[House Hearing, 116 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION ATTACKS ON ELECTIONS: LESSONS FROM EUROPE
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON EUROPE, EURASIA, ENERGY, AND THE ENVIRONMENT
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
July 16, 2019
__________
Serial No. 116-55
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Foreign Affairs
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COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS
ELIOT L. ENGEL, New York, Chairman
BRAD SHERMAN, California MICHAEL T. McCAUL, Texas, Ranking
GREGORY W. MEEKS, New York Member
ALBIO SIRES, New Jersey CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey
GERALD E. CONNOLLY, Virginia STEVE CHABOT, Ohio
THEODORE E. DEUTCH, Florida JOE WILSON, South Carolina
KAREN BASS, California SCOTT PERRY, Pennsylvania
WILLIAM KEATING, Massachusetts TED S. YOHO, Florida
DAVID CICILLINE, Rhode Island ADAM KINZINGER, Illinois
AMI BERA, California LEE ZELDIN, New York
JOAQUIN CASTRO, Texas JIM SENSENBRENNER, Wisconsin
DINA TITUS, Nevada ANN WAGNER, Missouri
ADRIANO ESPAILLAT, New York BRIAN MAST, Florida
TED LIEU, California FRANCIS ROONEY, Florida
SUSAN WILD, Pennsylvania BRIAN FITZPATRICK, Pennsylvania
DEAN PHILLPS, Minnesota JOHN CURTIS, Utah
ILHAN OMAR, Minnesota KEN BUCK, Colorado
COLIN ALLRED, Texas RON WRIGHT, Texas
ANDY LEVIN, Michigan GUY RESCHENTHALER, Pennsylvania
ABIGAIL SPANBERGER, Virginia TIM BURCHETT, Tennessee
CHRISSY HOULAHAN, Pennsylvania GREG PENCE, Indiana
TOM MALINOWSKI, New Jersey STEVE WATKINS, Kansas
DAVID TRONE, Maryland MIKE GUEST, Mississippi
JIM COSTA, California
JUAN VARGAS, California
VICENTE GONZALEZ, Texas
Jason Steinbaum, Democrat Staff Director
Brendan Shields, Republican Staff Director
------
Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, Energy, and The Environment
WILLIAM KEATING, Massachusetts, Chairman
ABIGAIL SPANBERGER, Virginia ADAM KINZINGER, Illinois, Ranking
GREGORY MEEKS, New York Member
ALBIO SIRES, New Jersey JOE WILSON, South Carolina
THEODORE DEUTCH, Florida ANN WAGNER, Missouri
DAVID CICILLINE, Rhode Island JIM SENSENBRENNER, Wisconsin
JOAQUIN CASTRO, Texas FRANCIS ROONEY, Florida
DINA TITUS, Nevada BRIAN FITZPATRICK, Pennsylvania
SUSAN WILD, Pennsylvania GREG PENCE, Indiana
DAVID TRONE, Maryland RON WRIGHT, Texas
JIM COSTA, California MIKE GUEST, Mississippi
VICENTE GONZALEZ, Texas TIM BURCHETT, Tennessee
Gabrielle Gould, Staff Director
C O N T E N T S
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Page
WITNESSES
Fried, The Honorable Daniel, Distinguished Fellow, Future Europe
Initiative and Eurasia Center, Atlantic Counsel (Former State
Department Coordinator for Sanctions Policy, Former Assistant
Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, and
Former United States Ambassador to Poland)..................... 7
Aro, Ms. Jessikka, Investigative Reporter, Yle Kioski............ 20
Kalensky, Mr. Jakub, Senior Fellow, Eurasia Center, Atlantic
Council........................................................ 33
Kagan, Dr. Frederick W., Resident Scholar and Director, Critical
Threats Project, American Enterprise Institute................. 51
APPENDIX
Hearing Notice................................................... 72
Hearing Minutes.................................................. 73
Hearing Attendance............................................... 74
RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION ATTACKS ON ELECTIONS: LESSONS FROM EUROPE
Tuesday, July 16, 2019
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia,
Energy, and the Environment,
Committee on Foreign Affairs,
Washington, DC
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:21 p.m., in
room 2172, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. William R.
Keating (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Mr. Keating. The hearing will come to order.
I want to thank the members that made it up from the last
roll call. We were delayed a bit as a result of a roll call. I
want to thank our witnesses for their patience in that regard.
Our national elections are just 15-plus months away. Just
this week, AP reported describing how voting systems across our
country still rely on old software that is vulnerable to
hackers. The list of threats to our elections are numerous, and
it is our job to address the weaknesses with the utmost haste
and diligence.
Our intelligence community is united in its findings that
the U.S. will once again face Russian threats to our elections
and our democratic process, and other countries could indeed
follow suit. We know countries like China are already stepping
up disinformation efforts on their own.
Today's hearing is on Russia's attacks on democratic
elections through targeted disinformation campaigns and the
takeaways from Europe where this activity has been accelerating
for years. It is on what the EU and the European countries are
doing themselves, what has been effective, what has not been,
lessons learned.
The United States awoke to the threat from Russian
disinformation as a result of the interference in the 2016
Presidential elections. Yet this malign tactic is nothing new
for our allies and partners in Europe who have experienced
disinformation campaigns since the time of the Soviet Union.
Based on this experience and after Russia's invasion of
Ukraine in 2014, Finland put in place a whole government
strategy to combat Russian disinformation and increase the
resiliency of its population against these attacks.
We are lucky today to be joined by Ms. Jessikka Aro, who is
a journalist from Finland and has reported extensively on this
topic. And while it was rescinded under questionable
circumstances, she would have received an International Women
of Courage award earlier this year for her work exposing the
network of pro-Kremlin trolls linked to the Russian Internet
Research Agency, a Russian institution which, as we all know,
was heavily involved in the 2016 Russian interference in our
election. That was detailed in part one of the Special Counsel
Mueller report.
Finland is not alone. Following numerous elections and
referenda where Russia and Russian-supported actors spread
disinformation and stoked conflict between and around public
debates, including in the recent EU parliamentary elections,
the European Union and its member States have since deployed
strategies to combat Russia's malign influence.
U.S. elections are the very bedrock of our democracy. And
as Members of Congress, we have shown an oath to uphold that
kind of protection of our democracy.
Russian interference undermines our elections, as well as
those of other countries around the world, while stoking anti-
Western sentiment and threatening our alliances and our
security. We have to do more.
In today's hearing we examine the lessons from our allies
in Europe and we will explore areas where transatlantic
cooperation serve us in advancing our response to Russian
election meddling here at home.
We are faced by different types of disinformation,
different actors who perpetuate it. Different options for
trying to stop it have been put into place, but there are
efforts to even destabilize those types of efforts.
This is where learning from our European partners comes
into play. While there have been steep challenges in their
effort to combat Russia's disinformation activities, we could
build on their progress and start moving much more aggressively
to address this here at home.
So today I hope we can learn more about what has worked,
what has not worked, what opportunities exist to engage with
civil society, social media companies, our legal system,
multilateral institutions, how countries are increasing their
resilience through media literacy programs, even some of those
at the grade school level.
And this is important: How investigative journalism has
helped expose Russian disinformation and what we need to do to
protect those individuals who take on great risk to defend the
democratic institutions that we all depend on to safeguard our
freedoms.
Just as we are seeing in Europe, we will likely need to
adjust course from time-to-time, monitor to make sure
protections against disinformation do not veer toward unjustly
restricting freedom of speech or failing to appropriately
respect privacy concerns.
Our enemies use our freedoms as a type of sanctuary.
However, we have to do more. So as soon as it is possible, on a
number of fronts, we will move forward.
Our efforts to date, as a government, and the efforts among
social media companies and other private sectors, have been
woefully lacking compared to the threat we face.
I would like to thank the witnesses for joining us and some
for traveling great distances to be here today. Your testimony
and expertise are greatly appreciated. I hope that we can come
away with some concrete next steps to guard against Russian
disinformation campaigns here at home and those affecting our
allies overseas.
With that, I would like to recognize the ranking member,
and then I will go through some of the ground rules of this
hearing.
So I recognize the ranking member, Mr. Kinzinger.
Mr. Kinzinger. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And thank you to the panel for joining us today. You have
all great reputations, your work proceeds you, and we are
excited to have you here with us.
Prior to the 2016 election, Russia engaged in one of the
most sophisticated information operations to date against the
United States. Regardless of your opinion of the Mueller report
and reading the first part of that and seeing the depth of
Russian attempts is eye opening, to be involved in this
election, as well as elections in other parts of the world.
This was not the first time that Russia has used
disinformation or malign influence to interfere in the
democratic process of Western society and I guarantee it will
not be the last. Russian trolls will amplify any message that
seeks to divide Western democracy and sow discord and chaos.
From supporting Code Pink and fascist groups in the United
States to spreading anti-European Union and anti-NATO messages
across Europe, Vladimir Putin's goal is to divide the bond that
holds democratic nations together. As long as Putin's hold on
power remains unchallenged, he will continue to meddle in
Western democracy.
