Using information security to explain why disinformation makes autocracies stronger and democracies weaker

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: November 28, 2018 8:23:42 JST
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Using information security to explain why disinformation makes autocracies stronger and 
> democracies weaker
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend David Rosenthal.  DLH]
>
> Using information security to explain why disinformation makes autocracies stronger and democracies weaker
> By Cory Doctorow
> Nov 27 2018
> <https://boingboing.net/2018/11/27/autocracy-loves-confusion.html>
>
> The same disinformation campaigns that epitomize the divisions in US society -- beliefs in voter fraud, vaccine 
> conspiracies, and racist conspiracies about migrants, George Soros and Black Lives Matter, to name a few -- are a 
> source of strength for autocracies like Russia, where the lack of a consensus on which groups and views are real and 
> which are manufactured by the state strengthens the hand of Putin and his clutch of oligarchs.
>
> In a new Harvard Berkman Center paper, Common -Knowledge Attacks on Democracy, political scientist Henry Farrell 
> (previously and security expert Bruce Schneier (previously) team up to explore this subject by using information 
> security techniques, and come to a very plausible-seeming explanation and a set of policy recommendations to address 
> the issue.
>
> Farrell and Schneier start by exploring the failures of both national security and information security paradigms to 
> come to grips with the issue: Cold War-style national security is oriented around Cold War ideas like 
> "offense–defense balance, conventional deterrence theory, and deterrence by denial," none of which are very useful 
> for thinking about disinformation attacks; meanwhile, information security limits itself to thinking about "servers 
> and individual networks" and not "the consequences of attacks for the broader fabric of democratic societies."
>
> Despite these limits, the authors say that there is a way to use the tools of information security to unpick these 
> kinds of "information attacks" on democracies: treat "the entire polity as an information system with associated 
> attack surfaces and threat models" -- that is, to think about the democracy itself as the thing to be defended, 
> rather than networks or computers.
>
> From there, they revisit the different disinformation styles of various autocracies and autocratic movements, 
> particularly the Russian style of sowing doubt about what truth is and where it can be found (infamously, Russia's 
> leading political strategist admits that he secretly funds some opposition groups, but won't say which ones, leaving 
> everyone to wonder whether a given group is genuine or manufactured -- there's some excellent scholarship contrasting 
> this with the style used by the Chinese state and also with techniques used by authoritarian insurgents inside of 
> democracies, like Milo Yiannopoulos). 
>
> In the paper's framework, the stability of autocrats' power requires that the public not know how other people feel 
> -- for there to be constant confusion about which institutions, groups and views are genuine and which ones are 
> conspiracies, frauds, or power-grabs. Once members of the public discover how many of their neighbors agree that the 
> ruling autocracy is garbage, they are emboldened to rise up against it. Tunisia's dictatorship was stable so long as 
> the law banning dissent could be enforced, but the lack of enforcement on Facebook allowed Tunisians to gain insight 
> into their neighbors' discontent, leading to the collapse of the regime.
>
> By contrast, democracies rely on good knowledge about the views of other people, most notably embodied by things like 
> free and fair elections, where citizens get a sense of their neighbors' views, and are thus motivated to find 
> solutions that they know will be widely viewed as legitimate and will therefore be sustainable.
>
> So when information attacks against democracies sow doubt about the genuineness of movements and views -- when Soros 
> is accused of funding left-wing movements, when Koch Industries' name is all over the funding sources of right-wing 
> think-tanks, when politicians depend on big money, and when Facebook ads and its engagement algorithm pushes people 
> to hoaxes and conspiracies -- it weakens democracy in exactly the same way that it strengthens autocracy. Without a 
> sense of which political views are genuine and which are disinformation, all debate degenerates into people calling 
> each other shills or bots, and never arriving at compromises with the stamp of broad legitimacy.
>
> It's not a coincidence that the right's political playbook is so intertwined with this kind of disinformation and 
> weakening of democracy. A widely held belief on the political right is that the most important "freedom" is private 
> property rights, and since rich people are always outnumbered by poor people, subscribers to this ideology hold that 
> "freedom is incompatible with democracy," because in a fair vote, the majority 99% will vote to redistribute the 
> fortunes of the minority 1%. In this conception, the rich are the only "oppressed minority" who can't be defended by 
> democracy. 
>
> This gives rise to the right's belief in natural hierarchies, which are sorted out by markets, with the best people 
> rising to the top (Boris Johnson: "As many as 16 per cent of our species have an IQ below 85, while about 2 per cent 
> have an IQ above 130. The harder you shake the pack, the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top.").
>
> The right's position, fundamentally, is that the "best" people should boss everyone else around for their own good: 
> kings should boss around commoners (monarchists); slavers should boss around enslaved people (white nationalists); 
> husbands should boss around wives and kids (Dominionists); America should boss around the world (imperialists); and 
> rich people should boss around workers (capitalists).
>
> [snip]
>
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