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Welcome to the Ethics Village.

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I'm Andrea Matwishan from Penn State, and we are incredibly lucky to have with us today Liesl Bogan from Tech Congress.

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Welcome, Liesl.

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Thank you for having me.

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I'm so excited.

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Thanks for joining us.

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So I'm gonna not talk at all after this, but if you wouldn't mind just telling us a little bit about yourself, how you got involved with tech policy, some of the exciting jobs you've had, and what you've learned from them, and how someone who's interested in following in your footsteps might be able to also get involved in tech policy work.

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And then after that, I look forward to your talk.

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Great.

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Thank you so much.

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Well, I have been working in technology for quite a while, but I didn't start there.

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My original intent was to do more global affairs, foreign policy work, and I did some of that, but I began working in new media technologies out of grad school, and then I was able to do a research fellowship at Stanford University, originally on international institutions,

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but then I began work on cybersecurity through that research, and we did a number of projects related to cybersecurity and technology.

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And then at the same time, when former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was coming out of office, she hired me to start with her a new consulting firm, and it was a boutique consulting firm, and it had technology clients from the Silicon Valley and large international banks and other organizations that needed help navigating complex challenges in emerging markets all over the world.

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So I was able to combine some of my economics background with this new technology expertise that I had to help do strategies for clients.

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At the same time, I was doing research at Stanford in a number of areas, particularly focused on cybersecurity.

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And then after that, I went to a tech company for a bit, and from there, I went back to Stanford.

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I was doing a lot of tech policy advising from that perspective because I had worked with senior government officials because the consulting firm was with former National Security Advisor Steve Hadley and former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and so the firm was Rice-Hadley-Gates.

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And so at Stanford, I was briefing members of Congress on big data issues, privacy, technology, and national security.

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And then from there, I went back to the private sector where I worked on global strategy for cybersecurity at a large professional services firm.

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And then following three years of that work and recognizing the importance of technology in the entire infrastructure in which we operate as citizens, I was compelled to join Tech Congress, which is a career technologist on the Hill.

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The fellowship is called the Congressional Innovation Fellowship, and I was a senior fellow in the office of Senator Mark Warner last year, and I advised and supported on national security issues, cybersecurity, and technology.

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After that, I was hired by Tech Congress to lead a new initiative by the organization, which is called the Congressional Digital Service, and that is an attempt to place developers on the Hill to help Congress deal with the COVID crisis currently.

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And I've been working in this research space for a long time, and I'm very excited to discuss cybersecurity and disinformation and some of the tactics and methods that are currently in use today, but also the legislative efforts to counter them.

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So with that, I will share... oh, how can you get interested?

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Sorry, I left that out.

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How can those of you who are interested in getting into this space?

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There are a number of ways you can do that.

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I think finding mentors is extremely important.

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I was really fortunate to have incredible mentors who pointed me in different directions than I may have thought of myself.

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Secondly, I think if you can look for fellowships or research internships or ways to sort of get in on the ground floor, it's really important.

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In terms of technology development, if you don't have tech skills, there are plenty of boot camps you can join.

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If you don't want to do a formal degree, you can take classes online.

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There are a lot of different courses that will teach you how to do information security or programming or coding from a variety of different perspectives and disciplines.

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I think getting involved in the information security ecosystem in terms of...

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there's a lot of InfoSec people on Twitter and on blogs and think tanks.

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I would also encourage you to look into Civic Tech, which is something I wasn't really familiar with until I was introduced to Tech Congress.

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But this is a group of technologists who are trying to work to make technology work better for the public.

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And I think that's a really important initiative and really important effort and something that I am committed to.

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Because I think the last few years have shown us technology can be an incredible force multiplier for good, but it can also be something that does quite a bit of bad in the world.

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And so belonging to organizations that are really looking at things from an ethical and public service perspective is really important and I think incredibly valuable.

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So that's... that would be my advice and feel free to contact me if you have any other questions.

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I'm going to share my screen.

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So we're going to talk about disinformation and security.

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These are obviously two different disciplines, but I'm going to talk about how they intersect and then what we do with them from a legislative perspective.

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I'll briefly give you a history of disinformation, some of the methods and tactics that are used, why I think we should take a more of a security versus a content approach to the problem, some of the global regulatory efforts that are in use today, and then what the U.S.

