Senators say US, allies will resist aggression
Mark Warner, Marco Rubio: No excuses, we must be ready for Russia
The Kremlin has been conducting information warfare or “active measures” against the West for decades. What’s new are the social media tools with the reach and power to magnify propaganda and false information with a scale and precision that would have been unimaginable back in the days of the Berlin Wall.
The Soviet Politburo could only have dreamed of the capability Russia now has to target voters directly in the U.S., Europe and other democracies with propaganda, misinformation and disinformation. Twenty-first century social media tools have the potential to further erode public confidence in western institutions and undermine the shared sense of facts that is supposed to be the foundation of honest political debate.
In 2016, we were taken by surprise. In 2018, there are no excuses. We must be ready. That’s why we’re teaming up with legislators from Canada and Europe to sound the alarm. We’re meeting in Washington today, the same day as President Donald Trump’s Helsinki summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Our goal is to demonstrate that the community of democratic nations does not intend to accede to any authoritarian’s view of the world. We will resist Russia’s aggression.
As elected officials, we must use our investigative tools and public platforms to expose the full scale and scope of Russia’s schemes to weaken democracies. The two of us are involved in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan effort to uncover Russia’s activities during the 2016 elections and publicly detail its array of asymmetric capabilities. Similarly, our colleagues in the British Parliament are conducting an inquiry on “fake news” and how it was used by both foreign and domestic actors to influence the Brexit vote.
But it is not enough simply to spotlight Russian aggression. As legislators, we also are responsible for passing laws to protect our democracy. There is little doubt that our own government and laws have not kept pace with tech- nological change. The magnitude of this challenge is poised only to expand with improvements in artificial intelligence, machine learning and related advancements like “deep fake” video manipulation. This technology can literally put words in someone’s mouth, creating a false narrative that can spread across the globe in minutes.
As our committee has helped establish, a key goal of Russian disinformation is to fracture the ability of open societies to reach social and political consensus — an objective significantly furthered when Americans can no longer believe “their lying eyes.” If we hope to stay resilient against these threats, we’ll need laws that keep up.
Our committee has put forward several bipartisan proposals to improve election security and ensure that the intelligence community does a better job of tracking, sharing and responding to efforts by any foreign power to influence our elections, including through social media. Among them are making clear to adversaries that attacking our election infrastructure is a hostile act and we will respond accordingly, and to states that they should replace outdated, vulnerable voting systems.
We also have a responsibility to ensure our respective governments are ready to track and attack the ongoing threat from influence operations. Finally, we have a responsibility as public officials to raise awareness and make sure the voting public is fully informed of how our adversaries are trying to manipulate us. But social media companies also have a civic responsibility to prevent abuse from proliferating on their platforms and to inform users when they’ve been exposed to it.
We in the U.S. have much to learn about Russian tactics from our allies across the Atlantic who are on the front lines of Russian information operations. Putin wants to divide us — both internally, here at home, and externally, from our transatlantic friends. Legislators from across the NATO alliance will send him a strong and direct message that it won’t work.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., is vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Sen. Marco Rubio, RFla., is a member of the Intelligence and Foreign Relations committees.