Information is the Most Important Tool in the new War for Truth

OPINION — The first step to winning a war is recognizing you’re in one. The world’s democracies are finally waking up to the waves of malign influence operations being launched against us by an amalgamation of autocratic regimes united in their antipathy for our vision of the proper relationship between peoples and their governments.

Our free-ranging public discourse, unfettered access to media and communications, and transparent democratic machinery make us asymmetrically vulnerable and all but invite subversion by those who mean us ill. And mean us ill they do, because no matter what policies we might pursue toward them, favorable or unfavorable, our mere existence as functioning democracies threatens the legitimacy of their repressive models. This is not the Cold War, it’s the Democracy War.

Yet even as we awaken to this threat, we gravitate toward a defensive “circle the wagons” approach and generally defer to our governments to lead the way. To this end, democratic governments have formed numerous counter-influence establishments, such as the US Department of State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)’s Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC), and Sweden’s Psychological Defense Agency.

Nevertheless, while the mission of detecting and warning of foreign malign influence efforts strengthens our resilience, its reactive mindset keeps the battlefield on our own turf and squanders the biggest asymmetric advantage we possess, the talent, imagination, and agility of free peoples. We need a new paradigm that better plays to our democratic strengths, not just shores up its weaknesses.

Democracy’s core foes are China, Russia, and Iran, three regimes with wildly divergent ideologies united only by their embrace of autocratic rule.

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Their asymmetric advantage is their ability to operate from the relative safety of their police state bastions where access to information is tightly restricted. Yet the fact that they devote such massive resources on censorship and maintaining internal security betrays their recognition of their own vulnerability and telegraphs exactly where we need to focus.

We need to take the fight to them by eroding their information monopoly at home by developing innovative means for inter-societal communication, thereby moving beyond just hardening our defenses to identifying and actioning their domestic vulnerabilities. Those living in glass houses must be made to understand why they should not cast stones. 

When these regimes marry advanced technology and conspiratorial methods to undermine our hyper-networked democracies, it stands to reason that the most genuinely asymmetric responses would not originate from our governments but from our aggrieved societies themselves. Continuing the asymmetry, we should avoid responding in kind with deceptive, malevolent efforts and instead answer in ways that are authentic and transparent. We should finally direct our attention not to the offending regimes but to their oppressed populations. Fight regime-launched clandestine malign influence operations with cathartic influence actions arising from our body politic and aimed at the thing despots fear most, their own people.

We’ve tried to level the information playing field using government-backed outlets like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Voice of America, and Radio Free Asia. They have impressive audiences, but their government connections mean they can’t entirely shake the propaganda label, which blunts their appeal. Moreover, despite the statutory firewall designed to insulate them from domestic political pressure, they still find themselves subject to partisan winds that can lead to distraction.

CIA covert influence operations could in principle circumvent the propaganda moniker by hiding the US hand, but secrecy is difficult if not impossible to sustain in efforts intended to influence on a societal scale. And if secrecy is compromised, the resulting taint is worse than that of mere propaganda; it’s the taint of subterfuge and manipulation. Exposure would render covert efforts not just ineffective but counterproductive.

The strict oversight and legal boundaries that our democracy rightly places on covert action also reduces this tool’s ability to innovate and experiment with agility in response to rapidly unfolding events. Besides, this would be a symmetrical not asymmetrical response. It’s playing their game.

Covert action has its place, but it’s a darker, more specialized craft better reserved for narrowly focused missions.

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The time has come for democracies to transcend the mindset that it’s a government responsibility to break down information barriers in closed societies whose rulers actively undermine our chosen system of governance. We need to step up and do it ourselves. But how?

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the breakout moment for democratized open source intelligence (OSINT). Operating mostly outside government, independent OSINT practitioners nimbly showcased their burgeoning capabilities to expose Russia’s perfidy and help rally global support for Ukraine’s cause. There’s reason to believe a similar society-driven approach could provide the crucial asymmetric answer to the escalating malign influence efforts directed against us.

The pathways for commercialization of dictatorship-targeted influence capabilities developed privately as part of such an undertaking, however, are less obvious than with OSINT tools. Altruism was a major motivator for independent OSINT players in the Russia-Ukraine war, but they were still able to apply the capabilities they developed to productive business use. The methods, partnerships, and technologies needed to penetrate the highly controlled information environments in China, Russia, and Iran will not as easily translate into profitable endeavors.

Is it fanciful then to expect that meaningful non-government initiatives to meet this challenge can succeed without near-term prospects for profitable spinoffs? Modest examples do exist, such as the “Flash Drives for Freedom” partnership between the non-profit Forum 280 and the Human Rights Foundation which provides flash drives to North Korean defector organizations to record uncensored news and entertainment that they then smuggle into North Korea.

Multiple non-profit and academic organizations, such as the Open Technology Fund (OTF) and the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab also work to develop ways to circumvent digital censorship in authoritarian countries. There are many others.

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For anti-authoritarian messaging to truly resonate at home, it’s also essential to partner with savvy Chinese, Russian, and Iranian organizations and individuals sharing aspirations for a democratic future for their homelands, for they have a keener understanding of internal dynamics in their respective countries. The Russian news organization Meduza and Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, for example, both now forced to operate in exile, have excellent track records for reaching audiences inside Russia and merit greater partnership and patronage.

The large overseas Chinese community and Iranian diaspora should also be combed for talent, insights, and connections back home, because lecturing China, Russia, and Iran by self-righteous foreigners has and will, continue to fail.

Many elements necessary for a serious non-governmental effort to penetrate the closed information space in these autocratic countries thus already exist. What’s missing is the intelligent marriage of diverse and dispersed capabilities to convert promising but lonely campaigns into a broad, collaborative movement. It will take resources to identify, link, innovate, and scale such an endeavor, but private entities regularly form endowments to support noble causes, and the cause of saving our democracies from those who would have us live differently is as worthy as any.

Business risk calculations, such as fear of losing access to the Chinese market or to Russian energy along with the general moral agnosticism conditioned into our econometrics obsessed business culture, have made our private sector dangerously myopic in facing up to the gravity of the geopolitical threats we face and the consequences of losing this struggle.

Private firms devote minimal attention to defensive measures like cyber security, deepfake detection, or supply chain risk, much less taking firm public stands against aggressive authoritarianism. But make no mistake, losing the Democracy War means replacing free enterprise with Chinese and Russian-style state subservient enterprise.

Democracy has arrived at an inflection point. Even absent external interference, we face unprecedented internal headwinds. Our adversaries recognize this and are energetically fanning the flames to sow doubt and cloud reason. One thing is certain, however, no matter the gravity of democracy’s domestic struggles, the alternative our police state adversaries offer is nothing we want–China’s dystopian communist super state, Russia’s murderous politics and repression of dissent, or Iran’s brutal and atavistic theocracy. Yet as much as we wish our future to be based on principles of democracy, the rule of law, and free enterprise, that outcome is not preordained.

By seizing the initiative as a society, we can take fuller advantage of democracy’s greatest edge over control-oriented models, the vibrance and creativity of free peoples. After all, the innovations our adversaries are now using against us–the internet, social media, artificial intelligence, etc.–are all products of our dynamic political, entrepreneurial, and scientific system. We are thus far better positioned than they to exploit them and fight back, if only we can muster the initiative and imagination to do so.

Now is the time to pool our creativity and resources as free people to take up the challenge of the Democracy War in a serious way. 

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