directions of the compass. here about close encounters with members of the dakota sioux. watch the c-span cities tour saturday at noon eastern, and sunday at 2 p.m. on american history tv on c-span 3. working with cable affiliates and visiting cities across the country. >> intelligence and foreign policy efforts discuss russian efforts in the united states look at thehey broader aims of the russian governments and how u.s. officials should respond. this is an hour and a half. >> thank you for joining us. why don't we get started. i am the executive director of

the center for the national interest. think you all of us -- thank you joining us today for what will hopefully be an interesting conversation about russian information efforts. we have got really terrific speakers. have different but backgrounds, both with extensive experience in the intelligence community. this man is a neuroscientist, but alszo a former chief technology officer. recipient of the

national intelligence distinguished service medal, someone with extensive experience at the intersection ,f technology and intelligence both in the private sector and in government. have theht, we director of the intelligence of the national security program here. a a career intelligence been anonal who had advisor to vice president cheney that,sian matters after the director of russian analysis

, after his time in government service, there might be some important private sector experience that correlates with technology and how people on thece one another internet. i would like to ask the speakers to speak for 10 minutes to get us started. and then we will open it up for questions and discussion. i would like to start the details of the russian information operations in this country. the russians view us in many asts as an -- in many ways an adversary. they have different views of conflict. we think of it in terms of warfare.

establish -- distinguish between conflict and non-conflict. you have to remember what was said about war. it is the achievement of political aims through violence. and you have to keep that in front of you. the end objective is political. whether you get it through violence or hacking or buying facebook ads as far as the russians are concerned the end objective is what they keep in mind. some context, if you look at the ,conomies of the two countries russia's gross domestic product is roughly that of texas. if you do a thought experiment and imagine you are texas and the rest of the adversary was the united states and i'm not saying anything negative about texas. i love texas. [laughter] i am using it as a reference. you think of the scale of things. your adversary is the united

states and you have the economy of texas, what do you do? you start there. what you do is several things. you want to avoid conflict against your opponent's strengths at all costs. they are going to beat you on the battlefield in conventional warfare -- you don't want to fight them. you want to avoid that while still achieving the political objective. the second thing is if you do have to fight them you want to win and it is a given that the superior numbers and economy will win. if one adversary is very clever about developing spikes of capability that exactly align with the weakness of a stronged adversary, they will beat them. i don't think anybody with argue -- would argue that the great achilles heel of our military apparatus is the fact that we are so dependent on the network. so, the network goes down it is very difficult for us to fight. it should come as no surprise that there may be no one better in the world at network warfare than the russians. the reason is simple.

that they have to be. so, i think that it is important to have that 100,000-foot view of what is happening now, because i think it puts into context what we are seeing. if the russians view us as adversaries, then it is fair game to engage in what they call information confrontation without armed conflict. because remember, they are trying to achieve political aims. so, now let's turn to some of the more recent things that you have heard about with facebook for example, in that context. a lot has been said about the russian activities in the 2016 election and how they were trying to favor one candidate over the other. but clearly that can't be the only story. for one thing the facebook campaign was continuing until august of this year.

we know this. facebook has acknowledged this. when you look at the content of the facebook, some of it advantaged one candidate but more generally its aim was to divide our society often -- on multiple levels. there were divisive statements on race, energy, guns. on about every latent crack pressure was applied surgically. if you look at it from that point of view, the larger aim was to weaken an adversary by lightening existing internal dissension. because a weakened adversary who is fight being themselves is less likely to fight you. if they do fight you they won't do it with the same will. it was also said the aim of war is not to defeat a military but to remove the will to fight from your adversary.

that the key phrase, will to fight. if there is internal dissension their will to fight is less. that is the context in which i would put what has been happening. i think that the prediction of my point of view is that this is going to continue for the foreseeable future. i suspect the sanctions are not going to produce meaningful movement in this direction. one of reasons i believe that is i'm not going to say with certainty that the russians wanted us to know that they were behind some of these things that were happening. but i think that one thing we have to keep in mind is that it is possible they did, or at a minimum they were not too concerned about us learning it was their hand in the d.n.c. hack, the facebook ads and in the other things that have been happening.

you say why on earth would they not be concerned about their hand being found in this or wanting us to know, or the rest of the world? that is a fascinating question. i do not pretend to be a policy person. i am a tech geek. but we have to look at that possibility. it takes you in fascinating directions. was this a deterrent? it is a well known principle of deterrence that if you don't really have the weapon and you can't prove that it works, then it is not a deterrent. was it show of force that if you mess with us we are going to mess with you. i don't know. but i think this is an aspect of this evolution that i suspect because i will say this. the russians are very skilled in network operations.

when it is their intention to hide what they are doing i suspect they are about as good at it as anybody. and when you look at the trade craft that is reported in the press, it doesn't, i think, live up to the standards of some things they are probably capable of. so i think that is one kind of interesting dimension of this. is there a meta message to us and rest of the world in these activities that have been going on? i will turn it over to my colleague, george. >> thank you very much. george, take it away. >> i would like to start out by doing something that i think is fairly rare at events like this, and that is to quote taylor swift, the popular singer. [laughter] i'm about to make my 12-year-old daughter very happy. but that is not why i'm quoting taylor swift. the quote is, haters going to hate.

