Cybersecurity

The disinformation game

The federal government is poised to bring new tools and strategies to bear in the fight against foreign-backed disinformation campaigns online, but how and when agencies choose to publicly identify such campaigns could have ramifications on the U.S. political ecosystem.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced in July that the Department of Justice set up a new task force to counter foreign influence efforts and signaled a more active role for federal agencies. The Departments of Homeland Security and State have also set up similar task forces or programs to counter "malign foreign influence operations" online and offline.

Rosenstein framed the new efforts as a tech-focused update to the same interagency government task forces set up by President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s to counter Soviet propaganda campaigns targeting the U.S. populace.

"Some people believe they can operate anonymously through the internet, but cybercrime generally does create electronic trails that lead to the perpetrators if the investigators are sufficiently skilled," Rosenstein said.

The FBI and DHS already work with state and local governments on election security measures, provide threat briefings to the private sector and hand out public indictments of hackers and troll factories associated with the Russian government. The State Department's Global Engagement Center works to counter propaganda efforts by terrorist organizations abroad. In 2016, the center received a broader mandate from Congress to tackle state-sponsored disinformation operations.

Now these agencies are exploring the use of technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning and other tools to map out and identify coordinated influence campaigns online and trace them back to their source.

"Pretty soon, we should be able to very accurately predict when disinformation campaigns are coming based on tracking and mapping the troll factories," said Shawn Powers, executive director for the advisory commission on public diplomacy at State. "We will be able to actually identify these campaigns within maybe even 24 hours of when they start, which then gives us a chance to get really proactive instead of reactive."

While many of the non-technical aspects of State's anti-disinformation program have been around for decades, a State Department spokesperson told FCW that the technological component is still in its infancy and is aimed at countering disinformation campaigns in other countries, not the United States. According to the spokesperson, the department is currently relying on a mixture of commercial off the shelf products and a machine learning algorithm developed in-house that can monitor social media activity and content, identify trends in conversation, flag botnets and identify false personas online.

State is also cultivating relationships with private sector tech companies to further build out its technical capabilities. Still, even in its limited state the program has presented State officials with logistic and ethical dilemmas around free speech and privacy.

"As you dig into the problem, it quickly becomes apparent that it's not as easy [to expose these operations] as it might otherwise seem," said the State Department spokesperson. "There are people who use these things for legitimate reasons or conceal their identities not for nefarious reasons, but for privacy."

Bots or free speech?

The concerns are more than hypothetical. In July, Facebook shut down 32 accounts, pages and groups tied to mostly progressive and leftist political causes that company officials claimed displayed "coordinated" and "inauthentic" behavior reminiscent of an influence campaign. While Facebook officials declined to make a firm attribution as to the origin, they said the campaign bore similarities to the Russia-based Internet Research Agency activity tracked during the 2016 election, with adjustments like the use of virtual private networks and third-party ad-buyers to further obfuscate the location and identity of users.

However, the fallout from those actions highlight just how tethered influence operations can be to regular online discourse and underscore how perilous it can be for large companies or governments to enter into the fray. The day after Facebook made its announcement, individual American citizens involved as organizers or administrators of the 32 shuttered accounts and pages complained that Facebook had censored them without notice and unfairly painted their otherwise-legitimate groups and movements as puppets of a foreign-backed influence campaign because of the actions of a few people.

"We've since created a new Facebook event but we know real organizing comes from talking with our neighbors, and that this is a real protest in Washington, D.C.," said one of the groups on Twitter shortly after the ban. "It is not George Soros, it is not Russia, it is just us."

Investigations by U.S. intelligence agencies and Congress have found that Russian troll factories like the Internet Research Agencies deliberately latched onto pre-existing groups and movements already present within the American political ecosystem. In many cases, these operations identified and infiltrated online groups largely run by Americans focused on issues like anti-fracking, genetically modified foods and campaign finance corruption, in order to gain access to audiences and influence voting priorities.