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regulatory approach to methods and tactics is currently.

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So the history of disinformation is very old.

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It goes back into the 1800s.

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Russia had monitored all internal and external communications, including those clear way back until way back until they were in the tsars.

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In the 19th century, Russia, the Ministry of Internal Affairs had a cryptanalytic division that analyzes encrypted, potentially anti-tsarist communications using code books that were purchased on the black market.

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This sort of dark information market existed not just in Russia but elsewhere, but they were quite good at organizing it.

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Tsar Alexander I gave credit to a Russian cryptanalyst for the defeat of Napoleon way back in 1812.

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Although by the early 1900s, Russian cryptography was far superior to any other world power, some of their disinformation tactics developed by the Russians after World War II were then gleaned from Russia by the military, German military, and the German military had a division that was dedicated to creating false military plans that were intended to confuse the enemy.

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So some people will trace disinformation efforts to Nazi Germany.

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The Russian word for disinformation includes all deception, except for camouflage.

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They made an exception for camouflage, but it meant any type of deception, and it quickly became part of their military operations with the intent to confuse and pollute the opinion-making process in the West.

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Many Russians believe that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was due to a deliberate information attack perpetrated by the West, and Timothy L Thomas notes that Russians perceived the Cold War as a war of information in which the West conquered the Soviet Union.

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So there's this deep sense that information had been weaponized against them, and it was fair play to weaponize it back against the West.

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So there are different concepts that we'll be talking about today, and they exist within fairly distinct domains that all sort of have overlapping Venn diagrams, although my Venn diagrams are quite overlapping, but those involve information and influence operations,

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which are often confused with this information.

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That is the state-sponsored collection of tactical information about an adversary, as well as the dissemination of propaganda in pursuit of a competitive advantage over an opponent.

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So it's very systematic and very strategic.

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Disinformation is deliberate, usually state-sponsored, false information used to mislead and deceive.

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Cybersecurity is a completely different, separate domain, and that is the domain of security that protects networks, devices, and data, as many of you know.

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But there's also this sort of subset that has become a big part of this discipline, which is what I and others have called cyber-enabled disinformation, and that's using digitized methods to spread deliberate false information intended to deceive.

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Some of the regulations and authorities that govern these domains are Title 50 of the NDAA, which proposed international standards to U.S.

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federal regulations, and then there are several other authorities that guide information operations in the intelligence community, throughout international law, within the State Department that they rely on, and a number of other executive agencies.

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We are just going to discuss the global anti-disinformation and U.S.

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anti-disinformation regulatory efforts, not sort of the broader frameworks which exist.

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So this brief history of Russian and Soviet disinformation.

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In the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviets created an enormous influence in intelligence apparatus across the globe.

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They were poor, they were relatively weak during that time, but they built these organizations, some of which were overt, some of which were covert, throughout the world, that were able to challenge all the major powers of Europe, and that the United States and most,

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without the knowledge of the United States and most of Europe.

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They used this apparatus, it was called, to accomplish a lot in the 1970s and 1980s.

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They were nearly able to split Europe and split NATO in Europe in the 1980s, and they began those efforts in the last year of the Carter administration, and continued those efforts into the Reagan years.

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When communication information was digitized, Russia's functional approach to monitoring and manipulating information didn't change.

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It actually just accelerated it and made it faster and more efficient.

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But in 1981, Reagan established the Active Measures Working Group to fight back against the global Soviet subversion efforts.

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This was a really enlightened approach.

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The Active Measures Working Group was created as an interagency working group, so it was chaired by the State Department, but it included representatives from what was then called the U.S.

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Information Agency.

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We don't have one anymore, but I actually think it's quite an important institution.

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The CIA, the FBI, the DIA, the DOD, and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

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All of these groups came together to counter Russian disinformation efforts around the world, and they realized that this was a really complex problem, and it required a multi-layered approach.

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So despite the public interest in the Active Measures Working Group and U.S.

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successes, because it actually received quite a lot of positive responses from the U.S.

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public, Americans really liked this effort, but the Soviet Union continued to successfully distribute disinformation.

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Some examples of that, of those successes include the U.S.

