Hacking democracies

These leaders and political parties also share four other characteristics:

·  They are anti-American – not only in the sense of opposing U.S. policies, but in being hostile to the norms and values of pluralist, liberal, and egalitarian democracy, and critical of institutions such as the free press, independent judiciary, and guaranteed rights

·  They call for the dismantling – or, at least, for their own country’s departure from – treaties and organizations such as NATO and the EU, created for the purpose of uniting like-minded democratic countries in an effort to guarantee Western prosperity while containing communism

·  They are vehemently anti-immigration and, in some cases, openly anti-Muslim

·  They openly call for policies which would be more accommodating of Russia’s interests and more accepting of the values and leadership style espoused by Vladimir Putin

A new report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute offers an in-depth analysis of Russia’s campaign to undermine Western democracies by weaponizing social media, and, to a lesser extent, China’s similar, if lower-key, campaign against neighboring Asian countries.

Here are the report’s Introduction and Findings and Recommendations:

Introduction

In 2016, Russia comprehensively and innovatively interfered in the U.S. presidential election, offering a template for how democracies around the world could be manipulated.(1) Since then there have been 194 national-level elections in 124 countries and an additional 31 referendums.(2) This report seeks to catalogue examples of foreign interference in those polls and group them into three “buckets”:

· interference targeting voting infrastructure and voter turnout

· interference in the information environment (to make the scope manageable, we have focused on interference surrounding elections, but it’s apparent that such efforts continue outside election periods as part of longer term efforts to manipulate societies)

· longer term efforts to erode public trust in governments, political leadership and public institutions.

This research focused on cyber-enabled interference (including, for example, information operations that harness social media and breaches of email and data storage systems), but excluded offline methods (for example, the financing of political parties and the suborning of prominent individuals). 

The yardstick for counting an activity as interference was that proposed by former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who put it this way when introducing counter-foreign-interference laws in Australia in 2017: “we will not tolerate foreign influence activities that are in any way covert, coercive or corrupt.

That’s the line that separates legitimate influence from unacceptable interference.”(3) A major issue has become the public perception that results may have been swayed, with consequences for the direction of these states’ policies and actions, together with a loss of public trust in democratic institutions and processes.

Multi-country Pew Research Center polling shows that there’s an increasing expectation among global publics that elections will suffer interference: majorities (including 65 percent of Australians) in 23 of 26 countries surveyed in 2018 said it was very or somewhat likely that a cyberattack would result in their elections being tampered with.(4)

In some cases, such as the 2016 US presidential election, polling shows that a large proportion of people (39 percent of U.S. adults) feel that Russian meddling swung the election,(5) which is probably the most valuable outcome Russia could have hoped for, given that it’s seeking to undermine confidence in U.S. global leadership and the U.S. public’s faith in the nation’s democratic process.(6)

Since that election, reports of foreign interference in democratic elections have continued to surface. This suggests a belief among adversary states that interference is serving their interests and that the costs of action are not sufficiently high to deter this behavior.

Of course, foreign governments interfering in elections is nothing new.(7) While the objectives might be similar to those of Cold War style efforts, the means are different. Today, a state such a Russia is able to reach more than a hundred million Americans through a single platform such as Facebook without sending a single operative into U.S. territory.(8) Or, as nearly happened in Ukraine, the official election results can be remotely altered to show a candidate who received just 1 percent of the vote as winning.(9)

And, significantly, a little effort goes a long way: in 2016, Russian operatives were able to organize two opposing groups to engage in a protest in front of the Islamic Da’wah Centre of Houston for ‘the bargain price of $200’.(10) Having a big impact is now much easier, cheaper and less risky. For democratic governments, responding can be extremely difficult. The methods used by adversaries typically exploit treasured democratic principles such as free speech, trust and openness. Detection can be hard both because the methods are difficult to identify and because democracies avoid surveillance of their own domestic populations and debates (outside niche areas such as traditional criminal and terrorist activity). Typically, the bulk of intelligence resources is directed towards external collection, and domestic populations are rightly wary of increased government monitoring.

Democratic governments themselves can be obstacles: if the winning party believes it benefited from the foreign interference or would be delegitimized by admitting its scale, it can even mean the newly elected government will play down or ignore the interference. Tensions in the US in the wake of Russian interference in the 2016 election point to the potential for these sorts of issues to arise.(11)

Measuring levels of interference and adversary’s objectives is another challenge. Given the difficulty of detection and the variance in methods employed, it’s hard to compare relative levels of interference across elections. Objectives are also not always straightforward. Most efforts to interfere in elections are not about directly altering the vote count. Instead, many appear aimed at disrupting societies or undermining trust in important institutions. There also appear to be different overarching aims depending on the adversary involved.

….

Findings and recommendations
The motivation behind this research is that, by better understanding the methods being used and the targets of high-activity adversary states, democracies will be able to better assess their existing response and mitigation capabilities and adjust as necessary.

We make the following recommendations.

1. Targets are limited: respond accordingly
Despite the enormous amount of media coverage that’s been devoted to state-backed election interference, the phenomenon isn’t universal. From public accounts, there are two primary actors and they focus judiciously on states that matter to them. Democracies should calibrate their policy responses to the likely risk, methods and adversary. The United States and European states are clear targets of the Russian government; Indo-Pacific nations are targets of the Chinese Communist Party.

