Allies can help fight foreign election interference
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 Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir 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 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 nationstates 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.”
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 As 51 per cent of Canadians receive news from digital sources first, and editors have been replaced by algorithms that are susceptible to disinformation campaigns fuelled by bots and troll farms.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.
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.
Where we are confronted with a common threat to our core values and institutions, collaboration with our allies is essential.