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claims and beliefs that were spread all over the world that the United States military had created AIDS and released it as a weapon.

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That story gained considerable traction throughout the world.

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By the end of 1985, there were articles published in 13 countries that made these claims.

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In 1986, it hadn't reached 50 countries, so one year later.

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By 1987, the story had been published over 40 times in official Soviet press and was reprinted or rebroadcast in 80 countries in over 30 different languages, and they didn't retract the story until 1987, but it had already, you know, done its damage quite all over the world.

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In January of 1987, the Soviets launched another disinformation campaign, so as soon as they retracted that one, they started a new one, or earlier they started a new one that was aimed at convincing people that the CIA had perpetrated the November 1978 mass suicide at Jonestown,

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Indiana.

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They also ran false allegations of the United States development and use of biological weapons, and that the United States was importing Latin American children, butchering them, and using their body parts for organ transplants.

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These stories ran repeatedly in the Soviet press and were picked up worldwide.

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We'll see how this is similar to events today.

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So there's the pre-digital Soviet disinformation method and the post-digital toolkit, and they are actually quite similar.

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So the pre-digital toolkit, they used a lot of forgeries.

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They often use them to discredit or malign influential figures, particularly those affiliated with the United States Information Agency.

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In a report to Congress in 1987, it noted that the Soviet Union had mailed a forged letter to the Washington Post and the U.S.

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News and World Report, who then picked up those stories and ran with them.

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The document purported to be a letter between U.S.

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Information Agency official Herbert Romanstein to Senator David F.

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Durenberger, who was a former chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, or SISI.

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The letter, dated April 29, 1986, described an alleged United States Information Agency campaign to spread this information on the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster.

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It was designed to discredit U.S.

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government and damage our relationships with Europe.

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They also used a lot of PR firms.

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Back in the 1980s, the Washington Post reported that Moscow had approached several PR firms in the United States to help represent their narratives to the U.S.

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public.

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They relied significantly on amplification.

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Disinformation narratives would be circulated domestically and infringe publications and then slowly move toward the mainstream publications, like the Washington Post and U.S.

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News and World Report and previous examples.

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There was a lot of media manipulation, the cultivation of reporters, getting reporters to pick up stories, investigate, and report on them.

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There were a number of front organizations.

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They were established to look like legitimate organizations, but they actually had disinformation purposes.

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Then there's the Post Digital Toolkit, which is actually very similar.

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Again, they're utilizing amplification, PR firms, forgeries, media manipulation, and front organizations.

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As you can see, this clip is from Twitter, and it was when the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs was accusing a white helmets worker of being an agent of Britain's MI6.

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And they continued to perpetuate this false information and actually did quite a lot of damage to him.

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This has some contemporary references.

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So, coronavirus and COVID-19, some recent examples related to a Chinese government official starting to circulate the narrative that the United States military brought the epidemic to war, in spite that being debunked by a number of other sources.

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Reuters reported on disinformation campaigns by Russia, Russian state media, and pro-Kremlin outlets regarding COVID-19.

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And they really pointed out that the aim of the Kremlin was to aggravate public health crisis in Western countries, in line with the Kremlin's broader strategy of attempting to subvert European societies.

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Again, it has a long history of this.

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We also saw other disinformation on platforms like Twitter.

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This is an example of the Chinese Communist Party capitalizing on the real rise in racism against Asian Americans in the U.S.

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Apparently there were a lot of videos of Asian Americans saying that there was a Chinese American brigade had had to be formed because violent white riots were attacking Chinese Americans in Los Angeles.

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This was proven false, although obviously there is quite a bit of racism being

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directed toward Asian Americans, unfortunately.

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Computational influence and digital disinformation.

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So what do we mean by that?

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It's kind of a word salad.

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So it's obviously not just Russia.

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Every state actor gets involved in this type of information operations.

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It's Russia, China, India, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela have all been identified by social media platforms as being engaged in these methods targeted at other states.

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And they're not just doing it to the U.S.

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They do it to each other.

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It's a global effort.

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And the things that the platforms have pointed out are the amplification efforts, where they use artificial amplification and media amplification.

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So those are artificial amplification is when you take a bot or you use some sort of scripted algorithm to make it seem as if something is more popular than it actually is or has a broader audience than it actually has.

