where i would like to start. i was in new orleans earlier this week and i had not been there in 25 years and so i told the story about, it was a july 4th weekend in 1996 and i convinced an audience that i was harry kind of junior stunt double because a movie had just come out. now, had i done that just five years later, someone would've looked on the internet and said this is totally impossible, you're not, i would gone okay, and we would've just lofted off.

fast forward ten more years, now, we are top doesn't six, you would have had believable of ration it fingertips you would've immediately been like this wasn't true and i would be like, okay, all by the beer, we will just transition. if that happened today in 2016, though,, what people believe what they saw on the internet or were they believe me, could i make them believe whatever i wanted them to believe because maybe before i walked in i posted thrown on attributed social media account a bunch of stories about harry khan junior stunt double or a road website that said i'm pretty sure harry do your didn't do his own stunt. does anybody know? and i layer the stuff out there and then when i walk, and what happens? in 20 years we went from almost no information, to where we just kind of laugh about a story to, i don't know what to believe, we went from no information to so much information that we actually know less, and that is sort of

what i think found our election process is today is we have more security, look at everyone who is in here today in all of the panels you are doing. you've invested more time going into election 2020, i would, surmise that any election in your history. we have invested a tremendous amount technical resources. we are bringing everyone together to come up with us practices and yet, no matter what we do, will the public be convinced on election day that the vote is true and safe and secure and that it is authentic? i think that is a big challenge for you so when you think about the information space, i will kind of rewind how this came about for me. i worked with a very small team. we were tracking terrorists in syria. literally keeping excel spreadsheets of them, terrorists our vein and so they like to brag when they are in syria and iraq and every time we get we would record it we are keeping track of that to try to understand the terrorist landscape. that is when we started coming

into this dissimilar sort of space which was all of these strange accounts that were made to look like and talk like americans from all over the united, australia, europe, which wanted bashar al-assad to stay in power in syria, wanted to convince the audience that i wasn't al-qaeda supporter which totally does not make sense support in the fbi,, that there were all sorts of conspiracies about what terrorists were doing or not doing throughout syria and iraq and what the u.s. government was doing or not doing it many of those persist today and you will see them surface sometimes in our, news alternative news environment but from, that we saw that relentless social media turn and what was fascinating about it was i did not believe it would work. if you've ever looked at a

piece of disinformation or misinformation, you think, well, surely nobody believes that. but people still click on the email from the guy in nigeria who wants to give you $1 million every day. so imagine that in your social media environment. if you stick at it over and over again, it wears down the mind and changes people's perceptions. it used to be hackers. now, it's if i just heckle people endlessly on social media, they will eventually take themselves off of social media and i win. or if i create a very attractive young lady or a hyper-partisan political figure who wants to direct message of something really important and then all of your accounts are compromised the next day which could be a voter roll.

in 2014, i briefed this disinformation stuff for first time here in the d.c. area and it was at the end of the terrorism preview. everybody was like, we care about isis. this stuff doesn't work and nobody cares. i was skeptical, but we fast forwarded one year and we saw such disinformation around a military exercise called jade helm down in texas. i specifically remembering a press conference of an army lieutenant colonel who was trying to brief and audience that there was not going to be martial law cleared in texas and that special operations command was not going to invade texas and take it voer. it seems crazy, but there were people there shut up in person and looked around try to figure out where the other 200 people were who said they would be there that day. you are seeing information mobilize people to action.

if you look at 2016, you saw people mobilized for and against issues at protests orchestrated by people in russia who have never even set foot. what was the message from the organizers? to take pictures, take pictures. because then on social media, i can amplify these divides over and over. i want to move past the russian discussion. this is something i'm sure you're already aware of, this is what everybody does now. it's on scale. so i wanted to talk to you about the range of ways this can play out. on election night 2016, i was not worried about russia. it was worried about violence,

that is what my colleagues and i were watching. regardless of your political stance, we don't want people showing up, hackers targeting election machines. we don't want people to lose faith in thes institutions and elected officials, so i want to talk about how we got to this point so we can think of ways to help you. help you be better informed to think about strategies to deal with this. about 2011 there was a guy who figured out when you look at google, your results were tailored to you, and he called a filter bubble. once people typed in results, they might be in a different locale, they might be looking