I believe that we must go on the offensive. While Vladimir
Putin won a sham reelection and will be in office until 2025,
the State Duma is slated to have an election in 2021. That
means that the United States has just over 2 years to highlight
how Putin's corrupt tactics have stolen money from the Russian
population, devaStated their economy, and ostracized their
nation from the West.
From an economic standpoint, Russia's GDP of $1.65 trillion
is dwarfed by that of the United States and the European Union,
which sits around the $40 trillion mark. However, in far-off
places like Venezuela, Syria, Ukraine, Georgia, and across the
Baltic and Balkan regions, Russia can use little capital to
extract unproportionate pressure.
Take Ukraine, for example, where Russian propaganda
targeted a joint U.S.-Ukrainian training exercise claiming that
American troops were going to provoke protests across Ukraine
to interfere in their electoral process. While this operation
was easily debunked, it shows how the Russians use a handful of
hackers to spread lies through social media. However, other
operations take decades of planning and complex support
networks to execute.
It has been almost 25 years since the Dayton Peace
Agreement ended the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. However,
Russia has used this time to support nationalist politicians
within the republic, the main belligerents of the Bosnian war
that employed genocide and killed over 100,000 people.
Last October, Bosnia held legislative elections. Since they
have been unable to form a government, given disagreements
between pro-Western political parties and the nationalist Serb
parties over what the relationship Bosnia should have with
NATO.
Staunch anti-NATO sentiment and threatened cessation from
Bosnia has been a staple of the Russian-backed Alliance of the
Independent Social Democrats, who have, in effect, been
blocking the government formation over NATO accession.
The Europeans have abandoned Bosnia, and the United States
cannot carry all the weight. If we want to counter Russian
malign operations, we must do so in conjunction with our
European allies. We must show Bosnia and other nations being
tempted by Putin that Western democracy is a far better option
than the tyrannical Russian system.
Examples like Bosnia and Ukraine show why holding a hearing
to expose Russian malign influence is so important.
And I want to put a bit of an emphasis on having recently
met with representatives from the Balkan region, from all
areas, every one of them mentioned, without exception, that the
United States is basically the only partner standing strong
with them against the Russians.
And that is not our backyard. That is Europe's backyard.
Europe has a responsibility to step up and do more as well.
This cannot be a U.S.-only operation, but we are happy to lead
with our European friends.
And I thank last I will say this. Part of exposing Russian
disinformation is understanding that if you see a news report
or a media report that seems way too crazy, it probably is.
Many of us here have been involved in or had written articles
about us by Russian trolls that are then posted by Sputnik or
RT and retweeted multiple times until it becomes mainstream.
By the way, did you know that I helped create ISIS,
according to some RT story that was put out there?
So that said, understanding the idiocy of some of the stuff
you read is the first step to pushing back against Russian
disinformation, because without that they have no other weapon.
So with that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Mr. Keating. The chair thanks the ranking member.
And I will now introduce our witnesses.
Ambassador Daniel Fried is a distinguished fellow with the
Future Europe Initiative and Eurasia Center at the Atlantic
Council. He has previously served as the State Department
coordinator for sanctions policy, assistant secretary of State
for European and Eurasian Affairs, and the United States
Ambassador to Poland.
Thank you for your service, and thank you for being here,
Ambassador.
Ms. Jessikka Aro is a Finnish journalist, working for
Finland's public service broadcaster Yle. She has received
awards for investigative journalism on pro-Russian internet
troll factories, having traveled to St. Petersburg to interview
employees of the Internet Research Agency and the Russian
journalists who first uncovered them.
Thank you for making the trip here.
Mr. Jakub Kalensky is a senior fellow with the Eurasia
Center at the Atlantic Council. He formerly worked for the
European Union's East StratCom Task Force and was the leader
for countering disinformation.
Thank you for being here.
Dr. Fred Kagan is a resident scholar and director of the
Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute.
He is formerly a professor of military history at the U.S.
Military Academy at West Point.
Thank you.
We all appreciate your being here and look forward to your
testimony. Please limit your testimony to 5 minutes. And
without objection, your prepared written statements will be
made part of the record.
As a reminder, all members will have 5 calendar days to
submit materials and questions for the record.
I will now go to Ambassador Fried for his statement.
STATEMENT OF DANIEL FRIED, DISTINGUISHED FELLOW, FUTURE EUROPE
INITIATIVE AND EURASIA CENTER, ATLANTIC COUNSEL (FORMER STATE
DEPARTMENT COORDINATOR FOR SANCTIONS POLICY, FORMER ASSISTANT
SECRETARY OF STATE FOR EUROPEAN AND EURASIAN AFFAIRS, AND
FORMER UNITED STATES AMBASSADOR TO POLAND)
Mr. Fried. Chairman Keating, Ranking Member Kinzinger,
members, I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you
today. The topic is relevant and timely.
I have to say it is an honor to be on this panel with
Jessikka Aro and Jakub Kalensky, two fighters against
disinformation, and a pleasure to be here with my old
colleague, Fred Kagan.
The Russians may be leaders in State-sponsored
disinformation, but they are not going to be the last. The
Democratic community, the free world, needs to face the
challenge of Russian and other forms of contemporary
disinformation while remaining true to our democratic values.
As we learned during the cold war, we must not and need not
become them in order to fight them.
I want to focus on what is to be done. First, the
Europeans, then the U.S.
Europeans have moved since 2018 toward action to deal with
disinformation. The EU approach includes strengthening the EU's
capacity to identify and expose disinformation, and hopefully
that includes strengthening support for East StratCom, where
Jakub Kalensky used to work. They have established an EU Rapid
Alert System to spread news of disinformation campaigns in real
time.
Most important, the EU has negotiated and concluded a Code
of Practice on disinformation with U.S. social media companies
setting out terms of behavior and standards. The code notes
that if progress is not satisfactory, the EU could turn to
regulation.
The EU is also looking at improving social resilience
against disinformation, creating a European network of
independent fact checkers, launching an online platform on
disinformation, and social media literacy.
European governments, particularly France, Sweden, but
others, perhaps in reaction to Russian hacking of the Macron
campaign in 2017, have been active. The good news is that the
EU and some European national governments have been addressing
the disinformation challenge. The bad news is that EU
implementation, even of its own plans, has been uneven. This is
just beginning.
The United States, though, and I am sorry to say this, lags
the EU both in conceptual framing of the issue and actions to
deal with it. This is not due to lack of awareness of the
problem inside the administration, but leadership has been
uneven.
Nevertheless, there is work ongoing in the administration.
The State Department's Global Engagement Center is funding
research and helping civil society groups and independent media
on the front lines of the threat. U.S. Cyber Command began
operations ahead of our last congressional elections to deter
Russian operations. USAID is supporting local media and civil
society in the European countries most vulnerable to Russian
disinformation. The Department of Treasury has imposed
sanctions on Russian entities tied to disinformation. The
Senate has introduced sanctions legislation, so-called DASKA,
which actually has some useful provisions on countering
disinformation.
These are good steps, but they lack the scope of what the
EU has already tried to launch. There is no U.S. equivalent to
the EU Code of Practice. We need to have an all-of-government
approach to the problem with the backing of the highest levels
of the administration. The following might serve as an action
plan for the U.S.
The U.S. Government needs to get organized. Somebody and
some agency needs to own the problem. Whether this is State,
DHS, or a national counter-disinformation center with the
backing of the President, somebody needs to answer the phone
when you want to call about disinformation.
Mr. Keating. Did you plan that?
Mr. Fried. Yes, sir, I did.
Mr. Keating. That was excellent.
Mr. Fried. Yes.
The U.S. needs to work with its friends, starting with the
European Union. We could stand up a transatlantic or G-7
counter-disinformation coalition to pool our knowledge, set
common standards, and use our regulatory power to greatest
impact.
Social media companies have happily moved beyond initial
denial, but they need to keep cleaning up their platforms and
reassessing online anonymity.
The administration and Congress should follow the
principles of transparency and authenticity on social media,
not heavy content control.
Regulation, I think, is coming. It needs to be iterative,
not heavy. We need to learn as we go. But I think that it is
important not to be heavy content control, but to talk about
inauthentic sites and enforce the principles of transparency.
Last thought. Civil society groups in the United States and
Europe are going to be the heroes of counter-disinformation
techniques. They, not government bureaucracy, are going to be
able to expose in real time Russian and other disinformation
operations. We ought to put our trust in them. We ought to put
some of our resources behind them, people like Jessikka Aro and
Jakub Kalensky. But others, Stop Fake in the Ukraine, the
Baltic elves, EU disinfo labs, the Atlantic Council's own DFR
Lab, these are the people who can expose, and then when
exposed, American society needs to wake up and pay attention to
this.
There is more to be said, but I will say it during the
questions if there is time.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Fried follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Keating. Thank you, Ambassador.
