i followed a woman who ended up on page of the post. leadsyelling at freshman -- plebes lined up against the wall. convinced that story helped get me a job at the post. >> american history tv, a weakened every weekend on c-span3. c-span, where history unfolded daily. 1970 nine, c-span was created as a public service by america's cable television openings. it is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. intelligence and foreign policy analysts discussed russian backed efforts to

influence american elections. they look at the broader aims of the russian government, and how it u.s. officials should respond. from the center for the national interests, this is one hour 30 minutes. >> 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 for joining us today for what will hopefully be an informative and interesting conversation about russian information efforts. we have got two really terrific speakers. they have different but complementary backgrounds, both with extensive experience in the intelligence community.

to my left, this man is a neuroscientist, but also a former chief technology officer. and also a recipient of the national intelligence distinguished service medal, someone with extensive experience at the intersection of technology and intelligence, both in the private sector and in government. to my right, we have the director of the intelligence of the national security program here. a career intelligence

professional who had been an advisor to vice president cheney on russia matters, and also intelligence issues. after that, the director of russian analysis at the central intelligence agency. after his time in governmentaftt service, there might be some important private sector experience that correlates with technology and how people influence one another on the 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 ways as an adversary. they have different views of conflict. we think of it in terms of warfare. they don't 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 economies 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 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 on multiple levels. there were divisive statements on race, energy, guns. on about every latent crack in our society that we have, pressure was applied surgically. if you look at it from that point of view, the larger aim was to weaken an adversary by heightening already 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 is the key phrase, will to fight. if there is internal dissension , then 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. i'm not really a policy person. 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.

wasn't this the -- was this a 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. george: 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 famously 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 on, 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 play upon disunity, 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 our 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 you believe that this is a 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 russia's 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 counts, 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 see if that hypothesis is true. i think 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 -- incompetence. 99% of the time incompetence is a enter bet. i won't say what george is -- i. 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? i think that 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. george: 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 international 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 the russians care whether we 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. first to o

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 where 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 blank denials on their part 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. a very energetic spokesman to 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 because we wanted to bring democracy to 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 only for myself i was a little surprised that they didn't hide their hand 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

tend to turn over more rapidly and they do forget, where in russia they don't. 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. 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. george: 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. -- volume metrics. 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. that is what they are built to do. they have a pulldown menus. 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, what is the first thing i think about? i think he thinks about what is going on inside his country. this is projecting power. our navy does a show of force. you 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. susan: >> this is a fascinating presentation.

i have one observation request. $100,000 as an advertisement buy doesn't sound like much money. i was told by an ad expert. the trump campaign spent $90 million on additional advertising. -- digital advertising. spent $100,000, 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. that the russians had doneness. could there have been someone else pretending to be russian?

so, do we have any way to 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! stuff like that is possible. 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.

if you take what i said, they can be very good at hiding their hand, youiding their 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. they like to steal money, i don't like to spend it. 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. this may not be the limit of what was spent. false flag is always possible. you always have to look at the deception hypothesis. but in this particular case, i doubt that was what actually occurred. >> i've been writing about some of this stuff. i put a couple paragraphs in each story. i think 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.

whether that was sincere or delusional, who knows? i am worried about the near-abroad. i've got trouble in ukraine, georgia, estonia. i feel like that is my backyard and i should control it. so, 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?

frankly, fairly clever and effective. maybe small-scale, 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, in 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? steering this from the kremlin? giving his blessing to this? vaguely aware of what's going on? 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. there is an interesting complexion to your question. 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? as a proxy. 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? yes. their boss is going to get a cut of something. maybe money can be made on this. -- their 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.

george: it does matter. it gets to the genesis of the activities. it gets to the intentions that might be behind them. it affects how you react. to weolicy response provide on our end. i will paint too extreme pictures. 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. within russian special services.

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 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 work under 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. they are going off at doing this stuff. evening, theye 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. who works for who and how they end up 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? george: 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. deception campaigns. to some degree, 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. there are new elements here that one of the biggest new elements 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. 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 same thing was true of radio and television, 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 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 sowing informationth

means. in the past, we required a combination 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 view bits 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 know the russians were not big fans of hillary. 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 and rethinking approaches to international democratization. but he was very much an unpredictable element. the russians don't like unpredictability. i think some of the things that have been attributed to putin have been exaggerated. 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. trump, the brilliance of his he complemented. which then turned into 'genius.' [laughter]

vastly overblown. >> you have to look at other elements of the recent campaign. be to sownt could dissension. viewed in that context, it is hard to make that conclusion. >> we have entertained so many different hypotheses. >> was that a compliment? [laughter] >> i have rarely seen such a confused and chaotic response to what so many people say is an act of war.