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There's media amplification, so where something starts out marginally as a small story on a blog or website and eventually is migrated through manipulation into more mainstream media forms.

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There are bot farms.

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And what bot farms?

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I'll go into those a little more in a moment .

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Astro-turfing, troll farms, dark ads, deep fakes, fake accounts, either sock puppets or social bots.

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Again, the terms and language to describe this type of behavior is evolving as this is sort of a new space.

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And then this concept of brigading .

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I'll go into those a little bit more detail in the next slides.

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So fake accounts, those are quite popular on online platforms.

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In November of 2019, Facebook grew 5.4 billion accounts that said were fake.

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It reported up to five percent of its monthly user base, so nearly 2.5 billion were fake accounts.

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There are a number of sock puppets, which is an online identity used for the purpose of deceiving.

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So it looks like it's a real person and then it isn't actually.

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The CEO of Whole Foods was convicted of engaging in this behavior in 2007.

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The CEO of Hollinger International was found guilty of mail fraud and obstruction of justice as well.

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The social bots are sometimes described as algorithmic software programs designed to interact with humans, so like chatbots, but in this case they often have more autonomy.

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And those aren't always nefarious, but sometimes they can be when people don't know what they're interacting with.

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And much of this can sometimes be very positive, really great, it's just oftentimes when it's used with a nefarious or manipulative intent it becomes problematic.

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So this is a quick clip of a video made by an American YouTube channel called cleantv.com and it was reposted by a Russia-linked Facebook page called Secured Borders.

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And so you see a lot of cross-platform pollination as well with these.

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So amplification, this is a another area where there's a lot of studies that are going into how artificial amplification, so when you take information or narrative and you use a scripted method to distribute it more widely than it than it normally would,

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and that's often used often by using fake accounts or bots which aren't even real accounts .

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There's media or platform amplification like I discussed before where, you know, it migrates from fringed platforms to mainstream media platforms.

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An example of amplification having really dire consequences is the case of Facebook in Burma.

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And so the Rohingya Muslims in Burma and Myanmar were driven out of the country.

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They were raped and slaughtered by the military in a genocide that was orchestrated through artificial amplification of this information.

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So it was and some of it was done by the military.

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They were creating fake accounts spreading false information about the Rohingya and Facebook wasn't able to shut that down before many of them had been slaughtered.

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Bot farms and wet bot farms, those are they're entities that are created by a scripted behavior that enable machines to do rote operations to upvote or download music or videos or products online or to otherwise automatically create the false impression of popularity or the false impression of an audience that may not actually exist.

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Wet bot farms are people who engage in similar rote operations to accomplish a task like upvoting music or downloading videos.

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So it's not a script that's running, it's an actual person that's following direction.

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And those two play a particularly destructive role when used to falsely amplify messages that are destructive, but it's also a false form of approval.

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So you may not, you may purchase a product on Amazon thinking that it has x numbers of positive reviews when many of those reviews might not actually be positive or a piece of music may seem incredibly popular, but like here's an example.

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So these are all cell phones that are playing music or they're downloading apps or they're upvoting music.

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But as you can see, these aren't actual people connected to those.

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It's a bunch of cell phones that are doing it with a scripted behavior that's connected to all of them.

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So troll farms and brigading.

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You can use bot farms, but you can also use sock puppets, which is a sort of new term, but Oxford researchers called fake armies of fake online influencers manufactured consensus.

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So that's when it looks like a ton of people agree or think one thing about something, but it's actually not a ton of people.

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It's a fake army of influencers.

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Troll farms usually refer to state-sponsored anonymous accounts for stock puppets or bots that engage in biased commentary.

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Brigading, that's when they can identify a target and gang up on them or that attempt to drown out online commentary by sheer volume through harassment or other methods.

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And brigading is an online harassment technique.

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There's a vote brigading as well.

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It's a massively coordinated online voting either with scores or approval ratings and it creates a false impression of approval where there maybe isn't such an impression.

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And there is often tied to what people call perception hacking.

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So there's astroturfing as well.

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This was a term coined in 1985 by Senator Lloyd Vincent of Texas and it occurs both online and offline.