at the issue in different ways. they are getting a view based on their filters. add social media to that, and it is an information nuclear disaster. social media is about preferences, that is why we go to it. you get the information you want from people you like to hear from, and you can have it when you choose. and if there is information you do not like how might you can block it out. what i have come to conclude after all the hysteria about this, wihle social media can do better, it is largely up to us to decide how we want to consume information, and to know what we are doing that is good or bad for us. it is one part algorithm and one part us. in any audience, even with younger audiences, i always remind them when you look at the phone, that world is uniquely tailored to you and only you, no one else sees that world. it has shaped to your preferences. if they do not have your phone,

they are seeing a totally different world. it is shaped by your preferences. we forget that when we talk to people, didn't you see this, can you believe what happened? there is changing receptions. everyone's perception is being changed daily based on their needs. how did we get to the system? it's because social media plays to three biases that they cannot unwind, we can scream. the system is made to do what? give you information that you like from people that look like you and talk like you. as long as that system is in place, you cannot unwind the biases that will play in there. confirmation bias is literally a like sign, i like this. here is another batch of it. i am one of those weird

stalkers in coffee shops that watches old people on facebook. i do not watch what they are saying nut how they interact with technology. the human body is not meant to process nine memes a minute and send them out to 100 people. think about the amplification of that. academics say we had the same problem when the printing press came out. no, no. there were not 3 billion printing presses printint 9 newspapers a day shooting it out out every day, every minute. the amplification is not the equivalent of eight printing presses in new york city 100 years ago. the human body cannot process that much information. you will fall for fake news because you went from 10 stories a day to 110 stories a day. even if you make a mistake one time, you are pushing out false information, misinformation about your elections, polling sites, whatever it might be faster, and that destroys how people take in information.

it annihilates their ability to process information. if you cannot make sense of the world, if you become distorted, it results in apathy. you can see internally in russia, they use that information to where it is so confusing people back away and look at memes of cats and focus on kids. the second bias is implicit bias. throughout psychological studies, people like information that look and talk like them. your feeds are nothing more than giant collections of people saying things you like and who talk like you dominantly. they are your tribe. this is more devastating in the development a world where we have tribes, and social media

reinforces tribalism and infighting. the third bias is what i call status quo bias, once you get into your tribe on social media, you do not want to say anything that makes the tribe angry. if you watch me on twitter, i will shoot out a tweet that will not be liked by my tribe so i can get the data analytics to know what they do not like. i did this two days ago. 150, 000 retweets, or, why did he say that? that is status quo bias, it changes how people interact on the platform so when something is said that you know is not true, you do not refute it, you let it go. as you let it go, the rest of the audience passively pass this on into the circle.

those three biases have amazing confounding effects on our don't on our culture and democracy. if you want to gain power, win the crowd and you can dictate to the crowd what to think and what to do. it is an amazing ability. we have always had this to a degree, but social media allows you to optimize it because the algorithm tells you when you were successful. think how many speeches teddy roosevelt would have had to give to figure out the perfect message a century ago? today you can do that in 24 hours and say it over and over again. the more your successful with the message, the more power you

accrue and you can dictate to the crowd and use the status quo bias to influence their perception of the world. this gives power to people who do not know anything. examples, you are dealing with it with your elections, your polling places are the machines secure? every day on social media, do we know the vote counted in 2016? every day for four years i have gotten between 100 and 200 queries about that. yes, i think the vote was accurately counted, and every day they asked me that question. think about how that changes and accrues power. somebody with influence, no matter what you tell them, it can be a problem. scenarios with neck scenes you get strong influencers and you are changing health policy. the big one today is coronavirus. news articles about false and manipulated information is being spread about a huge

health crisis. you get an influencer pushing out repetitively, it is hard not to believe them because you want to. the second pard is because they are in your social media nation. i asked how much time do your kids spend on phones? averages vary from three to five hours a day, and for some teenagers eight or more on a device, not counting television, gaming. the more time people spend in the virtual world, the less time in the physical world, the more their allegiances change. some surveys are alarming about young people open to alternative forms of government which are poorly explained and i do not think effectively researched, but they are open to that because of the degradation campaigns around

