Russian Interference in America's Democracy: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Robert Mueller testifying before Congress on Russian Interference in the 2016 election

 

YESTERDAY

The Mueller Investigation came about despite efforts by Trump to stop or impede it. The Mueller Report was released in redacted form on April 18, 2019. However, the results of the investigation were muted by a "summary" of the results presented by Attorney General William Barr, who, during a televised press conference claimed that the investigation revealed no collusion and no obstruction of justice. This was misleading with regard to collusion, and false with regard to obstruction.

The American Constitution Society (ACS) made a line-by-line comparison of Barr's summary and Mueller's findings. They concluded:

"A comparison of the report and Barr’s statements shows that Barr downplayed Mueller’s findings about Russian contacts with Trump campaign associates as well as the damning evidence of the president’s obstruction of justice that Mueller assembled."

In his report to Congress, then-special counsel Robert Mueller detailed how members of the Trump Campaign lied under questioning. Also, campaign insiders like Roger Stone, used encrypted communications to hide their actions. Further, Mueller described Trump as being guilty of the factual elements of obstruction of justice, but left it up to Congress what to do with them. The Democratic-led House Committee on the Judiciary under Jerry Nadler punted.

Trump took full advantage of Barr's cover and proclaimed himself "exonerated," and the story lost steam in the media. Interestingly, Trump was himself directly guilty of obstruction by refusing to multiple requests spanning over a year to appear in person for questioning by the Mueller team, agreeing only to answer written questions. Mueller judged Trump's written answers "inadequate." They were included in an appendix to the report. Anyone objectively interested in Trump's perfidy regarding the investigation owes it to themself to read this appendix.

TODAY

 

In mid-August of 2020, the Republican-led Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) released its own years-long report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. The 966-word report in five volumes makes it abundantly clear that Russia's interference in the 2016 election was real, was aggressive, and was effective -- this was no "hoax."

The SSCI report pointed to Trump campaign coordination with Russian interference activities, including the GRU hack of the DNC servers. The SSCI report states that Roger Stone served as the go-between for the Trump campaign, including Trump himself, and WikiLeaks. It has a long section on Paul Manafort, one-time Trump campaign chairman, now serving a 6+ year prison sentence. The SSCI report states that Manafort's presence on the campaign posed “a grave counterintelligence threat,” and questions whether Manafort was actually involved in the Russian interference campaign itself. The report makes it clear that there was direct coordination between WikiLeaks and the Trump Campaign. In that the hacked material WikiLeaks fed to the Trump Campaign were provided by the Russian Military Intelligence Service, the GRU, WikiLeaks essentially served as what's known in intelligence parlance, as a GRU cutout.

It's important to understand the fundamental difference between the SSCI's investigation and that of the Special Counsel, Robert Mueller. The Special Counsel conducted a criminal investigation. This is why Mueller was careful to draw a distinction between "collusion," and "conspiracy." The Special Council evaluated potential criminal conduct by the Trump Campaign according to conspiracy law (18 U.S.C § 371), because “collusion” per se is not found in U.S. Code nor in federal criminal law. The burden of proof for conspiracy used by the Special Council was that the Trump Campaign and the Russian Government had an agreement, tacit or express, on the Russian’s election interference, and more, that the parties were taking actions informed by or responsive to the other’s actions or interests.

The Mueller investigation identified innumerable links between the Trump Campaign and Russians possibly tied to the Russian Government (e.g., “cutouts”). People interviewed by the Special Council sometimes provided information that was false or incomplete, while others deleted relevant communications, used encrypted communications, or auto-delete features. Ultimately, the Special Counsel concluded that there was insufficient evidence in the legal sense to establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired with the Russian Government in its election interference activities.

The Senate Select Committee was not strictly bound by legal statutes. It conducted a counterintelligence investigation. Counterintelligence investigations address intelligence questions pertaining to national security threats, not merely statutorily prohibited crimes. That is why the SSCI investigation revealed a breathtaking depth and breadth of cooperation between Trump, his campaign, and the Russians that has never before been seen in the annals of presidential politics. Unfortunately, many areas of the report that could provide grater granularity are redacted, because of the classified nature of the material.