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It's a political activity designed to appear as if it's unsolicited or autonomous political engagement.

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So people will be paid to express their opinions, paid to show up at a town hall, paid to create the impression of an organic grassroots effort when in fact it's not that.

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Several American corporations and political campaigns have engaged in astroturfing and it's often difficult from an intellectual, academic, or practical perspective to distinguish it from certain types of advertising.

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There is this concept called dark ads and what it is are precisely targeted ads that don't show up on a user's timeline or feed organically.

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Facebook invented them but all platforms use them.

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So following Cambridge Analytica and blowback from the platform's role in the Brexit campaign, Facebook and Twitter developed an ad transparency tool that allows all ads run on the platform to be visible.

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Targeted online advertising, algorithmic bias, and discrimination are highly problematic.

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And we have examples of these.

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They'll create a psychographic profile of someone.

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So if you see here in this slide, you can drill down the specific type of consumer that you want to advertise to or political participant that you want to target by saying a French and English speaking woman ages between the ages of 31 and 56 located in the 10 mile radius of Boston,

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Massachusetts who works either from home or from a small office in the retail production industry.

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I mean if you look through this, this drills down to their their fit moms and green moms.

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They have great grade school kids.

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They live in a condo down to the exact square feet of that condo.

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What they enjoy doing for their activities.

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And you can get even to the types of travel apps and specific types of travel that are on their phone and that they've used.

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And this is a level of specificity that a lot of consumers aren't aware is being used against them to target ads to them.

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There's this other concept of deep fakes, shallow fakes.

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So deep fakes use artificial intelligence or fake videos or photos of real people.

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And it often uses neural network AI.

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There's three types.

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There are three types.

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Generative, adversarial networks, GANs, autoencoders, and VAEs, variational autoencoders.

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Google's DeepMind showed that the VAE could outperform GANs on face generation.

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Variational autoencoders are capable of both compressing data like an auto encoder and synthesizing data like a GAN.

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However, GANs generate data in fine granular detail and images created by VAEs tend to be more blurred.

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Shallow fakes are doctored videos that are less dramatic like the speaker Pelosi video.

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And what researchers have been telling us is that a lot of the time what the hardest part about deep fakes actually often isn't the images but the voices and the sounds and getting those to mimic the actual intonations.

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Here's an example of a deep fake.

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At the beginning, before anything, you get together and you read through the script.

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And so it's like, you know, all these heavyweights like, you know, Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Robert Denny Jr.

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Everybody at the end is like me.

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You know, like, hey, happy to be here, guys.

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And some other supporting guys.

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And then Tom Cruise walks in and even those guys are like, whoa, and he's super stoked to be there.

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You know, he's like, yeah, oh, oh, you know, like, he's like, wow.

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He's immediately excited when he walks into a room.

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And so he comes over and he sits next to me and I think he had been briefed on some of the supporting guys, but he was like trying to place me, you know.

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So he sat down next to me.

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He's like, I

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love your work.

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And I went, oh, thanks.

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I love your work, too, Tom Cruise.

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So as you can see, it's a very impressive manipulation of that media.

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So some of the technical issues with addressing this information, as considered by Congress, are the identity validation piece, financial transactions, spoofing, VPNs, bot detection technologies, SAM detection, and sentiment analysis, network analysis,

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and behavior analysis.

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I'll just briefly...

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I think all of these involve constitutional rights.

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So identity validation, forcing individuals to validate their identity online, has a lot of benefits for a variety of groups, but also has a lot of problems for those who believe in the First Amendment right to anonymity online.

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Financial transactions are difficult because they're layered on many of these platforms, so it's not always clear who made the payments and where they came from.

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Another problem that members of Congress thought, well, if you just identify the individual where they are based , are they in the U.S., are they in the U.S., or are they in, you I've had a number of members say, like, if I'm in engaging with somebody,

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I want to know if I'm talking to an American or if I'm if I'm talking to a Russian operative.

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Well, the problem with that is that you can't always tell.

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There's spoofing, you can use VPNs, and people all over the world use these.

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Bot detection technologies have developed considerably.

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There is an enormous amount of, depending on how you define bot, but there there's an incredible amount of work that has been done in this space, and the techniques are very sophisticated, but at the same time, things get through.