other people say it is an unprecedented penetration of the very bastion of american democracy. people would be surprised by the risk guard, that it would its reputational integrity. in supporting crowd strikes. then, we find out free agencies, a handful of people came to this conclusion. there has been a lot of chaos in the way the american intelligence community has been looking at this.

is this an embarrassment, if people claim this is as serious as it is? there was a lot of soul-searching after the weapons of mass destruction in 2003. i don't see a lot of that now. i may not be looking in the right place. any soul-searching going on? should there be a major overhaul of the u.s. intelligence community if this is truly as threatening as many people claim? >> i would like to entertain a number of thoughts. [laughter] i very much disagree the intelligence community is in chaos. i have been inside the highest levels of the intelligence

community. i was the associate director of national intelligence at one time. i was quite shocked at the unanimity on this issue. i don't ever recall seeing that level in my time there. i do not think there was chaos. there was consensus. the press likes to show conflict and chaos. because it is newsworthy. 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. you don't have to worry. my old boss says, never throw away an old chart. they will all come back. it will happen, don't worry. >> i would certainly not want to use terms like embarrassing and chaotic.

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." the process done was not the normal approach. normally we reach a national intelligence judgment of some kind. there is a national intelligence council under which that occurs. there is a process under which people reasonably have a role to play by virtue of their organizational responsibilities. it doesn't sound from the press reporting as if it was done that way.

it sounds as if john brennan put together a task force of a small number of people from the agencies, and that they had to sign a nondisclosure agreement about the evidence they were shown. that evidence was not more widely disseminated throughout the broader intelligence community. that is a very unusual way to do this. the argument i have understood that was made, 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 that were being

reached, these were approached in a methodological matter and through an organizational process. it looks like that wasn't the case. >> we talked about the russians being mad at us for interfering in their elections. i was under the impression those kind of tapered off. if there is a debate to be had, you don't mess with our internal affairs and we won't mess with yours? can we get clarity on that? [laughter] >> one thing i could say, and i haven't looked at it closely, a lot of that went away. if we are talking about open

programs, what most people are used to talking about and looking at, a lot of that went away during the obama administration. we just had a conversation about what we see versus what we don't. i expect they have similar conversations in russia. >> we have to look at the broader effects. who is taking the narrative? they have kind of taken the narrative. we are spending a tremendous amount of time on this we aren't spending on other things. that is something important to think about. i don't know if that is what is intended. but it is powerful.

>> one question here. >> thank you. russian destabilization efforts in eastern europe rely on partners within countries. i wonder if we are having the right discussion about collusion. we are coming to a legal understanding of what that looks like. but there is evidence the russian embassy was good at getting people within the trump government to compromise themselves. michael flynn clearly did that. what discussion should we be having on collusion to better prevent people in the united states government from, arising

-- from compromising themselves and then actively colluding? what should we be talking about when we talk about collusion? we will be talking a lot more about that. >> i don't feel qualified to answer that. i don't have any information. >> what is the useful definition? where should we begin to think about an off-line conversation between two people? there is stuff that feels fruitful, and is stuff that

stuff that feels malignant. in a very abstract way. how should we be talking about collusion? i am not looking for you to say, someone colluded. he is down the street. >> i am not sure how to answer that. there is classic intelligence recruitment, where you are developing and ultimately paying a source to spy, to conduct classic espionage. we have a lot in the books about that already. these 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 in a gray area. i am not sure you can fruitfully legislate things that can prevent that sort of thing from going on. education and self-awareness are probably best handled there. probably best handled there. an atmosphere in the country where people are afraid to talk to russians is something that is not in our international interest. we have to be careful when we talk about people doing putin's bidding. >> what sort of education efforts, what form would that

take, in terms of having people not being unwitting agents? you don't want the highest level of government coming out and saying, don't be an unwitting agent. how do you walk that balance between helping people understand what that looks like and not being an alarmist? >> this is nothing new. guarding against foreign intelligence something we have been aware of for a long time. those inside the system get lots of counseling and feedback about context. there is nothing that is -- that has happened recently that would cause us to depart from common sense. people in positions to have sensitive information need to

know that there is national security at stake and they have to be careful. they have to keep in the back of their mind that interactions with foreign nationals may not be so innocent. i don't see a need for changing anything based on what is -- has happened recently. this has been with us for ever. -- forever. >> i was a political appointee at the state department during the bush administration. they hired me. i went in for my first days, and there was a briefing on how to do this and that. and on security. it covered many of these issues. those are things typically repeated by the government on a

