this is 45 minutes. >> i want to thank you for joining us here at this winter conference for the national association of secretaries of state and our program on election security. it is my pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker. clint is a senior research fellow at george washington

university. he recently examined the rise of social media influence by publishing his first book titled " messing with the enemy: surviving in a social media world of russians, hackers, and fake news". his research and writing focused since focuses on terrorism and counterterrorism. from 2014 to 2016, cling worked with a team to track and model the rise of russian influence operations via social media leading to the presidential election of 2016. this research led him to testify between four different committees in 2017 and 2018 regarding russia's information warfare campaign against the united states and the west. before becoming a consultant, clint served as an army officer

and an agent, as a executive officer of combating terrorism center, as a consultant of the counterterrorism division, and the national security ranch branch, the nsb. he is an analyst supporting the intelligence committee and special operations command. his remarks today concern election security, specifically the threat actor behavior and countermeasures for disrupting state and nonstate actors. these join me in welcoming dr. clint watts. >> thanks to everybody for having me today. it's a change from when i talked about this topic in 2016, nobody was too interested. i'm not sure if you're aware, russia interfered in our election.

we haven't talked about it much for the last four years, but today, i wanted to talk to about something other than that. i thought a good way to put context on it and to think about the dilemma you all face in each of these states, which has different political, social, and financial interests. you have different populations looking at different information sources. i think that is where i would like to start. i was in new orleans earlier this week and i had not been there in 25 years. it was july 4th weekend 1996, and i convinced an audience that i was harry connick jr.'s stunt double because movie had just come out. if we had set up a four, we

would have left it off. 10 years later, you would've immediately had mobile information at your fingertips. if that happened today in 2016, what people believe what they saw on the internet or what they believe me would they believe me? or could i meake them believe because maybe i posted a bunch of stories about harry connick jr.'s stunt double. or i wrote a website saying i'm pretty sure harry connick jr. did not do his stunts. does anybody know? i latest tough out there, and when i walk in, what happens? in 20 years we went from almost no information to laughing at a store in new orleans story in new orleans. we have gone from having so much information that we actually know less. what confounds us today, you

have invested more time going into 2020 than any election in history. we've invested a tremendous amount of technical resources. and yet, no matter what we do, will the public the convinced on election day that the vote is true, and that it's safe, and and that's it's secure and authentic? i think that is a big challenge. so when we think about the selection, i will rewind how this goes for me. i was with a small team tracking terrorists in syria. literally keeping excel spreadhseets of them. terrorists are vain and they like to brag whenever they're in syria and iraq. every time, we would record it and try to understand the language. that is when we started coming into the disinformation space

with all of these strange accounts that were made to look like and talk like american all over the united states, australia, europe, which wanted to convince the audience that i was an al qaeda supporter, which makes sense, as is everyone the fbi. from the fbi. we are all al-qaeda supporters. there were all kinds of conspiracy theories, many of these persist today and you will even see them sometimes in our alternative news environment. from that, we saw the relentless social media turn, and what was fascinating about it was i did not believe it would work. it seemed super dumb. if you've ever looked at a piece of disinformation or misinformation you think, well, surely nobody believes that. that seems like a bunch of

nonsense. 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, your information environemtn. if you stick at it over and over, it wears down people's perceptions. and people are getting smarter about it. 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. or if i create a very attractive young lady or a hyper-partisan political figure who wants to direct message you something really important. then all of your accounts are compromised the next day. they're gaining an incredible capability. in 2014, i briefed for the first time here in the d.c. area and it was at the end of the terrorism preview.

everybody was like, i don't care about this. we care about isis. this stuff doesn't work and nobody cares. i was even skeptical, but we fast forwarded one year and we saw such disinformation and misinformation around a military exercise called jade helm down in texas. and i specifically remembering a press conference of an army lieutenant colonel who was tyring to brief an 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 over, which seems kind of crazy, but there were people there shut up in person and looked around try to figure out where the other 200 people were online who said they would be there that day. you're seeing information mobilize people to action. if you look at what happened in 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 in every one of your states and counties and cities. is what everybody does now. it's based on stamp. scale. so i wanted to talk to you about the range of waste can play out. on election night, i was not worried about russia. i was worried about violence at polling places. it was that early what my colleagues and i were watching. regardless of your political