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There's also spam detection and sentiment analysis.

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These also involve constitutional considerations given the privacy issues involved in sentiment analysis, and that's where certain types of language can be, and behavior online can be analyzed to assess whether or not you are positive towards something or negative.

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It works really well with some of the targeted advertising.

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Obviously, network and behavioral analysis, those are those are ways to look at the kind of broader infrastructure in which some of this activity is happening, and Congress does consider it when they're thinking about bills and ways to control some of this,

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some of the problems that are created by some of this behavior online.

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So there are a lot of First Amendment issues with addressing disinformationist content, and so I think going after the content on these platforms is never the right approach.

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Doing a content -neutral approach is always best, if possible, because of the First Amendment.

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So the First Amendment issues involved in regulating disinformation online include the right of the users, but also includes the right of the companies, and it protects, the First Amendment protects anonymity.

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It protects against compelled speech.

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The government can't make you say anything.

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So often, companies will fight disclosure laws that are often well-intended efforts at transparency, but because the government can't compel you to speak about something, they'll fight it.

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SCOTUS has historically allowed greater regulation of commercial speech, but since the 70s, it has been increasingly protective of commercial speech, which has been an interesting development.

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And SCOTUS, the Supreme Court of the United States, has sometimes upheld laws that regulate speech if it's part of a larger regulatory scheme focused on conduct, and only incidentally, verbal speech.

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It's also allowed regulation of speech in a commercial context if there's a reasonable government interest in compelling factual and uncontroversial information.

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So I say that addressing disinformation is a security rather than a content problem.

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So over the history of cybersecurity and infrastructure security, we've developed this perimeterless security.

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So organizations realize that traditional perimeters for information security, like firewalls, signature-based anti-malware, those approaches were becoming less effective, particularly as you have a more mobile workforce.

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So traditional cybersecurity defenses leave organizations vulnerable to what many call the Maginot Line problem .

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And the Maginot Line was a military work of genius.

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It was this wall that was supposed to surround France , and everyone thought it was impenetrable, but the bottom piece was supposed to be this forest that nobody could get through, but the Germans just went around the wall.

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And in many cases, organizations would design their cybersecurity infrastructure in such a way that they had, well, we have the best firewalls, we have the best security, and then an adversary would just go around it or move laterally within it.

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So I think that content and speech is a Maginot Line, that when we attack content or narrowly-scoped methods of deterrence without thinking about the infrastructure or the consequences, I think state actors can simply go around our defenses.

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And I also think it looks like when some of the legislation considered to address some of these problems can often look like the authoritarian laws we have seen in other parts of the world.

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And I'm going to briefly go over those.

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So global regulation of disinformation.

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There are 54 countries have introduced legislation to address disinformation online.

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16 of them have enacted or introduced some form of fake news or misinformation laws.

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France, Belarus, Bangladesh, China, Kenya, Burkina Faso, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Egypt, Germany, India, Myanmar, Singapore, and the United States.

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So France's... I'm going to go over just a few.

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I'm not going to make you go through all these countries.

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I'll just go through a few.

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But France's disinformation law emerged as a number of disinformation efforts were directed toward the French president.

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In 2018, they passed a law that provides a definition of fake news, which is inexact allegations or imputations for news that falsely reports facts with the aim of changing the sincerity of a vote.

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It's designed to enact strict rules on the media during electoral campaigns and more specifically in a three-month proceeding in the vote.

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They made changes to the draft law in July 2018 to account for satire.

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So as you can see, like, satire would have definitely fallen under some of those restrictions, so they had to make a change.

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The legislation gives authorities the power to remove fake content spread via social media and block the sites that publish it, as well as enforce more financial transparency for sponsored content.

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In the three months before the election period, it builds upon an 1881 law that outlines dissemination of false news.

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There's a long history of false news in the world, as well as disinformation.

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As you can see, it has three major provisions and it borrows from the Honest Ads Act, actually, of the United States.

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So what's also interesting is that a lot of legislatures around the world, whether they're democratic or not, will borrow from each other's legislation.

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And in this case, they use some provisions from the Honest Ad Act to apply existing standards for TV and radio and apply them to social media, which I actually think is a fantastic idea.