periodic basis, for all of the employees who might have access to information that someone else might find desirable. i would align with that. i would point out, on the question of foreign influence, we have outside the room, dimitri knows my favorite president is george washington. his bust. if you read the farewell address and the portion that deals with the question of foreign influence, it has two sides. one side, you have to be careful of allowing your affections for another country to drive your policy. that can distort policy. another side, you have to be careful to not allow your antipathy toward another country to warp your decision-making

process. it is a useful reminder for us to think about this during this unusual time that we are in. >> we know the kgb was giving an enormous freedom of action to soviet agencies. they have spent a lot of time recruiting. technologies have changed. behind technologies, there are human beings. maybe we should study history books and examine and learn more about what kgb was doing, to

learn their habits and skills and motivations. return we degree of would want to know more about. >> i agree. >> thank you. short answer. >> you both have said what happened was more or less predictable, given what the russians have been doing elsewhere. c was unified the i on what was happening. if you look at what happened in europe, it is happening on social media. it kind of relates back to the

question of, if you were united, if it was predictable, you move -- you knew the platform it would be coming on, why did intel in congress seems so surprised? and where is the defense? what is the government doing to stop this? given the fact you knew it was coming on social media, what is the defense? >> you opened a fascinating question. what role should the government 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 regarding the i.t.

of american businesses, given that nation-states are going up against some of them, as happened in the sony case. it is unlikely you will see the government lean forward and get into the private sector and start managing the messaging that happens in the private sector and be protecting the cyber security more than what homeland security and the fbi are already doing. it is a fascinating question about the differences in our society. that separation between the private and public is not true in russia. i don't think it is appropriate for the government to get into the business of determining what

messages are and are not put out there in public media. >> we're not talking about messages in any normal way. we're talking about as an instrument to do something that you have already discussed. it is achieving their political goals. we know it is driven by nation-states to do to do us harm. >> i want to come back to something. al qaeda cannot destroy america. only we can do that. we have to look to ourselves, and how fractious we are. i look at it like a bee sting. someone has an allergic reaction

that kills them. it is what we do to ourselves. people look to the government to do things which it is not appropriate for them to do. can we allow someone to do this to ourselves? it is how we react to this and how people vote based on this. i would turn the focus more to the american people than the government. >> i will second that. i think there is much we can do and should do to ensure the integrity of actual balloting in elections. that is something the government needs to be involved in. there is much that we can do practically. one simple thing is to mandate the use of paper balloting backup systems.

so we are all confidence that when we have an election, those vote tallies are accurate. and only relying on electronic balloting is a bad idea. not hard to do and a proper role for government. it is precarious for the government to get into the business of policing content. it is one where the russians have long been claiming that information itself can be weaponized. they have been urging this on us for a long time. our reaction is that information yearns to be free. we have started to say in the last year, maybe information can be dangerous.

that is a dangerous thing for the government to be in that business. i am not confident the wood -- we would do it well. i think it would change the nature of who we are. >> hackers are given 30 of the voting machines now used in the united states. they hacked all of them within 45 minutes. >> let me follow up on this conversation. if you look at our media environment, if two big networks want to merge together, the government and the american people have an opinion. there is going to be a monopoly. you can have this much of a share. are facebook and twitter too

big, are they part of the problem? are they sort of like monopolies? that is a challenging question. >> technology moves faster than policy and law. social media has created a new currency. social information. that currency is like a commodity that can be monopolized. being close to the internet, in the end, information wins out. there are so many ways the barrier to entry has made anyone able to broadcast to a large number of people. media is moving from one to many, to many to many.

i do not believe we are in any danger of having someone to monopolize information. everything is fast going in the opposite direction. >> so much for that idea. a question over here. >> what is the ultimate goal for the russians? they want this mutual noninterference. this seems to be a thread they have been on since the soviet era. is that ultimately what they want, some sort of noninterference pact? are mutual interests their goal? >> yes.

one of their goals. we have to call their bluff on that. and ask if they are serious. it is in our interest to do that. it is not going to prevent messing in our political system. that is going to happen one way or the other. it could take some of the sharper edges off of that. it could minimize the dangers, and ensure this doesn't get out of hand. >> i will return to the domestic perspective inside russia. in terms of what their goal is. i have to believe near the top of their list is using this to consolidate their own stability. putin and his group may have done that.

the potency -- they have taken the narrative here. we are talking about them. putin can say, we, with an economy the size of texas, are dominating the american discourse. that makes him pretty strong. that is not someone you might to -- you want to mess with inside of russia. that is something we need to keep in mind. he wakes up in russia. >> in other words, strike at putin by not talking about him so much. [laughter] >> that was our last question. thank you all for joining us. this was a very enlightening conversation. thank you. [applause]

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