democracy conducted domestic and international. taking about that over time, kids will not be overtaken by the matrix, they will enlist in the matrix, they love the matrix. seven hours a day on your device is better than the real world. this dynamic is unfolding in real time but it changes allegiances and people become tied to hastags or avatars, but do not want to thank they have it in our neighborhood to affect their daily life. changing that is something we have to think about. it results in the ultra-woke person who wants to stand up for every issue but never leaves the couch, which is annoying. or your angry uncle who screams at you on facebook. it creates a strange dynamic

that we do not understand how we are perceived, so i joke that twitter is where you go to get yelled at where peo by people you do not know. that dynamic has changed where we are pushing people away to draw the attention of people who might be on the other side of the world, the country, or not even who they say they are. the third part is the death of expertise which is the most critical part. tom nichols wrote a book about this. you as institutional leaders and defenders of voting of the processes of executing our

democracy is essential that everyone has confidence in you. i do, i see what you are doing to prepare the election, but it only takes one idiot on social media to ruin your life, and it consumes so much of your time that you cannot effectively execute the duties of your job. now you're dealing with misinformation when you want to secure the election, it is a cost. everyone with an internet the believes there are smarter than everyone in the world on any topic. anyone with children in high school knows this is true. this is a tough dynamic that we

need to restore in the coming years. when thinking about this, i want to alert you to something else on the horizon. when i started doing this, we get activists and hackers who kick this off, they were the first to hack into critical information to exposed to the public, they could influence behavior and how people think. the second generation is extremists, they reached an entire audience around the world, and they did it by going multiplatform, multimedia, communicating in all different languages. that is why isis overtook al qaeda, they could overtake more people. they would translate into dozens of languages. they were expanding the audiences they could reach. nationstates, russia and many have overtaken the system. when they saw the arab spring were social media rallies were occurring, people did not know each other, toppling dictators. did you think authoritarians would think that social media would just be them? no way. within months, every one of these countries going back to iran after the twitter uprising in 2009, every one of them moved into this space. first, find my opponents, track them down, infiltrate groups, destroy the system with

information. we call it a troll farm, in the technical world a disinformation center. meme makers, blog posts, social media trolling and every country. the nationstates will try to affect you, they have to speak in your language. if they want to mess around in your election, they have to speak english like an american. the easiest way to spot them, they do not know how to use spellcheck, i don't know why. they make mistakes grammatically. they lay the jokes out when it doesn't fit the scenario. those were early indications of foreign interference. today we have moved to the fourth generation, trolling as

a service. the most groundbreaking thing is you have a wide spectrum of actors who can buy or acquire these services individually or combine them together to amplify disinformation, misinformation and picked that against you pit that against you. everyone has its ability at their fingertips. you can go to the dark web and by social bots or hire people to troll. it is remarkable how this has gone down. next on the horizon which is just startinge which is essentially owning the system, and china will win. this is a combination of censorship, social scoring, say something nice about us or you do not get points, no points, no loans or jobs. scoring systems will shape peoples behavior. if you want to see what will be

the 9/11 of that, it will be the nba in china just in recent weeks. someone sticks up for democracy and the nba says we like some democracy, but we like profits a little more. major social influencers are saying we need to stick out of their business, and china said this is the beginning, we will see you. wait until we get artificial intelligence online, we will change your world view. you will not have any idea bad things are happening, and i will make you believe good things are happening that never happen. they will have that ability to shape. i put that to you as you plan these scenarios how to deal with these actors. in terms of sophistication, on the left side is what is important to understand, there are degrees to influence, some

are easier than others. selling someone something, changing their views even a little bit based on how they vote, hard but not impossible. the next level players are setting up fake universities, fake think tanks, institutions and nonprofit to say all voting machines are weak and you cannot trust them. this is the combination of lobbyists, political groups, oligarchs, they are buying media outlets and combining these tools to shape your reality. that is what i worry about, can we fight off those who have no intent, know-how, and resources to change the reality of our democracy. the reality of our democracy is it is the best form of government on this planet, we have achieved more than any society, and places that have moved toward democracy have done better. that is truth.