very well-known expression. why do i raise that? because behind that thought is actually a fairly big idea. it is one that graham allison cited in his study of cuban missile crisis, the organizational process model. it is the idea that sometimes when governments do things there is central direction, there is a unitary rational actor pursuing coherent strategic objectives, sometimes it is parts of government that are operating according to their normal organizational processes. they are doing the things they are paid to do. and what we are seeing is not the product of an elaborate strategic plan, but routine business as usual. that is very relevant to the question that we are facing today here. we have a fairly interesting picture of what is going often

in the facebook and twitter advertising purchases, messages that were targeted at very particular proportions of our population in very specific geographic areas. do we look at this as part of a grand kremlin plan, with very specific objectives toward the united states? do we look at this as the results of lower-level working-level activities among russians that is fairly routine? or is it something in between? i would like to argue that it is probably something in between, but i will caution that there is still a lot we don't know about this and we ought to be careful about drawing conclusions so early in this process. i would like to tell you why i think that is the case.

before i get into that, i want to point out a common cognitive trap that we can all fall into as we address questions like this. that is confirmation bias. it is very easy to start with a hypothesis, an explanation for what is going on, then go out and do research to see if you can find information that is consistent with that hypothesis and when you go about doing things like that you usually find evidence that is consistent with your hypothesis. the trap that you can run into is that you are not looking at alternative explanations that are also consistent with that same evidence. in this case the hypothesis that the kremlin directed an influence operation campaign in the united states designed to sow dissension within the united

states, and ultimately as some phrased it to destroy our democracy and broader liberal international order -- there is evidence that is consistent with that. i would say that same evidence is consistent with other explanations, including the haters are going to hate and influence models are going to influence. and with explanations that fall between those two extremes. i want to offer an alternative look at this, a little different paradigm just as a thought exercise. it goes like this. as russia sunk deeper and deeper into political and economic and societal dysfunction during the 1990's, and as they watched nato moving eastward, russians began to think that maybe this wasn't an accident. maybe the hordes of american experts that were coming over there providing advice on

reforms that they ought to pursue actually wanted to see russia sink deeper and deeper into dysfunction. that this was a grand design on or part to finish our enemy off. to complete the unfinished business of that cold war defeat. and then as time went by social media and the internet became more and more influential we started having color revolutions in the former soviet union, movements in the middle east, the so-called arab spring that seemed to be very much related to social media messaging. the kremlin became worried that this was pointed toward a u.s. directed-regime change effort that would prominently feature social media as well as other

things, and they started to take action to defend themselves. you started seeing a lot of activity inside russia to get a handle on social media influence, so-called troll factories were created where they employed thousands of people to go out and post things in this medium. comment on blogs and other posts online. take out advertising, create message campaigns of their own. this became very, very common inside russia. a lot of people were employed doing this and a lot of money was spent in this area. it gradually moved from inside russia out into the world more broadly, including into the united states. >> what years would you describe this process? >> the mid-2000's and on. the question here is, is what we are seeing with these

advertising purchases on facebook and twitter the product of these troll factories going out there and doing what they have been doing for years, business as usual? i would point out that the methodology that appears to be being used that links these ad buys to russians, much of it is linked to what we know about one of these very prominent troll factories, which has gone by a number of different names but the most noteworthy the internet research agency, which is operating in st. petersburg. we can trace some of these ad buys to people connected to that group. these are not highly trained intelligence professionals. for the most part, these are people that need jobs that are being paid on quota to post things. they are rewarded for high

productivity in posting these things. they get some broad guidance as to what they ought to be doing but not a lot of day-to-day specificity about the direction and what they are up to. what we are seeing i think is not inconsistent with the picture we are talking about. do i know for sure it is a and not b? no, i don't. but what i can say is both of these explanations for the evidence we have in front of us fit with what we know so far. the best to ensure that you are not falling into the confirmation bias is to look for disconfirming evidence. things that can rule out hypotheses. for example, if your in belief this is aieve that kremlin directed effort to undermine u.s. democracy bringing about our demise as an adversary, what would you expect to see beyond the evidence we have so far?

i would submit there that we don't have disconfirming evidence, things that rule out that hypothesis. but we are not seeing some things that we would expect to see if the russians were really trying to bring our democracy down. for example, it is well within cyber-capabilities to do things like turn out the lights at least temporarily in parts of our country, things that may not have necessarily a crippling effect on our business operations but would have a profound psychological effect on our sense of security. wall street trading is another one. that is one that could be highly disruptive and not only psychologically there. and it is interesting we have not seen that. in the area of elections, a lot has been made about the probes that have gone on in state electoral systems there. there is a little bit of confusion as to what actually

occurred there and i'm not sure we have all the facts yet as to what actually went on. but i think that there's a general sense right now that they did not mess with the actual tallying of the votes. and even if they didn't mess with the actual tallying of the votes, i think it is fair to say they didn't do anything that would try to deceive us into believing that the vote system was messed with and even if you don't have the ability physically to change the vote counter, they certainly have the ability to deceive us into thinking they did. so far we have not seen that, which you would expect to see if that hypothesis were what is driving the russians. do i have anything that rules

out organizational process explanation, haters going to hate theory? no. but i think that there is one thing i would do that could test it. i think right now it might be in the u.s. interest to try to test it. if the russians are trying to do some things that would get our attention, that would cause us to say you know what, all the things that the russians suspect we have been doing inside russia, supporting opposition movements, trying to hasten democratic reform that they find very alarming, if what they are trying to do is to show they can do things here to knock it off we can test that proposition. just this past week during his first meeting with newly confirmed u.s. ambassador to russia, putin mentioned principles that he thought should guide the bilateral relationship. one is mutual noninterference in the internal affairs of the other side. we could look at that and say this is a bluff.