Ms. Aro.
STATEMENT OF JESSIKKA ARO, INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER, YLE KIOSKI
Ms. Aro. Chairman Keating, Ranking Member Kinzinger,
distinguished members of the committee, thank you so much.
Thank you for having me here. It is such an honor to discuss
the Russian trolls and how to counter them and prevent them
from causing any more international damage in the future. I
will tell you what I have found out in my investigations as
well as give you recommendations how to prevent the damage in
the future.
Five years ago, I started to investigate the Kremlin tool
of information psychological warfare, Russia's use of paid
online propaganda workers. Thanks to the brave Russian
journalists who had infiltrated the St. Petersburg-based troll
factory already in 2013, we knew that a shady office paid
people to build fake identities and profiles on social media.
These trolls pretend online as real people and produce pro-
Putin and pro-Russian content on an industrial scale. According
to leaked emails between the factory supervisors and employees,
the trolls' mission was to shift the balance of online
discussions by increasing comments supportive to Putin, thus
manipulating real people online.
Back then, in 2014, the Russian trolls in Finland attacked
mostly opinion leaders, for example, our then defense minister.
I wanted to investigate how the trolls influence and impact in
the general audience, the ordinary internet users. Did they
have any meaningful impact or influence on them, on Finnish
real people's ideas, attitudes, and even behavior.
I found several influence methods which are still actively
in use by the trolls today. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, every
other social media comment sections of traditional media and
Russian discussion forums were abused already back then to
spread lies benefiting the Kremlin. The trolls smeared Western
leaders as Nazis and fascists, blamed the U.S., NATO, and the
European Union for the war in Ukraine, claimed Russian soldiers
never stepped their foot on Ukrainian soil.
The Russian Embassy in Helsinki supported these social
media operations. In addition, anonymous operators formed
groups on Facebook and conducted other psychological operations
against civilians.
The trolls, indeed, had impact on real Finnish people. Some
Finnish who are interviewed told me that they had stopped
discussing Russia-related issues online altogether just to
avoid the death threats and name calling that would follow from
the trolls after they did that. Thus, the digital operations
had succeeded in both silencing and importing fear into Finnish
public debate about Russia. That is a profound threat to
people's freedom of speech coming from a hostile foreign power.
But there was more. Some people had lost the idea of what
is true and what is not. For example, in the case of Ukraine,
disinformation had again succeeded in manipulating real
people's thoughts. It is difficult to make decisions who to
vote for or whether to view Russia as the aggressor in Ukraine
or not after you are not sure what is factually even happening.
Russia wants to brainwash useful idiots. My most disturbing
finding, in my own opinion, was that some people who are
subjected to propaganda believe it and spread it further in
their own networks. I also learned that not everyone are
influenced, but some people are and they need protection.
Later, I started to investigate attacks on private Western
individuals as I was myself made the target of Russian-
originating and still ongoing defamation campaign because of my
work. For almost 5 years, I have been defamed in Russian fake
new sites, in Finnish pro-Kremlin racist and hate speech fake
news sites by the German RT, by the troll factory, and by
countless social media activists and neo-Nazis.
The retaliation campaign against me is partly criminal in
nature. It has impacted even some of my friends and has led to
some of the agitated people threatening to kill me. These are
real Finnish individuals.
I needed police escort to attend a trial against some of
these perpetrators. Police said that I faced the threat of
impulsive violence if I am in the wrong place at the wrong
time. Why? Because Putin's administration's employee and other
propagandists want to smear and silence me and scare and stop
me from investigating and talking about the troll activity.
And I am also somewhat worried to testify here today
because I believe it will lead to retaliation against me just
like so many other of my public appearances in the last years.
Also, the same kinds of operations are ongoing against
different European and even American people who voice out their
criticism or information about Russia or Putin's regime. They
become systematically smeared.
And finally, I recommend the Western governments and
international police organizations who, in my view, are in the
core of countering this international disinformation campaign,
they should be treated as what they are, international
politically motivated organized crime conducted by intelligence
officers and paid propagandists. These criminals, they do not
want to take your money. They want to capture your thinking and
control you.
Targeted people are often civilians. They need help. More
robust preventive measures from intelligence services are
needed.
Also, maybe it is time we start to call the Kremlin troll
farms and digital disinformation for what they are, crime
factories and digital crime. The word troll farm does not come
close to describing the destruction of these operations.
Countries should also check their legislations on libel,
illegal threats, instigating violence, secrecy crimes, privacy
breaches, espionage, and computer hacks as they seem to be the
Kremlin's favorite online violations used in these operations.
The punishments for these crimes are often not enough to
prevent this organized crime.
The Kremlin also knows that as long as Facebook, Twitter,
and other social media giants are not properly regulated, they
can abuse them as much as they can.
And just my most important notion today is that the
Kremlin's operations continue uninterrupted all the time
between and during the elections. The trolls are given new
themes every day, and they will continue unless they are
stopped.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Aro follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Keating. Mr. Kalensky.
STATEMENT OF JAKUB KALENSKY, SENIOR FELLOW, EURASIA CENTER,
ATLANTIC COUNCIL
Mr. Kalensky. Chairman Keating, Ranking Member Kinzinger,
distinguished members of the subcommittee, thank you very much
for the invitation to speak in front of you today. It is an
honor. I will summarize my written testimony for the hearing.
In 2014, NATO's military commander, Philip Breedlove,
called the Kremlin's disinformation campaign targeting Ukraine
the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg we have ever
seen in the history of information warfare.
Five years later, it is obvious that the initial blitzkrieg
has evolved into a sustained and ongoing disinformation
campaign using thousands of channels and dozens of languages,
targeting hundreds of millions of people on a daily basis. It
is a campaign with the goal to undermine Western democracies,
human rights, and rule of law, and to denigrate those who stand
for these values, including the United States.
The Kremlin's media are tasked to advance Russian military
goals regardless of the current peace-war status with a given
country. These pseudo-journalists are dutifully fulfilling
those tasks, and they get rewarded by the Kremlin for the more
visible Russian military operations like in Ukraine or in
Syria. They perceive themselves as being in a permanent
information war with the whole Western world.
The messages of Russian State media get further amplified
by an ecosystem consisting of so-called alternative media,
social media, Russian officials and representatives, NGO's, and
other less researched communication channels. Often,
influencers in European States are repeating the messages of
the Kremlin's disinformation ecosystem, giving their messages
new legitimacy and spreading it among new audiences.
Even in the Netherlands, the country that lost the most
citizens in the tragedy of the MH 17 flight where nearly 300
civilians were killed by a Russian weapon, even in the
Netherlands you can find politicians repeating the Kremlin's
lies about who is to blame.
As some of the opinion polls show us, the synergy of
Kremlin-controlled and Kremlin-influenced channels is
effective. According to one poll, 80 percent of Bulgarians did
not believe that it was Russian secret services who are to
blame for the nerve agent attack in Salisbury, England. That is
four out of five people believing a disinformation campaign
instead of facts and evidence.
After 5 years of sustained information aggression, it
unfortunately seems that the European audiences are getting
used to a certain level of disinformation campaign, almost
perceiving it as the new normal. This fatigue facilities
further disinformation campaigns, including those from new
actors, both State and non-State.
It is for these reasons why I worry that the Kremlin is
currently winning the information war it is conducting against
the Western democracies, mostly because we in the West do not
understand that we are in such a war. We do not understand what
it has already cost us and what will it cost us in the future.
And we have failed to fight back and defend our values against
this new kind of aggressor.
It does not have to be this way. We in the West have all
the knowledge and all the capabilities to win this fight. The
only thing we lack is political will and the determination of
our adversary.
In my written testimony, I have described multiple measures
that can be undertaken to defend against this kind of
aggression. Out of all the examples, let me highlight here the
case of Lithuania. This small nation shows us how the
combination of documenting this threat, raising the level of
awareness about it, mitigating the weaknesses of the
information space, and punishing of the information aggressors
can result in a successful defense even against an opponent who
is many times stronger and has many times more resources.
Lithuania has a track record of neutralizing a disinformation
campaign even before it has time to spread and influence the
audiences, which is the best possible result you can achieve.
It is these four areas of defense which I perceive as
necessary in order to successfully defend against the massive
disinformation campaigns that the Kremlin conducts in the past
years. What we see in many European countries and in the EU are
the first three of these areas: documenting the threat, raising
awareness, and mitigating the weaknesses.
However, it is actually the fourth area, punishing the
information aggressors, that might make the biggest difference.
The other three areas will help us better cope with information
aggression, but they will never help stop it.
I am deeply convinced that unless we start punishing the
information aggressors in a more resolute way, we will not only
fail to stop their aggression, but we will also show to other
potential aggressors that we in the West are not capable of
dealing with this kind of threat, and we will invite further
aggression.
And there are other, more powerful actors in the world than
Russia. If they start adopting the Kremlin's tactics, as we
already see happening in a few cases, we might face a
significantly bigger problem in the future.
