The Inside Battle Against Disinformation: The U.S. Intelligence Community

00:05 Brandus: Most Americans have heard of the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, of course, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI. Perhaps even the biggest intelligence agency of all, the National Security Agency, or NSA. But lesser known is the fact that the United States Intelligence Community, or IC, is actually comprised of 17 agencies in all. Many were formed decades ago, tasked, of course, with a wide variety of responsibilities. But the explosion and cantorous growth of a different kind of threat poses a new challenge. That threat is false information, intended to confuse, mislead, and or undermine a target. There's another word for this, of course, disinformation. The Chief Executive Officer of Emergent Risk International, Meredith Wilson, is away. I'll be joined in this episode by ERI's Chief Operating Officer, Brady Roberts. The federal government is stepping up its efforts to counter foreign disinformation. The Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, noted this in recent Senate testimony.
01:33 Haines: Congress put into law that we should establish a farm line influence center in the intelligence community. We have stood that up and it encompasses our election threat executive work essentially looking at foreign influence and interference in elections, but it also deals with disinformation more generally. And what we have been doing is effectively trying to support the Global Engagement Center, others throughout the U.S. government, in helping them to understand what are the plans and intentions of the key actors in this space. China, Russia, other, you know, Iran, et cetera. And then give them a sense of what it is that we're seeing in terms of the techniques that they use, how they go about this, and provide that for policymakers so that they're able to take that information and hopefully counter it and address it.

02:30 Brandus: Director Haynes mentioned something called the Foreign Malign Influence Center, or FMIC. Its mission is to bolster the intelligence community's overall efforts to counter hostile foreign actors. She singled out China, Russia, and Iran. I mentioned 17 U.S. intelligence agencies. The director of one of them, the Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, is Lieutenant General Scott Barrier, who at that same Senate hearing added some additional context.

03:03 Berrier: I think DIA's perspective on this, Senator, is really speed. We want to be able to detect that, and it's really with our open source collection capability, working with our combatant command partners where this is happening all over the world, and then the ability to turn something quickly with them under the right authorities to counter that disinformation or misinformation.

03:21 Brandus: The Foreign Malign Influence Center is new, authorized by Congress a year ago. Director Haynes said that in addition to its focus on combating election interference, the FMIC is also tasked with dealing with, in her words, disinformation more generally. Indeed, when you read the entire law behind the FMIC's creation, it notes, quote, public opinion within the United States. So, in other words, this appears to be an attempt to combat the flood of disinformation that ordinary Americans are hit with every day. But how do you combat that, especially when the disinformation has already been tweeted, texted, shared, posted, broadcast, and printed? We've talked about this core problem at length during the two years of this podcast series. Once the false information is out there, it's out there. What do you do about that? Can we learn from anyone else? An examination of best practices offers at least one interesting possibility, and for that, we go to Sweden, soon to be the newest member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, driven into its arms by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Last year, the Swedish government launched something called the Psychological Defense Agency, or PDA. One of its top analysts, Andrea Leibman, consented to an on-the-record interview.

04:52 Leibman: We are actually alone in the world as far as a country having an agency like this. So we're a government agency, we're a civil defence capacity, so we report to the Ministry of Defence. And our primary purpose is to identify, analyse and counter foreign malign information influence. We see disinformation as part of hybrid warfare directed towards Sweden by foreign actors. So we do not look at our domestic space. We don't look at domestic actors. But it's all about foreign actors targeting Sweden with disinformation.

05:33 Brandus: And I know the answer to this question, but who is targeting Sweden?

05:38 Leibman: Well, there's a variety of actors, state, non-state, ideologically motivated actors, for example. So it's a great variety. You'd have the usual Suspects, Russia for example, they'd be very interested in influencing the Swedish population, Swedish interests, decision making by the leadership in many ways in order to kind of run their own agenda.

06:09 Brandus: Russian influence operations against Sweden have had mixed results. The Russians tried, but have apparently failed, to keep the once neutral and non-aligned Swedes from joining NATO, for example. But the Russians eagerly exploited a recent situation in which a far-right anti-Islamic politician set fire to a Quran. There have been incidents setting off protests in Sweden and the Middle East, like this one in Baghdad, in which angry Iraqis breached the Swedish embassy. There have been some European reports, including a claim by the then Foreign Minister of Sweden's neighbour Finland, which is also in NATO now, that the Russians were associated, through others, with the Koran burner. This programme has been unable to independently prove such claims. But there's no question Liebman says that the Russians have been eager to stir the pot.

