Food For Thought: ‘’Technology is
neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral’’
-
Laws of
Technology By Professor Melvin Kranzberg (1917-1995)
Introduction:
Social media, big data and artificial intelligence
(AI) can be likened to the 21st
century arms race. These innovations have disrupted the way we communicate, predict
patterns/the stock market, national security (electronic intelligence and
cyber-defence), and democracy, amongst others. Evidence abound of States, rogue
states, non-state actors or ‘’lone wolves’’
(cyber troops) weaponizing information or launching information warfare (IW),
psychological warfare (PSYWAR) or psychological operations (PSYOPs), and in some cases, manipulating
social media with a bid to influencing the outcome of an election.
A Freedom on the Net 2017 report titled, ''Manipulating Social Media to Undermine
Democracy'', established that voters in the most countries ever, 30 out of 65 surveyed
faced social media distortion efforts. In October 2015, Finnish
President Sauli Niinistö warned of the “information warfare” that was already
affecting Finns, and said that it was the duty of every citizen to combat it. Finnish officials claim to have documented 20 disinformation campaigns against Finland
that have come directly from the Kremlin (Russia). United States Army Gen. Paul Nakasone, who heads both NSA and Cyber
Command, opined that, ''Foreign adversaries have
stepped up the use of information warfare to control populations since 2011 and
the operations are one of the new threats in the digital age''. It is widely speculated that influence operations by Russia in tandem with Cambridge Analytica and
Facebook data boosted Trump’s prospect during the US presidential election.
What Is Weaponized
Information?
A weaponized information (also referred to as weaponized narrative, cognitive
hacking, or disinformation) is a message or content contrived to affect the
recipient's perception of an event or someone in a manner that is not warranted
thereby serving the strategic objective of the sender. We can liken social
media disinformation to hybrid
threats - the fusion of irregular and regular
tools—everything from tweets to tanks—that both state and non-state actors,
like terrorist groups, are using to try to destabilize countries and
institutions. Weaponized information
could be a blend of truth, a faux pas, deliberate falsehoods (or fake news)
aimed at spreading fear, paranoia, uncertainty
and distrust about a product, an individual or even a country. Information Weaponization is similar to what is referred to in
military circles as ‘’Information operations’’ -
the collection of tactical information about an adversary as well as the
dissemination of propaganda in pursuit of a competitive advantage over an
opponent, or as ‘’Sharp
power’’ - the use of manipulative
diplomatic policies or information warfare by one country to influence and
undermine the political system of a target country. More often than not, weaponized information are astroturfed – disseminated in a way that masks
the sponsors of the message or organization (e.g., political, advertising,
religious or public relations) and they are made to appear as though the
message originates from and is supported by grassroots contributors.
A weaponized narrative can be genuine but taken
out of context. An example is a remark intentionally selected from a longer
statement and tweaked in such a way that it waters down or magnifies what the
speaker said or meant. Just about anything – a
trending topic, information or hashtag on social media can be weaponized. For instance, sequel to President Trump’s
purported #lifeless comment
about the Nigerian president, it appears ‘’lifeless’’ is now a popular lexicon on
many online forums, social media platforms and the Nigerian public space. Another
example is the #LazyNigerianYouth comment and hashtag which trended on Twitter
for quite some time.
Weaponized
Information, A Proliferating Global Phenomenon
From the United
States to the United Kingdom, Sweden to Germany, weaponized information of
disinformation is a proliferating global phenomenon. The Atlantic reports that ''disinformation is spreading
on WhatsApp in India—and it’s getting dangerous''. The British embassy in
Moscow recently accused Russia of spreading
"disinformation" after London charged two supposed G.U. or GRU (Russian
military intelligence) operatives traveling under the names Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov
as the chief suspects in the poisoning of ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his
daughter Yulia in the UK. In its piece titled - ''Disinformation Wars'', Foreign Policy says,
''Russian disinformation has become a problem for European governments.
In the last two years, Kremlin-backed campaigns have spread false stories
alleging that French President Emmanuel Macron was backed by the “gay lobby,”
fabricated a story of a Russian-German girl raped by Arab migrants, and spread
a litany of conspiracy theories about the Catalan independence referendum,
among other efforts.
The University of Oxford-based Computational
Propaganda Project researched myriads of ways in which big data, bots and
computational propaganda are employed in disinformation and manipulating public
opinion over major social networking platforms. The research established that cyber troops are a pervasive and global phenomenon.
The report asserts that, ''Many different countries employ significant numbers
of people and resources to manage and manipulate public opinion online,
sometimes targeting domestic audiences and sometimes targeting foreign
publics''. Mr.
Sean Gourley, an Artificial Intelligence(AI) consultant to the United States intelligence agencies warns that fake news may have
already influenced politics in the US, but ‘’it’s going to get a lot worse’’. He argues that the
next generation of fake news would be far more sophisticated thanks to AI. Another report
says AI will soon be able to mimic any human voice leading to a ‘’complete
destruction of trust in anything you see or hear’’.