stance, we don't want hackers targeting election machines. we don't want people to lose faith in elected officials. 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 your strategies to deal with this. about 2011 there was a guy who figured out that when you looked at google, your results were tailored to you, and he called it a filter bubbles, essentially. once people typed into their search engines, they get different results. they might be looking at an issue in different ways. they are getting a view of the world based on their filters. add social media into that, and it is an information nuclear disaster. social media is about preferences, that's why we go to it. you get the information that you want when you want it from

people you like to hear from, and you can have it whenever you choose. if there is information you don't like, you can block it out. with all the hysteria, while social media can do better, it is largely up to us to decide how we want to consume information, and to know when we are doing what's good or bad for us. it is one part algorithm and one part us. in any audience, even with younger audiences now, i always remind them when you look at the phone, that world is uniquely tailored to only you, no one else sees the same world. it has shaped to your preferences. you can ask someone their perception, but if they do not have your phone, they are seeing a 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 individual perception is being changed. how did we get to this 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 and talk like you. as long as that system is in place, you cannot unwind the biases that will play in there. the first is confirmation bias. it is literally a like sign, i like this. yes you do. here is another batch of it. i am one of those weird stockers in coffee shops who watch old people on facebook. i do not watch what they are reading and saying, but 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. often times, i'll hear academics say we had the same problem when the printing press came out, no, no. there were not 3 billion printing presses printing nine newspapers a day, shooting it out every day, every minute. the amplification is not the equivalent of eight printing presses in new york city 100 years ago. we're talking about scales of information. the human body cannot process that much information. you will fall for fake news because you went from looking at 10 stories a day to 110 stories a day. still even if you make a mistake only one time, you are pushing out false information, misinformation about your elections, about your polling sites, whatever it might be, much faster, and that destroys

how people take in information. it annihilates their ability to take in and understand proper information. worse than no information is too much 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 anihilation to where it is so confusing people back away and look at memes of cats and focus on their kids. the second way it plays out is implicit bias. throughout psychological studies, people like information that look and talk like them. your social feeds are nothing more than giant collections of people saying things you like and who talk like you prodominantly. they are your tribe. this is more devastating in the developing a world where we

have tribes that don't have mainstream media outlets and social media reinforces tribalism and infighting. the third bias is really what i call status quo bias. once you get into your tribe on social media, you don't want to say anything that makes the tribe angry. i occasionally, if you watch me on twitter, i will shoot out a tweet that will not be liked by my tribe, just so i can get the data analytics to know what they dont 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 a lot of 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 anywhere from 2 to 100 queries about that. every day i say yes, i think the vote was accurately counted, and every day they asked me that question. so think about how that changes and accrues power. if you get somebody with influence, no matter what you tell them, this can become a problem. scenarios with vaccines, you've seen this, you get strong influencers and you are changing health policy. the big one today is coronavirus. i'm not sure if you saw news articles about false and manipulated information is being spread about a this huge

public health crisis. you get an influencer pushing out repetitively, it is hard not to believe them because you want to. the second part is because those people 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 even counting television, gaming. the more time people spend in the virtual world, the less time in the physical world, the more their allegiances change to democratic institutions.

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 quite annoying or your angry uncle who is the nicest hguy

you see at christmas but 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 by people you do not know. that dynamic has changed where we are pushing people away in the physical world 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 for you. tom nichols wrote a whole book about this. you as institutional leaders, as defenders of voting, of the processes, of executing our democracy, it's essential that everyone has confidence in you. i do. i see what you are doing today to prepare the election, but it only takes one idiot on social media to just 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 feed now believes they're are smarter than everyone in the world on any topic. anyone with children in high school knows this is true, and this is a tough dynamic that we need to restore in the coming years. when thinking about this, i also 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, a diaspora 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 reach more people. they would translate into dozens of languages. they were expanding the audiences they could reach. nationstates, russia, but now many, have overtaken the system. when they saw the arab spring, where social media rallies were occurring, people did not know each other, toppling dictators. did you really think authoritarians around the would say that social media would just beat them? no way. within months, every one of these countries going all the way back to iran after the twitter uprising in 2009, every one of them moved into this space. first, find my opponents, second, track them down, third, infiltrate groups, destroy the system with information.

