Schneier on Security: Tagged disinformation

Entries Tagged "disinformation"

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Political Disinformation and AI

Elections around the world are facing an evolving threat from foreign actors, one that involves artificial intelligence.

Countries trying to influence each other’s elections entered a new era in 2016, when the Russians launched a series of social media disinformation campaigns targeting the US presidential election. Over the next seven years, a number of countries—most prominently China and Iran—used social media to influence foreign elections, both in the US and elsewhere in the world. There’s no reason to expect 2023 and 2024 to be any different.

But there is a new element: generative AI and large language models. These have the ability to quickly and easily produce endless reams of text on any topic in any tone from any perspective. As a security expert, I believe it’s a tool uniquely suited to Internet-era propaganda.

This is all very new. ChatGPT was introduced in November 2022. The more powerful GPT-4 was released in March 2023. Other language and image production AIs are around the same age. It’s not clear how these technologies will change disinformation, how effective they will be or what effects they will have. But we are about to find out.

Election season will soon be in full swing in much of the democratic world. Seventy-one percent of people living in democracies will vote in a national election between now and the end of next year. Among them: Argentina and Poland in October, Taiwan in January, Indonesia in February, India in April, the European Union and Mexico in June, and the US in November. Nine African democracies, including South Africa, will have elections in 2024. Australia and the UK don’t have fixed dates, but elections are likely to occur in 2024.

Many of those elections matter a lot to the countries that have run social media influence operations in the past. China cares a great deal about Taiwan, Indonesia, India, and many African countries. Russia cares about the UK, Poland, Germany, and the EU in general. Everyone cares about the United States.

And that’s only considering the largest players. Every US national election from 2016 has brought with it an additional country attempting to influence the outcome. First it was just Russia, then Russia and China, and most recently those two plus Iran. As the financial cost of foreign influence decreases, more countries can get in on the action. Tools like ChatGPT significantly reduce the price of producing and distributing propaganda, bringing that capability within the budget of many more countries.

A couple of months ago, I attended a conference with representatives from all of the cybersecurity agencies in the US. They talked about their expectations regarding election interference in 2024. They expected the usual players—Russia, China, and Iran—and a significant new one: “domestic actors.” That is a direct result of this reduced cost.

Of course, there’s a lot more to running a disinformation campaign than generating content. The hard part is distribution. A propagandist needs a series of fake accounts on which to post, and others to boost it into the mainstream where it can go viral. Companies like Meta have gotten much better at identifying these accounts and taking them down. Just last month, Meta announced that it had removed 7,704 Facebook accounts, 954 Facebook pages, 15 Facebook groups, and 15 Instagram accounts associated with a Chinese influence campaign, and identified hundreds more accounts on TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), LiveJournal, and Blogspot. But that was a campaign that began four years ago, producing pre-AI disinformation.

Disinformation is an arms race. Both the attackers and defenders have improved, but also the world of social media is different. Four years ago, Twitter was a direct line to the media, and propaganda on that platform was a way to tilt the political narrative. A Columbia Journalism Review study found that most major news outlets used Russian tweets as sources for partisan opinion. That Twitter, with virtually every news editor reading it and everyone who was anyone posting there, is no more.

Many propaganda outlets moved from Facebook to messaging platforms such as Telegram and WhatsApp, which makes them harder to identify and remove. TikTok is a newer platform that is controlled by China and more suitable for short, provocative videos—ones that AI makes much easier to produce. And the current crop of generative AIs are being connected to tools that will make content distribution easier as well.

Generative AI tools also allow for new techniques of production and distribution, such as low-level propaganda at scale. Imagine a new AI-powered personal account on social media. For the most part, it behaves normally. It posts about its fake everyday life, joins interest groups and comments on others’ posts, and generally behaves like a normal user. And once in a while, not very often, it says—or amplifies—something political. These persona bots, as computer scientist Latanya Sweeney calls them, have negligible influence on their own. But replicated by the thousands or millions, they would have a lot more.

That’s just one scenario. The military officers in Russia, China, and elsewhere in charge of election interference are likely to have their best people thinking of others. And their tactics are likely to be much more sophisticated than they were in 2016.

