Welcome to the Ethics Village. I'm Andrea Matwishan from Penn State,
and we are incredibly lucky to have with us today Liesl Bogan from Tech Congress.
Welcome, Liesl. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited. Thanks for joining us.
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. And then after that,
I look forward to your talk. Great. Thank you so much. Well, I have been
working in technology for quite a while, but I didn't start there.
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, but then
I began work on cybersecurity through that research, and we did a number
of projects related to cybersecurity and technology.
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. 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. At the same time, I was doing research
at Stanford in a number of areas, particularly focused on cybersecurity.
And then after that, I went to a tech company for a bit, and from there,
I went back to Stanford. 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. And so at Stanford, I was briefing members
of Congress on big data issues, privacy, technology, and national
security. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. So with that, I will share... oh, how can
you get interested? Sorry, I left that out. How can those of you who are
interested in getting into this space? There are a number of ways you can do
that. I think finding mentors is extremely important.
I was really fortunate to have incredible mentors who
pointed me in different directions than I may have thought of myself.
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. In terms of technology development, if
you don't have tech skills, there are plenty of boot camps you can join. If you
don't want to do a formal degree, you can take classes online. 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. I think getting involved in the
information security ecosystem in terms of...
there's a lot of InfoSec people on Twitter and
on blogs and think tanks. 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. But this is a group of technologists who
are trying to work to make technology work better for the public.
And I think that's a really important initiative and really important effort
and something that I am committed to. 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. 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. So that's... that would be my advice and
feel free to contact me if you have any other questions.
I'm going to share my screen. So we're going to talk about
disinformation and security. 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.
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. regulatory
approach to methods and tactics is currently. So the history of
disinformation is very old. It goes back into the
1800s. Russia had monitored all internal and external communications, including
those clear way back until
way back until they were in the tsars. 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.
This sort of dark information market existed not just in Russia but elsewhere,
but they were quite good at organizing it.
Tsar Alexander I gave credit to a Russian cryptanalyst for the defeat of
Napoleon way back in 1812. 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. So some people will trace disinformation efforts to
Nazi Germany. The Russian word for disinformation
includes all deception, except for camouflage. 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. 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. 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.
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, which are often confused with this information. 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. So it's very systematic
and very strategic. Disinformation is deliberate, usually
state-sponsored, false information used to mislead
and deceive. 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. 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. Some of the regulations and
authorities that govern these domains are Title 50 of the NDAA,
which proposed international standards to U.S. 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.
We are just going to discuss the global anti-disinformation and U.S.
anti-disinformation regulatory efforts, not sort of the broader frameworks which
exist. So this brief history of Russian and
Soviet disinformation. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviets created
an enormous influence in intelligence apparatus across the globe.
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, without the knowledge of the United
States and most of Europe. They used this apparatus, it was called,
to accomplish a lot in the 1970s and 1980s.
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.
When communication information was digitized, Russia's functional
approach to monitoring and manipulating information didn't change.
It actually just accelerated it and made it faster and more efficient.
But in 1981, Reagan established the Active Measures Working Group to fight
back against the global Soviet subversion efforts.
This was a really enlightened approach. 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. Information Agency. We don't have one
anymore, but I actually think it's quite an important institution.
The CIA, the FBI, the DIA, the DOD, and the Arms Control and Disarmament
Agency. 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.
So despite the public interest in the Active Measures Working Group and U.S.
successes, because it actually received quite a lot
of positive responses from the U.S. public, Americans really liked
this effort, but the Soviet Union continued to successfully
distribute disinformation. Some examples of that,
of those successes include the U.S. claims and beliefs that were spread all
over the world that the United States military had
created AIDS and released it as a weapon. That story
gained considerable traction throughout the world. By the end of 1985,
there were articles published in 13 countries that made these claims.
In 1986, it hadn't reached 50 countries, so one year later.
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.
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, Indiana. 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.
These stories ran repeatedly in the Soviet press and were picked up worldwide.
We'll see how this is similar to events today.