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It allows political candidates to sue for removal of contested material, but again, because it is a restriction on speech, it is hot...

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the whole bill is hotly contested.

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Singapore has an anti- misinformation law, and this one criminalizes the dissemination of false information online.

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It is one of the more comprehensive and aggressive pieces of legislation in the world.

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It passed 72 to 9 in Singapore's parliament, and it makes it illegal to spread false statements of fact in Singapore that compromise security, public tranquility, which I find particularly problematic, public safety, and the country's relations with other nations.

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It punishes people who post false information with heavy fines and even jail time.

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This law has been condemned by a number of human rights groups and publications for unduly limiting free speech.

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It lets the government demand publication of corrections alongside allegedly false claims.

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It also outlaws the spread of misinformation on private messaging apps and gives the government the power to remove false content that undermines public trust, so it increases surveillance tenfold, although it's obviously a surveillance state as it is.

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It is quite comprehensive, but what's also problematic is that I found in the law itself it utilizes terms that were published by the social media platforms, things like coordinated inauthentic behavior, CIB.

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That type of language originates with U.S.

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companies and then it's adopted by foreign states for their legislations to regulate behaviors in perhaps a way that maybe the social media companies weren't necessarily intending.

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The U.S.

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regulatory efforts on disinformation, because of all the constraints that I mentioned before, the complexity of the language issues, the different domains that they operate, there are a number of ways why it's been harder for the government to legislate on some of this activity.

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First of all, when it comes to social media companies, the government is...

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the social media companies are not the government.

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They're not violating the First Amendment by imposing restrictions on speech.

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It's when the government forces a social media company to impose those restrictions that there's a lot of legal problems that Dr.

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Matwishan could probably elaborate on much better than I could.

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Some of these provisions are the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act.

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That was included in the National Defense Authorization Act in 2017.

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The H.R.

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5910, Defend Against Russian Disinformation and Aggression Act.

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We have the Honest Ads Act, the Deepfake Report Act, the Malicious Deepfake Prohibition Act in 2018, and Defending each... this is a deepfake , so they turned it into an acronym, which is quite clever.

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Again, Congress wants to act on some of these bad behaviors that are having negative consequences, and they've been doing a lot more in the last few years.

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But again, it's quite complex.

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So this bill, Countering Foreign Propaganda in the NDAA, that was introduced by Senator Rob Portman and Senator Murphy.

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The bill created a grant program for NGOs, think tanks, civil society, and other active groups outside of government who are engaged in counter-propaganda-related work.

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I actually think we need to do... this great under the State Department, but I do think we need some form of a U .S.

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Information Agency, just to take a more holistic approach, so that it requires that all executive agencies, like the former Working Group, come together and consider solutions for this ecosystem in a coordinated manner.

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We had the Honest Ads Act, as I mentioned, adopted by France.

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It was introduced by Senator Klobuchar, Senator Lindsey Graham, and Senator Warner in 2018.

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And it helps prevent foreign interference in election advertising.

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And it amends the definition of electioneering communication in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 to include paid internet and digital advertisements.

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A lot of these problems are a result of old legislation not being updated for new technologies.

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I encountered this early on in my career at a studio in Hollywood.

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They had a whole framework for television and music rights, but that was pre-digital.

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And when we had introduced streaming and downloading, all the licenses that applied to television shows, movies, their music that accompanied them, those were all completely outdated.

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So when we started analyzing that, and how do you... you can't go through and renegotiate every single license.

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Most of the studios in Hollywood, the one I worked at, but as well as many others, renegotiated those licenses based on a framework that looked at the new media technology landscape and said a download is equivalent to a VHS, for example, and streaming is equivalent to a broadcast license.

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So they were able to expedite some of the framework, expedite some of the licensing in that way.

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But I think a lot of legislation in Congress right now could be expedited if we simply updated some of the older legislation for a new technology environment.

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Because as you know, technology moves very, very quickly.

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So yeah, these are the other requirements.

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And it also, you know, required them to make every reasonable effort to ensure that foreign individuals and entities are not purchasing political advertisements in order to influence the American electorate.

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Seems like a small ask, but as again, the purchasing piece of this is quite difficult sometimes online, trying to validate who's buying what and how.