Countries like Russia and China have a history of testing both cyberattacks and information operations on smaller countries before rolling them out at scale. When that happens, it’s important to be able to fingerprint these tactics. Countering new disinformation campaigns requires being able to recognize them, and recognizing them requires looking for and cataloging them now.

In the computer security world, researchers recognize that sharing methods of attack and their effectiveness is the only way to build strong defensive systems. The same kind of thinking also applies to these information campaigns: The more that researchers study what techniques are being employed in distant countries, the better they can defend their own countries.

Disinformation campaigns in the AI era are likely to be much more sophisticated than they were in 2016. I believe the US needs to have efforts in place to fingerprint and identify AI-produced propaganda in Taiwan, where a presidential candidate claims a deepfake audio recording has defamed him, and other places. Otherwise, we’re not going to see them when they arrive here. Unfortunately, researchers are instead being targeted and harassed.

Maybe this will all turn out okay. There have been some important democratic elections in the generative AI era with no significant disinformation issues: primaries in Argentina, first-round elections in Ecuador, and national elections in Thailand, Turkey, Spain, and Greece. But the sooner we know what to expect, the better we can deal with what comes.

This essay previously appeared in The Conversation.

Posted on October 5, 2023 at 7:12 AM • View Comments

Information Flows and Democracy

Henry Farrell and I published a paper on fixing American democracy: “Rechanneling Beliefs: How Information Flows Hinder or Help Democracy.”

It’s much easier for democratic stability to break down than most people realize, but this doesn’t mean we must despair over the future. It’s possible, though very difficult, to back away from our current situation towards one of greater democratic stability. This wouldn’t entail a restoration of a previous status quo. Instead, it would recognize that the status quo was less stable than it seemed, and a major source of the tensions that have started to unravel it. What we need is a dynamic stability, one that incorporates new forces into American democracy rather than trying to deny or quash them.

This paper is our attempt to explain what this might mean in practice. We start by analyzing the problem and explaining more precisely why a breakdown in public consensus harms democracy. We then look at how these beliefs are being undermined by three feedback loops, in which anti-democratic actions and anti-democratic beliefs feed on each other. Finally, we explain how these feedback loops might be redirected so as to sustain democracy rather than undermining it.

To be clear: redirecting these and other energies in more constructive ways presents enormous challenges, and any plausible success will at best be untidy and provisional. But, almost by definition, that’s true of any successful democratic reforms where people of different beliefs and values need to figure out how to coexist. Even when it’s working well, democracy is messy. Solutions to democratic breakdowns are going to be messy as well.

This is part of our series of papers looking at democracy as an information system. The first paper was “Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy.”

Posted on June 9, 2021 at 6:46 AM • View Comments

Undermining Democracy

Last Thursday, Rudy Giuliani, a Trump campaign lawyer, alleged a widespread voting conspiracy involving Venezuela, Cuba, and China. Another lawyer, Sidney Powell, argued that Mr. Trump won in a landslide, the entire election in swing states should be overturned and the legislatures should make sure that the electors are selected for the president.

The Republican National Committee swung in to support her false claim that Mr. Trump won in a landslide, while Michigan election officials have tried to stop the certification of the vote.

It is wildly unlikely that their efforts can block Joe Biden from becoming president. But they may still do lasting damage to American democracy for a shocking reason: the moves have come from trusted insiders.

American democracy’s vulnerability to disinformation has been very much in the news since the Russian disinformation campaign in 2016. The fear is that outsiders, whether they be foreign or domestic actors, will undermine our system by swaying popular opinion and election results.

This is half right. American democracy is an information system, in which the information isn’t bits and bytes but citizens’ beliefs. When peoples’ faith in the democratic system is undermined, democracy stops working. But as information security specialists know, outsider attacks are hard. Russian trolls, who don’t really understand how American politics works, have actually had a difficult time subverting it.