he doesn't really mean that. but we could test it, too. we could pursue that and see. if the russians' goal is to bring down our democracy as opposed to get us to change our behavior toward them, they should not bite on this. they may play this out, play for time, but actually reaching a deal we should not see if that -- we should see if that hypothesis is true. i thinking that is one that we ought to investigate. because personally i suspect that this is something that they would be interested in pursuing. i will leave it at that. >> thank you very much, george. >> may i respond? >> please. >> the thing that i learned in the intel business is when you see something bad happening you can attribute it to malice or in

competence, and 99% of the time incompetence is a enter bet. i won't say what george is saying about is it incompetence that the russian information organs got a little ahead of where the policy makers were? i think that is a possibility. except in the case of the russians i don't think that is the case. i would kind of contest a little bit something that george said where are we looking for evidence that the russians are trying to take down or democracy? training is a straw man that is too extreme. i don't think they think they are going to be able to do this. i think they maybe have much less ambitious goals which nonetheless would explain what we are seeing. in military affairs we have denial which is to deny us our democratic government, then there is the notion of degradation. i think that the russians are smart enough to know this extreme begets extreme. if they really did do as you said, to take down our command and control of the

infrastructure, i think that would be viewed as something that would engender a kinetic response because that is a kinetic effect as we say in the military. my own view is that the russians have a kind of a degradation strategy and that's what we are seeing. and that, interestingly -- i will close my comment saying i seen from our side when we have been incompetent and screwed up and we take a step back and we say yes we shouldn't have done it but we did it so how do we exploit it and i interpret some of the things on the other side in that context. whether or not that was their original intent is where we have gotten into and if you look on the world stage and say how does that hurt russia?

they would rather be feared than liked. it serves their interests. >> a quick response, i think your views and mine on it are not that far apart. the difficulty we are in right now is that the public discussion of this has been extreme. we are told that we are at war for example by morgan freeman and company. that russia is in fact seeking to destroy our democracy and undermine the liberal national order. and that is actually something that we have been told by official u.s. intelligence community analysis on this. which is offered actually two contrasting explanations for what we have seen since election one that the russians were trying to elect president trump, the other they were trying to

undermine our democracy and the broader international order. i think that the reality of what we are dealing with is a little more nuanced than that. i think you have pointed out some of them. >> i don't really think this whether weians care have a democracy or not. i think what they care about is are we going to mess with them in some way and get in the way of their policy aims, whatever our ideology. >> i quite agree. >> i think they are somewhat apolitical in that sense, that they have a larger agenda, which is they more care about us from pragmatic view than ideological view except as relates to their own population and how they view true democracy or not. jurisdiction let's go first to our president at the center for the national interest. >> i completely agree with eric, the issue for the russians is probably not american democracy. after all the russians have good relations with good democracies such as india, brazil and i would say israel.

whatever differences the russians have with israelis, so issues in syria and lebanon are not the quality of democracy. i think that george, paul and myself together with the delegation were just in russia -- we talked to russian officials and had some very vigorous conversations about interference issues which my impression is they do not take seriously and do not understand the denials would not be sufficient. i think that it is clear to most of us, probably all of us, that there was russian interference and the facebook episode demonstrates the russians were trying to create some element of destabilization in american society.

we don't know, as george indicated, why and what was the objective. but i have a question to both of you. was it a surprise? should it be a surprise? i felt that for a number of years it was next to inevitable that russia would retaliate in some way in terms of interference in american domestic affairs because they were complaining that we were interfering in theirs. ben cardin is one of founding fathers of russian interference in our affairs because he was a very strong spokesman. toery energetic spokesman change the nature of the russian

political process. it is quite clear you can make a strong case, it is okay for us to interfere in russian domestic -- affairs-- affiars because we democracy tong russia. and it is not a case for them to interfere in american affairs because they are messing with real democracy. but you said we are in kind of a warfare business with russia and when you are in warfare business you have the rule that if you do something to them they will want to do something to us. and what is remarkable to us at least to what extent some starting with senator carden were not thinking about predictable implications of their actions. where am i wrong? >> eric, please. >> there is surprise and there is surprise. those of us students of russian

trade craft, were we surprised that they did it and how? i would say no. speaking evenly for myself i was a little surprised that they didn't hide their hand as were -- as much as they did and that made me suspect there could be a quid pro quo. there is no point poking a finger in somebody's eyes when you are responding to them poking it into your eye if you don't let them know it is you poking. so a strong hypothesis there has to be looked at, but another level strategically we have have shorter corporate memories than russians. our administrations and policies continued to turn over more rapidly and they do forget, where in russia they don't. back it are we at war with russia, again my view of the russians is that if they are going to go to war they want to weaken the opponent long before.

