00:05 clip audio: There is concern tonight as election officials prepare for primaries and the presidential election about the unprecedented number of threats they are facing just for doing their job.

00:15 Paul Brandus: One looming threat as America's presidential election nears is security at polling places. Can it be maintained? This is no abstract concern that ABC News report noting that the number of threats to election workers has surged. As November approaches, however, the threat to people is but one concern. There are also worries about election infrastructure and reputational concerns about public confidence in the overall electoral process. An important new study on these three risks, again human, infrastructure, and reputational, says that together they constitute a potential perfect storm. And weaving its way among these worries is the issue of false narratives, also known as disinformation. I'm Paul Brandus, and that's the name of this podcast series, Disinformation, a co-production of Evergreen Podcasting and Emergent Risk International, a global risk advisory firm. The RAND Corporation, the Los Angeles-based think tank, minces no words with its report on our coming election. Indulge me in reading the first few sentences of that report. Quote, Foreign governments interfered in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, while some domestic leaders alleged election fraud before voting even began. Assertions that the election was stolen gained so much traction that as certification began, a crowd rallied and attacked the U.S. Capitol, causing damage, injury, and death. Messages discrediting the election results and the agencies and officials investigating the riot and election-related offenses have continued unabated particularly on social media," unquote. But what about now? One of the authors of the study, Marek Possard, is a military sociologist, also a faculty member at the Rand Graduate School of Public Policy. Here's a portion of our conversation. Your report on America's upcoming election is disturbing on, well, lots of fronts. You say a perfect storm is brewing. Give our listeners, if you could, a brief summary of that perfect storm, and then we'll go into the details.

02:47 Marek Possard: I think there's kind of three examples here. The first is that we do have this hyper-partisanship in our country right now. And you have both parties jockeying for a very small number of votes in many of these swing states. You have the potential for a crisis that is completely or seemingly completely unrelated to the election, such as an attack on critical infrastructure that could occur. You have parties that are trying to amplify various crises for their own political benefit. And then you have these adversaries that are looking for these tactical opportunities that they can jump in and they can amplify falsehoods, they can try to gin up the population. And these can all converge at the right moment, right being from the perspective of an adversary to really kind of create a lot of lasting problems in the 2024 election, in my humble opinion.

03:44 Paul Brandus: So there are domestic concerns, there are foreign-based concerns. Let's talk about some of these in detail. You classify them in three general areas, physical threats, human threats, reputational threats. If you could discuss them within the context of disinformation, if you could, this is a podcast on disinformation. First, the physical threats, tell me about those.

04:13 Marek Possard: So the truth of the matter is that because we have a decentralized election system, these physical threats, which are really anything that is tangible that relates to our election infrastructure. So facilities, equipment, information storage, voting machines, ballots. What's nice here in terms of the US is that we have a decentralized election system. So it's actually very difficult to systematically target physical aspects of our election infrastructure. The same goes for human, what we call human assets, or human parts of this infrastructure. These are the people that actually run our elections, government contractors, non-government partners, volunteer poll workers. And again, this is very decentralized, so those are hard things to actually systematically target. But we have this third asset class that we call reputational assets. These are public perceptions of physical and human assets in our election system. There's an interesting paradox with our election system. It's decentralized, so it's really hard to systematically target physical and human assets. But that makes it really easy to target reputational assets. It's really easy in the US to make people think an election was stolen, because all you got to do is find a few one-off examples of where something maybe not right happened, and then you can amplify them. And I think that's where this issue of misinformation comes in, is you can use one-off examples, amplify them to kind of essentially jet up the population.

05:50 Paul Brandus: delve into recent history, but there were obviously plenty of examples where people took one little discrepancy or minor anomaly in one voting system in one county or precinct or something, blew it up. But there have been scores of court challenges, court investigations, these kinds of things. None of them have really proven to show that there has been a widespread or even minor election fraud and yet these views continue to persist. Why is that? Why do these false narratives live on years after the fact? Why does that happen?

06:39 Marek Possard: Well, at RAND, we have this broader research portfolio called Truth Decay. And there's been this broader trend, I think, across our society of the decline of facts and objective analysis to take these issues head on. And so I think there's a broader social headwind that occurs. Plus, there's a larger issue of distrust of the government that I think is brewing across our country. The issue with elections in particular, though, is that when you find those one-offs and amplify them, we do have a judicial process that the United States uses to essentially adjudicate these facts. What I am most concerned about is our adversaries getting into the bunch. And so I led RAND's work on election or foreign election interference in 2020 for Governor Newsom in the state of California. And one thing that we found was the Russians in particular would find targets of opportunity and amplify and essentially recycle our partisanship at scale.

