40 The New York Review
a “ temporary setback for the art and
craft of disinformation.” Those en-
gaged in it were cynically amoral then,
and they’re cynically amoral now.
And yet it would not be right to con-
clude that today’s disinformation ef-
forts are simply a high- tech version of
those of the past. The differences are
more substantial than that. Today’s ac-
tive measures are simultaneously more
personal and much broader in reach
than before. While KGB operatives in
the 1950s might have placed a forged
pamphlet or bogus magazine in front of
a few thousand readers, their heirs can
now microtarget millions of individuals
at once, each one receiving bespoke
messaging, designed to press their
most intimately neuralgic spots. Those
engaged in what Howard calls “com-
putational propaganda” don’t merely
mine the attitudes you’ve expressed
on social media; they can also draw
conclusions from your behavior, as re-
corded by your credit card data. What’s
more, think of all the data gathered by
the connected objects around you—the
Internet of things—monitoring your
sleep, your meals, your habits, your
every move. This reveals more about
you than your browsers ever could, says
Howard, adding, arrestingly, that we’ve
been “focusing on the wrong internet.”
It’s this blend of “massive distribu-
tion, combined with sophisticated tar-
get i ng” t hat is new. T he work is so much
easier too, requiring little of the fine,
almost artistic skill demanded of the
master forgers and tricksters of yore.
In the earlier era, only governments,
through their intelligence agencies,
had the money and muscle to attempt
such work. Now the cost of production
is low, and so is the bar to entry.
What’s more, technological ad-
vances promise to make disinforma-
tion easier still and more effective. It’s
already possible to create fake audio
and video; it can’t be long before fake
fact- checking sites follow. Chatbots are
in their infancy, but they are growing
more sophisticated. The future may see
not only your Twitter feed dotted with
AI bots, but even your WhatsApp mes-
sages, filled with “digital personalities”
engineered to look and sound like peo-
ple you know.
The heart of the matter is data, the
resource that makes all this possible.
For Howard, junk news is merely the
symptom; the disease is the “monop-
olization of information” in the hands
of a few tech giants. It used to be the
churches that held the important infor-
mation about us, he writes: our births,
deaths, and marriages. Then it was gov-
ernments and libraries. “Now a hand-
ful of technology firms have the best
data on us as individuals, on our net-
works, and on public life,” and they sell
both that information and the tools to
exploit it to anyone willing to pay.
There’s a last difference in kind from
the political warfare of the past, though
none of these authors addresses it di-
rectly. Put simply, there can never have
been a world leader so willing to am-
plify and echo the hostile messages of
his most devoted adversary as Donald
Trump. Only the most optimistic Krem-
lin spymaster would ever have dreamed
of a US president who himself, unbid-
den, encourages the American people
to lose all faith in their institutions, to
distrust their media, scientists, judges,
and intelligence agencies, even to take
wild risks with their own health and so
make a vicious pandemic worse. There
is surely little need for active mea-
sures—spreading conspiracy theories
or promoting bogus remedies—when
the man in the Oval Office will do that
work for you.
What, then, can be done to arm
ourselves against the next decades of
informational war? There are some
mechanical steps worth taking, which
sound almost too basic to spell out. One
can only admire Mitt Romney’s 2012
presidential campaign, which, alert to
the threat of foreign hackers and their
interest in his choice of running mate,
devised code names for the potential
candidates and communicated only via
computers unhooked from the Internet.
US election officials at the federal and
state levels would be wise to regard 2016
as a trial run for the mayhem Moscow
might be plotting for 2020, viewing the
various attacks on voting systems four
years ago as, in the words of Franklin
Foer in The Atlantic, “casing the joint.”
Some rudimentary electronic defenses
are missing and need to be put in place.