Thank you very much for your attention, and I will be
looking forward to your questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Kalensky follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Keating. Dr. Kagan.
STATEMENT OF FREDERICK W. KAGAN, PH.D., RESIDENT SCHOLAR AND
DIRECTOR, CRITICAL THREATS PROJECT, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE
INSTITUTE
Mr. Kagan. Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Kinzinger, thank
you for the opportunity to appear before the subcommittee
today. Thank you also for calling this hearing to address the
challenges of Russian information operations against both the
United States and Europe generally.
It is vitally important to keep in mind, as the
subcommittee clearly does, that Vladimir Putin is engaged in a
general attack on the institutions of democracy and
representative government throughout the West and, in fact,
throughout the world.
One of his aims is to destroy the trust and confidence of
Western peoples in their governments and in the very
institutions of representative government themselves. He
pursues this aim, unfortunately, in an increasingly conducive
environment, as Western people seem increasingly to be losing
faith in critical institutions on their own. Addressing the
Russian challenge will thus require that we also address that
internal problem.
Putin is not an opportunistic predator as he is often
portrayed. He has a concrete program. He has articulated an end
state. He has articulated an alternate vision of the world. He
pursues those objectives through concrete and organized
campaigns. They are very flexible, they are opportunistic, they
take advantage when he can, but they are nevertheless clear.
Russian military doctrine increasingly is making the
argument that even tactical undertakings, even kinetic actions,
should all be subordinated to the aim of shaping the
information environment rather than achieving specific military
ends, and that is important because I think that we need to see
the activities that Putin is engaged in in the context of a
political military campaign that he is pursuing globally, not
just as crimes, although they clearly are crimes and also need
to be punished in that way.
The Soviet concept of reflexive control is central to this
entire undertaking, and it is important to understand that
concept. Basically, the idea of reflexive control is so to
shape your adversary's perception of reality as to cause your
adversary voluntarily, of his own will, to choose the course of
action you prefer without even being aware that he has been
manipulated into doing so.
It is a kind of jiu-jitsu in information operations, which
is not surprising considering that Putin himself is a fan of
the Russian or Soviet version of Judo. Also, that he is a small
person, which bears repeating as part of an information
operation.
One of the advantages that Putin's aims give him is that
they are negative. What matters to Putin is less that we
believe what he is saying and more that we do not believe what
we are saying. And so Putin's objectives are achieved if people
simply say to themselves and to each other: Well, who really
knows? I mean, after all, did the Russians shoot down the
airplane? I mean, who really knows?
And of course, we do know. But getting people to positive
belief is much harder than getting them simply to throw up
their hands and say: Who knows? And we have to understand how
important, how difficult that makes the challenge that we are
facing here.
But the approach that Putin is taking has vulnerabilities
as well. It relies to a very heavy extent on a degree of
stealth and anonymity and on the ability to persuade people
that what they are hearing is not simply Russian propaganda but
is coming from sources that they trust and so forth.
And in addition to that, we have now seen on several
occasions that Putin can pay a very significant price when
covert operations are blown, and there are two major examples
of that in, ironically, two of his biggest successes, Ukraine,
where the sense of Ukrainian nationhood and nationalism and
resistance to and separation from Russia in western Ukraine is
higher than it has ever been. And I do not actually think that
it will be undone regardless of what settlement is reached by
this government in Kiev or any other. And that is a result of
the reaction against what Putin did there.
And even in our own election, the fact that we are having
this hearing, the fact that we are here, is evidence of a Putin
failure. It demonstrates the degree to which he has caused us
to reflect on what he is doing.
And that blowback phenomenon is something that we can take
advantage of. But we are not, as my co-panelists have pointed
out, equipped as a government or a people to take advantage of
it yet, and we should focus on that.
And so some of my concrete recommendations to you are to
consider establishing cells in various places in the
government, I do not really care who owns them, whose job it is
to follow the Russian campaigns, to understand what Putin is
trying to do generally, which will allow us to predict the
kinds of information operations that he is likely to undertake,
the kinds of cyber operations that he is likely to launch in
support of them.
And then those cells need to develop plans. When should we
blow this operation? When should we make it public that the
Russians are doing this? To what purpose? What will we try to
accomplish? What are our plans for accomplishing that?
And I would submit this needs to be a specialized cell
because we must also restrict ourselves only to telling the
truth. We must never get into the business of lying to
ourselves, to the American people. We can do that, but it makes
it harder. And so I think that this is something that
organizationally and structurally would require a great deal of
attention.
And we also need to have cells that are prepared to take
advantage when third parties blow Russian operations, because
that will happen more frequently than us blowing them
ourselves. We have heroic people like Ms. Aro, who will do this
on their own, and others, and we need to be prepared to take
advantage of that.
And there are various other specific things that I think we
could talk about as well, and I would be happy to address
those.
I simply want to end, though, by saying we also have to
recognize the weaknesses in our own current political discourse
that make us particularly vulnerable to what the Russians are
doing. The incivility, the mistrust, the hate, the emotion that
is spewed by both sides and within both parties at each other
is undermining Americans' faith in themselves and what we stand
for, in our institutions, and it is opening opportunities for
Putin.
I do not expect to get to some grand kumbaya moment where
all of that stops, but to the extent that we can close that gap
and restore civility to our discourse, we will make it much
harder for Putin to attack us in this fashion.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Kagan follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Keating. Thank you, Doctor.
I now give myself 5 minutes for questions.
Ms. Aro, you mentioned in your testimony that you have
been--well documented--you have been threatened in the past,
harassed, defamed, and you mentioned even being here today
could result in that. And I admire your courage, we all do, for
continuing that effort and for the role of journalists to
continue that effort.
If you would like, could you take a few minutes and be more
specific about the kind of things that were done to you. I
think if you are worried about the future, one of the best
things to do is a little sunshine and tell the kind of tactics
that were used against you personally, and hopefully, this will
deter them to do that in the future, if you could.
Ms. Aro. Of course. Thank you so much for the encouraging
words.
So, for example, over 300 articles in a fake news site,
pro-Kremlin, Finnish-language site called--excuse me, my
language--WTF paper, somewhat popular far-right neo-Nazi, pro-
hate speech site. They have published around 300 articles in
which they smear me as a paid NATO agent, paid America
propagandist, brain damaged, drug user, that I am a threat to
Finnish national security, that I work in cooperation with
British and American troll armies. And they also post really
nasty photos of my face, like manipulated horrible photos, and
they even attack anyone who publicly supports me or even, you
know, credits my work. They attack them as well. They smear
them as well.
They also have attacked the policemen who have investigated
my case. They have attacked just, you know, anyone. They also
cyber stalk me and my activities.
In addition, for example, the police found in their
investigations that someone, even my colleague within the
Finnish Broadcasting Company, had been keeping an eye on me
inside my workplace and then passed on that information about
my job assignments as well as my job, you know, activities and
my location to the main suspected stalker, who works for
Putin's think tank in Moscow and who has been in charge of
these operations.
And, yes, so because also these operations have been
international, I have also received death threats and shooting
phone calls from Russian-speaking countries, because there are
Russian smear articles against me. And, for example, I have
been forced to leave Finland some years back just to, you know,
try and make my investigative book about Russian trolls in
peace.
Mr. Keating. Actually you had to leave your home?
Ms. Aro. Sorry?
Mr. Keating. You had to leave your home?
Ms. Aro. Yes.
Mr. Keating. That is amazing. Have the authorities done
much to help you in that regard? What is available? What was
available to you to help you?
Ms. Aro. Yes, they have definitely investigated my crime
complaints very carefully and I believe they still continue to
do so. But of course these court processes take time, and the
trolls and propagandists and security services who run these
operations, they take advantage of our longish justice system.
Mr. Keating. Thank you for sharing that. I know it was not
easy.
Just quickly, Ambassador Fried and Dr. Kagan mentioned this
in particular, and in a different way Mr. Kalensky did too.
Reflecting on the U.S. situation, what I heard from your
testimony was we are not as organized or centralized as we
should be, that we are lacking in political will to deal with
this, and there is further need of punishing or some kind of a
response to this. Pretty disturbing reflections.
We are out of time, almost. Can you just quickly, what
could we do to improve this in our own country?
Ambassador.
Mr. Fried. The signals from the top of the U.S.
administration should not be ambiguous.
Mr. Keating. Let me be clear. When you say top of the
administration----
Mr. Fried. The President.
Mr. Keating. The President.
Mr. Fried. Ambiguity is not helpful. There are a lot of
people in the administration, political appointees and career
people, who understand the problem and want to do the right
thing. But in an atmosphere of, let us say, mixed signals,
there is a natural disincentive for somebody to stand up and
try to own the problem, to try to push forward difficult
solutions.
And regulatory solutions are going to be difficult. We are
going to be bumping up against issues of free speech. And you
need a collaborative, cooperative base from which to tackle
them.