07:46 Paul Brandus: The Russians in particular, which brings us to Vladimir Putin, here speaking in the Kremlin earlier this month after being sworn in for another six-year term as Russia's president. It is hardly news that Russia's information warfare efforts are robust widespread and increasingly sophisticated. But what makes them even more effective, Rand study says, is that those efforts are taking full advantage of our own weaknesses and divisions, in other words, what we are doing to ourselves. In this regard, the Russians are hardly alone.

08:18 Marek Possard: And so in many cases, it's not that Russia or China or these other countries are doing this. What, in fact, is happening is they're waiting for us to kind of essentially create a tactical opportunity that they exploit, and then they can amplify it further. So we're doing it to ourselves, and then our adversaries essentially exploit it. And I think that's what happens in many cases with our elections, where there might be some one-off case. There might be a court case that one is trying to have adjudicated. And then our adversaries are going to jump in the mix and start trying to amplify this stuff online or in other mediums.

08:51 Paul Brandus: They're just piling on to things that we are doing to ourselves.

08:56 Marek Possard: Oh, yeah. I mean, when this issue of partisanship and actually broader truth decay in our society are actually really tactical opportunities for our adversaries. It is a Christmas gift to the Russians. It is a gift to the Chinese and the Iranians and other countries that are trying to harm our democracy.

09:13 Paul Brandus: And you say, rather disturbingly, that these are not individual silos, that these seemingly unrelated threats could happen simultaneously. Tell me more about that. How might that unfold? What should we be looking for?

09:31 Marek Possard: I think the key thing we should be looking for here is how one type of seemingly disconnected threat could suddenly relate to another threat. So if there's an attack on our critical infrastructure, such as our utility companies, and there is a partisan reaction and suddenly you start seeing it grow, we do have to ask ourselves, why is it growing? Is it actually homegrown in terms of the reaction to some type of crisis, which could be Attack on critical infrastructure, it could be a hurricane, it could be a cyber attack, or our adversaries trying to amplify this up further. And I think one thing that we're not particularly prepared for is having multiple adversaries jumping in at the same time. And so if there is some national crisis or a regional crisis that may affect the ability for us to carry out election in a state or locality, and then suddenly you have Russian trolls online, you might have Iranian operations operating separately, to really just kind of mishmash this crisis, are we going to be in a position to be able to adjudicate it accordingly, essentially, and say, what do we need to do to get this done to carry out our elections? Or are we going to essentially just self-consume ourselves during this crisis?

10:47 Paul Brandus: At a recent summit between Russian President Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, Xi said there are no bounds to our relationship, meaning military cooperation, intelligence cooperation, economic cooperation, on and on and on. Is there any evidence that you have seen that they are coordinating their efforts to interfere with their election in any of the ways that you have described?

11:18 Marek Possard: So I haven't actually looked at that question specifically, so I don't want to speak to whether or not that's happening. I will say, as a hypothesis, it wouldn't be super surprising. These are very cheap operations to carry out. You don't need to invest in a 10-year weapons system and dump hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D to carry this stuff out. It really is a matter of You have a direct pipeline, particularly with social media and with individuals. Essentially, all you're doing is figuring out who you want to target and you pump out content. It would be not super surprising, to say the least, if Russia and China were somehow coordinating, either explicitly or implicitly. And that very well could just be that there might be a tactical opportunity that Russia finds and they exploit. And then China jumps in in their own way, not necessarily coordinating every step of the way, but again, just finding that opportunity and being able to communicate it. You don't need to do a whole lot to gin people up, particularly in this type of election cycle where I would suspect we're going through a political realignment. And so it's a lot of exploitable opportunities to say the least.

12:27 Paul Brandus: And to your earlier point about our election system being decentralized, you really don't have to do that much. And in the case of Russia and China, you really only have to look at these handful of swing states that are going to determine the election. It's conceivable they could target just two or three states that they think are going to make a difference and just focus on those. So talk about you know, asymmetric warfare in a very tiny way could actually make a huge difference.

13:02 Marek Possard: Exactly. And I think the key is, is that they're not going to, I don't think it's really a huge payoff to necessarily try to hack our voting machines or try to turn individuals who are local election workers because it's such a decentralized system. There's a lot of different standard operating procedures across states, but you're right. There's a few states where the vote margins are very narrow. And if you can find a crisis that somehow relates to or is happening inside that state, it's not that hard to gin people up. And then you start casting doubt more broadly on the election system based on one or two examples or one or two crises that are occurring in a swing state that could potentially directly relate to kind of the national outcome because of our electoral college. It's an opportunity for the Russians and the Chinese, the Iranians and others.