how do they do they? we call it a troll farm, in the technical world a disinformation center. meme makers, blog posts, comments on news articles, social media trolling and every country. what's important to know about 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. they make mistakes grammatically. they lay their jokes out when it doesn't fit the scenario. those were some of the early indications of when you saw foreign interference. today we have moved to the fourth generation, which i call trolling as a service. the biggest and most groundbreaking thing is you now have a wide spectrum of actors who can buy or acquire each of these services individually or combine them together to

amplify disinformation, misinformation, and picked that against you pit that against you. everyone has this ability at their fingertips. you can go to the dark web and buy social bots or hire people to troll. it's remarkable how this has gone down. i'll move quicly to the next on the horizon which is just starting, which is essentially owning the system, and china will win that. this is a combination of censorship, social scoring, you say something nice about us or you don't get points, no points, no loans or jobs. those scoring systems will shape peoples behavior shape people's behavior. that is on the horizon. if you want to see what will be the 9/11 of that, it was the the nba in china in recent weeks. where someone sticks up for democracy and the nba says we

like some democracy, but we like profits maybe a little more. and you had major social influencers are saying we need to stick out of their business, and china said this is the beginning, we will see you. just wait until we get artificial intelligence online, we will change your entireworld view. you will not have any idea that bad things are happening, and i will make you believe good things are happening that never happened. they'll have that ability to shape and they won't be the only ones. that's really what i put that to you as you plan these scenarios how to deal with these actors. in the right side is the actors, in terms of sophistication, on the left side is what is important to understand. there are degrees to influence. some easier than others. selling someone something, changing their views even a little bit based on how they vote or a social issue, hard but not impossible.

the next level players out there are setting up fake universities, fake think tanks, institutions and nonprofit that say that all voting machines are weak and you can't trust them. this is a combination of lobbyists, political groups, oligarchs, ultrawealthy people they are buying media outlets and combining all of these tools to shape your reality. that is what i worry about, can we fight off those who have mal intent, know-how, and lots of resources to push against this, changing 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 has ever achieved, and places that have moved toward democracy have always done better. that is the truth. that is what i say. 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 that their votes count on election day. what other country could even accomplish this? no one could do this, wight. we have to reinforce those things that we're doing. public 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 won't be able 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 of this right now, that is when you have to be out there aggressively pushing it back with this stuff. i will close with a few things

to think about in your roles, and definitely let me know on time if i am going too long. as countries, the most important thing we can do, whether you are a 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. yesterday there was a conspiracy that some russian spokesperson said the u.s. had maybe used a climate weapon on moscow and that is why it was warmer there last year. 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 use data? we have that ability, we are one of the only countries who has that ability to pull back

into data and project it, rely on it, 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 actually have some resources. they usually have nothing. so use those advantages you have to push back. the other part is anticipating breaches and smear campaigns. that is what i am trying to do, a lot of overt reading of what people say. it turns out, if people talk terrible about you in public, they might hack you as well. who knew? so that's a leading indicator. literally, people would ask me, i testified to the senate and mentioned to senator rubio, russia didn't do you any favors. people asked how i knew and i said, i read russian news and they did not like him. you can guess what they might be doing. they might be trying to hack into his systems.

you can look at these measures in the overt space and it will signal what they are doing in the covert space. the other thing is a reaction 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 get money or defame people. how do we stay in front of that? the other part is knowing where those data dump website come from. a domain pops up, they say i need to expose the truth, and a week later a bunch of documents show up, and thank you for exposing criminal theft you just conducted dumping information our there. those are early warnings you can look at in the internet space that should give you a

tip that you need to prepare and plan, it is probably coming your way. for agencies, social media usage policy for employees 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, right? 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 also how you manage information but how do you do your own public social media engagement question mark the classic mistake agencies make is an allegation comes out, they think it's 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 machines were hacked and votes were changed. time, response, went to respond, who you would respond to. the other classic mistake is a troll with two followers who has had an account for one week, you see a major institution respond. no we didn't. and they go, i gained 200 followers, thank you. so you can amplify your dissenters. you have to wargame these things. you have to practice, you do not do it in the open. you talk to your teams and your strategy as you move forward. you all in this room know in the last 60 days going into the election, election rigging, voter fraud, machines are down, power outage, hacker, all those