It is possible. This is not an impossible problem to
manage. It is impossible if your standard for solving it is 100
percent. But that need not be our standard. This is doable, but
we have to go out and start doing it.
Mr. Keating. I have gone over my time. I am sure some of
the other witnesses will reflect that with the other questions
of the members of the committee.
I now recognize the ranking member for 5 minutes, Mr.
Kinzinger.
Mr. Kinzinger. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And, again, thank you all for being here.
Ms. Aro, I just want to say that you are heroic in what you
are doing. And I know that it is difficult, I know that it is
not fun, and I know that the easiest thing to do would be to
walk away and just say you did your peace. But I appreciate you
being here and continuing to stand strong in the face of a
really tiny man, as Dr. Kagan pointed out.
Mr. Ambassador, you are correct, too, in talking about
ambiguity. I think the reality is Russia tried to interfere in
the 2016 election. We can have debates about, you know, what
the result was of that, we may disagree on that, but there was
no doubt there was interference.
And it is going to happen to both parties eventually. It is
all about creating instability. It is all about creating doubt.
And it is something that we have to be very clear about,
because lack of clarity leads to Dr. Kagan's point about, well,
who knows what is true? And then if you are, ``Who knows what
is true?'' you are, like, ``I will just watch, you know,
whatever is on TV and not care,'' and still get fed this
disinformation.
So thank you all for your testimoneys.
Dr. Kagan, I want to ask you about disinformation and any
advantages or disadvantages we have.
When we do Radio Free Europe, for instance, or Radio Free
America, we tell the truth on that, and sometimes that truth is
not pretty to our own system of governance. And telling the
truth, I think, is the right thing.
But that can be a disadvantage when Vladimir Putin puts out
disinformation. So, yes, it is true that Vladimir Putin is tiny
in stature, for instance, right, that is something important to
know, that he is stealing money from his people, getting that
information out there.
But it is not true that Bashar al-Assad defends Christians
and is the hero of Christian civilization, and Vladimir Putin
is a defender of Christianity against radical Muslims, as we
hear. He is just a violent man that wants power.
So when it comes to us countering with our own information,
what are disadvantages and advantages we have, and how do we do
that better? Because again, if you put a disinformation
campaign against a true information campaign, the
disinformation is going to be more powerful. But we do not want
to get in the lying game, either. So how do we do that?
Mr. Kagan. Well, Congressman, I think you put your finger
on a big part of the advantage that we have, which is actually
the truth favors us. He has to tell lies in order to make
anything look good for himself.
He has an economy the size of Australia's, and it is not
even a real economy. It is a kleptocracy, which is
dysfunctional and which harms the Russian people. The Russian
standard of living is dropping. Russian health is dropping. The
demography is terrible. Russia is in a terrible, disastrous
situation. That truth is an advantage for us.
We, on the other hand, are a vibrant, thriving society with
the largest economy in the world and great freedoms and the
ability to have a lot of civil discord. That is a tremendous
advantage for us.
I think it comes down to how we tell our own story, and I
think that we have been so focused on ripping each other apart
that the message that we are sending to the world is that we
are awful and that no one should copy us, no one should want to
join us, no one should want to work with us. And I do not
attribute that to any individual in government. I think it is
across the board, the nature of our argumentation.
So I think our advantage is the story that we actually have
to tell. The disadvantage is the nature of our discourse buries
that story.
Mr. Kinzinger. Yes. Thank you for bringing that up.
I mean, I look at we have not done a good job of selling
our side. We assumed we won the cold war and that was it was
100 agreed that this was the best way of life. We can put up a
$40 trillion economy between the United States and Europe
versus 1.6 or 1.7 trillion dollar economy of Russia. But that
does not sell it because Vladimir Putin uses ethnic tensions
now, and ethnic tensions actually are more compelling than
saying you get a new iPhone or you get a little bit more money.
The reality is this is the best time to be alive. I mean,
you have any information you want here. We are comfortable. The
United States of America, at least, and most of Europe does not
worry about an attack on a daily basis besides maybe a cyber
attack. But yet we are more miserable than I think we have ever
been in our life.
And I think getting our heads around what we have and what
we are and projecting that is how we won the cold war. It was
not necessarily a military buildup. It was an idea war. That is
how we are going to defeat radical terrorism, by giving an idea
war to show what possibility lays out there.
Ms. Aro, do you have anything to add to that? I only have
20 seconds left, but I want to give you a chance to add to the
information side of that.
You are good. I like that.
All right. Well, with that, Mr. Chairman, I will yield
back.
Mr. Keating. Thank you.
The chair recognizes the gentlewoman from Pennsylvania, Ms.
Wild.
Ms. Wild. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Ambassador, I would like to direct my first question to
you, and that is relative to the disinformation campaign that
we know that took place here in the United States in 2016. And
of course, we are coming up on a very important election again
next year.
In your view, what kind of Russian influence operations are
currently operating in the United States?
Mr. Fried. I think the Russian disinformation tactics are
beginning to shift from ads and bots over to manipulated
organic content and maybe in the direction of deepfake,
artificial intelligence.
And I mean by that that instead of making up stuff and
posting it under an impersonation account, they are going to
take genuine U.S. posts, blogs, tweets from radical groups,
right, left, does not matter, and they are going to amplify
them, and then use their sophisticated trolls to slip into that
radicalized conversation and try to play both sides of an
issue, the better to stimulate social tensions.
Now, we do not have to search far. The Soviets used to do
that, but they did it analog. It took weeks. Now it is done in
minutes.
But I think we are going toward manipulation of organic
content rather than wholesale fabrication and then use of
artificial intelligence, spreading around deepfakes. I think
that is the cutting issue more than bots and ads.
Ms. Wild. And do you have any sense of how the U.S.
Government should work to guard against that kind of
interference?
Mr. Fried. Several levels.
First, working to expose it. Sunlight is the great
disinfectant. One of the great success stories of counter-
disinformation was the French elections where European and
American civil society groups exposed what the Russians were up
to, and then the story became in France not what was stolen,
not the stolen files and disseminated nasty information about
the Macron campaign, but the fact of the Russian campaign. That
was a successful example of turning back disinformation.
So expose it, and then start working with social media
companies so they stop acting as purveyors, unwitting purveyors
of Russian intelligence operations. They are past denial of the
problem; I will give them that. I think they want to be part of
the solution, but they are going to need various forms of
persuasion.
And I was skeptical about regulation when I started looking
at this issue before, but I think it is coming, and I think it
probably should. I think that we and the Europeans ought to be
working together to develop common standards. The democratic
world, the free world needs to develop a common approach to
this, and I think it can be done.
Ms. Wild. And do you believe that the deterioration of our
relationship with our allies adversely affects that kind of
cooperation?
Mr. Fried. It makes it a lot harder. Why on earth are we
spending our political capital making theoretical fights
against the European Union which was our idea in the first
place? That is--pardon me--but that is nuts.
They are our closest democratic partner. We together, we
and the Europeans, form the core of the free world. Sure, the
EU can be difficult to deal with. Well, so can the American
government. That is irrelevant.
We have a similar set of assumptions. We have a similar
problem. The Finns, the Balts, the Poles, the Ukrainians, they
have been telling us about this for years. Now we are in a
position to listen. We ought to be working, making common cause
with the Europeans.
And the solution set of issues is not going to be that hard
to find. There are problems in this world that are genuinely
somewhere between difficult and impossible. This is not one of
them. This is fixable.
Ms. Wild. Ms. Aro, did you want to add something to that?
Ms. Aro. Yes, please, about the kinds and types of
disinformation campaigns targeted to the United States.
There was last year a really interesting university
research in which the researchers found that the Russian troll
accounts on Twitter, which had previously been pushing pro-
Russian and pro-Trump messages, they have started to push anti-
vaccination messages to America, and you can just imagine the
outcome of that.
Ms. Wild. Yes. Thank you so much.
I am out of time. I yield back.
Mr. Keating. Thank you.
The chair recognizes the gentlewoman from Missouri, the
home of the Stanley Cup champions, and it pains me to say that,
Mrs. Wagner.
Mrs. Wagner. I thank the chairman. And you know I did not
bring up the fact that my St. Louis Blues are, in fact, the NHL
Cup winners, but over a certain Bruins team of Massachusetts.
But very kind of you to acknowledge it, Mr. Chairman, very
kind. And I thank you for organizing this hearing.
And I thank you to our witnesses.
Russia's capabilities in the information space cannot be
underestimated. Russian disinformation activities run counter
to our U.S. values and our interests, and we must prioritize
efforts to counter Russian information warfare in coordination
with our transatlantic partners.
Mr. Kalensky, you mentioned Russia's attempts to, you said,
launder information in order to obscure its source. What can
the intelligence communities in the United States and Europe do
to improve attribution, so to speak?
Mr. Kalensky. I think for that, it is actually very useful
if you have the first part of the four solutions I offered, and
that is actually documenting the threat, because then you can
always highlight that it was the Russian information space
where the disinformation appeared.