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The Deep Fakes Report Act was passed in the Senate by unanimous consent, which means that it was introduced and everyone, something that passes by unanimous consent, if no one objects, then it passes.

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And it was passed by Senator Portman, Schatz, Joni Ernst, Martin Heinrich, Senator Gardner, Senator Peters, Senator Rounds, and Senator Hassan.

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And that required the Department of Homeland Security to publish an annual report on the use of deepfake technologies that would be required to include an assessment of how both foreign governments and domestic groups are using deepfakes and digital forgeries to harm national security and mislead the American people.

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Now that's just a report, and Congress will do this a lot.

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They'll issue a... they'll pass something that requires an executive agency to create a report to help inform the public a little bit better.

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So this is the Malicious Deepfake Prohibition Act.

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It was introduced by Senator Ben Sasse in 2018, and it was supposed to create a new criminal offense related to the creation or distribution of fake electronic media records.

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It was criticized at the time for being sloppy and poorly thought through, but in fairness to them, you know, these are brand new concepts and ideas and, you know, there may be flaws, but the... but I do think that Congress just needs better resources to help them inform their decisions.

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There's the Defending Each and Every Person from False Appearances by Keeping Exploitation Subject to Accountability Act of 2019.

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This was... would require intentionally deceptive content creators to label videos with the digital watermark and written disclaimer informing its viewers that the content has been manipulated.

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That is... it does provide a legal course of action against content creators while also giving people who have been portrayed in deepfake videos a private right of action.

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Some of this was considered unenforceable, as we go into that.

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The Defend Against Russian Disinformation Aggression Act.

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This bill has included a package of bills in the House to secure America from Russian Interference Act of 2018, and it includes 17 bills to address subversive Russian activities.

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Congress... when people say Congress doesn't do anything, it's not entirely true.

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They wrote 17 bills to try to address the problem.

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It included legislation to codify the State Department Sanctions Office, and it required reporting on Putin's fake accounts and authorized... enhanced NATO cooperation, which is... I think allied cooperation is really important.

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The 2020 Technology Legislative Agenda.

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These are just some of the things that early in 2020 we identified as, you know, efforts that Congress would try to tackle.

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And this was before COVID, and, you know, another crisis had... a social justice crisis had emerged.

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So that includes trying to craft a federal data privacy framework, a greater shift toward consumer protection rather than disinformation protection.

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We... I suspected that House is still actively considering breaking up the... well, they are actively considering breaking up the big technology companies, and you may have seen the hearing more recently.

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We highlighted COPPRA, the Consumer Online Protection Act.

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Senator Cantwell torpedoed this a few times in 2018, but the sticking point remains that the private right of action for consumers if platforms misuse their data is a non-starter for Republicans.

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The House version of the Honest Ads Act will continue to be debated.

362
00:44:39,750 --> 00:44:46,670
Senator Warner introduced the Detour Act, the Access Act, and Josh Hawley... and with Josh Hawley, the Smart Act.

363
00:44:46,730 --> 00:44:51,290
The Detour Act is about dark patterns.

364
00:44:51,290 --> 00:44:56,770
That was to try to address manipulative design on websites.

365
00:44:56,770 --> 00:45:00,550
The Access Act was an interoperability bill.

366
00:45:00,550 --> 00:45:04,450
The senator wanted to make it easier to move your data from one platform to another.

367
00:45:04,450 --> 00:45:19,930
And I think we'll continue to see this movement toward the incremental breaking up of large tech companies and or antitrust reform, but I think the tone of the 2020 legislative agenda has shifted due to COVID and families trying to work from home and relying so heavily on technology.

368
00:45:19,930 --> 00:45:25,430
So I just want to ensure that that's probably going to continue to shape the public debate.

369
00:45:25,710 --> 00:45:28,510
And that is all I have.

370
00:45:30,890 --> 00:45:31,950
There we go.

371
00:45:31,950 --> 00:45:32,950
Thank you.

372
00:45:34,490 --> 00:45:39,330
Thank you so much, Liesl, for joining us today and for that amazing talk.

373
00:45:39,330 --> 00:45:43,210
And Q&A with you follows after this.

374
00:45:43,470 --> 00:45:44,750
Thanks so much.