so the distinction between war and not is not the same as the distinction we have. >> george. >> i think it is never a wise idea to tell your boss he is wrong. in this particular case i agree. i think it is not surprising what has gone on. it would be surprising, were the russians not to do things here that they believe we are doing there. i think eric is correct here, there is no point in doing that unless you are not looking to bargain at all. if you are not looking to change our behavior, then you do want to hide your hand and do things that will hasten our demise and you want to cover your tracks precisely for the reason you highlighted, which is it could

probably evoke a kinetic response that russia doesn't want to get into. it is not a fight they will come out well from. so those are reasons i suspect what we have is a situation where the russians are looking to change our behavior. they don't like what we have been doing. they have been trying to argue us into changing, pleading, complaining, delivering lists of grievances for many years with not much to show for it. i think they have moved into a situation where they are strong enough and capable enough to push back in the hope that that will get our attention. and they have certainly gotten our attention. there's no question. the next question is, have they gotten the attention of a country that doesn't recognize these nuances between war and peace? i think you are either a friend or you are an enemy but the

areas in between are difficult for us to cope with and i think there is a danger that we could overreact regarding it as some sort of declaration of war, read more into their intentions that are there and find ourselves in a very dangerous situation as a result. >> ambassador. we have a mic, yes. >> thank you. i have really two interrelated questions to ask both of us. the first is, i understand that in one way or another in undertaking these various activities the russians have been trying to send a message, maybe as dimitri argues, it is we can try to tamper with your internal politics and so forth. but have they made -- do you think they have made a

fundamental mistake by misunderstanding the kind of current semi-hysterical nature of american politics and there's been ferocious counterreaction to this? it has breathed new life into the hawks on the republican side and given the democrats a new rationale for going after the russians? and, if so, does it provide us an opportunity as george was suggesting to work out a new understanding along the lines of noninterference? secondly, in terms of their information activities, i guess the question i have is how did they fairly quickly, if you follow george's scenario, how did they get so good at this? hillary clinton in her

interviews now after her book has published even suggested to be able to fine tune their information activities to target certain states that were kind of strategic in terms of the election, she's actually suggested they needed some sort of american political strategy advice on how to engage effectively along these lines. and if george is right, the people doing this stuff are sort of potentially unemployed people in st. petersburg, that is not the same as a high price the washington lobbyist. why have these activities on their part apparently been pretty effective given the fact at least in my experience with the russians' understanding of grassroots american politics is

not very acute. >> first of all, i'm not sure how effective the russian efforts actually have been. it is a very hard thing to assess. often times you will get volume. how many might have seen the messaging, then you end up with headlines like 10 million people may have seen it, $100,000 worth of ads. 10 million saw it potentially. the problem with that, it is one thing to know somebody potentially could have seen something. it is another thing to know they actually looked at it and read it and those two are frequently out of line. it is another thing to know that you actually affected the audience you are looking at. that is harder to know. so i think we ought to be cautious about approaching the question of how effective these things are. the second question really is,

how sophisticated really was this campaign, and how much in the depth of knowledge about the american political system is necessary to do what they did? and obviously there are many people out there that believe it was highly sophisticated and required a very nuanced understanding of u.s. politics to do. i'm not persuaded that that is true. microtargeting of an audience, if you are going to buy facebook and twitter ads you have to micro-target. when you want to buy something you have to select who you want to put them in front of. so it not only makes it easy to microtarget but those platforms require microtargeting to work. number two, it doesn't take a lot of depth of understanding of

the u.s. political system to identify swing states. even within those swing states it is not very hard to figure out what the swing districts are. and i have heard it said that the russians couldn't possibly have known who to target within the swing states. all of that information is readily available. you can go to any one of a number of data brokers that are out there that sell this information. i can buy voter lists with all kinds of information of who, where they are registered, all kinds of demographic information that goes with it. so, could the russians have purchased all of that or stolen it fairly readily from the companies that have it? absolutely. it is not hard to do. >> i have a short summary of

what george said, who taught the russians was facebook and twitter with pulldown menus. that is the short answer to the question. i think the larger issue is was it effective? you have to ask who was the intended audience and what was the intended effect. we have not talked much about the russian population which is something we should think about. someone said all politics are local. when you look at a foreign policy and you are seeing a change in behavior and aggressive behavior the first thing you look at is what is going on inside that country that might motivate a lean forward foreign policy. part of audience for this is the russian population. and what effect do they want to have on them. and what was the effect on them. i don't know a lot about that. i haven't studied that but i

suspect it is a very important question in terms of, if i'm vladimir putin and wake up i think he thinks about what is going on inside his country. our navy does a show of force. he could view this as a cyber-showing of the flag, to send a certain message about the navy in cyberspace. >> we have susan. the microphone is behind you. >> this is a fascinating presentation. i have one observation request.

$100,000 as an advertisement buy doesn't sound like much money. the trump campaign spent $90 million on additional advertising. if the russians spent a hundred thousand dollars, we're talking about small potatoes. i would be interested to know whether that might influence where in the food chain this might occur. secondly, the fact that it was so obvious. could there have been someone else pretending to be russian? can we go to deeper levels to figure out the answer? >> could it have been a false flag operation? yes.

i don't think it was. >> any comment on the advertisement buys? i read that it was a training exercise for new kids at the institute. here is some money, go learn! possible. that is but a lot of people think the money was the tip of the iceberg. the russians are very good at denial and distraction. look over here, says the magician. while i am doing the real stuff. you have to entertain the possibility that they may have spent millions in ways you do not know. >> i agree. if we assume that $100,000 is

the limit of what we have spent, and that is not a very significant amount relative to the amount spent on the campaign, it is enough to say these weren't patriotic hackers. the folks out there that are very good at messing around are also very stingy about spending their money on stuff. i think we can safely rule out these were patriotic hackers. it had to be someone with connections to government money in some way. i think it is a legitimate point. false flag is always possible.

