There is no “quick and easy fix” for the United States to deal with Russian disinformation and influence operations. Steve Hall, a former senior CIA officer who retired in 2015 and spent much of his career overseeing intelligence operations in the countries of the former Soviet Union and the former Warsaw Pact, says it is critical to break this national security threat into two categories — cyber protection and combatting disinformation. The Cipher Brief’s Mackenzie Weinger spoke with Hall about Russia’s long history of active measures operations and what the U.S. can learn from Europe as it devises plans to counter the threat.
The Cipher Brief: I wanted to get your thoughts on what new tactics are out there, general policy suggestions, and any lessons the U.S. can learn from European countries that have dealt with this more substantially. What’s on the horizon?
Steve Hall: Suffice it to say, it’s really a tough question. I don’t think it’s going to be something where there’s a quick and easy fix for it, such as, let’s better secure our voting system here in the United States. Although that certainly needs to be done. It’s awfully easy, I suppose, to say we need to be really careful with regard to “fake news” and stuff that appears on the internet and elsewhere that originates from adversarial nations such as Russia. The real question is, how do you go about it? What specifically can you do?
In order to get to the bottom of that question, you need to break out the individual disciplines the Russians and others are using to try to manipulate foreign politics, foreign elections, and things like that. The first, and perhaps the easiest one to identify, is cyber protection. It’s a technical question that gets to how do you do things — how do you protect the electronic part of the U.S. voting system, and how do you protect voter registration sites? It’s almost an infrastructure question.
The next question beyond that is, if you can figure out how to protect those things, you also need to consider how to protect strategic technical points in the United States, internet nodes, servers, that kind of thing. There is a cyber angle to it, and that’s one of the disciplines that needs to be addressed. We saw that because of the DNC hack and the emerging information on what exactly the Russians were up to in terms of looking at our electoral system.
Obviously there needs to be hardening of those systems — but how do you go about that and still make sure they’re flexible enough to do what they need to do, stay connected, exchange data, and those types of things? That’s a real challenge for anyone working in an internet-based, open society, because these systems are designed to make things like voting, communication, and registration easy. That’s the great draw of it. But the very things that make those easily doable also make them vulnerable to those who would do harm from within.
TCB: On combatting the disinformation side, are there any efforts out there that have proven useful in the Eastern or Western European contexts?
Hall: That’s really the second discipline, and that’s even harder than the cyber piece. It’s extremely time intensive, and there’s no silver bullet. As far as I can tell, what it requires are dedicated entities — whether government or, increasingly, private entities both in the United States and Europe — that are analyzing what’s going on in the Internet and in the information sphere that is clearly either Russia-based or other countries that can do this too.
But let’s take Russia, because it’s easy and obvious. What is Russia doing, what is Russia sponsoring, how is Russia manipulating the West’s open system to its own ends to influence elections?
I think part of it is just kind of old school gumshoe work, which some people are already doing — identifying fake news, reading it, trying to figure out where it’s coming from, what the slant is, and trying to connect all of those dots. Identifying propaganda themes that the Russians would likely be pushing, and then doing online investigative work as to who actually put that up and was it a genuine expression of interest about something or was it a government-sponsored operation.
A good portion of it is simply having people out there, whether it is sponsored by a government, which I think is a good idea, or private groups, which I think is also a good idea, to try to see who is out there, what governments are trying to influence things, as opposed to just individuals expressing their interests. That’s key, but it’s hard to do.
TCB: Do you have any other practical advice for the U.S. and other countries facing this? Of course, every country has their own specific relationship with Russia. But if you were writing a memo to administration officials, are there any policies or tips you would suggest?
Hall: I think if I were to draft that memo to the National Security Council or an organization like that, I think I would look at those two pieces as different sides of the same coin — the coin being protection against foreign influence. If you’re talking about trying to make sure our elections don’t get messed with again, like they were by the Russians last year, you’ve got to do that piece with maintaining the technical integrity of our voting systems.