I come from a country where we have quite a pro-Kremlin
President, and when the attack in Salisbury happened, the
Russians tried to spread multiple versions, often
contradicting, about the story. You could see after the murder
of Boris Nemtsov, after shooting down MH 17, and it was the
same after Salisbury, you try to spread contradicting versions
of events because the aim is not to persuade about one version,
but precisely so, as Dr. Kagan said, so that you end up like
say: I do not know where the truth is.
And one of the versions was that it was not only Russia who
was the producer of novichok, the poison that was used there,
but it was also Czech Republic. The Czech President was one of
the first people to repeat that piece of disinformation.
Suddenly you would see the Russian disinformation machine not
saying it was us inventing the lie in the first place, but it
was, as even the Czech President admitted, the Czechs produced
novichok. The information was laundered.
You have to monitor the information space very accurately
so that you can say that actually, no, it was the Russians who
came with the lie in the first place, we know it, and whoever
parrots it is just multiplying Russian lie and is playing a
useful idiot for the Russian disinformation machine.
I think that is why we also need to be a bit more resolute
in punishing the information aggressors. We have to call them
out. We have to call out when someone acts as a useful idiot of
Russian disinformation campaign and parrots its lies.
Mrs. Wagner. Absolutely.
Dr. Kagan, I agree that the United States needs to develop
new structures and strategies to identify, expose, and disrupt
these hybrid operations. This must include coordination with
our NATO allies. How should the U.S. approach the development
of a coherent, NATO-based response to hybrid threats?
Mr. Kagan. Thank you, ma'am.
It is important for us to do as much of this work as
possible at the unclassified level and probably not in the
intelligence community.
Mrs. Wagner. Again, the sunlight, the transparency, needs
to be seen by all.
Mr. Kagan. Exactly. And as soon as you do it in the IC,
then it is classified, and so forth.
Mrs. Wagner. Right. Interesting.
Mr. Kagan. In addition to that, if you are not aware of
them, if you look into the restrictions on the IC's ability
even to monitor publicly available information, a lot of people
would be surprised at how hard it is for the IC to do that.
So I think that this is something where governments need to
facilitate interaction of civil society organizations. The
computer algorithms to catch deepfakes are not going to be
written by the government. They are being written by private
industry, by individuals. The ability to track stories from one
place to another, that is out there. It is a matter of
encouraging the mobilization of civil society.
And then what the government needs to do is to be--and the
governments need to do--is to coordinate on our responses to
these things. So what are we going to try to accomplish?
We know that we have got the Russians cold on this, for
example. Just pick any example you like. What are we going to
do with that information to maximize the damage to the entire
Russian disinformation campaign and to demonstrate to our own
people that there is truth out there, that we can know what it
is, and to defeat the ``who knows'' principle?
Mrs. Wagner. Thank you. The IC part of this I think is
very, very important.
Ms. Aro, in my very limited time, what lessons should
Western governments draw from Finland's programs to improve
media literacy and public awareness regarding disinformation
and influence operation, ma'am?
Ms. Aro. Well, first and foremost, of course, everyone
needs to make university education free for everyone as we have
in Finland, but when that is not possible, then what was
mentioned already before, the program of the Finnish
Government, of training government officials to recognize and
counter disinformation operations already at the very early
stage, and 2014 has been a good example.
Also, journalistic community has started to train school
kids on their free time. They just visit schools and tell what
is facts and what is fiction and how you separate the two.
Mrs. Wagner. You have got to find the truth. Yes.
Absolutely. Well, thank you, and thank you for your courage.
Thank you all for being here today.
I have gone past my time. I yield back to the chair. Thank
you.
Mr. Keating. Thank you.
The chair recognizes the vice chair of the committee, the
gentlewoman from Virginia, Ms. Spanberger.
Ms. Spanberger. Thank you very much for being here today.
My colleague Mrs. Wagner's comments raised for me this idea
of recognizing what the real threat is. And so before I ask my
question, Mr. Kalensky, from your testimony, you outline that
researchers and journalists have identified pro-Kremlin
disinformation campaigns have occurred in the following
elections: Scottish independence referendum, Ukrainian
elections, Bulgarian local elections in 2015, Dutch
referendums, Brexit referendum, Austrian Presidential
elections, Italian constitutional referendum, French elections
in 2017, German elections in 2017, Catalan referendum, Czech
Presidential elections, Italian parliamentary elections,
Macedonian name referendum, Ukrainian Presidential elections,
Slovakian Presidential elections, European Parliament
elections. And you note that this list is likely not
exhaustive.
I list through those because I think it is so vitally
important that while we are focused on what has happened in the
United States or some of the larger known efforts by the
Russian Government to meddle in election and democracies,
looking at that exhaustive list is incredibly important.
But I would like to ask a question focused on the European
response and specifically the European Union's Rapid Alert
System. It was developed this year to facilitate communication
among members relating to disinformation campaigns in their
countries in order to coordinate their responses. The RAS is
based on open source information and will also draw upon
insights from academia, fact checkers, online platforms, and
international partners.
However, there are reports that have surfaced, including a
recent article in The New York Times, that some countries are
choosing not to participate and a number of potentially high
profile alerts of Russia disinformation were not shared with
the public or relevant organizations because of internal
disagreement over the significance of this detected
disinformation.
In your opinion, what tools does the European Union's Rapid
Alert System utilize to combat disinformation, and what is your
assessment of the effectiveness of these mechanisms?
Mr. Kalensky. I am a bit worried that the Rapid Alert
System looks a bit better on paper than in reality.
The European Union will always obviously praise the system
in its public documents. It is the job of the communication
experts there. But from my private conversations with
government officials from various member State governments, I
am a bit afraid that the system is not as effective as it
probably should be. Most of the information there is actually
from publicly available East StratCom documents and that the
member States themselves are actually not putting in too much
information.
So if we have a Rapid Alert System that does not produce
any alerts, I am not sure whether it is really a rapid alert
system.
I think what would really help would be if the system was
made public, because then the journalists and the researchers
and everybody could see what is being reported there and what
is not being reported there. And I could ask my, you know,
Czech authorities: How come you have not reported this case of
Russian disinformation that even I know about?
If there is not this public pressure, and the system is
nontransparent, I am a bit afraid that we can read basically
anything in the public documents, but we have no way to check
it.
And it is a bit of a paradox that part of the EU's anti-
disinformation efforts is pushing the platforms to being more
transparent, and yet this system for rapid alert is actually
nontransparent and nonpublic.
Ms. Spanberger. And in an effort to provide greater
transparency, what would be some of the actual changes to the
system that you all would recommend if we were looking at a
system like that, how it could be effective, or how it could be
made more effective?
Mr. Kalensky. I think we could learn from the best examples
we have in Europe, and again, I will come back to Lithuania,
the Lithuanian armed forces. STRATCOM has trained most of the
important stakeholders in the country, be it civil servants,
government officials, but even local authorities.
So, for example, when the Lisa case, I referred to in the
written testimony, when it appeared it was the mayor of a small
town alerting the armed forces STRATCOM that something like
this has happened. So we have to get to a phase where even a
mayor of a small-sized city somewhere, you know, in Alabama or
Missouri will be aware of what Russian disinformation is, what
topics it exploits, what it tries to achieve.
So for that, the No. 2 solution I offered, raising the
awareness about the threat, I think you can achieve that. If we
would be able to see what is reported in the alert system, A,
we would be alerted, which would be nice, and B, we would know
what the authorities actually--I mean, where is the failure in
their monitoring, what they do not see, and where we, for
example, the civil society, what we can help them with.
Because, as Dr. Kagan mentioned, sometimes exhaustive
monitoring tasks are not extremely easy sometimes. The civil
society might be even quicker than the government because, yes,
the civil society is younger people, more tech savvy, and they
might fulfill this task better than the government.
Ms. Spanberger. And it is an interesting process where you
create a circumstance where you are expecting people to be
aware of it if they have the ability to report or they are
looped into what the reports are.
Thank you all for your time today. I yield back.
Mr. Keating. The chair recognizes the gentleman from
Tennessee, Mr. Burchett.
Mr. Burchett. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member, and
thank you all for being here.
I am interested to hear your all's take on how the EU and
NATO can respond to these disinformation campaigns, and
specifically what the abilities they have to push back are.
Just all of you all. Remember, I have got 5 minutes. I know you
all like to talk. If you all can kind just make sure everybody
gets to answer because I have another question to followup
with.
Mr. Fried. NATO has set up a Center of Excellence to
counter disinformation in Riga, and there is a NATO-EU hybrid
center set up in Helsinki. So there is some institutional
capacity already existing.
These centers can do two things. They can identify Russian
disinformation operations and spread the word, hopefully more
effectively than the EU system, but they may get up--I am
hopeful that the EU system gets up to speed.
Second, they can start targeting Russian bad actors. And
when I know who the bad actors are, there are various ways we
can go after them, including, by the way, through sanctions. So
there is the beginning of an institutional capability.