in this particular case, i doubt that was what actually occurred. >> i've been writing about some of this stuff. george may be questioning -- what seems like a fairly rational explanation for all of this, which is -- i am putin, who blames demonstrations against him in 2011 on hillary clinton. i am worried about the near-abroad. ukraine, georgia, estonia.

i feel like that is my backyard and i should control it. by damaging the united states brand, by making the united states look like a very divided, gridlocked place, all tangled up in all kinds of disputes over immigration, race, putin can effectively turn to russians or estonians or georgians, and say, you may not like us, but that is not much of a model. why isn't that a rational explanation for this whole program? this is fairly clever and effective.

to exploit those divisions doesn't make sense. >> i agree with you. the kremlin wants to take any kind of evidence of dysfunction in the west and the world's showcase democracies and use that for internal propaganda. no doubt. where i might offer a more nuanced position would be on whether the russians think they have to stoke that dysfunction to serve that purpose. there is plenty of material for them to work with already. >> i can't add to that. [laughter] >> jacob. >> thank you. my question is fairly simple.

there has been talk about, who are the russians? are we talking about the fsb? the military? putin? giving his blessing to this? can we get more specificity? >> i don't know there is anything i am allowed to say that would be constructive on this. [laughter] if you think the organ of state security is doing things putin found out about after-the-fact, you would be in error.

his command over those organs is good. does it matter whether it was any of these institutes affiliated with the government? i am not sure it does. in america, we tend to clearly differentiate between the government and other nongovernmental things like organized crime. some people would say they are not as separate as they should be. they are. not so much in russia. to what degree has organized crime in russia had a hand in this? what is that relationship? that is an interesting question. this may not be the question you asked, but it is one i am answering.

>> maybe yes. maybe no. when you are looking at russia's cyber operations, you were looking at an officer conducting those -- who are they working for? mother russia? their boss is going to get a cut of something. loyalties and motivations may not be the same as the equivalent people we have doing these things. in intelligence, we have to guard against mirroring. they are just a different version of us. they are not, i am here to tell you. >> it gets to the intentions

that might be behind them. how do you react? what kind of response to be have -- we have on our end? the russians may be kremlin-directed, personally putin-directed operation. he started with a plan. this is what we want to do and here is the plan. you all go out and play your part. that is one possible explanation. another is, we have broad set of instructions out there. you have collection priorities, influence operation priorities. you know what you need to do. go do it and report back to me. folks at the working level can be somewhat entrepreneurial in these broad directives.

i don't know what the plans of the republican national committee are. i want to stand -- to understand how american voters are reacting to things. i am going to go out and collect information and be rewarded for all of this. let us go beyond that. some of the folks doing that are not only government staff who wear badges all day long. but people living in a gray world where they might be working a contract for the government. they are hackers and they have done some time at doing organized crime. they have some skills the government needs. the government has put them on contract to do some things. maybe they won't prosecute them for old transgressions.

maybe they are trying to make some money to supplement their daytime activities during the evening. they collect valuable information out there and they want to sell it. maybe wikileaks. i am not saying that is what happened, but the question you are getting to is a pretty important one. it does matter who the russians are and to what degree we are dealing with a complex and confusing world, where it is not very clear who is who. for who and how they being directed. >> let us go over here. >> donald smith. two questions.

i have heard that russia has engaged in information warfare with us since back to world war ii. what is different about this time and how much more intense is this? >> i am glad you asked. i was hoping someone would ask that. the russians have been doing this kind of thing since well before world war ii. dating into the czarist era. we can see a long tradition of propaganda and disinformation. you can look at this and say, this is just a continuation of standard procedure. i would make the case this is not just a continuation of things that have been long done.

there are new elements here that are important. one of the biggest new elements is technology. never before could somebody pull down menus on social media to micro-target messaging the way they are doing now. we used to live in an information republic. information republic. the media was one where we had a handful of very prominent editorial staff who decided what was newsworthy and what wasn't. what was true and not true. you could rely on "the new york times," and "the washington post" to put in front of readers

content they felt met certain standards. we are in more of an informational democracy, which might be a charitable description. there are intermediaries who can sort out what is newsworthy and what is not. within that environment, one of the big challenges we face is that anyone can do these sorts of things we are seeing. it is hard for audiences to discern the difference between truth and fiction, what is attention-worthy and what is not. that is an element that matters a lot.

it means the nature of what the russians are doing in the environment and the environment in which they are doing it has changed. >> i think we have had a paradigm shift. i have been reading a number of russian leading thinkers, and they translate this term to "strategic task." it is achieving a major policy objective. for example, to neuter nato. their thinkers have been saying, we are now capable of achieving strategic tasks solely with information means. we required a culmination of information means and warfare. we can now achieve everything we want with just information.

that is one thing different about us. we tend to view bits as intelligence. they feel -- view bullets as ideas. there are more sophisticated in their thinking on this subject. because of the lower barrier to entry, which allows someone with the economy the size of texas to punch their weight, they feel this is on the same level as other strategic weapons. >> i heard a lot of reasons why russia is doing this. i haven't heard they want to get donald trump elected or not to get hillary clinton elected. is there any element of truth to either one of those? >> i am happy to let george take that. [laughter]