The other side of the coin is more of a challenge because it’s harder for governments to do it, and there aren’t existing structures yet. That’s exactly what we were just talking about, people to do their online research, to identify, okay, this is a Russian-sponsored line of propaganda as opposed to some legitimate citizen or legitimate news outlet. You’ve got to put more resources into that to try to grow a piece of the government, and it could happen in a number of different places, but you’ve got to have pieces of the U.S. government that are responsible for having analysts take a look at that and say what is propaganda and what is not. And it’s really difficult.
TCB: Are there any unexpected connections with Russian disinformation, areas they’re specifically targeting, that might come as a surprise?
Hall: I think people sometimes forget that the message with regard to Russian propaganda is not the most important thing. It’s actually just the disruption of fact. And in that, they’ve been extremely successful. You talk to people now and you’ve just got a whole bunch of different facts or fact sets out there, or what people believe to be facts. And one of the things the Russians have been so successful with since they started this operation a couple years ago was just driving a wedge in that whole idea of what is fact and what can be thrown out there as a reasonable alternative to fact. Sometimes there’s not necessarily a propaganda theme as much as there is just getting it out there and stirring the pot up such that people and open societies have a real difficulty with dealing with that sort of information.
TCB: That’s even harder to combat then. If you’re not goal oriented on the opposing end, that must make it all the more difficult.
Hall: This is why propaganda and active measures from the Russian perspective are such a complicated, difficult thing. And they’ve been doing it for so long. Now, they’ve got the internet and different tools they didn’t have 50, 75 years ago, but nevertheless, they were doing it that long ago. They understand that regardless of the delivery system, whether it’s the internet or some other way, or just a newspaper or magazine, just disrupting information, causing doubt, casting aspersions, so that somebody can say, well, I read that article over here, or somebody wrote about this there, or somebody spoke about this. They understand the disruptive effect of that. And yeah, how do you counter that?
Some people in Eastern Europe have said — the Poles are working on this, too, and the position is, we have to have a better educated electorate. Better educated citizens will understand what adversarial countries are up to when they’re trying to use propaganda. But that’s a tall order.
TCB: That’s a generational issue right there.
Hall: Exactly. Are you going to try to educate the entirety of the U.S. electorate? It’s hard enough to do it on an issue like healthcare or tax reform. How do you do it on something as bizarre as foreign propaganda? It’s really hard.
TCB: Is there anything I didn’t ask or that the media isn’t getting quite right about this topic?
Hall: I think it would be a pretty significant accomplishment to be able to make a distinction between tactical things, like protecting our voting infrastructure, and trying to be able to successfully identify origin and motivation of propaganda, whether it comes from Russia or China or Iran or wherever. Those are things I think people can grasp. But when you get to that mega question, the one that overrides it, which is maybe there isn’t a specific political theme that Russia or other adversarial nations are going after, maybe they’re just out there to inject so much weirdness into how we look at facts and exchange information that that in and of itself is disruptive and plays into the Russians’ hands.
A really good example of Russia once again using propaganda themes in Europe is the recent secessionist movement in Catalonia. A secessionist, independence movement inside an established European state like Spain is a made-to-order wedge issue that the Russians jumped on quickly, because it helps advance a key strategic goal of Putin's: dividing the West. This is why you have seen Russia highlight the issue in the press, questioning how a democracy like Spain could use such "heavy-handed" and "violent" police tactics to "put down the Catalan people.” Very predictably, Russia compared the situation to Kosovo independence from Russian ally and fellow ethnic Slav country Serbia, falsely calling out “Western double standards.” Of course, the Russian propaganda machine left out the part about the ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians being the key factor in the West supporting Kosovo's independence — last I checked, Madrid was not slaughtering thousands in Catalonia.
The Catalonia situation is a great example of how Russia will continue to employ active measures whenever it perceives divisive issues in Europe, the U.S., and elsewhere.