That is especially true given the na-
ture of the incumbent. It is surely not
wise to assume that Trump would
take defeat gracefully, quietly packing
his bags and waving farewell from the
South Lawn. Trump is bound to claim
that the vote was rigged, that the bal-
lots were unsafe, and that the result in
battleground states was void. With that
in mind, the sage election official willlook to ensure a verifiable paper record
of all the votes cast. Not that such a
precaution would restrain a president
so determined to cling to office that, as
some fear, he would invoke emergency
national security powers, claiming a
foreign adversary—say, China—had
meddled in the election. In that sce-
nario, a confected Department of Jus-
tice investigation into foreign intrusion
might just offer a way for Trump to
swerve around the electoral college and
throw the election to the House of Rep-
resentatives where, because the vote
would be by state delegation, with one
vote per state, Trump would be likely to
win. In such a situation, a documented
record of votes cast on November 3
would at least be a powerful exhibit in
the court of public opinion. To ensure
such a record, the most obvious mecha-
nism is not so much low- tech as no- tech:
a British- style ballot paper marked by a
si mple c ro s s , w it h t he pap er s c ou nte d by
hand. No voting machines, no hacking.
Failing that, mail- in ballots would
not only present an obvious remedy
to the conundrum of holding an elec-
tion in the era of social distancing,
they’d also promise a measure of pro-
tection against a repeat Russian effort
to swing the 2020 election: mailed
votes automatically provide their own
verifiable paper record. Hackable ma-
chines would still have to count them,
of course—and a committed election-
wrecker could always try to ensure that
some ballots get “lost” en route or, noless damagingly, claim that they had—
but for all Trump’s drum- banging
about the risk of fraud, absentee ballots
do at least offer the basic safeguard of a
documentary record of a voter’s choice.
It’s wearily predictable that a president
who has never taken the threat of Rus-
sian interference seriously—who in-
deed is affronted by the mere mention
of it in his presence—opposes even the
modest precaution of absentee ballots.Perhaps this debate has come too late.
There are alarming signs that election
supervisors across the US haven’t left
enough time to protect themselves—a
situation not helped by Senate Repub-
licans’ refusal to pass a bill that would
have afforded some protection against
a Moscow offensive, replacing it with
legislation that funded new voting ma-
chines but did not insist on security
measures. In truth, and more broadly,
if US elections are to be regarded as
safe, they need to be put on a radically
different legal footing—one that would
overturn the Citizens United judgment
that allows the funding of political cam-
paigns to be so easily kept mysterious.
Howard offers a five- point mani-
festo, aimed chiefly at big tech’s mo-
nopoly on data. Some of his demands
are innovative, including citizens’ right
to donate their own data to favored po-
litical organizations, so that those play-
ers can begin to compete on something
like level terms with the tech giants and
those who currently pay to use their
services. He also advocates “mandatory
reporting on the ultimate beneficiaries
of data,” much as arms manufacturers
can be compelled to reveal the end-
users of their products, and a tithing sys-
tem, whereby 10 percent of ads on social
media platforms are given over to public
service announcements. Data is power,
and Howard demands that we share it.
Politicians obviously need to be
more alive to this menace—it’s grim to
recall Barack Obama’s feeble response
to the Russian attack in 2016, merely
telling Putin to “cut it out”—but so do
all those who write about and analyze
politics. Clearly, every time a jour-
nalist wrote a story about the hacked
DNC emails, they were doing Russia’s
bidding, but the problem is bigger than
that. Buchanan is right to suggest that
“while most policymakers and schol-
ars understand what nuclear weapons
and tanks do, the possibilities, pitfalls,
and processes of hacking missions are
comparatively opaque.” Information
warfare is designed to bamboozle, but
its digital variant can be especially baf-
fling to the nonspecialist.
Nevertheless, the only true protec-
tion against active measures, whether
by Russia or anyone else, is to deny
them the openings they rely on. Those
2016 attacks were devilishly ingenious,
driving wedge after wedge into Amer-
ica’s most seismic fractures, but none
would have worked had those divisions
not been there, ready to exploit. A de-
mocracy such as the United States will
always be divided—of course it will.
But Americans’ best defense against
foreign enemies might be to stop see-
ing political opponents as domestic en-
emies. Russia’s exploits work because
Americans are too quick to turn vi-
ciously against one another. The culture
war has made the country vulnerable
in the disinformation wars. Working
for a truce in the one might be the
best hope for victory in the other. QBUY IN
Yes, we did
ask to be born.Not all of us, of course,
only the first few.They must have bought in
to this round robin
duress:the gasp,the gnawing hunger,
then the actual gnawing.Maybe they did it
the way we’d put ona corset or toe shoes
one nightand feel fabulous.To be able to repeat themselves
must have seemedlike such a thrill
at first.But who were they
if not that trick—that breathless
pirouette?—Rae Armantrout