07:12 Leibman: Russia has been very interested in Sweden and NATO for quite some time, so it's not just now. It started already in 2014, for example, if I give it a year. But at this time, Russia is more interested in, for example, the information influence campaign that's directed by Islamist actors towards Sweden at the moment. It has to do with the Koran burnings that are one after another been coming up now in Sweden. So Russia is amplifying the false messages that the Islamist actors are creating in order to, which has been mentioned quite a lot during this conference, in order to polarize, for example, or create distrust or a great deal of worry. And this is to run their own agenda. And based on the fact that Sweden is in an application to NATO, Russia is very interested in sort of breaking down Sweden's population and trust to certain issues from within. We also have, for example, the refugee crisis in 2015. Russia's very interested in migration, the refugee crisis at the time, and now leading up towards sort of intercepting with the areas of crime or immigration and fueling that type of information that is perhaps seen more in Europe than in Sweden. But there are these issues that Russia then amplifies.

08:46 Brandus: But how does this PDA, the Psychological Defense Agency, actually do its job? We'll get into that after this short break. We'll also check in with the Chief Operating Officer of Emergent Risk International for his take on all this. We'll be right back.

09:05 ad read: This series on disinformation is a co-production of Evergreen Podcasts and Emergent Risk International, a global risk advisory firm. Emergent Risk International. We build intelligent solutions that find opportunities in a world of risk.

09:26 Brandus: Welcome back. More from my chat now with Andrea Libin of Sweden's Psychological Defense Agency. I asked her, once they're convinced that something is disinformation, then what? It leads to something called deplatforming. Listen,

09:42 Leibman: There's a variety of things that could be done, but once, if there is a way of actually, you've got to be certain to attribute, so the identification has to be 100%. If you're not certain, then you can't go out with outing these actors. But when it comes to the information influence campaign that I've been mentioning directed towards Sweden at this time, by the Islamist Actors. It started actually in December 2021, January 2022. It was right about the time when we started our agency. And it sort of peaked at that time and sort of then it dropped, but it's been coming back and it goes in waves. So at that time, we were able to attribute And what we do then is, in that case, for example, we had to, what you'd say, de-platform nearly, attempt to de-platform and out the actors. So we went out in media and we conducted a line of interviews. And what happened was that Swedish journalists, they did their job, they took the ball and they ran with it. They did an incredible job in doing some investigative work themselves, and we could sort of take a step back. Talking to media is one of our strategic approaches in getting our information out. We also hold press conferences together with, just recently with our Minister of Civil Defence. And in this way we also reach media, but also a general population.

11:22 Brandus: But this is where a key difference between Sweden and the United States emerges. Here in the U.S., surveys have shown for years that trust in both the federal government and the media is waning. But in Sweden, those bonds, that trust is stronger, which makes the job of the psychological defense agency easier. I didn't say easy, only easier.

11:46 Leibman: As far as building resilience within our population, and we also support other actors, but the resilience building efforts and actually strengthening and creating that psychological defense capacity, we work operationally and we provide a variety of actors with situational pictures. But what we also do is we conduct many different types of training and capacity building efforts. towards a variety of target audiences in Sweden. So for example, towards civil society and youth. And we cooperate with other agencies and civil society that specifically work with youth, for example. We also support journalists. Now, we do not tell them what to do. They don't come to us. They only come to us if they look for support. And we have produced a handbook for journalists when it comes to identifying and analyzing disinformation. So we're talking again from foreign powers directed towards Sweden and how to sort of decipher in the information environment. And we also have a handbook for communication professionals. And we have educated journalists and communication professionals, but also many, many other actors in Sweden when it comes to malign information influence and how to actually identify but also count.

13:11 Brandus: Would something like Sweden's Psychological Defense Agency work here in America? I asked Brady Roberts.

13:19 Brady Roberts: I personally think that there should be. I think when you look at the incredible impact that this information is having on the entire company, the country of the U.S., and the polarization that exists in the country, It's my personal view that we should have some type of body, given the government's resources, which are arguably greater than any other organization in the country, to be able to investigate disinformation, distribute and publish information on disinformation. I don't really see how you, as a country, like the US, I don't see how you tackle this problem without there being a government body. The challenge, of course, is that doing so is incredibly controversial, as we saw with the very short term attempt to stand up the disinformation governance board.

14:17 Brandus: Brady mentioned something called the Disinformation Governance Board. In the spring of 2022, the Department of Homeland Security launched this. It was supposed to establish guidelines for DHS to deal with mis- or disinformation that posed a threat to national security. But the Disinformation Governance Board ran into a buzzsaw of opposition immediately. It was disbanded just four months after it was launched.