But if I had one wish, you know, a magic wand loaded with
one wish, it would be transparency and the ability to expose in
real time Russian disinformation ops.
Mr. Kalensky. What you can see in the EU and in NATO, it is
definitely some of the documenting of the threat and some
raising the awareness about the threat. You could see it there.
I would like to see more of punishing of the information
aggressors. I think we should sanction more of the Russian so-
called journalists because they are not journalists, they are
just part of the Russian Army. And I find it horrific that you
have a person called Vladimir Solovyov, he has a show two or
three evenings per week. He uses it to spread hatred against
the West in general or against its countries in particular.
Mr. Burchett. Is he on CNN?
Mr. Kalensky. Unfortunately, no.
Mr. Burchett. OK. I was just throwing that out.
Mr. Kalensky. And after the show, he sits on the plane and
he enjoys his villas at Lago di Como.
I do not think we should allow those who are trying to----
Mr. Burchett. Say that last sentence again. You lost me. I
am from east Tennessee. You are going to have to slow it down.
Mr. Kalensky. Lago di Como. That is an Italian lake, a
very, very nice resort, a very nice touristic area.
We should also sanction the companies. When you have a look
at the list of advertisers on Russian State TV, you would see a
lot of Western companies even in the highest positions. This
quote ascribed to Vladimir Lenin said: Capitalists will sell us
the rope with which we will hang them.
This is precisely what the Western companies are currently
doing, those Western companies that are buying advertisement
time on Russian TV. They are actually paying for destroying the
West.
Mr. Burchett. OK. One other question.
Ma'am, maybe you would--tell me how you say your last name.
Ms. Aro. Aro.
Mr. Burchett. Aro? All right. You say it a lot better than
I do.
In your view, what are the most vulnerable European States
to Russian disinformation campaigns? And what do you project to
be the next electoral target?
Ms. Aro. Well, I would say Balkans, which were already
mentioned here, because many of these countries are--for
example, Serbia is very fully engaged with different types of
Russian projects. For example, they do military operations. And
the Russian disinformation really much wants to tie them even
more tightly together with Russian Federation.
So they also have a lot of pro-Russian propaganda media,
which other so-called traditional, normal, neutral journalists
also follow and called for stories.
So I would be really careful in addressing those regions,
just like mentioned here before.
Mr. Burchett. Yes, sir?
Mr. Kalensky. In 2016, there was an article in Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung in Germany, and the author said they got
hold of a document that the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the
domestic secret service, acquired, a document created for the
Kremlin, ranking the European member States, European Union
member States, according to their vulnerability to Russian
propaganda. And the first three were countries on this list
were Austria, Hungary, and Czech Republic.
So that is for the most vulnerable countries. At the end of
this list were the Nordic countries.
Mr. Burchett. I am out of time. But if you all ever hear
about them messing in the Second congressional District in
Tennessee, I would sure like to know.
Thank you all very much you.
Mr. Chairman, I yield back to you, Brother. Thank you
again.
Mr. Keating. Well, thank you.
The chair recognizes the gentlewoman from Nevada, Ms.
Titus.
Ms. Titus. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank all of you for being here.
In addition to this committee, I serve on the House
Democracy Partnership where we partner with legislatures in
other countries with budding democracies, and a lot of those
are in pretty hostile neighborhoods.
Just this morning, we had a panel talking about some of the
threats that authoritarianism is kind of posing for new
democracies. Three of the countries there were Georgia,
Ukraine, and North Macedonia. So you know they have been
dealing with this for a long time.
You have talked about some of the successes that we have
seen Russia have. I would like to talk about some of the
failures and see what we can learn from there.
They tried messing in the election in Greece and in
Macedonia over the name change to try to prevent Macedonia from
moving forward with the NATO accession. They failed there. They
failed perhaps in the French election last time around.
What can we learn from where they failed? And is it
legislative? Is it policy? Is it a difference in the media
structure? And if it is the latter, what can we do maybe to try
to change things here?
Anybody? Everybody?
Mr. Fried. The common element of the successes you cited
was exposure of Russian disinformation campaigns in real time,
and then the national media understanding the importance of
talking about that, rather than the message the Russians were
trying to push.
This was successfully used in France, Greece. I think that
the Germans turned back some disinformation operations that the
Russians tried, trying to stir up anti-immigrant sentiment.
That is the first piece, expose it and disseminate the
exposure.
The second piece is longer term. It is to get societies to
be more sophisticated about what they read. And that takes
time, though, that is a generation. And we need to act in the
here and now.
Ms. Titus. And how can we possibly do that when people do
not read anymore? Students do not read. They do not write.
Everything comes out in 40 characters. Is this just a challenge
to our whole educational system?
Mr. Kagan. I think the issue is it does not matter whether
we are teaching them how to read or not. It is a question of
teaching people how to process information that they are
receiving. It does not--the medium does not matter. And, in
fact, in many respects, I am less worried--like many others--I
am less worried about what they are doing in the text space
than I am about deepfakes and various other things, because it
is well documented that images are much more powerful.
And talking someone around from a text story that they have
read is a lot easier than getting an image--something that is
taken in by an image, even if it is known to be fake.
And so there is a larger issue here that really has nothing
to do with the deplorable fact, and I agree with you, that
people do not read anymore, but that really comes to how do we
process and receive information that is presented to us in any
form.
Mr. Fried. I agree with that. And I would add that,
therefore, the social media companies need to act--they need to
up their game and not be used as the conveyer belts for what I
think will be the future in disinformation ops, which is lurid,
provocative, completely phony visual posts, videos of speeches
that look like Donald Trump or Elizabeth Warren but are not,
that are completely fabricated.
Ms. Titus. Or slowing down Speaker Pelosi's words?
Mr. Fried. That was not an even good example. A good
example is going to be something that looks exactly like a
candidate, sounds like them, sounds like the kind of thing they
could say, but is 100 percent fabricated. That could be
disseminated within minutes, and social media companies that--
the regulatory framework that I am thinking about would require
social media companies to have a check, especially when they
discover that there is a foreign connection, which often is
going to be technically feasible.
Now, I do not want to drive it into the weeds. But you are
asking exactly the right question.
Ms. Titus. Thank you.
Ms. Aro.
Ms. Aro. I would like to contribute to listing the failures
of the Kremlin. The Russian agents who operated here really
widely in 2016, without any foreign agent registration in
place, and tried to repel the Global Magnitsky Act, as well as
smear Bill Browder, the human rights promoter and businessman,
but they failed and basically ended up in the Mueller and other
types of investigations. So that was one epic fail.
Ms. Titus. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Keating. Thank you.
I know that Ambassador Fried might be leaving in a few
minutes. So when you do, we will take no offense. Hold in there
until you can.
And the chair recognizes the gentleman from South Carolina,
Mr. Wilson.
Mr. Wilson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank you for this
hearing on Russian disinformation.
I and my sons, daughter-in-laws, and grandchildren, have
visited Russia a number of times. It is so impressive, the
people, the beautiful countryside, the architecture, the
literature, the art. That is why it is so sad, that Putin's
abuse of such talented people, with a corrupt elite, is so sad.
My first visit was actually to Moscow in 1990. It was the
last year of the Soviet empire. And it was really inspiring to
see the empire disappear, to be replaced by hopefully a more
modern society, but that did not necessarily occur.
And then I had the opportunity, with the National Endowment
for Democracy, to lecture to different youth groups across
Siberia. And it was incredible to appear as we, on an
expressway, came to Novosibirsk, and there was a sign in
English welcoming everyone to the Chicago of Siberia.
And then I had the opportunity to lead a delegation to St.
Petersburg to place a wreath at the cemetery, on behalf of the
American people, to show our love and affection for the
hundreds of thousands of people in the mass grave who had been
murdered by the Nazi siege.
And so, again, see what an extraordinary city, St.
Petersburg. And then I was grateful to participate with Mayor
Bob Coble of Columbia, South Carolina, to visit Chelyabinsk,
Russia, which is the sister city of Columbia, South Carolina.
And so you would not anticipate all of this, but the reason
I review these associations is because my view is that the
American people are not anti-Russian, but they certainly hope
the best for the citizens of Russia for a positive change.
With all of this in mind, Dr. Kagan, Ambassador Fried, in
your view, what are the most vulnerable European States to
Russian disinformation?
Mr. Fried. Ukraine used to be, but in a possible other epic
Russian failure, Ukrainian patriotism has crystallized in a
pro-Western, pro-American direction, which otherwise might not
have been possible. Nevertheless, they are vulnerable because
they are under attack.
I think Hungary, Czech Republic are vulnerable for the
reasons that Mr. Kalensky mentioned. I think Poland less so. I
think Serbia is still vulnerable to Russian disinformation
operations. The legacy of the NATO operations and break-up of
Yugoslavia weighs heavily.