So there's the pre-digital Soviet disinformation
method and the post-digital toolkit, and they are actually
quite similar. So the pre-digital toolkit, they used a lot of forgeries.
They often use them to discredit or malign
influential figures, particularly those affiliated with the United States
Information Agency. 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. News and World Report, who then picked up those stories and ran
with them. The document purported to be a letter
between U.S. Information Agency official Herbert Romanstein
to Senator David F. Durenberger, who was a former chairman of the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence, or SISI. 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.
It was designed to discredit U.S. government and damage our relationships
with Europe. They also used a lot of PR firms.
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. public. They relied significantly on
amplification. Disinformation narratives would be
circulated domestically and infringe publications and then slowly move toward
the mainstream publications, like the Washington Post and U.S. News and World
Report and previous examples. There was a lot of media manipulation,
the cultivation of reporters, getting reporters to pick up stories,
investigate, and report on them. There were a number of
front organizations. They were established to look like
legitimate organizations, but they actually had disinformation purposes.
Then there's the Post Digital Toolkit, which is actually very similar. Again,
they're utilizing amplification, PR firms, forgeries,
media manipulation, and front organizations. 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. And they continued to perpetuate this
false information and actually did quite a lot of damage to him.
This has some contemporary references. 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. Reuters reported on disinformation
campaigns by Russia, Russian state media, and pro-Kremlin
outlets regarding COVID-19. 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.
Again, it has a long history of this. We also saw other disinformation
on platforms like Twitter. This is an example
of the Chinese Communist Party capitalizing on the real rise in
racism against Asian Americans in the U.S.
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. This was proven
false, although obviously there is quite a bit of racism being
directed toward Asian Americans, unfortunately.
Computational influence and digital disinformation. So what do we mean by
that? It's kind of a word salad. So it's obviously not just
Russia. Every state actor gets involved in this
type of information operations. 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. And they're not just doing it to the U.S. They do it to each other.
It's a global effort. And the things that the platforms have
pointed out are the amplification efforts,
where they use artificial amplification and media
amplification. 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. 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. There are bot
farms. And what bot farms? I'll go into those a little more in a
moment. Astro-turfing, troll farms, dark ads, deep fakes,
fake accounts, either sock puppets or social bots. Again,
the terms and language to describe this type of behavior is evolving as this is
sort of a new space. And then this concept of
brigading. I'll go into those a little bit more detail in the next slides.
So fake accounts, those are quite popular
on online platforms. In November of 2019, Facebook grew 5.4 billion accounts that
said were fake. It reported up to five percent of its
monthly user base, so nearly 2.5 billion were fake accounts.
There are a number of sock puppets, which is an online identity used for the
purpose of deceiving. So it looks like it's a real person and
then it isn't actually. The CEO of Whole Foods
was convicted of engaging in this behavior in 2007.
The CEO of Hollinger International was found guilty of mail fraud and
obstruction of justice as well. 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. And those aren't always nefarious, but
sometimes they can be when people don't know
what they're interacting with. 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. 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. And so you see a lot of
cross-platform pollination as well with these. 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, and that's often used
often by using fake accounts or bots which aren't even
real accounts. There's media or platform amplification like I discussed before
where, you know, it migrates from fringed
platforms to mainstream media platforms. An example
of amplification having really dire consequences is
the case of Facebook in Burma. And so the Rohingya Muslims in
Burma and Myanmar were driven out of the country. They were raped and slaughtered
by the military in a genocide that was orchestrated
through artificial amplification of this information. So it was
and some of it was done by the military. 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.
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. Wet bot farms are people who engage in similar rote operations to
accomplish a task like upvoting music or downloading videos. So
it's not a script that's running, it's an actual person that's following
direction. 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. 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.
So these are all cell phones that are playing music or
they're downloading apps or they're upvoting music.
But as you can see, these aren't actual people
connected to those. It's a bunch of cell phones that are doing
it with a scripted behavior that's connected to all of them.