>> i am skeptical about the explanation the russians were looking to get donald trump elected or hurt hillary clinton. i don't doubt for a second that the russians were not big fans of hillary. i do think they looked at trump as something of an unknown. they were encouraged by some of the things he had to say about wanting a different relationship with russia. i think they were encouraged by some of the things he said about rethinking approaches to international democratization. but he was also very much and , and theable element russians don't like him predictability. they like things to be predictable.

i think some of the things that have been attributed to putin on trump have been exaggerated or distorted. he said one thing about candidate trump. he said it in response to a question at the end of a long press conference. it was not a prepared statement. his comments were mistranslated. he call -- called him a colorful character, which got translated into a brilliant character, which then got turned into genius. [laughter] none of that is true. so the degree has been vastly overblown. >> to reinforce something said earlier, you have to look at other elements of the recent campaign, which are continuing to this day, whose intent one make cracksin is to in our society.

context, the sole goal in this campaign to elect trump is hard to make that conclusion in my case. >> thank you for a very -- this is the most entertaining panel we have been to because we have entertained so many different hypotheses here. >> is that a compliment? [laughter] >> take it as -- i would like to take the opportunity to talk about -- ask about the american side of the story. i have rarely seen such a keep -- confused and chaotic response to what some people say is an act of war, others say is an unprecedented penetration of the very bastion of american democracy. it started with the two reports

that were highly questionable in terms of the actual proof they presented. andtarted with 17 agencies -- would bethe surprised by the coast guard would risk its reputational integrity. then was the eighth of may testimony on the hill, when we find out from clapper that it .as actually three agencies of, there long list has been a long list of chaos in the way the american intelligence community has been looking at this. a's -- as serious as some people claim it was, is this an embarrassment, and as opposed to the 2003 weapons of

mass description -- destruction debacle, and i remember a lot of soul-searching, i don't see a lot of soul-searching now. in theot be looking right place, but is there any soul-searching going on and should there be a major overhaul of the u.s. intelligence truly as if this is as existentially damaging and threatening as people are claiming? >> i would like to entertain a number of thoughts on that. [laughter] first of all, i very much disagree that the intelligence community is in chaos on this. i have been inside the highest levels of the intelligence community, associate director at one time. i was quite shocked at the unanimous he -- unanimity on this issue. i don't ever recall seeing that level in my time there.

i do not think there was chaos on it. i think there was pretty much consensus. the press likes to sow conflict and chaos and turmoil because it is newsworthy, i suppose, but i don't think that is the case. should this cause a reorganization of the intelligence community? i have lived through so many of those, i wouldn't think so. they rarely do any good. but you don't have to worry. sooner or later, my old boss says, never throw away an old chart. they will all come back. it is going to happen anyhow, so don't worry. >> george, anything to add on that? >> i would certainly not want to use terms like embarrassing and chaotic to describe this. i would say, however, based on what i have read about the process, and i am relying largely on work that has been done in "the washington post,"

and "the new york times" among others. it sounds to me as if the irregular, not the normal approach to this. normally when you reach a national intelligence judgment of some kind, there is a national intelligence council umbrella under which that occurs, and there is a formal process. all of the people which reasonably have a role to play by virtue of their organizational responsibilities would be involved. it doesn't sound from the press reporting as if that was the way this was done. it sounds as if john brennan, in , put together a particular task force, a small number of people from the three agencies that you had mentioned, and they actually had to sign a nondisclosure agreement about the evidence they were shown.

moreevidence was not widely disseminated throughout the broader intelligence community. that is a very unusual way to do this sort of thing. argument that i have understood that was made, was that the sensitivity of the sources that were involved was so extraordinary that it required this. i am not aware of another topic that has been tackled in that way. when i look at this and want to be confident myself at the judgments being reached with high confidence were approached in not just a methodologically rigorous manner, but through an organizational process that was very sound. i am worried that wasn't the case here. >> james? so, we talked about the

russians being mad at us for interfering in their collections with our democrat is in efforts -- democratization. those had kindd of tapered off, but if there is a debate to be had, putin says you don't mess in our internal affairs, we won't mess with yours. can we get clarity on that? >> no. [laughter] >> i think one thing i could say , and i haven't looked at it closely recently, but a lot of the money for that went away -- if we are talking about open , not coming out of the intelligence community, but what most people are used to talking about and looking at. i think a lot of that went away during the obama administration.

[indiscernible] thatguess my response to would be, we just had a conversation about what we see versus what we don't see and i expect they have similar conversations in russia. we have to look at the broader effects of this thing. who has taken the narrative? they have kind of taken the narrative and we are all spending a tremendous amount of time on this that we aren't spending on other things. i don't know if that wasn't intended effect, but it is certainly a powerful one. >> we have one down here. >> thanks. russian destabilization efforts in eastern europe usually rely on a partner within country,

ukraine for instance. i wonder if we are having the right discussion about collusion. we are going to come to a legal understanding of what collusion looks like, and there is a lot of of evidence now, just historical fact that the russian embassy was very good at getting people within the trump campaign and the trump government to whatomise themselves, discussion should we be actually having outside of whatever legal definitions on collusion, in order to better prevent people within the united states government, particularly, from potentially compromising themselves and actively colluding? is this something that is as ukraine, but what