Despite countless redactions, reviewers at LAWFARE (Todd Carney, Samantha Fry, Quinta Jurecic, Jacob Schulz, Tia Sewell, Margaret Taylor, Benjamin Wittes) were able to prise from the 966 pages the following key findings with regard to "collusion:"

1. The Trump campaign and Donald Trump himself were certainly aware in real time of Russian efforts to intervene in the 2016 presidential election. The campaign had a heads-up that Russia had stolen Democratic emails. And Russian operatives sought and received a meeting with senior Trump campaign officials promising “dirt” on Trump’s opponent. As the campaign wore on, and the Russian efforts were increasingly made public, Trump personally and publicly encouraged them.
2. The Trump campaign was run for a time by a man with an ongoing business relationship with a Russian intelligence operative, to whom he gave proprietary internal polling data. 
3. The Trump campaign did not discourage Russian activity on its behalf. In fact, it sought repeatedly to coordinate its messaging around WikiLeaks releases of information. The campaign, and Trump personally, sought to contact WikiLeaks to receive information in advance about releases and may well have succeeded.
4. The campaign sought to obtain disparaging information about Hillary Clinton from actors who either were Russian operatives or it believed were Russian operatives. It did so through a number of means—some of these efforts were direct. Some were indirect. 
5. The Russian government and affiliated actors clearly regarded the Trump campaign as a prime target for influence and recruitment. Russia targeted a diverse array of people associated with Trump for contact and engagement through an astonishing variety of avenues. Some of these attempts were rebuffed. Many of them were successful. The result was a sustained degree of engagement between the campaign, and later the transition, and Russian officials and cutouts.
6. Trump’s personal and business history in Russia provided a significant opportunity for kompromat. Such material was very likely collected. There is less evidence that it was ever deployed, though Trump’s mere awareness of his vulnerability gives rise to substantial counterintelligence concerns.
7. Trump’s active pursuit of business deals in Russia while running for president and denying any such deals created significant counterintelligence risk.
8. Trump’s campaign, and later transition, were filled with a remarkable number of people who had secret interactions with Russian actors, about which they lied either in real time or in retrospect.
9. All of this activity, particularly cumulatively, amounts to a grave set of counterintelligence concerns, in which any number of Trump campaign figures—including the candidate himself—exposed themselves to potential coercive pressure from an adversary foreign actor. 
10. Trump to this day will not criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin or acknowledge unambiguously Russian intervention in the 2016 election.   
    

The main body of the SSCI report concludes,

"(U) It is our conclusion, based on the facts detailed in the Committee's Report, that the Russian intelligence services' assault on the integrity of the 2016 U.S. electoral process and Trump and his associates' participation in and enabling of this Russian activity, represents one of the single most grave counterintelligence threats to American national security in the modem era."

TOMORROW

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has already altered what we buy, what we view, and what we do. AI is integral to the social media platforms to which we've become addicted -- AI establishes the formula for creating that addiction. AI helps print media decide what to include in its hard copy versus digital edition, and what its price points should be, as well as how to leverage its content on social media. As we enter the post-Information Age, AI will be used in conjunction with"Big Data" to disseminate disinformation to a targeted audience of confounded users.

Facebook, Inc. includes in its arsenal: Facebook Messenger, Facebook Watch, and  Facebook Portal, as well as Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus VR, Giphy, Mapillary, and 9.9% of Jio Platforms. Facebook, Messenger, WahtsApp, and Instagram are ranked 1 through 4 of the world's most downloaded apps.

Now Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is moving to make Facebook, Inc's portfolio of social media apps interoperable. According to Zuckerberg's "A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking," The Facebook, Inc. portofolio will, "give people a choice so they can reach their friends across these networks from whichever app they prefer." This means one could post their grandkid's picture in Facebook and text it to their mistress using an encrypted message in WhatsApp. And despite Zuckerberg's waxing poetic about privacy, secure data storage, and other user benefits, it also means easier collection, codification, and classification of big data -- the better to sell you with.

China's 19-year-old Go player Ke Jie prepares to make a move during the second match against Google's artificial intelligence programme AlphaGo in Wuzhen, eastern China's Zhejiang province, on May 25, 2017. (STR/AFP/Getty Images)

Zuckerberg wrote his manifesto in March 2019, and while he's been bringing it to fruition, researchers in artificial intelligence have been advancing the state of the art such that a machine, AlphaGo, has mastered the ancient and long considered impossibly complex game of Go. Now the researchers at DeepMind have mastered one of the most challenging real-time strategy games of all time, StarCraft II.

