Information attacks on democracies; refunding the Alaska purchase?; Russian trolls & toxic politics, and more

But in order for this to work, there needs to be common knowledge both of how government functions and how political leaders are chosen. There also needs to be common knowledge of who the political actors are, what they and their parties stand for, and how they clash with each other. Furthermore, this knowledge is decentralized across a wide variety of actors—an essential element, since ordinary citizens play a significant role in political decision making.
Contrast this with an autocracy. There, common political knowledge about who is in charge over the long term and what their policy goals are is a basic condition of stability. Autocracies do not require common political knowledge about the efficacy and fairness of elections, and strive to maintain a monopoly on other forms of common political knowledge. They actively suppress common political knowledge about potential groupings within their society, their levels of popular support, and how they might form coalitions with each other. On the other hand, they benefit from contested political knowledge about nongovernmental groups and actors in society. If no one really knows which other political parties might form, what they might stand for, and what support they might get, that itself is a significant barrier to those parties ever forming.
This difference has important consequences for security. Authoritarian regimes are vulnerable to information attacks that challenge their monopoly on common political knowledge. They are vulnerable to outside information that demonstrates that the government is manipulating common political knowledge to their own benefit. And they are vulnerable to attacks that turn contested political knowledge—uncertainty about potential adversaries of the ruling regime, their popular levels of support and their ability to form coalitions—into common political knowledge. As such, they are vulnerable to tools that allow people to communicate and organize more easily, as well as tools that provide citizens with outside information and perspectives.
For example, before the first stirrings of the Arab Spring, the Tunisian government had extensive control over common knowledge. It required everyone to publicly support the regime, making it hard for citizens to know how many other people hated it, and it prevented potential anti-regime coalitions from organizing. However, it didn’t pay attention in time to Facebook, which allowed citizens to talk more easily about how much they detested their rulers, and, when an initial incident sparked a protest, to rapidly organize mass demonstrations against the regime. The Arab Spring faltered in many countries, but it is no surprise that countries like Russia see the Internet openness agenda as a knife at their throats.
Democracies, in contrast, are vulnerable to information attacks that turn common political knowledge into contested political knowledge. If people disagree on the results of an election, or whether a census process is accurate, then democracy suffers. Similarly, if people lose any sense of what the other perspectives in society are, who is real and who is not real, then the debate and argument that democracy thrives on will be degraded. This is what seems to be Russia’s aims in their information campaigns against the U.S.: to weaken our collective trust in the institutions and systems that hold our country together. This is also the situation that writers like Adrien Chen and Peter Pomerantsev describe in today’s Russia, where no one knows which parties or voices are genuine, and which are puppets of the regime, creating general paranoia and despair.
This difference explains how the same policy measure can increase the stability of one form of regime and decrease the stability of the other. We have already seen that open information flows have benefited democracies while at the same time threatening autocracies. In our language, they transform regime-supporting contested political knowledge into regime-undermining common political knowledge. And much more recently, we have seen other uses of the same information flows undermining democracies by turning regime-supported common political knowledge into regime-undermining contested political knowledge.
In other words, the same fake news techniques that benefit autocracies by making everyone unsure about political alternatives undermine democracies by making people question the common political systems that bind their society.
This framework not only helps us understand how different political systems are vulnerable and how they can be attacked, but also how to bolster security in democracies. First, we need to better defend the common political knowledge that democracies need to function. That is, we need to bolster public confidence in the institutions and systems that maintain a democracy. Second, we need to make it harder for outside political groups to cooperate with inside political groups and organize disinformation attacks, through measures like transparency in political funding and spending. And finally, we need to treat attacks on common political knowledge by insiders as being just as threatening as the same attacks by foreigners.
There’s a lot more in the paper.

Russian trolls prey on the toxic way we do our politics (Rafael Behr, Guardian)
The Kremlin’s target is not the outcome of specific votes, such as for Brexit or the US presidency, but to divide the west

Russia asserts immunity in the DNC case (Ingrid Wuerth, Lawfare)
Writing in Lawfare in April 2018, I considered the role of foreign sovereign immunity in the Democratic National Committee’s lawsuit against the Russian Federation and Russian individuals and entities. The case raised an interesting set of issues, I noted, but “these questions will only arise if Russia and the state-related defendants are properly served and if they decide to litigate rather than default.” The courts may get to think through some of these questions after all. It appears that Russia has been served, and on Nov. 9 it responded with a letter and a “Statement of Immunity” (SOI).
The SOI does not merely invoke immunity—it also provides an analysis of various provisions of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA), describes the purported benefits to the United States of according immunity to Russia in this case, and argues that the case should be dismissed as a political question.
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) alleges that the Russian government hacked into the DNC, exfiltrated information and conspired with the Trump campaign and others to publicize the information during the 2016 presidential campaign. The case has changed a bit since my initial analysis. The amended complaint no longer names “Guccifer 2.0” and the “John Does” (unnamed Russian intelligence operatives) as defendants, so the issues of individual immunity addressed in my earlier post are unlikely to arise.
The SOI invokes immunity for the Russian Federation, which is still named as a defendant in the amended complaint. The arguments it advances likely apply to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (commonly called the GRU)—also a named defendant—as well, although the SOI does not explicitly take that position. The amended complaint (¶ 34) alleges that the GRU is an “agency or instrumentality” of Russia under the FSIA. It is unclear whether that allegation is correct: The GRU might be classified as the Russian government itself rather than an agency or instrumentality. In many contexts, however, the distinction does not matter. Foreign states and their agencies and instrumentalities are both entitled to immunity unless an exception applies.