conspiracies will come forward probably, because people want to win, or people overseas want to mess around in your election or hurt institutions. so you have to wargame those so the public stays confident in you and not in some random social media account out there. in terms of citizens, this is really where i think it's at, 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 saying an alien had landed at area 51. most weeks. i vaguely talking to my parents, did an alien land? no, no one reads that. guess what, 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 just get hammered by people i went to high school with by the

craziest stuff i have ever seen in my life. if i printed this and put it at the grocery store, you would not buy it, but if it's on facebook, you'll send it to me every day. it's about understanding where those come from. the first big one is the cost and benefits of social media use. is it a good or miserable experience? if you spend most of the days with the hairs on the back of your neck and you're angry, and you have social media rage it's probably not worth it. you could let it go and your world would be better and you would be happier. the other big part is reinforcing connections. there is no going back with young people, by the way. the idea we will give them phone breaks, we are not. it is how do we integrate technology and people in ways where it is just a blended environment and young people are together and 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, right? they have figured this out on their own, but how do we reinforce that over time? the big thing is knowing th esource of the information you consume. 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 that i knew was completely false, and posting russian state-sponsored propaganda saying we could not trust the fbi. i almost flew to missouri to fight him over the wheels on my car and the fbi. i was so upset and then i let it go. 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 don't talk about what is

happening in russia because you usually don't care, right? why? they want they do not care who wins the election, they want democracy to fall. they want us to retreat. they want americans to not believe in their elected leaders, their officials, other institutions, and their democratic processes. don't let them do that. we are very good at doing that ourselves. do not let someone else do it. in all seriousness, the idea is, know what you consume. i 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 physically located at, there is a reason for that. they are probably not up to snuff in terms of their editorial processes. the second part, do you know who the author is? particularly of memes. 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 don't have ads, you cannot figure out how they are paying their bills but somehow they write 50 memes a day or 15 news stories a day, how do they do that? do you understand their motivations in terms of their content production? 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 mostly 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 when you go back through time, people believe

four things. 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, no challenge. that is basically your social media feed. speed first. liking amplification, those sorts of things. that is your tribe, you trust them naturally? the source of the information, not necessarily who made the content, but who gave it to you. c this is where it gets muddled on social media. we already block out rebuttals to that information. first, most, trusted source, rebuttal. what have you got to do? you have got to seemed, 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.

so when you walk out the door you've got to be accurate. 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 demobilize a troll is show up at their house. show up at their communities. if they're broadcasting some conspiracy about your polling place, be there. knock them down, have your data. think about your strategy there. we just think we post back or tweet a lot. no, nothing works better than a direct challenge to someone who is pushing disinformation against you. the last thing is to know when you're an expert. when it's the death of expertise, people tend to say experience.

i will say, you have been analyzing social media for 30 years? they say, this sort of thing. i'm pretty sure not. the next thing is competency. what is their actual experience? the third part is what analysis they use to arrive at it? we used to think of this thing is the intelligence community which was we were always evaluating information sources and experts. how do we put that together to understand what they are putting out in terms of information and what they're trying to make you believe. the last part is when i 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, iranian, and chinese state-sponsored propaganda to see how they are talking about the elections and the candidates. that is a good forecast to kind of look at how serious they are about election 2020. where are their interests? 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. and the alliance for securing democracy created a dashboard that runs in real-time around overt content from russia, china, and iran coming on that tells you what that news cycle is about. that's one part to tell you

about vulnerabilities that might be around election 2020 and second to challenge those candidates who say there are all sorts of people messing around. they will say, i don't know, i've been watching for years, 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 is a big issue we'll be studying here in the summertime. after the conventions, we know disinformation will rapidly start to emerge in that space and we will use those two projects, my team and the interns, 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 news stories. they also use it for their own college projects and papers. with that, thank you for having me here today.

and good luck.

the hearing will come to order. good morning. welcome to today's hearing o our weight and by volume, trucks move more freight domestically in the united states than any other form of transportation.