So troll farms and brigading. 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. 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. It's a fake army of
influencers. Troll farms usually refer to state-sponsored anonymous accounts for
stock puppets or bots that engage in biased
commentary. 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. And
brigading is an online harassment technique.
There's a vote brigading as well. 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. And there is often tied to what people call perception
hacking. So there's astroturfing as well. This
was a term coined in 1985 by Senator Lloyd
Vincent of Texas and it occurs both online and offline. It's a political
activity designed to appear as if it's
unsolicited or autonomous political engagement. 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. 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. 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. Facebook invented them but all platforms use them. 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.
Targeted online advertising, algorithmic bias, and discrimination are highly
problematic. And we have examples of these. They'll
create a psychographic profile of someone. 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, Massachusetts
who works either from home or from a small office in the retail production
industry. I mean if you look through this, this drills down to their
their fit moms and green moms. They have great
grade school kids. They live in a condo down to the exact square feet of that
condo. What they enjoy doing for their
activities. 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. 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. There's this other concept of deep fakes, shallow fakes.
So deep fakes use artificial intelligence or fake videos or photos of
real people. And it often uses neural network AI.
There's three types. There are three types. Generative,
adversarial networks, GANs, autoencoders, and VAEs, variational
autoencoders. Google's DeepMind showed that the VAE
could outperform GANs on face generation.
Variational autoencoders are capable of both compressing data like an auto
encoder and synthesizing data like a GAN. However,
GANs generate data in fine granular detail and images
created by VAEs tend to be more blurred. Shallow fakes are doctored videos that
are less dramatic like the speaker Pelosi video.
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. Here's an example
of a deep fake. At the beginning, before anything, you get
together and you read through the script. And so it's like, you know, all these
heavyweights like, you know, Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Robert
Denny Jr. Everybody at the end is like me.
You know, like, hey, happy to be here, guys.
And some other supporting guys. And then Tom Cruise walks in
and even those guys are like, whoa, and he's super stoked to be there.
You know, he's like, yeah, oh, oh, you know, like, he's like, wow.
He's immediately excited when he walks into a room.
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. So he sat down next to me. He's like, I
love your work.
And I went, oh, thanks. I love your work, too, Tom Cruise.
So as you can see, it's a very impressive
manipulation of that media. 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, and behavior analysis. I'll just briefly...
I think all of these involve constitutional rights. 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. 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. 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, I want
to know if I'm talking to an American or if I'm
if I'm talking to a Russian operative. Well, the problem with that is that you
can't always tell. There's spoofing, you can use VPNs,
and people all over the world use these. Bot detection technologies have
developed considerably. 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. There's also spam
detection and sentiment analysis. 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. It works really
well with some of the targeted advertising.
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,
some of the problems that are created by some of this behavior online.
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. Doing a
content-neutral approach is always best, if possible, because of
the First Amendment. 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. It protects against compelled speech. The
government can't make you say anything. 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. 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. 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. It's also allowed regulation of speech
in a commercial context if there's a reasonable government interest in
compelling factual and uncontroversial information. So I say
that addressing disinformation is a security rather than
a content problem. So over the history of cybersecurity and infrastructure
security, we've developed this perimeterless
security. 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. So traditional cybersecurity defenses
leave organizations vulnerable to what many call the Maginot Line
problem. And the Maginot Line was a military
work of genius. 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.
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. 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. 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. And I'm going to briefly go over those.
So global regulation of disinformation. There are 54 countries
have introduced legislation to address disinformation online.
16 of them have enacted or introduced some form of fake news or
misinformation laws. France, Belarus, Bangladesh, China, Kenya,
Burkina Faso, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Egypt, Germany,
India, Myanmar, Singapore, and the United States.
So France's... I'm going to go over just a few. I'm not going to make you go
through all these countries. I'll just go through a few. But France's
disinformation law emerged as a number of disinformation
efforts were directed toward the French president.
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.
It's designed to enact strict rules on the media during electoral campaigns and
more specifically in a three-month proceeding in the vote.
They made changes to the draft law in July 2018 to account for satire.