14:46 Brady Roberts: When you look back at the disinformation governance board and you think about the problems with standing it up, you had two issues. One was that it wasn't necessarily created, at least from my perspective, from what I understand, in the most bipartisan of manner. But then its mission was not clearly and publicly defined, which left it open to criticism in this case by the right because the Democrats were standing up this initiative. I think the way to do it in my view is to look at this organization as a mission statement, as in terms of authorities, in terms of the rollout is one that has to be done in a way that is utterly transparent. Again, you go back to the DGP and some of the criticisms. One of the big criticisms there was that even understanding exactly what authorities the organization would have. When journalists tried to submit a Freedom of Information Act request to get the full scope of the program, there were things coming back that were censored, and probably, I'm sure, censored for very good reasons. But that, again, gets back to how was this organization being constructed? What would be its authorities? I think it's very hard to create a body in the US such as this and place it under an organization like Department of Homeland Security that within that organization has law enforcement authorities. If you're going to do this in the US, it's got to be an agency, in my mind, an agency that is about publicizing this information, showing where it came from, being able to distribute this information in a way that the public becomes aware. But you will always face that question of, well, is there going to be a legal ramification if, for example, an American especially unwittingly or unknowingly amplifies it. You know, that's that's where the that's where the first amendment rights and the freedom of speech rights come into play. And what one of the core principles that makes this so complicated and so controversial.

17:08 Brandus: Perhaps the new foreign malign influence center that I mentioned at the top of this episode will help. But let's go back for a second to the testimony of Avril Haines, again, the director of national intelligence. I'll play part of her testimony again.

17:23 Haines: But it also deals with disinformation more generally. And what we have been doing is effectively trying to support the Global Engagement Center, others throughout the U.S. government.

17:33 Brandus: In other words, the Foreign Malign Influence Center, designed to help thwart disinformation in general, will support an already existing government agency, the Global Engagement Center, or GEC, which is part of the State Department. Lots of acronyms to keep track of here. Haines, the DNI, says the FMIC will help support the GEC. Meanwhile, the DGB, the short-lived Disinformation Governance Board, has gone away. Sorting through this alphabet of acronyms, one organization The Foreign Malign Influence Center is part of the vast U.S. intelligence community, while the Global Engagement Center falls under the Department Responsibility for Diplomacy and Public Engagement with the rest of the world, the State Department. These organizations, based on their public profiles, are generally looking beyond our shores for false narratives to thwart. But what about homegrown disinformation? More from my discussion with Brady Roberts, who mentions another federal agency, CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. And how would you deal with the issue of companies in the private sector, which unless they're doing something egregiously illegal, have the right to do essentially whatever they want, I suppose. Again, unless it's just outlandishly violating some sort of a law or something. How do you bring companies, and I'm not going to need to name uh, media companies or anything like that. But, uh, folks who, uh, distribute or use their platforms to, uh, broadcast, share, disseminate, whatever you want to call it, uh, content that many folks know is false. You can have a government organization, but, uh, what powers of enforcement would they have? Should they have a, how might that look in your view?

19:36 Brady Roberts: Well, yeah, that's a complicated question that requires multiple steps to answer. In my mind, if you're going to set up effectively an organization such as this, it's going to operate very similarly to the footprint that already exists or the blueprint that already exists, which to my mind is CISA. CISA today provides alerts and advisories and warnings. It collects some in the cybersecurity realm. It publishes information on active exploits on vulnerabilities that it knows exists. And then it allows the public to include companies and organizations to be aware of them in order to take steps to mitigate. It collects that information, oftentimes through classified sources, but the vulnerability, the fact that it exists itself, and oftentimes the origin of that vulnerability, it's published. It's publicly available knowledge. I would see an organization like this being able to operate relatively similarly, where the only thing that's not always going to be transparent to the public might be how the government acquired the information. making that public knowledge, then it creates an environment that puts all that information out there transparently to the public, and it creates a mechanism for, for example, social media companies to then be able to go back and say, hey, there's been this advisory that this false narrative comes from, whether it's this criminal organization or this key foreign adversary that has created this narrative. We can go in, if you're a social media company, we can begin to look at what bots are amplifying that information. We can begin to take those down.

21:33 Brandus: Thanks to Andrea Liebman of Sweden's Psychological Defense Agency and Brady Roberts of Emergent Risk International. Sound from C-SPAN and The Telegram. Our sound designer and editor, Noah Foutz. Audio engineer, Nathan Corson. Executive producers, Michael D'Eloia and Gerardo Orlando. And on behalf of Meredith Wilson, I'm Paul Brandus. Thanks so much for listening.