should we be talking about when we talk about collusion, because we will be talking a lot more about that in the coming months. i don't know about you, george, i just don't feel qualified to answer that honestly. i don't have any information at all. [indiscernible] of moving away this type of stuff. where should we be thinking between a conversation two people, whether subjective, there is department stuff that can be fruitful, then there is stuff that feels a little more malignant. how should we be talking about, in a brad -- broad abstract way, not looking for you to say i know a guy who colluded down the

street, in a broad abstract way, how should we be talking about collusion over the next year? >> i'm not sure how to answer that. there is classic intelligence recruitment, where you are actually developing and ultimately paying a source to spy in some way, to conduct classic espionage. obviously, we have a lot in the books about that already. that are quite adequate for dealing with that problem. a second category, you might call, unwitting agents. people are doing things the russians want them to do who are completely unaware of who might be on the other end that is helping them. that is the kind of thing that is a great area, and i am not sure that you can fruitfully

legislate things that can prevent that sort of thing from going on. that is one where education and self-awareness sorts of things are probably best handled. an atmospherethat in the country where people are afraid to talk to russians is probably not something that is international interest. careful in this area when we talk about collusion or accusations that people doing putin's bidding. or advancing russian interests. >> very quick follow up, so now something more precise. what sort of education efforts, what form would that take, in terms of helping people not be unwitting agents? you don't want to look hysterical and you don't want the highest level of government coming out and saying, don't be an unwitting agent. at the same time, it is a

problem you want to bring attention to. how do you walk the balance between helping people understand what that looks like and not looking like you are an alarmist? >> i think the main point is this is nothing new. i don't think anything is new -- new is called for because we have a new situation. guarding against foreign intelligence something we have been aware of for a long time. us who are inside the system get lots of counseling on that and constant feedback, and things of that nature. there is nothing in my mind that would cause us to depart from common sense, which is people who are in positions to have sensitive information, whether in the political domain or not, need to know as they always have that there is national security at stake and they have to be very careful. when they have interactions with foreign nationals, to keep in mind this may not be so innocent.

that has always been the case and i see no need for changing anything based on what has happened recently, because this has been with us forever. i will just speak from my personal experience. i was a political appointee at the state department in the bush administration. they hired me and i went in for my first days and there was a andfing on how to do this how to do that, and there was a briefing on security. issues.ed many of these those are things that are typically repeated by the government on a periodic basis for all the employees who might have access to information that someone else might find desirable. align withtainly what george and eric said. i would also point out on the question of foreign influence we

have outside the room, dimitri knows my favorite president, george washington, his bust. if you go and read the farewell address and read the portion of the farewell address that deals with a question of foreign influence, it actually has two sides. one side is, you have to be very careful of allowing your toection for another country drive your policy, because that can distort your policy, but there is also another side, which is you have to be careful not to allow your antipathy towards another country to warp your decision-making process and , and i your thinking think it is kind of a useful reminder for us to perhaps think about this during this unusual time period that we are in.

now we have one here, and then we will come here. >> thank you, i will be brief. we know the kgb was given enormous freedom of action agenciesto all soviet in the past, and they have been very creative in destroying, distorting, abusing, recruiting. we know the technologies have changed and this was emphasized today many times. still, behind those technologies, i support my friend saying this is always human beings. to what extent do you think it is time to go back and to go back and study the history books and examine our intelligence professionals, examined their experience and learn more about what the kgb was doing then to learn again the habits and the skills and the motivation they are using today, to what extent? i think that is absolutely a

good idea. >> all right, thank you very much. short answer. i'm with "the washington post." you both had said what happened was more or less predictable, given what the russians had been doing elsewhere, and you both have said that the ic was pretty unified on what happened or what was happening. and if you look at what happened in europe, you would know that it happened and happens and is happening on social media as a platform. so it kind of relates back to anton's question. united, if it was predictable, if you knew the platform it would be coming on to, why did the intel communities in congress seem so surprised, and where is the defense?

the governmentor this,hole doing to stop and again, given the fact you knew it was coming on social media and you know what the restrictions on the authorities would be, what is the defense? >> you have just opened what i think is a fascinating question, which is what role should the government national security, intelligence and others take in getting into what amounts to the private sector. facebook is private sector, twitter is private sector. there is some question about how much national security should get involved in guarding the i.t. of american businesses. given that it is possible that nationstates are going up against some of them in the sony case. it is very unlikely

you are going to see the government lean forward and get into the are and start day managing the messaging that happens in the private sector, and be protecting the cyber security more than what homeland security and fbi are already doing. questionascinating about the differences in our societies. i would say that same separation between the private and public is not true in russia. i don't think they would view it that way. so i don't hold that much hope, nor do i think it is necessarily appropriate for a government to get into the business of determining what the sages are and are not put out there in the public media. up with i could follow that, so we're not talking just about messages in any normal way. i mean, we are talking about it as an instrument to do something

we have already discussed is either akin to war or achieving their political goals, so we know it is driven by a nationstate to do us harm. does that still mean -- >> well, i want to come back to something that i think it was, wrote in the new yorker "my trip to al qaeda." he ends by saying al qaeda cannot destroy america. only we can do that. look towe have to ourselves, not necessarily our politicians, and how fractious we are. like a beeook at it sting and someone having an allergic reaction that kills them, not the bee sting. it is what we do to ourselves. people look to the government to do things which it is not appropriate for the government to do. it is appropriate to say, can we