So as you can see, like, satire would have definitely fallen under
some of those restrictions, so they had to make a change.
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.
In the three months before the election period, it builds upon an 1881 law that
outlines dissemination of false news. There's a long history of
false news in the world, as well as disinformation.
As you can see, it has three major provisions and it borrows from
the Honest Ads Act, actually, of the United States. 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. 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.
It allows political candidates to sue for removal of contested material,
but again, because it is a restriction on speech, it is hot...
the whole bill is hotly contested. Singapore has an anti-
misinformation law, and this one criminalizes the dissemination of false
information online. It is one of the more comprehensive
and aggressive pieces of legislation in the world.
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. It punishes people who post false
information with heavy fines and even jail time.
This law has been condemned by a number of human rights groups and
publications for unduly limiting free speech.
It lets the government demand publication of corrections alongside
allegedly false claims. 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. 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. That type of
language originates with U.S. 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.
The U.S. 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. First of all,
when it comes to social media companies, the government is...
the social media companies are not the government.
They're not violating the First Amendment by imposing restrictions on
speech. It's when the government forces a social media company to impose those
restrictions that there's a lot of legal problems that Dr.
Matwishan could probably elaborate on much better than
I could. Some of these provisions are the Countering Foreign Propaganda and
Disinformation Act. That was included in the National
Defense Authorization Act in 2017. The H.R. 5910,
Defend Against Russian Disinformation and Aggression Act.
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.
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.
But again, it's quite complex. So this bill, Countering Foreign Propaganda
in the NDAA, that was introduced by Senator Rob Portman and Senator Murphy.
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. 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. 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.
We had the Honest Ads Act, as I mentioned, adopted by France. It was introduced by
Senator Klobuchar, Senator Lindsey Graham, and Senator Warner in 2018.
And it helps prevent foreign interference in election advertising.
And it amends the definition of electioneering communication
in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 to include paid internet and
digital advertisements. A lot of these problems are a result of
old legislation not being updated for new technologies. I encountered this
early on in my career at a studio in Hollywood. They had
a whole framework for television and music rights,
but that was pre-digital. 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.
So when we started analyzing that, and how do you... you can't go through and
renegotiate every single license. 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.
So they were able to expedite some of the framework,
expedite some of the licensing in that way. 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. Because as you know, technology moves very, very quickly.
So yeah, these are the other requirements.
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.
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. 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.
And it was passed by Senator Portman, Schatz,
Joni Ernst, Martin Heinrich, Senator Gardner, Senator Peters, Senator Rounds,
and Senator Hassan. 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. Now that's just a report, and Congress will do this
a lot. 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.
So this is the Malicious Deepfake Prohibition Act. 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. 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.
There's the Defending Each and Every Person from False Appearances by Keeping
Exploitation Subject to Accountability Act of 2019.
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.
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.
Some of this was considered unenforceable, as
we go into that. The Defend Against Russian Disinformation Aggression Act.
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.
Congress... when people say Congress doesn't do anything, it's not entirely
true. They wrote 17 bills to try to address
the problem. 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.
The 2020 Technology Legislative Agenda. These are just some of the things that
early in 2020 we identified as, you know,
efforts that Congress would try to tackle. And this was before COVID,
and, you know, another crisis had... a social justice crisis had
emerged. So that includes trying to craft a federal
data privacy framework, a greater shift toward consumer protection rather than
disinformation protection. 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. We highlighted COPPRA, the Consumer
Online Protection Act. 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. The House version of the Honest Ads Act will
continue to be debated. Senator Warner introduced the Detour
Act, the Access Act, and Josh Hawley... and with Josh Hawley, the Smart Act.
The Detour Act is about dark patterns. That was to try to
address manipulative design on websites.
The Access Act was an interoperability bill. The senator wanted to make it
easier to move your data from one platform to another.
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. So I just want to ensure that that's
probably going to continue to shape the public debate. And that is all I have.
There we go. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Liesl, for joining us today and for that amazing talk.
And Q&A with you follows after this. Thanks so much.