But we have also found that countries you would not expect
to be vulnerable to Russian disinformation ops have had them in
their countries. Spain, around the Catalonia referendum; the
U.K. as it turns out, with Brexit. And we do not know where the
Russians are going to pop up. But the countries I mentioned
come to mind.
Mr. Wilson. Dr. Kagan.
Mr. Kagan. I agree with the list of vulnerabilities. I
would like to put a couple of other countries on the list. The
issue is a little less how vulnerable they might be than how
desirable a target they are to the Russians.
We have not spoken about Moldova, but Moldova is in the
midst of a major political crisis at the moment, and where it
ultimately lands on the pro-Russia or pro-West trajectory is
very much up in the air. The Russians are playing massively in
that space. Virtually no one in the West is paying any
attention at all. And it matters a lot for all sorts of
reasons, including there is still a Russian military presence
in Moldova held over from the Soviet days.
Latvia is very concerning to me, not because I think that
the Latvians themselves are vulnerable, but the Russian
minority in Latvia is vulnerable to manipulation. And as part
of a hybrid war approach, that could be an immediate problem,
huge problem for NATO. I am very concerned about Latvia in
particular among the Baltic States, although they are all at
risk.
Even Belarus. We do not really imagine Belarus as ever
being in play, because it is so much in the Russian orbit. But
there is a gambit that Putin seems to be engaged in to try to
warp Belarus so fully back into the Russian orbit that it
basically recreates a single State of the two entities.
And the Russia team at the Institute for the Study of War
has actually hypothesized that that is potentially one way in
which he could imagine dealing with a constitutional problem he
has as his term ends, ostensibly without ability to run again,
he could theoretically make himself President of this new
organization. And there is a weird degree of small, little
pushback in Belarus against this, which might be worth paying
attention to.
And in two countries, which in principle are not hugely
vulnerable, but I think will be massive targets, are Germany,
because the question of who succeeds Angela Merkel will
determine the fate of Europe, if you want to really be
hyperbolic about it. But it is not all that hyperbolic; it
really matters a lot. And so I see that Putin will for sure be
all over that.
And the U.K. The opportunities to continue to sow discord
and advance nationalist agendas, look at the Irish question,
various other things, there are a lot of opportunities there
that I think Putin will be aggressive about taking advantage
of.
Mr. Wilson. Thank you very much. And we appreciate you and
your wife.
Thank you very much.
Mr. Keating. The chair recognizes the ranking member for
any closing statement you might have.
Mr. Kinzinger. I have no closing statement except to thank
again the witnesses for being here and all your great work. And
hopefully we can all together, you know, do something of action
instead of just talking.
So thank you very much for being here.
Mr. Keating. I also want to thank you. It was tremendous
testimony, important testimony, not only for our allies in
Europe, but for lessons learned that we should take home here.
We certainly learned that from the top down, from the
President, as Ambassador Fried said, we need clarity, focus, no
ambiguity whatsoever. We are under attack. Our intelligence
community has been clear. Experience in Europe has taught us
that.
We have to organize better in this country. There has been
testimony about how to centralize this effort into one agency.
We are fragmented, frankly. Whether it is Homeland Security,
whether it is our intelligence groups and agencies, there
should be, I believe--and I think it was great testimony--a
greater central focus on this.
And we need a strong political will as well. And that
means, to the extent that we can, less infighting among our
parties and among different views within our own parties.
I think it is important and it has been emphasized how
difficult but important social media is from the private side
to engage in this, as well as a free and vibrant press, free
from intimidation and threats. And making sure they are backed
up in that regard.
In the absence of all of this, I agree with Ambassador
Fried, and some of you, there could be results in more
sanctions, to put teeth into our actions, and reluctantly in
the difficult task of regulation.
So these are all things that we have to consider.
In this closing statement, I have recognized one more
member who has come. And, if we could, we will recognize Mr.
Costa from California for 5 minutes to conclude this hearing.
Thank you.
Mr. Costa. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
And this was an important hearing with some very good
witnesses. And I appreciated very much getting their insight on
what is continuing to be a very vexing issue with the Russians'
interference not only in our elections, but in Europe, what is
obviously part of a comprehensive effort that Putin and his
team have been planning on for Western democracies.
To what extent on the Russian disinformation that we have
discussed here this afternoon draw upon and amplify on anti-
Semitism and other forms of prejudices, in your view?
Mr. Kalensky. As I was trying to describe in the written
testimony, it is always about finding the most pulsating
weakness that the particular, that the given audience might
have. And in some audiences, it might be anti-Semitism. So,
yes, in some audiences you would find that the anti-Semitic
remarks are being played.
If I am not mistaken, it was nice research by Kate Starbird
from University of Washington in Seattle, where she was looking
at which accounts and which sites were pushing the lies about
White Helmets. And she found out that very often they were
obviously pro-Russian, or almost in all cases.
But she even found out that you would find there
aggressively pro-Zionistic websites, but also aggressively
anti-Semitic websites. So it is always about playing both parts
of the extreme, because if you manage to play both parts of the
extreme, you will have a more polarized discussion, more
hysterical, less rational. And less rational people are more
vulnerable to disinformation.
Mr. Costa. Well, and you are playing upon the populism and
the nationalism that is taking place not only in this country,
but in Europe as well. And a lot of that deals with not only
the misinformation that is rampant, but also the fact that a
lot of people are relying on social media to get their
information, which I think is part of the problem when we look
at the totality of what we are dealing with here.
Mr. Kalensky. Sometimes. But, you know, sometimes I have a
feeling, especially here in the United States, that the
importance of social media is a bit overemphasized.
And, for example, in the country where I come from, you
have a huge group that is not present on social media, and yet
they consume heavily polarized and disinformation messages, for
example, via chain emails. And you would really have half of
Europe and half of Europe's pensioners consuming information
via this channel. They are not on Twitter, they are not on
Facebook, and they do not turn on the TV news because everybody
is lying.
Mr. Costa. Yes. Well, has there been any, either among
either of you or with other efforts that we are trying to get a
handle on this, a collection of information that tries to
measure to what success these disinformation campaigns have had
success in elections or the impacts of these campaigns? And how
much evidence do we have regarding the Russian efforts on the
spread of disinformation like in the Brexit vote?
Mr. Kalensky. That is, again, part of the trouble. We do
not actually research this enough. There are not enough people
focusing on the topic.
I am aware of----
Mr. Costa. Would that be something that you think that this
committee should look at in a separate piece of legislation of
trying to collect and gather that data, that information?
Mr. Kalensky. I believe----
Mr. Costa. Yes, if you would like to respond, please.
Ms. Aro. I am sorry.
Yes, definitely. I also proposed in my written statement
that because part of the problem is really that we do not
even--at the moment, we do not even know what kind of
operations we are targeted to. We might know in 2 years, when
someone starts to really investigate them. But we should
address and counter these operations while they are ongoing,
because they take effect like that.
Mr. Costa. So, Mr. Chairman, this is something that I think
we should try to look into, I mean, to measure this. We have
all of this work, and we should probably sit down with you
folks to get that.
Finally, my time is expiring, but I guess the--as chairman
of the Transatlantic Legislators' Dialogue, I know our European
colleagues are as concerned about this as we are. And to what
effect do you think that they had on the most recent
parliamentary elections that just finished in May in the EU? Do
we have any idea?
Mr. Kalensky. How impactful were the operations?
Mr. Costa. Yes.
Mr. Kalensky. Unfortunately, again, we do not have the
measure. So what we saw, for example, from the data of the East
StratCom Task Force, the team where I used to work, their
numbers show that the amount of disinformation cases in 2019,
before the elections, has actually doubled compared to the same
period in 2018. There were two times more disinformation cases
that the StratCom unit has identified.
So you would see that there was probably more--more of
disinformation, more disinformation messages. But measuring the
impact, this is unfortunately a thing that not too many
government agencies are doing, as far as I know.
For example, I know about a very nice book by Professor
Kathleen Hall Jamieson from University of Pennsylvania about
cyber war and about the effect that the Russian disinformation
operations had on the U.S. elections. Unfortunately, you would
not see that many investigations in Europe.
Mr. Costa. Well, Mr. Chairman, my time has run out. I want
to thank you for calling this hearing. And maybe this is
something that, with your subcommittee, we could work together
with our European counterparts to really take a deep dive in
trying to measure what really is taking place, both here and
Europe, in a way in which we could use it to protect ourselves
from further elections--in future elections.
Mr. Keating. Great. Thank you. This will be a continuation
of those efforts.
I am just reminded as we close that Russia and the things
that they have done, these attacks, are like bullies. And many
times bullies cannot build themselves up. If they cannot stand
on their own success and merits, they have to tear others down.
And that is what is happening with the Russian leadership.
It is certainly not the case with the Russian people.
I believe that today's hearing, I hope, will help the U.S.
and the West work together and make sure that we realize this
threat and that we address it as successfully as we can. And
that means working together to address that threat.
So I want to thank you for a very important hearing, and we
will continue on this together.
With that, I adjourn the hearing.
[Whereupon, at 3:54 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
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