If we care about protecting our democracies against foreign election interference, we should work together across party lines, with our democratic allies around the world, and with our respective intelligence communities.

On the same day that U.S. President Trump and Russian President Putin met in Finland, we were in Washington for a parliamentary roundtable and conference hosted by the Atlantic Council to discuss the reality of Russian election interference.

We heard from Senators Mark Warner, Amy Klobuchar, and Marco Rubio about the bipartisan work of the Senate Intelligence Committee to confirm the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.

We also heard from our U.K. colleagues about the role that Russian interference played in support of the Brexit campaign, and from colleagues in Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, Sweden, Czech Republic, and Italy about their own respective experiences.

We were there to provide a Canadian perspective on this global challenge.

In June of last year, our Communications Security Establishment (CSE) released a report stating that, over the first half of that year, 13 per cent of countries holding federal elections had their democratic process targeted.

While CSE has “not observed nation-states using cyber capabilities with the purpose of influencing the democratic process in Canada” to date, it expects “that multiple hacktivist groups will very likely deploy cyber capabilities in an attempt to influence the democratic process during the 2019 federal election.”

We need to be prepared for all possibilities.

CSE identified three aspects of our democratic process that adversaries worldwide use cyber capabilities to target: elections; political parties and politicians; and both traditional and social media.

Our elections are paper-based, and both Conservative and Liberal governments have worked to ensure that Elections Canada processes are secure.

Our political parties and politicians are more vulnerable. For example, Russia hacked into both Republican and Democratic National Committees during the 2016 U.S. election.

The media, particularly social media, is also vulnerable to manipulation. As 51 per cent of Canadians receive news from digital sources first, and editors have been replaced by algorithms that are susceptible to disinformation campaigns fuelled by bots and troll farms.

The government has proposed some changes through Bill C-76, to target impersonation, malicious computer systems, and foreign spending to influence our domestic elections.

But there is more work for us to do.

Our parliamentary committee on Access to Information, Privacy, and Ethics has worked across partisan lines to address the improper acquisition and manipulation of personal information and the resulting impact on our privacy rights and democratic processes.

Through our inquiry, we have examined Facebook’s improper disclosure of personal information to Cambridge Analytica and issues of psychographic profiling and targeting.

We have also worked in partnership with our parliamentary colleagues in the U.K. to assist in their investigation of fake news and Brexit.

This co-operation across the Atlantic has proven timely. The U.K. Commissioner recently proposed a £500,000 fine against Facebook for misusing personal information, and the U.K. Elections Commission determined that the Leave campaigns improperly colluded in breach of election finance laws.

Based on our investigation to date, we’ve made a number of unanimous recommendations to address privacy vulnerabilities and election interference here in Canada.

In our view, the government should subject political activities to strict privacy rules, bring greater transparency to online advertising and targeting, establish data sovereignty rules to ensure our personal information is protected, and empower the privacy commissioner to better enforce the law.

We will continue our work this fall, with a closer examination of potential disinformation techniques, including “deepfake” videos, the role of third party political activities and how we can bring greater transparency to algorithms.

Our hope is that our ideas will not stand alone, but will be read alongside similar recommendations from the U.K. committee, and our American counterparts. We should be at the forefront of setting standards to this global problem.

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At the close of the Atlantic Council conference, our communique highlighted the need to “support greater and sustained Transatlantic co-operation, between national governments, NATO, and the European Union, to share information on risks, vulnerabilities, and best practices to counter interference.”

Where we are confronted with a common threat to our core values and institutions, collaboration with our allies is essential.

Nathaniel Erskine-Smith is the Liberal MP for Beaches-East York and Bob Zimmer is the Conservative MP for Prince George-Peace River-Northern Rockies.

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