Government-Sponsored Disinformation, Computational
Propaganda
Scholars argue
that nearly 50 million accounts on Twitter are actually automatically run by computer
bots – a software application programmed to
run automated tasks such as
interacting with and mimicking human users.
Israel is said
to have more than 350 official government social media accounts, covering the
full range of online platforms, from Twitter to Instagram, and operating in
three languages: Hebrew, Arabic and English.
Ukraine’s i‐Army, also known as “the army of truth”, operates
a website where citizens and volunteers can access and share “truthful”
information on social media (Benedictus, 2016).
Azerbaijan’s pro-government trolls have become a
textbook case of state-level social media manipulation. The United
State through the USAid secretly
created ZunZuneo otherwise known as 'Cuban Twitter' to stir unrest and
undermine the Cuban government.
Chinese Trolls (50-centers), pro-government netizens reportedly dispense
an estimated 450 million fake social media comments in a year aimed at distracting the public from government policy-related issues
that threaten to anger citizens enough to turn them out onto the streets.
There is also the notorious Internet Research
Agency, a Russian troll factory which specializes in churning out fake news and propaganda on the
internet and social media platforms.
Government supporters in Iran created
websites to mimic the BBC's Persian service, but instead "filled them with
conspiracy theories and anti-Western propaganda." Also in Iran, hackers
created mock websites of Syrian opposition leaders in "social-engineering
schemes." A
recent BBC investigation found that online trolls and fake accounts poisons Arab social media,
particularly in the year-long propaganda war between Qatar and its Gulf
neighbours.
Philippine's controversial President Rodrigo
Duterte's inadvertently admitted
that he used keyboard troll army to manipulate social media during 2016
campaign. "In Mexico, an estimated
75,000 automated accounts known colloquially as Peñabots have been employed to
overwhelm political opposition on Twitter." "When a new hashtag
emerges to raise awareness about a protest or corruption scandal, government
backers employ two methods to game the system in favor of President Enrique
Peña Nieto."
In South Korea, an
investigation found that state-sponsored disinformation operation during
the country’s 2012 presidential election by the National Intelligence Service
generated more than 1.2 million Twitter messages which supported now-impeached
South Korean President Park Geun-hye and while denigrating her rival in the
election.
Oxford University researchers say one-in-three news articles shared
online about the recent Swedish election involves widespread online disinformation
or “junk news”. Using
machine learning, the Swedish
Defense Research Agency established prior to the September election that
‘’Twitter bots proliferated ahead of Sweden’s
election. The report says the suspected Twitter bots were 40 percent more
likely to support the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats (SD) than human users’’. On September 9, 2018, Swedes went to the poll to elect members of
its Parliament - Riksdag who will in turn elect the Prime Minister. As
predicted, anti-immigrant party, Sweden Democrats (SD) made sizeable gains.
Their share of the vote jumped from 12.9% to 17.6, so far at the expense of the
two main parties in the country's General Election.
How Disinformation, Impacts
Democracy, National Security
Weaponized information wields the unparalleled capacity to
destabilize a target country’s peace, stability,
democracy and national security even without firing a single shot. This is tantamount to Chinese military strategist and
philosopher, Sun Tzu's concept of subduing the enemy without fighting. Data
analytics and social media
manipulation has become an essential component of electioneering worldwide. This
new normal has morphed into a “guns for hire” professional service, as Professor
Andrew Chadwick, Co-Director, New Political Communication Unit at Royal
Holloway described
it. UK parliament's digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS) committee believes that democracy is at risk unless the
government and regulators take urgent action to combat a growing crisis of data
manipulation, disinformation and so-called fake news.
The likes of Cambridge Analytica which sought to influence
the Nigerian presidential election in 2015 and AKPD Message and Media, A PR group founded by former Obama campaign
manager David Axelrod, which worked for the then opposition, comes to mind.
This is why these days; savvy
politicians assemble and bankrolls retinue (social) media teams - cyber
warriors, spin doctors and praise-singers who render disinformation
as a service (DaaS). Since 2010 political parties and
governments have reportedly spent more than half a billion
dollars on social-media manipulation. Such subtle battle for hearts and minds can catapult an 'unlikely' candidate
to power.
Writing on the activities
of the Buhari Media Centre (BMC) which was recently rebranded as Buhari New
Media Centre (BNMC), a Nigerian
journalist, author, blogger and US-based professor, Dr. Farooq Kperogi, refers
to the Buhari government is ''an absolute propagandocracy, that is, a
government conducted by intentionally false and manipulative information''. I
think there’s also an Atiku Media Centre or something like that. You would see
a lot of these trolls, hirelings and ‘paid commenter’s’ on Nigeria’s popular
online forum – www.nairaland.com and other social media platforms. Just recently, Demola Olarewaju, a political strategist and PDP
member raised an alarm in a series of tweets about sinister plans by the BNMC to use bots and online trolls to attack his
person. Demola advised handlers of the
BNMC to rein in the bots else he would expose "minutes of meetings,
letters requesting money, phone numbers, addresses, bank details, planned
propaganda etc".