that is what i said, but many people would want to argue with me. we have our ups and downs, this is not the best week. in the long-term we have people from any culture or identity here today from all 50 states working together to come up with solutions to make sure people know their votes count on election day. what other country could accomplish this? no one could do this. we have to reinforce what we are doing. of the awareness is a big part of it. fear is a weapon for our adversaries. fear that your vote did not count, that voting machines got hacked, fear that you will not get to the polling place or be on the rolls. when you see those responses of fear and the public rising up, coronavirus is an amazing example right now, that is when you have to be out there aggressively pushing back. i will close with a few things

to think about in your roles, and let me know if i am going too long. as countries, the most important thing we can do, whether you are state, local or federal official is have a rigid pinning to the truth and be data driven. you are the holders of data, the u.s. government holds more data than any institution around the world. there was a conspiracy yesterday that some russian spokesperson said the u.s. had used a climate weapon on moscow and that is why it was warmer. i said yes, it is called carbon dioxide and you can read about it at our website, nasa. gov. how can you use facts and data? we have that ability, we are one of the only countries who

has that ability to pull back into data and use it. that is your strength against trolls. you know things and they do not. you have data behind you, they oftentimes have zero. you have resources, they usually have nothing. use your advantages you have to push back. the other part is anticipating reaches and smear campaigns. that is what i am trying to do, over reading of what people say. if people talk terrible about you, they might hack you as well. who knew? that is a leading indicator. people would ask me, i testified to the senate and mentioned to senator rubio, russia did not do you any favors.

i read russian news and they did not like him. you can pretty much guess what they might be doing. they might be trying to hack into his systems. you can look at these measures, and it will signal what they are doing in the covert space. the other way is a capability to a smear campaign. as soon as you know you got hacked, what will you do on our one, on our one, our 12 hour one, hour 12? this is a big weakness for us. we did not understand hacking was to gainmoney or defame people. how do we stay in front of that? a domain pops up, they say hi, i need to expose the truth, and a week later a bunch of documents show up, and thank you for exposing this criminal

theft of dumping information. those are early warnings you can look at in the internet space that should give you a tip to prepare and plan, it is probably coming your way. for agencies, social media is not something that is good to do. i can tell you now 6:00 p. m. on friday i would stalk employees to find information, amazing how many pictures of id badges and what they really feel about their boss, come out on weekends when they are more relaxed. that is the stuff hackers are thinking about. we saw that consistently in 2014 and 2015. understand if people have complaints, bring them forward, but how do you do your own

public social media engagement? the classic mistake agencies make is an allegation comes out, they think it is dumb or silly and they wait. then after the 100, 000th tweet they want to issue a response, too late, it is already out there. their response will be you are hiding something because they know the votes were hacked. time, response, when to respond, who you would respond to. the other classic mistake is a troll with two followers who has an account for one week, you see a major institution respond to them. no we didn't. and they go, i gained 200 followers, thank you. you can amplify your dissenters. you have to wargame, you have to practice, you do not do it in the open, talk to your teams

and your strategy as it moves forward. you will know in the last 60 days going into the election, election rigging, voter fraud, machines are down, power outage, hackers, all those conspiracies will come forward because people want to win, or overseas want to mess around in your election and hurt your institutions. you have to wargame those so the public stays confident in you and not some random social media account that's out there. in terms of citizens, this is where it is that, how do we help people understand the information? i use the example, when i was a kid you go to the grocery store and there would be a newspaper stand where an alien had landed at area 51. i vaguely talking to my parents, did an alien land? no, no one reads that.