When you really need to worry is when insiders go bad. And that is precisely what is happening in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. In traditional information systems, the insiders are the people who have both detailed knowledge and high level access, allowing them to bypass security measures and more effectively subvert systems. In democracy, the insiders aren’t just the officials who manage voting but also the politicians who shape what people believe about politics. For four years, Donald Trump has been trying to dismantle our shared beliefs about democracy. And now, his fellow Republicans are helping him.

Democracy works when we all expect that votes will be fairly counted, and defeated candidates leave office. As the democratic theorist Adam Przeworski puts it, democracy is “a system in which parties lose elections.” These beliefs can break down when political insiders make bogus claims about general fraud, trying to cling to power when the election has gone against them.

It’s obvious how these kinds of claims damage Republican voters’ commitment to democracy. They will think that elections are rigged by the other side and will not accept the judgment of voters when it goes against their preferred candidate. Their belief that the Biden administration is illegitimate will justify all sorts of measures to prevent it from functioning.

It’s less obvious that these strategies affect Democratic voters’ faith in democracy, too. Democrats are paying attention to Republicans’ efforts to stop the votes of Democratic voters - and especially Black Democratic voters - from being counted. They, too, are likely to have less trust in elections going forward, and with good reason. They will expect that Republicans will try to rig the system against them. Mr. Trump is having a hard time winning unfairly, because he has lost in several states. But what if Mr. Biden’s margin of victory depended only on one state? What if something like that happens in the next election?

The real fear is that this will lead to a spiral of distrust and destruction. Republicans who are increasingly committed to the notion that the Democrats are committing pervasive fraud - will do everything that they can to win power and to cling to power when they can get it. Democrats - seeing what Republicans are doing will try to entrench themselves in turn. They suspect that if the Republicans really win power, they will not ever give it back. The claims of Republicans like Senator Mike Lee of Utah that America is not really a democracy might become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

More likely, this spiral will not directly lead to the death of American democracy. The U.S. federal system of government is complex and hard for any one actor or coalition to dominate completely. But it may turn American democracy into an unworkable confrontation between two hostile camps, each unwilling to make any concession to its adversary.

We know how to make voting itself more open and more secure; the literature is filled with vital and important suggestions. The more difficult problem is this. How do you shift the collective belief among Republicans that elections are rigged?

Political science suggests that partisans are more likely to be persuaded by fellow partisans, like Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state in Georgia, who said that election fraud wasn’t a big problem. But this would only be effective if other well-known Republicans supported him.

Public outrage, alternatively, can sometimes force officials to back down, as when people crowded in to denounce the Michigan Republican election officials who were trying to deny certification of their votes.

The fundamental problem, however, is Republican insiders who have convinced themselves that to keep and hold power, they need to trash the shared beliefs that hold American democracy together.

They may have long-term worries about the consequences, but they’re unlikely to do anything about those worries in the near-term unless voters, wealthy donors or others whom they depend on make them pay short-term costs.

This essay was written with Henry Farrell, and previously appeared in the New York Times.

Posted on November 27, 2020 at 6:10 AM • View Comments

2020 Was a Secure Election

Over at Lawfare: “2020 Is An Election Security Success Story (So Far).”

What’s more, the voting itself was remarkably smooth. It was only a few months ago that professionals and analysts who monitor election administration were alarmed at how badly unprepared the country was for voting during a pandemic. Some of the primaries were disasters. There were not clear rules in many states for voting by mail or sufficient opportunities for voting early. There was an acute shortage of poll workers. Yet the United States saw unprecedented turnout over the last few weeks. Many states handled voting by mail and early voting impressively and huge numbers of volunteers turned up to work the polls. Large amounts of litigation before the election clarified the rules in every state. And for all the president’s griping about the counting of votes, it has been orderly and apparently without significant incident. The result was that, in the midst of a pandemic that has killed 230,000 Americans, record numbers of Americans voted—and voted by mail—and those votes are almost all counted at this stage.

On the cybersecurity front, there is even more good news. Most significantly, there was no serious effort to target voting infrastructure. After voting concluded, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Chris Krebs, released a statement, saying that “after millions of Americans voted, we have no evidence any foreign adversary was capable of preventing Americans from voting or changing vote tallies.” Krebs pledged to “remain vigilant for any attempts by foreign actors to target or disrupt the ongoing vote counting and final certification of results,” and no reports have emerged of threats to tabulation and certification processes.

