Are financial and cyber crises alike? Trump says he accepts evidence of Russian meddling Trump’s defence of Russia sparks outrage in US Mueller charges 12 Russian intelligence officers Opinion FT Magazine Why is America so bad at information wars? ‘Russian-backed groups began populating US social media from the autumn of 2015 onwards’ GILLIAN TETT Add to myFT Share on Twitter (opens new window) Share on Facebook (opens new window) Share on LinkedIn (opens new window) Save Save to myFT Gillian Tett JULY 18, 2018 Print this page97 While fighting al-Shabaab in 2011, Kenyan army officer Major Emmanuel Chirchir noticed that the Somali-based Islamist group was using donkeys to transport weapons. He dispatched a message via Twitter, warning the local Kenyan population:
“Any large concentration and movement of loaded donkeys will be considered as al-Shabaab activity.” Al-Shabaab cyber-punched back, mocking Chirchir for threatening to bomb donkeys: “Your eccentric battle has got animal rights groups quite concerned, Major.” In his new book Messing With the Enemy, Clint Watts, a former FBI agent, describes this exchange as the first “international-terrorist-versus-counter-terrorist Twitter battle”. On one level, this long-forgotten exchange might seem trivial. In recent years, there has been a deluge of grisly news about Islamist extremist campaigns. And more sophisticated cyber tactics have, according to the FBI, been used by Russian intelligence to undermine both US and European elections. Earlier this month, Robert Mueller’s investigation unveiled indictments against a dozen Russian agents for using social media to discredit Hillary Clinton during the 2016 US election campaign.
Last week I stumbled on Watts’s book and realised that the story of the Kenyan donkeys is rather symbolic right now. One way to make sense of today’s extraordinary cyber battles with the Russians is to look at how jihadi groups developed such campaigns years earlier — not least because this oft-ignored parallel shows how the US government has done a poor job fighting its enemies in cyberspace. “America sucks at information warfare,” Watts laments. “Absolutely sucks.” This tale starts, as Watts explains, after the first Gulf war in the early 1990s, when terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda hurried to establish a global footing. This coincided with the rise of the internet, and al-Qaeda used email and online chatrooms to spread its message, with great success. Similarly, rival movements such as Isis and al-Shabaab emerged just as social media was taking off, and proved to be so savvy at using it to win recruits that they eclipsed al-Qaeda. “For al-Qaeda, the internet was its saviour and social media was its undoing,”
Watts observes. US officials attempted to fight back against Isis’s social media campaigns. Watts reveals that in 2013 while at the FBI — and later as a security consultant — he engaged in a long Twitter duel with American-born terrorist Omar Hammami. Other US intelligence groups tried to develop psychological-operations campaigns to fight the extremists. Some of the experimental techniques used to profile social media users were later deployed in the ad-tech industry by companies such as Cambridge Analytica. However, the US military was simply too bureaucratic, slow moving and rule-laden to match its enemies. And the country that seemed to learn the most from the social media extremists was Russia: Watts describes how he inadvertently witnessed Russian-backed groups populating American social media from the autumn of 2015 onwards, copying some of the tactics of the Islamists.
Some American cyber experts realised the threat this new Russian involvement posed. But their warnings were largely ignored by the media and government, since it was the jihadi threat that was dominating the foreign policy debate. The Russians were free, therefore, to expand their cyber activities into more corners of American political life. And, while Watts stops short of suggesting that Donald Trump was actively collaborating with the Russian president Vladimir Putin to spread fake news, he believes Trump was a “useful idiot” for the Kremlin’s interests. If somebody had made a movie with this plot line a decade ago, it would have been panned for being too fanciful. But it doesn’t end there. Watts’s proposed remedy is just as startling: he believes that US government agencies are now so ill-equipped to fight in these type of social media wars that it is time for non-government groups to take the lead instead.
“Westerners wanting to protect their democracies need to bypass their governments and create their own online counter-insurgency,” he argues, suggesting that a new army of civic-minded cyber volunteers must populate the parts of the internet where Russians (or others) are sowing dissent, expose this, track the key actors — and then neutralise their influence. Is this crazy? Many US officials would claim that it is and go on to point out that Watts no longer works for the FBI. But before anyone dismisses this whole idea, I have heard many leading figures in Silicon Valley furtively express similar views. Indeed, some appear to be quietly funding civilian “volunteers” to do exactly what Watts suggests: namely, hunt for ways to counter Russian attacks by infiltrating enemy cyber groups.
Who knows whether this type of grass-roots action will work, or how widespread it might be — everything is deeply murky in the arena of cyberspace and information wars. But those Kenyan donkey tweets should remind us how fast cyber war has evolved in the past decade; and how it is likely to keep mutating in unpredictable ways. With or without Putin and Trump.
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