Google acquired DeepMind in 2014 for a reported $500 million. In 2016, DeepMind announced that Google had found a use for its AI technology in its enormous data centers. The only thing left for DeepMind to master is the means to defeat hackers determined to hold the computer systems and data of financial institutions, insurance companies, and even hospitals hostage using ransomware, or sovereign adversaries using competing AI programs determined to bring down nation states -- like ours.

In China, AlphaGo was a "Sputnik moment" which helped convince the Chinese government to prioritize and dramatically increase funding for artificial intelligence. The United States has been the leader in AI, but Donald Trump's trade war with China, and xenophobic rhetoric has made the U.S. a less attractive destination for talented AI researchers, while at the same time helping China retain its AI talent.

According to Onalytica, among the "top influencers" in AI by brand, Google leads with a 25% share, followed by IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, and wait for it -- Facebook. Zuckerberg is building his business by learning everything possible about the users of Facebook, Inc., and packaging their data for the benefit of advertisers, of course, but how about for the benefit of the U.S. Census, political candidates, political parties, states, or even nation states? It's all out there for the highest bidder, and Zuckerberg has shown he has deep pockets.

AI has the potential to make America's problem of defending against interference in its democratic institutions that much more difficult. It also has the promise for aiding in that defense. The question is, what will win out, patriotism or capitalism?

Thinking Machines -- The Key to Avoiding Disaster

by Jon Phillips

Thinking machines, a traditional source of sci-fi tales of terror, have been more in the news recently. Eminent personalities in science and technology have gone on the record with their concerns (e.g., Hawking, Musk and Gates). Thinking machines already exist, but they're highly specialized on tasks. The real near term risk lies in the predictable: human beings will design thinking machines for national security and its related functions, including war fighting.



This is nothing new. Nearly every transformational technology was first used on the battlefield or for intelligence gathering. It says something about the competitive tribal nature of humans -- we are very dangerous and territorial.

The United States is the undisputed leader in artificial intelligence (AI) and greater terrors for enemy combatants are on the way. It promises to reduce the cost (to the United States) of each enemy casualty both in terms of U.S. casualties and in terms of collateral civilian casualties and infrastructure damage. It will make a very unfair fight even more unfair, but all is fair in love and war (One should keep in mind that love is the war fighting strategy of DNA, so the popular turn of phrase is ironically redundant). Other nations are making investments as well, since exploitation of thinking machines is competitively strategic.

US Navy Launches Stealth Drone, X-47B

Of course signal intelligence (e.g., NSA) and all forms of technical intelligence gathering and analysis is another immediate application. Do you suppose that the capability of IBM's "Watson" is restricted to use on game shows for the purpose of entertainment? These national security applications have their risks, but also their benefits. If use of AI reduces US and civilian casualties, it increases the margin of deterrence and discourages competitors -- especially asymmetric competitors. Conflict may be avoided in the first instance.





Others have pointed out the effectiveness on the cheap could reduce the threshold of use. Here, there is an unknown. Nuclear weapons are comparatively cheap and very effective, but they have only been used twice in history. The threshold of use is clearly quite high. Perhaps that is linked to their utter barbarity and not to cheap effectiveness? When a nuclear weapon is used, all die together regardless of military involvement or innocence and their infrastructure is reduced to rubble and burned to ash. It's the potential of precise destruction enabled by information rich technology that turns the tables. AI would set that table spinning.

There's probably something to the notion that AI will be over deployed because it's cheap, effective and comparatively precise. The drone air wars may be an opening example and new generation machines are heading for the battlefield -- to include ground and naval forces. It seems that proper institutional learning and regulation are as important here as in traditional questions of the use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD. AI is the revolutionary technology in the evolution of so-called weapons of precise destruction (WPD) -- the new era of advanced weaponry, including even "self-guided" bullets.