A good summary.

Posted on November 10, 2020 at 6:40 AM • View Comments

Fake Stories in Real News Sites

Fireeye is reporting that a hacking group called Ghostwriter broke into the content management systems of Eastern European news sites to plant fake stories.

From a Wired story:

The propagandists have created and disseminated disinformation since at least March 2017, with a focus on undermining NATO and the US troops in Poland and the Baltics; they’ve posted fake content on everything from social media to pro-Russian news websites. In some cases, FireEye says, Ghostwriter has deployed a bolder tactic: hacking the content management systems of news websites to post their own stories. They then disseminate their literal fake news with spoofed emails, social media, and even op-eds the propagandists write on other sites that accept user-generated content.

That hacking campaign, targeting media sites from Poland to Lithuania, has spread false stories about US military aggression, NATO soldiers spreading coronavirus, NATO planning a full-on invasion of Belarus, and more.

EDITED TO ADD (8/12): This review of three books on the topic is related.

Posted on July 30, 2020 at 2:56 PM • View Comments

Chinese COVID-19 Disinformation Campaign

The New York Times is reporting on state-sponsored disinformation campaigns coming out of China:

Since that wave of panic, United States intelligence agencies have assessed that Chinese operatives helped push the messages across platforms, according to six American officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to publicly discuss intelligence matters. The amplification techniques are alarming to officials because the disinformation showed up as texts on many Americans’ cellphones, a tactic that several of the officials said they had not seen before.

Posted on April 23, 2020 at 12:01 PM • View Comments

Story of Gus Weiss

This is a long and fascinating article about Gus Weiss, who masterminded a long campaign to feed technical disinformation to the Soviet Union, which may or may not have caused a massive pipeline explosion somewhere in Siberia in the 1980s, if in fact there even was a massive pipeline explosion somewhere in Siberia in the 1980s.

Lots of information about the origins of US export controls laws and sabotage operations.

Posted on March 27, 2020 at 6:03 AM • View Comments

Artificial Personas and Public Discourse

Presidential campaign season is officially, officially, upon us now, which means it’s time to confront the weird and insidious ways in which technology is warping politics. One of the biggest threats on the horizon: artificial personas are coming, and they’re poised to take over political debate. The risk arises from two separate threads coming together: artificial intelligence-driven text generation and social media chatbots. These computer-generated “people” will drown out actual human discussions on the Internet.

Text-generation software is already good enough to fool most people most of the time. It’s writing news stories, particularly in sports and finance. It’s talking with customers on merchant websites. It’s writing convincing op-eds on topics in the news (though there are limitations). And it’s being used to bulk up “pink-slime journalism”—websites meant to appear like legitimate local news outlets but that publish propaganda instead.

There’s a record of algorithmic content pretending to be from individuals, as well. In 2017, the Federal Communications Commission had an online public-commenting period for its plans to repeal net neutrality. A staggering 22 million comments were received. Many of them—maybe half—were fake, using stolen identities. These comments were also crude; 1.3 million were generated from the same template, with some words altered to make them appear unique. They didn’t stand up to even cursory scrutiny.

These efforts will only get more sophisticated. In a recent experiment, Harvard senior Max Weiss used a text-generation program to create 1,000 comments in response to a government call on a Medicaid issue. These comments were all unique, and sounded like real people advocating for a specific policy position. They fooled the Medicaid.gov administrators, who accepted them as genuine concerns from actual human beings. This being research, Weiss subsequently identified the comments and asked for them to be removed, so that no actual policy debate would be unfairly biased. The next group to try this won’t be so honorable.

Chatbots have been skewing social-media discussions for years. About a fifth of all tweets about the 2016 presidential election were published by bots, according to one estimate, as were about a third of all tweets about that year’s Brexit vote. An Oxford Internet Institute report from last year found evidence of bots being used to spread propaganda in 50 countries. These tended to be simple programs mindlessly repeating slogans: a quarter million pro-Saudi “We all have trust in Mohammed bin Salman” tweets following the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi, for example. Detecting many bots with a few followers each is harder than detecting a few bots with lots of followers. And measuring the effectiveness of these bots is difficult. The best analyses indicate that they did not affect the 2016 US presidential election. More likely, they distort people’s sense of public sentiment and their faith in reasoned political debate. We are all in the middle of a novel social experiment.