Delay, deny, deflect: Facebook’s Russian propaganda crisis playbook (Sheera Frenkel, Nicholas Confessore, and Cecilia Kang, Sydney Morning Herald)
Inside Facebook’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters, top executives gathered in the glass-walled conference room of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg.
It was September 2017, more than a year after Facebook engineers discovered suspicious Russia-linked activity on its site, an early warning of the Kremlin campaign to disrupt the 2016 US election.
Congressional and federal investigators were closing in on evidence that would implicate the company.
But it wasn’t the looming disaster at Facebook that angered Sandberg.
It was the social network’s security chief, Alex Stamos, who had informed company board members the day before that Facebook had yet to contain the Russian infestation.

Facebook can’t explain the difference between its PR operation and Russian troll farms (Brian Feldman, New York Magazine)
Facebook is on the defensive again, after yet another unflattering report about how the company is handling the ever-increasing scrutiny and criticism aimed in its direction. Yesterday, the New York Times explained how Facebook had contracted a conservative consulting firm called Definers Public Affairs and former Jeb Bush aide Tim Miller to spin flattering news about Facebook and unflattering news about its competitors, such as Google and Apple.
That Facebook would hire a PR firm to protect itself is not that surprising. Mark Zuckerberg described it as a “typical D.C. relationship” in a conference call on Thursday and said he only learned about Definers from the Times’ report. If Definers is a “typical” D.C. press shop, though, maybe we should be concerned.

Schumer told Warner to back off of Facebook: report (Harper Neidig, The Hill)
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) reportedly told Sen. Mark Warner (Va.), the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, to back off of investigating Facebook and its role in enabling Russia’s misinformation campaign in the U.S.
The New York Times reported on Wednesday in a story about Facebook’s internal response to controversies over data privacy and Russian election meddling that Schumer told Warner, who has been the tech platform’s chief antagonist on Capitol Hill, that he should be trying to cooperate with Facebook instead of scrutinizing it.
A Senate source familiar with the meeting between Schumer and Warner told The Hill that Schumer urged Warner to have the committee focus on issues related to disinformation and future election meddling.
The source said that Schumer was worried that Facebook may “bow to pressure from the right wing, who opposed Facebook’s purging of fake accounts and bots.”

Alaska purchase: Kremlin’s trolls suggest a refund (EU vs Disinfo)
Wheels were turning last week in the St. Petersburg troll factory. Its very own news agency, RIA FAN, published a statement by Kremlin-linked publicist Nikolai Starikov, who suggested that Russia might withdraw from the 1867 treaty with the United States on transferring the ownership of Alaska.
According to Mr. Starikov, Russia is ready to refund the United States the $7.2 million it paid for Alaska and bring the region back into the Russian fold. This, in Mr. Starikov’s opinion, should be in response to Washington’s plans to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF).
In a published statement that combines two disinformation favourites of provocation and “whataboutism”, Mr. Starikov sets out the supposed legal grounds for such a step. According to him, the Alaska Treaty of Cession was signed in a different geopolitical reality. And while the treaty provides for the transfer of the territory, it does not specify for how long, as the traditional Russian diplomatic formula “for eternal time” is missing.
Mr. Starikov who is also the commercial director of the “Pervyi kanal” TV station branch in St. Petersburg, has in the past been involved in spreading large quantities of false and misleading information, all in line with the Kremlin’s disinformation narratives on issues such as Ukraine, the migration crisis and terror attacks in Europe. Mr. Starikov has not shied away from conspiracy theories either. Entries on his personal blog suggest that the Bilderberg group made Emmanuel Macron the President of France and that global elites are destroying the world financial system via the leakage of the Panama Papers.
Insinuating that Alaskans would be better off under Moscow’s control has also been a part of the Kremlin’s disinformation campaign in the past.
A journalistic research project by the independent Russian news outlet RBC showed last year that the RIA FAN news agency is a creation of the troll factory in St. Petersburg and shared its first address with the trolls before moving to separate premises. Owned by businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, who has earned the nickname “Putin’s chef”, RIA FAN has been instrumental in spreading disinformation and disrupting the public information sphere both in Russia and abroad.

Britain presses for sanctions against Russian spy chiefs (Francis Elliott, Marc Bennetts, Times)
Britain is pushing for new EU sanctions on senior figures in President Putin’s military spy network responsible for the Salisbury poisoning in March.
Members of the GRU senior leadership are on a draft list of individuals to be sanctioned under a new EU regime aimed at curbing the use of chemical weapons, say diplomatic sources.
The UK hopes to secure the backing of France and Germany for the sanctions. It is pressing for other foreign ministers to approve freezing assets and banning travel for the named senior Russian spies within weeks.