allow someone to do this to ourselves? it is us, it is how we react to this and how we vote based on this. i would turn the focus more to the american people than the government. >> i will second that. i will add a couple of things. is much we can do and should do to ensure the integrity of actual balloting in elections. think, is something the government needs to be involved in. there is much we can do practically. one very simple thing is to mandate the use of paper balloting backup systems, so that we are all confident that when we have an election, those tallies are actually accurate. and relying on only electronic cyber threater the circumstances we face is a very

bad idea. it is not hard to do, it is not expensive and that is a proper role for government, i think. precariousis a proposition to get into the business of policing content. interesting, it is one where the russians have long been claiming that information itself is a threat and can be weaponize and we need to do something about this. they have been urging this on us for a long time, the chinese have, as well as a our reaction has been no, no, information yearns to be free. yearse in the past few began thinking, maybe information can be dangerous. maybe we need to do something about that. that is a dangerous thing for the government to be in that business. i am not at all confident we would do it well and it would change the nature of who we are to do that. >> i just want to go to the point about voting. where hackers were given 30 of

the voting machines now used in the united states and within 45 minutes, they had hacked all of them. let me follow up a little bit on this conversation, and i am go in a slightly different direction with it. you look at our media environment. if two tv networks want to merge together and create some huge government hashe an opinion on that. the american people have an opinion on that. there is monopoly and you can have this much share and all of this other kind of stuff. are facebook and twitter too too pervasive and it is part of the problem that they are sort of like monopolies in that space? very --ize that is a

that is a pretty challenging question. it is interesting that technology moves faster than tech -- law and policy. we have a new currency. social information. that currency is like a commodity that can be monopolized. my own view is being very close to the web and internet, and a end,atti of a sort, in the information wins out. there are so many ways the barrier to entry has made anyone able to broadcast to a large number of people and in turn, here from large numbers of people. media is moving from one to many, to many to many. so i, for one, do not believe we are in any danger of someone monopolizing information. everything is going in the opposite direction fast. >> agreed. >> so much for that idea.

we have one over here. dave? >> what is the ultimate goal for the russians here? mentioned it earlier that they kind of want this mutual t, thiserference pac seems to be a thread they have been on since the soviet era. is that what they want, some sort of noninterference pact? respective mutual interest, is that still ultimately their goal? >> i think that is at least one of their goals, yes. there are probably some others that go along with that. particular, is one we have to test and call their bluff, so to speak and see if they are in fact serious about

pursuing it. if they are, it is very much in our interest to do that. it is not going to prevent messing about in our political system. i think that is probably going to happen one way or the other. i think it could take some of the sharper edges off of that, minimize the dangers and ensure that this doesn't get out of hand. comment -- again, i'll return to the domestic perspective of this inside russia, in terms of what their goal is. i have to believe that we're the top of their list is to somehow use this to consolidate their own stability and let them see, putin and his group. in some sense, they may have --e that because the potency again, they have taken the narrative. here we are talking about them, and if i am putin i can say --k, we with an excise economy the size of texas are

completely dominating the american discourse. lookway, that makes him pretty strong and not someone you want to mess with inside of russia. that is what we always need to keep in mind. we are so focused on ourselves, but he wakes up in russia. >> in other words, strike a blow at putin by not talking about him so much? [laughter] >> yes, actually i think that is a good idea. >> thank you very much. i think that was our last question. all of youery much for joining us this afternoon. i think we had a terrific and very enlightening conversation. thank you. [applause]

[captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] announcer: on wednesday, president trump's personal attorney will testify at a senate hearing on russian interference in the 2016 election. we will have live coverage on c-span3, c-span.org, and the c-span radio app. "afterwards,"n radio host and contributor charles sykes discusses his book. he's interviewed by tammy bruce, fox news contributor and host of the tammy bruce show. >> donald trump represented something. he represented a middle finger

from voters to the establishment. but if you really wanted to deal with some of these issues, you would have gone with marco rubio, or scott walker, or ted cruz, and they didn't. in terms of communication, yes, he's a master of twitter, but he was crude, rude, a serial liar, he's thin-skinned, he's erratic, he's a fraud. this was relatively well-known. conservatives, who not that long ago used to argue that character mattered, that the president was a role model, have somewhere found a way to rationalize the behavior of someone who insults women, mocks paid aabled, mocks pows, multimillion dollar fine for defrauding students who wanted to get an education. announcer: watch "afterwards," sunday night at 9:00 p.m. eastern on book tv.

announcer: next week, book tv is in primetime on c-span2 monday night at 8:30 p.m., finalists for the book awards, with frances inches -- fitzgerald, david grann, and nancy mclean. tuesday night, cyber warfare and security with fred kaplan, bill jeremyand john you and rabkin with their book. wednesday night at 8:00, a look at the 2016 election with hillary clinton and her book. jonathan allen and amy par, onhored of -- authors, thursday night at 8:00 eastern. books made into movies, featuring the author of "hidden gures," and "the immortal

life of henrietta lacks." of congressbrarian and in mississippi congressman at the mississippi book festival. next week, watch the tv in primetime on c-span2. announcer: on washington journal, we talked about the 2018 federal budget and how it relates to republican tax reform proposal. this is happening. -- this is half an hour. >> maya macguineas back at our desk. joining us this morning after the house passed its 2018 budget rose -- resolution, please explain where the budget goes from here and why this is important to the republican tax reform effort. >> it is very impnt