Hacking Your Vote

The Russian campaign to undermine Canadian democracy

Hacking Your Vote The Russian campaign to undermine Canadian democracy 24

Sometime in 2016, reports circulated on social media about three highly trained teams that had slipped into the Donetsk People’s Republic, in eastern Ukraine. While the teams had paperwork linking them to the local health ministry, they were, in fact, commandos with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, tasked with infiltrating one of the world’s most active military conflicts. The republic had declared its independence from Ukraine in 2014, largely with the help of Russia, which provided the separatists with funds and guns. Thousands, including scores of civilians, had died in the fighting between rebels and Ukrainian forces.

The tactical units, composed of some twenty special-forces operators, had been sent to raid separatist positions, sabotage the republic’s infrastructure, and eliminate the country’s eastern checkpoints. It was a surgical military effort to incapacitate the breakaway region. Something went wrong. One unit tripped a mine, alerting the Donetsk troops to its presence. Snipers took aim at the Canadians. Another unit was detected around the same time, and it was hit by heavy machine-gun fire. The third retreated soon after. In all, eleven special forces were killed in the raid, making it one of the Canadian military’s deadliest incidents since it left Afghanistan. Trouble is, hardly a word of it is true. Yes, Canada has dispatched troops to Ukraine as part of a joint initiative with the United States and United Kingdom to train Ukrainian security services after Moscow annexed Crimea, a large peninsula in the country’s south. And yes, thousands have died in the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine since 2013. But no Canadian personnel have seen combat. In the two years since it first surfaced, the Donetsk story has travelled throughout the internet — an English translation was shared over 3,000 times on Facebook alone. A similar story blew up on pro-russia websites this past May. The new iteration, which spread even more widely, suggested that three Canadian soldiers were killed after their car hit a land mine while they were being escorted by the Ukrainian military. These stories are, in the purest sense, fake news: fabricated reportage made to look credible. Specifically, they were lies that advanced many of Russia’s preferred narratives with regards to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the military alliance of European and North American democracies founded after the Second World War. The Kremlin, for example, wants to paint NATO as a dangerous and oppressive aggressor, an occupying force locals should be afraid of. It’s a narrative designed, in part, to weaken Ukraine’s will to resist Russia and, by sparking tensions with host countries, discourage Canada and others from continuing their foreign deployments so close to Russia’s border. If the Donetsk story had worked, and Canadians and Ukrainians had believed it, it would have incited allegations of a cover-up —allegations that NATO was lying about the high cost Canadians were paying to protect Ukrainians. But while the hoaxes fizzled — CTV News published comments from the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces debunking the original Donetsk story the day after it appeared online — there are no assurances that the next piece of Russian disinformation won’t go viral. Moscow, and the vast network of cybertrolls and hackers who operate at varying degrees of closeness to the state, are armed with an arsenal of tactics to boost their version of reality and sow discord around the world. They’re using searchengine-optimization strategies to circulate conspiracy theories, some of them complete nonsense (such as that the US is readying for all-out nuclear war against Russia or that Western firms are using microchip implants to make employees docile). They’re setting up sophisticated social-media campaigns to make their ideas appear popular. They’re spreading the information to a wide array of sites, seemingly across the political spectrum, to create the illusion of consensus. They’re setting up fake think tanks to make it seem as though governments and media are on the wrong side of academic research. It is a campaign, and it is well organized. A 2017 summary of the Kremlin disinformation threat by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service sets up the conflict starkly: “There are no front lines — the war is total — and there is no neutrality.” In the US, cybertrolls tied to Russian disinformation operations carried out an aggressive effort aimed at putting Donald Trump in the White House. In Western Europe, similar troll accounts have promoted antiestablishment parties regardless of whether they’re pro-moscow: they’ve boosted Spain’s Catalan independence movement and built up Brexit chatter in the UK. In the Baltics, Russian-language, Kremlinbacked media have attempted to turn local populations against NATO. Wherever it can, Russia has tried to pull countries into its sphere of influence. President Vladimir Putin, a KGB veteran, has shown particular skill not only at leveraging Russia’s various intelligence agencies but also at overseeing an arms-length state run by oligarchs close to his regime. There are many layers to his work. And that work may be finding a receptive audience. According to a 2015 Pew Research survey, the populations of many NATO countries are divided about using military force against Russia to defend a NATO ally. European countries including France, Germany, and Sweden have taken direct action to fight fake news. Governments are increasingly supporting, and sometimes subsidizing, legitimate news media while simultaneously drafting tougher regulations to combat hate speech and distortion online. The US and the UK, meanwhile, have tried to counter Putin’s attempts at plausible deniability by taking the unique step of releasing actual intelligence reports describing Russian interference and providing consistent updates on cyberattacks and espionage. In that context, Canada comes across as surprisingly unconcerned. After all the tough talk from Ottawa about ensuring radical transparency on political advertising and auditing Facebook’s handling of its users’ personal data in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal — in which a company amassed information on tens of millions of people for the purpose of targeting ads to potential voters — the

One play from Russia could be to help elect a kind of Manchurian candidate in the vein of Donald Trump.

government has introduced no meaningful regulations applied to social-media companies. Maybe the most noteworthy effort to fight fake news in Canada is Facebook’s decision topartner with media organizations to help it factcheck suspicious content on its platform. A positive step, given Facebook’s status as the favoured disinformation tool, but one that, on its own, could prove inadequate, given the sheer volume of propaganda that agents are pumping out. According to statements made to US Congress by the social-media company in 2017, Russian-linked posts reached 126 million users in the US over a two-year period spanning the 2016 presidential election. Faced with that output, the pick-andchoose strategy of news verification is like using one traffic cop to stop accidents on a highway where the speed limit is 200 kilometres per hour. There are reasons for Canada to be complacent. The country’s political climate is muted compared to the tumult in America and Europe. Our russophone population is small compared to Eastern Europe’s, meaning Moscow would have limited success piping Russian-language propaganda into the country. But we’re mistaken if we think Russia doesn’t have an active interest here. Canada is an Arctic power, a founding partner of NATO, a close ally of Ukraine, and the next-door neighbour of the US. Perhaps most importantly, Canada has participated in sanctions against Russia that have cost the country billions of rubles. Last June, the Communications Security Establishment — a Canadian spy agency that dates back to the start of the Cold War — published a report on the high possibility of cyberattacks in the lead up to the 2019 election. “Cyber threat activity against the democratic process is increasing around the world,” the report warns. “And Canada is not immune.” One play from Russia here could be to help elect a kind of Manchurian candidate — a sympathetic partner in the vein of Donald Trump or former French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen. A proPutin prime minister might pull Ottawa back from NATO, maybe open the door to Russian military expansion