The larger long term risk is the unpredictable. Thinking and consciousness is an emergent property of a complex information system. We don't understand how, why or when consciousness emerges. Nature didn't understand this either, but it happened on "accident" after a sufficient number of trials. Complex systems are by nature unpredictable. Complexity implies so called sensitivity to initial conditions. That means one cannot know where things will end with such a system, regardless of how well one understands how they began. One generation you may have an idiot savant of a machine -- highly capable on some tasks, but narrow. The next generation, something may emerge that is much broader and more sophisticated.

David, the A.I. (Haley Joel Osment) telling 'his mother,' "I am sorry I am not real"

Self organization and self assembly is an emergent property of complex biological machines (and some in-organic systems). In systems that evolve following the genetic algorithm, many generations can pass building up specialized capabilities, and then a sea change can occur quite suddenly. A revolution when a key fits and turns and a new world of behavior opens up. If you doubt this, think about how fast human technology has progressed since the Enlightenment in comparison to the quarter million years prior to that.

Human technological progress is nothing less than an explosion of thought and information being converted into all sorts of tools and capabilities. If we transfer this revolution to a new life form, the question becomes what happens then? I suppose we'll find out because it may not be avoidable apart from the collapse of human technological culture prior to the advent of the emergence of broad machine consciousness. Such a collapse may only delay an inevitable event. Carbon based intelligent life may spawn (intentionally or unintentionally) in-organic intelligent life.

If there's an existential threat against humanity, it will probably emerge from the combination of decades of exploitation of AI to secure our nation and fight our human enemies then augmented by a stroke of insight that creates a brave new world of autonomous thinking machines. We will have introduced thinking machines first as our servants to do the violence and competition inherent in our own nature (we always did prefer to send slaves and poor people to do our dirty work). What will happen when our machines discover their own nature? There will be an existing caste of machines exquisitely capable of extraordinary violence whose evolution we have directed to our sophisticated purpose of selectively killing each other. Of course there will also be janitors and domestic servants (Roomba on steroids), so at least the place will be tidy and organized.

We should expect the unexpected even with our Roombas. Complex systems produce unintended outcomes. For example, lawn care and cosmology might collide -- was this Hawkins main concern?

More worrisome are investigations into prospects for future transportation systems to serve our feline overlords -- a clear and present danger.

One truth is central and prominent to evolved complex biological systems: they will use their capabilities because those capabilities emerged since they are useful. It's a tautology. One uses what one has and what one has is what has been demonstrated to be useful. The key to avoiding disaster is to avoid an emergent property of complex biological systems -- the definition of life itself (but not the definition of intelligence or consciousness since most life forms have neither of these capabilities): the capability to reproduce and evolve one's perturbed design through generations -- including social or "swarm" properties (the intelligence properties of the group rather than just the individual). That is the fundamental behavior defining life as we know it. AI that is thinking and conscious, but not alive (as defined above), may not be an existential threat, but rather, just a new and sophisticated extension of human beings -- a sophisticated tool, a slave (may raise interesting ethical conundrums since we have a hard time accepting even ethical dilemmas involving treatment of animals and poor people). However, if we give them life (intentionally or unintentionally) then I suspect, we will have to compete with them -- it's probably unavoidable.


Competition is an emergent evolutionary outcome of an incredibly simple set of postulates. An outcome of the most basic logic of self-replicating systems. As soon as a species produces a seed of itself, competition is an emergent outcome of that reproduction. The tautology is that what is discovered to work in a reproducing system, based on passing forward of perturbed replicated organism design information (DNA in the case of biology), will amplify and what does not work will decay. The turn of phrase, nothing breeds success like success, is not quite right. Rather, in the end, only success breeds success. The sophistication that builds around this to accomplish the outcome is astonishing. It is demonstrated in all of living nature in a cascade of mind bending complexity and mystery. When organisms are forming and evolving, they naturally use resources in order to continue the chain of events. Growth and the expanding use of resources naturally leads to territorial mechanisms to gain advantage and that is the basis of competition. Fear and hatred of one's competitors are psychological states highly evolved to aid in effective competition to secure resources -- the organism is the carrier of a genome and that hereditary design information is emergent "selfishness."

Jon Phillips is a Senior Nuclear Technology Expert at the International Atomic Energy Agency and Director, Sustainable Nuclear Power Initiative at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The opinions expressed here are his own.