2. Build up detection capabilities
More effort is needed to detect foreign interference, including offline and non-state efforts (such as by for-profit groups that misuse social media platforms to stir up hate). Because democracies have a natural aversion to government surveillance, a better answer than simply stepped-up government monitoring may be supporting non-profit, non-government initiatives and independent media. These groups can more credibly monitor for interference and more easily engage at the community level. In smaller states, where local media outlets are disappearing, government subsidies may be needed to ensure sufficient scrutiny of local and state political groups (which are often feeder groups for national politics).

3. Fund research to measure impact and measure the effectiveness of education campaigns to address public concerns
Governments should fund research to develop better ways to measure the impact of foreign interference to allow for a more informed decision on resourcing efforts to counter it. Notwithstanding the lack of current empirical data on impact, opinion polling points to a perception that foreign interference will occur, and in places such as the US to widely held views that elections have been swayed. Various efforts have been made to respond, including fact-checking services,(70) opening up social media data streams to election-oriented academic research,(71) and legislation to counter fake news.(72) Research is needed to understand which efforts are most effective, after which those tougher measures should be twinned with public awareness campaigns to address these concerns.

4. Publicly fund the defense of political parties
Political parties and politicians are clear targets of foreign adversaries. With their shoestring budgets and the requirement to scale up dramatically during election campaigns, they’re no match for the resources of sophisticated state actors. Politicians are also vulnerable, including through the use of their personal devices. There’s a strong public interest in preventing foreign states from being able to exploit breaches of both parties and individual politicians to undermine domestic political processes. Democratic governments should consider public funding to better protect all major political parties and to step up cybersecurity support to politicians.

5. Impose costs 
Democracies need to look at better ways of imposing costs on adversaries. Because of spikes in interference activity around elections, they can be prone to being picked off or to discounting interference if the party that won benefited from it. Democracies should consider concerted joint global or regional action that looks beyond their own particular cases as well as more traditional approaches such as retaliatory sanctions. Legislation may also be needed to make it more difficult for foreign adversaries to operate (being mindful of the differing objectives of the two main actors)—this may be a second best for countries that find it too difficult to call out adversaries. 

6. Look beyond the digital
Russian interference is detectable, if not immediately, then often after the event. This has generated a natural focus on Moscow’s methods and activities. However, there are many more subtle ways to interfere in democracies. Research like this that focuses on digital attack mechanisms also misses more traditional and potentially more corrosive tactics, such as the provision of funding to political parties by foreign states and their proxies and the long-term cultivation of political influence by foreign state actors. Australia has recently passed legislation to counter more subtle forms of foreign interference(73) that were starting to be detected.(74) States, particularly those in the Indo-Pacific, should be attuned to these types of interference and make preparations to prevent, counter and expose them.

7. Look beyond states
Troubling public perceptions of democracy are unlikely to be explained by foreign interference alone. Foreign interference may, however, magnify or exploit underlying sources of tension and grievance in particular societies. A thorough response by government and civil society needs to consider a wider set of issues and threat actors, including trolls working for profit, and the health of the political and media environment (including by ensuring that local and regional media remain viable or are adequately funded).

(1) This has been comprehensively documented; see, for example, Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Background to ‘Assessing Russian activities and intentions in recent US elections’: the analytic process and cyber incident attribution, U.S. Government, 6 January 2017, online; P. N. Howard, B. Ganesh, D. Liotsiou, J. Kelly, “The IRA, social media and political polarization in the United States, 2012–2018,” Computational Propaganda Research Project, Oxford University, 2018, online.

(2) ElectionGuide: democracy assistance and elections news, online.

(3) Malcolm Turnbull, “Speech introducing the National Security Legislation Amendment (Espionage and Foreign Interference) Bill 2017,” 7 December 2017, online.

(4) Jacob Poushter, Janell Fetterolf, “International publics brace for cyberattacks on elections, infrastructure, national security,” Pew Research Center, 9 January 2019, online.

(5) “Americans’ views on Russia, the 2016 election, and U.S.–Russian relations (trends),” news release, Gallup, August 2018, online.

(6) Matthew Cole, Richard Esposito, Sam Biddle, Ryan Grim, “Top-secret NSA report details Russian hacking effort days before 2016 election,” The Intercept, 6 June 2017, online; Zeynep Tufekci, “The election has already been hacked,” New York Times, 3 November 2018, online.

(7) Ishaan Tharoor, “The long history of the U.S. interfering with elections elsewhere,” Washington Post, 13 October 2016, online.

(8) “As many as 146 million people on Facebook may have received information from Russian agency, Zuckerberg says,” PBS News Hour, 9 April 2018, online.

(9) Mark Clayton, “Ukraine election narrowly avoided ‘wanton destruction’ from hackers,” Christian Science Monitor, 17 June 2014, online.

(10) Claire Allbright, “A Russian Facebook page organized a protest in Texas. A different Russian page launched the counterprotest,” Texas Tribune, 1 November 2017, online.

(11) Karen Yourish, Troy Griggs, “8 U.S. intelligence groups blame Russia for meddling, but Trump keeps clouding the picture,” New York Times, 2 August 2018, online.

….

(70) “Fact-checking on Facebook: what publishers should know,” Facebook, no date, online.

(71) “Facebook will open its data up to academics to see how it impacts elections,” MIT Technology Review, 30 April, online.

(72) “Germany approves plans to fine social media firms up to €50m,” The Guardian, 30 June 2017, online.

(73) National Security Legislation Amendment (Espionage and Foreign Interference) Bill 2018, online.

(74) Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee, Estimates, Australian Senate, 24 May 2018, online.

— Read more in Fergus Hanson, Sarah O’Connor, Mali Walker, and Luke Courtois, Hacking democracies: Cataloguing cyber-enabled attacks on elections (Australian Strategic Policy Institute, May 2019