Essays Tagged "Defusing Disinfo"

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Defending Democratic Mechanisms and Institutions against Information Attacks

  • Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier
  • Defusing Disinfo
  • January 28, 2019

To better understand influence attacks, we proposed an approach that models democracy itself as an information system and explains how democracies are vulnerable to certain forms of information attacks that autocracies naturally resist. Our model combines ideas from both international security and computer security, avoiding the limitations of both in explaining how influence attacks may damage democracy as a whole.

Our initial account is necessarily limited. Building a truly comprehensive understanding of democracy as an information system will be a Herculean labor, involving the collective endeavors of political scientists and theorists, computer scientists, scholars of complexity, and others…

Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.