all of our parents read that now on social media and send it to me. how did this happen? they are so brilliant at the grocery store, but then i get hammered by people i went to high school with by the craziest stuff i have seen in my life. if i printed this put it at the grocery store, you would not buy it, but if it is on facebook, you send it to me every day. it is about understanding where those come from. the first is the cost and benefits of social media use, is it a good or miserable experience? do you spend most of the days with the hairs on the back of your neck and you are angry, and instead of road rage you had social media rage it is probably not worth it. you could let it go in your world would be better and you would be happier. there is no going back with young people. the idea we will give them phone breaks, no we are not. it is how do we integrate technology and people in ways

where it is a blended environment and people are working together. that has happened more in the last three to four years largely due to my generation and older souring them on social media behavior. they have figured this out on their own, but how do we reinforce that over time? just this week the guy who lived across the street from me stole the wheels off my chevy nova, just misplaced anger, but was sending me totally bogus news i knew was false, and posting russian state-sponsored propaganda that said we could not trust the fbi. i am most flew to missouri to fight him over the wheels on my car and the propaganda. how does this still happen?

why does russia want to run a new site that tells you what is happening in america in english? they do not talk about what is happening in russia because you do not usually care. why? they want long run, they do not care who wins the election, they want democracy to fall. they want americans to not believe in their elected leaders, their officials, other institutions, their democratic processes. we are very good at doing that ourselves, do not let someone else do it. the ideas, know what you consume. i always try to give tips to people on social media because you are making decisions superquick. do you know the outlet? if they are not telling you where they are located at, there is a reason for that. they are not up to snuff in terms of their editorial processes.

second part, do you know who the author is? particularly a meme. seven words that feel good are oftentimes not true. do you know where it came from? how does that information source make their money? if they do not have ads and you cannot figure out how they are paying their bills that they write 50 memes a day or 15 new stories a day, how do they do that? do you understand their motivations? listen more than you speak, read more than you write, watch more than you film. the current generation can make more content than they can consume. they make that for themselves oftentimes. they are constantly broadcasting producing. it makes it hard for anyone to consume anything if you are producing content. the biggest thing, if i could

leave one thing for you, is understand what you tend to believe. war propaganda back through time, it is biological, psychological, the thing you hear first, that which you hear the most, that which comes from a truck that source, and that which is not accompanied by a rebuttal, that is basically your social media feed. speed first. liking amplification those sorts of things. do you trust them naturally? the source of the information, not necessarily who made the content, this is where it gets a little muddled on social media. we already block out rebuttals to that information. first, most, trusted source, rebuttal. that is what you have got to do.

you have got to be repetitive, though it seemed stupid but you have to keep doing it over and over. you have to be a trusted source, which means you have to be right almost 100% of the time. in terms of being in that space so that people can hear you challenge them, that means that if it's happening on social media, you might need to be there on the ground. the best way is to show up at their house come at their communities. if they are broadcasting some conspiracy about your polling place, either. be there. knock them down, have your data. we just think we post back or tweet a lot. nothing works better than a direct challenge to someone who is pushing this information against you. the last thing is to know when you are an expert. when it is the death of

expertise, people say experience. i will say, you have been analyzing social media for 30 years? >> they go, the sort of thing. the next thing is competency. what is their actual experience in this space? the third part is what analysis they use to arrive. we used to teach at this thing called the intelligence community where we were always evaluating experts. how do we put that together to understand what they are putting out in terms of information. the last part that i want to close with. i work with two different teams

designed to help protect the elections in 2020. the first is at the foreign policy research institute. i have been able to recruit 33 interns that are students from all around the country. they all work remotely, but we go through russian and iranian state-sponsored propaganda to see how they are talking about the elections and the candidates. that is a good forecast to look at how serious they are about election 2020. we are also doing how they talk about technology and electoral systems is another thing we are looking at. then we try to push that out into the social media space. the other is called the hamilton 68 dashboard. it is built out of social media camps we have been looking at. the alliance for securing democracy created a dashboard that runs in real-time. they have content from russia,

china, and iran also coming on that tells you what that new cycle is about. it is one part to tell you about vulnerabilities and a second to challenge those candidates that say there are all sorts of people messing around with the elections. they will say, i don't know, i don't see it. maybe you are going to lose just because people did not vote for you. it is two parts this time. this will be a big issue will be studying here in the summertime. we know disinformation will rapidly start to emerge in that space and we will use those two projects. it's pretty amazing to watch how fast young people can read news compared to me, which i enjoy.

i think we will have approached 7, 000 new stories. they also use it for their own college projects and papers. with that, thank you for having me today. good luck.