Countering Weaponized Information, Fake News 2.0
Preparatory
to the 2018 midterm elections in the US, social media
companies scrambled to reassure the United States government that their
platforms would not be abused by vested interests. Pursuant
to what can be deemed ‘antidisinformation as a service’ (AdaaS) provided by an enterprise cybersecurity company - FireEye, Facebook declared
on August 21, 2018 that it took down 652 fake accounts. Twitter
foiled and removed
political influence social media campaigns allegedly originating from Russia. Similarly, Microsoft dismantled
six phishing domains linked to Russian election hackers. Google reportedly took
down 39 YouTube channels linked to Iranian influence campaign. Given the growing threat of weaponized
information to national security, the
British Army announced
the creation of a new unit for psychological and
social media warfare to help Britain “fight in the information age” and control
the “narrative” of warfare. The United Kingdom recently set up a ''dedicated
national security unit
to tackle fake news and disinformation''. The equivalent
in the United States is the ''Global Engagement Center
(GEC)'', which is ''charged with leading the U.S. government’s efforts to
counter propaganda and disinformation from international terrorist organizations
and foreign countries''. Similar bodies established to counter weaponized information and hybrid threats include: the
European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats (CoE) which was set
up in Finland, aftermath of an agreement between eight European countries, the
US, and NATO; EU’s East StratCom Task Force, NATO’s StratCom Center of
Excellence, amongst others.
Egyptian President, Abdul Fattah al-Sisi recently ratified
a law that seeks to monitor social media users
in Egypt. This legislation empowers Egypt's Supreme Council for Media
Regulations the power to place people with more than 5,000 followers — on
social media or with a personal blog or website — under supervision - and
to suspend or block any personal account which "publishes or broadcasts
fake news or anything [information] inciting violating the law, violence
or hatred." Those who administer or visit such websites, intentionally or
"in error without a valid reason," can now face jail time and
fines. Not to be outdone, the Nigerian military says it
now monitors
social media for anti-government and anti-military information. The Nigerian Army upped the ante by launching its CyberwarfareCommand aimed at combating terrorism, fake news. Recall that Nigeria's Minister of information and culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed had since set up a ''National Campaign Against Fake
News”.
Hacking Critical Election Infrastructure
Apart from
weaponizing information and using social to hack hearts and minds, hacking
critical election infrastructure is also doable. In 2016, hackers breached
databases for election systems in Illinois and Arizona, in the United States.
This explains why as part of proactive election security measure, 36 states in
the US have deployed Albert
Sensors, a cybersecurity
detection system that could detect hacking attempts and send alerts to federal
and state government agencies. If the United States which parades some of the
best cybersecurity brasses and professionals, struggles to ward of
cyber-attacks, one wonders the fate of Nigeria where fire-brigade approach is a
state policy. Interestingly, I read the Director General of Nigeria's National
Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Dr. Isa Pantami recently
saying that the 2019 general elections may be disrupted if adequate information
technology security measures were not put in place. Dr. Pantami raised the
alarm at the 10th annual conference organised by Information Systems Audit and
Control Association (ISACA), Abuja Chapter. He was quoted
as saying, ‘’terrorists may disrupt the national elections by hacking into the
voter registration database of the Independent National Electoral Commission
(INEC)’’. Perhaps Nigeria should consider the aforesaid ‘’Sensors’’. We are
also are of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) saying
it will transmit the results of the results of the 2019 general elections from
the 119,973 polling units nationwide electronically and in real time through
the Nigerian Communications Satellites Limited (NIGCOMSAT’s) satellite. May I
remind the INEC and Nigeria’s national security agencies that commercial
satellites can be hijacked, or hacked. The Hackers News reports about an
incident where a group of Russian hackers, most notably the Turla APT (Advanced
Persistent Threat) reportedly
hijacked a commercial satellite.
Conclusion
As the defining 2019 general election approaches, Nigeria must ramp up
cyber-defence capability and cybersecurity
standards to counter weaponized information, disinformation and influence
operations on our democratic process by domestic and foreign vested interests. It is imperative
that the National Assembly expedites passage of a robust data protection framework
and privacy laws in Nigeria with a view to protecting citizen’s data from data
breaches. The European Union GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)
is a classic template.
Written By:
© Don Okereke, security consultant/analyst, technology aficionado,
researcher, writer, active citizen, good governance advocate.
September 14, 2018
Twitter: @DonOkereke
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