Over the years, algorithmic bots have evolved to have personas. They have fake names, fake bios, and fake photos—sometimes generated by AI. Instead of endlessly spewing propaganda, they post only occasionally. Researchers can detect that these are bots and not people, based on their patterns of posting, but the bot technology is getting better all the time, outpacing tracking attempts. Future groups won’t be so easily identified. They’ll embed themselves in human social groups better. Their propaganda will be subtle, and interwoven in tweets about topics relevant to those social groups.

Combine these two trends and you have the recipe for nonhuman chatter to overwhelm actual political speech.

Soon, AI-driven personas will be able to write personalized letters to newspapers and elected officials, submit individual comments to public rule-making processes, and intelligently debate political issues on social media. They will be able to comment on social-media posts, news sites, and elsewhere, creating persistent personas that seem real even to someone scrutinizing them. They will be able to pose as individuals on social media and send personalized texts. They will be replicated in the millions and engage on the issues around the clock, sending billions of messages, long and short. Putting all this together, they’ll be able to drown out any actual debate on the Internet. Not just on social media, but everywhere there’s commentary.

Maybe these persona bots will be controlled by foreign actors. Maybe it’ll be domestic political groups. Maybe it’ll be the candidates themselves. Most likely, it’ll be everybody. The most important lesson from the 2016 election about misinformation isn’t that misinformation occurred; it is how cheap and easy misinforming people was. Future technological improvements will make it all even more affordable.

Our future will consist of boisterous political debate, mostly bots arguing with other bots. This is not what we think of when we laud the marketplace of ideas, or any democratic political process. Democracy requires two things to function properly: information and agency. Artificial personas can starve people of both.

Solutions are hard to imagine. We can regulate the use of bots—a proposed California law would require bots to identify themselves—but that is effective only against legitimate influence campaigns, such as advertising. Surreptitious influence operations will be much harder to detect. The most obvious defense is to develop and standardize better authentication methods. If social networks verify that an actual person is behind each account, then they can better weed out fake personas. But fake accounts are already regularly created for real people without their knowledge or consent, and anonymous speech is essential for robust political debate, especially when speakers are from disadvantaged or marginalized communities. We don’t have an authentication system that both protects privacy and scales to the billions of users.

We can hope that our ability to identify artificial personas keeps up with our ability to disguise them. If the arms race between deep fakes and deep-fake detectors is any guide, that’ll be hard as well. The technologies of obfuscation always seem one step ahead of the technologies of detection. And artificial personas will be designed to act exactly like real people.

In the end, any solutions have to be nontechnical. We have to recognize the limitations of online political conversation, and again prioritize face-to-face interactions. These are harder to automate, and we know the people we’re talking with are actual people. This would be a cultural shift away from the internet and text, stepping back from social media and comment threads. Today that seems like a completely unrealistic solution.

Misinformation efforts are now common around the globe, conducted in more than 70 countries. This is the normal way to push propaganda in countries with authoritarian leanings, and it’s becoming the way to run a political campaign, for either a candidate or an issue.

Artificial personas are the future of propaganda. And while they may not be effective in tilting debate to one side or another, they easily drown out debate entirely. We don’t know the effect of that noise on democracy, only that it’ll be pernicious, and that it’s inevitable.

This essay previously appeared in TheAtlantic.com.

EDITED TO ADD: Jamie Susskind wrote a similar essay.

EDITED TO ADD (3/16): This essay has been translated into Spanish.

EDITED TO ADD (6/4): This essay has been translated into Portuguese.

Posted on January 13, 2020 at 8:21 AM • View Comments

The Threat of Fake Academic Research

Interesting analysis of the possibility, feasibility, and efficacy of deliberately fake scientific research, something I had previously speculated about.

Posted on August 27, 2019 at 5:14 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.