13:51 Paul Brandus: Let's shift, if we could, just for a minute to artificial intelligence. This is something that is far more top of mind than it was in 2020. Tell me about the impact of that in 2024 relative to four years ago.

14:09 Marek Possard: So I had to hypothesize here. I would probably suspect that it's just going to pollute the information space. Well, I think there's two things. One, it's going to pollute the information space because it's just going to create more bullshit on the internet. And when you have more crap on the internet, it's difficult for individuals to disentangle what is true from what is a falsehood, particularly because you might have images and video that look very, very realistic. The second thing is it allows our adversaries to scale their operations relatively easy. These are already cheap operations to run. You don't need a lot of money to stand up a server and maybe stand up some individuals to produce content, but this will allow you to automate that. Essentially, you're reducing the costs. to enter into this kind of operation. And we already have a lot of crap on the internet. And now you're going to have AI producing more crap, essentially polluting the information space, making it harder for regular citizens to make an informed decision based on whatever policy issue is popping up in a discussion on a given day.

15:14 Paul Brandus: Now, you and I are speaking in early May. The general election is six months away, but we've already gone through the primaries and so forth. In terms of false narratives, disinformation, AI, and all the rest, what have you already seen this year that makes you worry?

15:35 Marek Possard: Well, I think you've seen these videos pop up periodically of former President Trump and President Biden, in some cases, where they're doing things that they didn't do. They're deepfakes. And I think that's the thing that could potentially be problematic. Not so much that that's going to destroy our democracy. And I don't think AI is this existential risk, personally. But what I do think could happen is, if you time it correctly, you could take a crisis and you can exploit it. And all you got to do is get that one viral video and then get the news cycle running and have it get picked up. And I think that's going to be really particularly concerning. If they get the, if our adversaries get the timing right and they get the right piece of content that hooks onto a percentage of the electorate and it goes viral, it's really hard to get ahead of that story.

16:29 clip audio: We know the value of voting Democratic when our votes count. It's important that you save your vote for the November election.

16:36 Paul Brandus: And deepfakes are getting better every day, like this fake robocall of President Biden urging New Hampshire Democrats to skip that state's primary.

16:46 clip audio: You claim to have found evidence of corruption and deceit in Trump's data center. Yeah, right. Krusty Hillary tried that too and failed miserably.

16:54 Paul Brandus: Donald Trump has also been the target of deep fakes like this clip, again, artificially manufactured. The problem, of course, is that for the average person looking at or listening to something, it may be difficult to discern fact from fiction. What can be done to bolster our defenses against this sort of thing? I put that question to Mr. Posarn.

17:17 Marek Possard: So, I mean, the truth of the matter is the vast majority of Americans are living their lives. They've got mortgages to pay. They've got kids to take care of. They're not thinking about these issues as deeply as maybe folks inside the D.C. bubble. And so I think sometimes people, you know, there should be a concern that this may sway the elector. We also often understand that People have their lives to live, so they're not going to be thinking about this as closely as maybe folks inside the Beltway are. With that being said, a little bit of planning can go a long way. And so one thing that we recommend is scenario-based planning, where we work with local, state, and federal governments. This becomes important because this mishmash of crises that could really just blow up in our face, we can start trying to plan ahead in terms of who's going to do what if something hits. And we can get creative with these scenarios. One thing I can tell you, for example, with mis and disinformation from my work in 2020 was you might be far right or far left, but nobody wants Russia reaffirming their beliefs. We found that in our focus groups and interviews in 2020, a month before the election. You might believe in the Second Amendment and you believe that the Democrats are going to take your guns away, but you don't want Russia to do that. The same thing for those on the far left. So I think a lot of times it's figuring out getting ahead of this stuff and figuring out what one's going to do quickly as a whole government approach and meeting people where they're at and having a kind of strategy up front. Cause right now I think we just respond once it happens and that's kind of going to be a recipe for disaster, I think.

18:54 Paul Brandus: That's an interesting point, being reactive as opposed to being proactive, and you outlined a couple of things that can be done. But is that going to be enough in your view to prevent, I'm thinking about some kind of October surprise, the proverbial October surprise that tends to pop up every election cycle. Are we doing enough to prevent that? I suppose it's hard to answer that, but give me your forecast.

19:25 Marek Possard: I think we don't know until it happens, right? But I would argue that these proactive measures across state, local, tribal, and territorial governments is going to be key. And I would go a step further, and this is not in the actual report, but there's a handful of states where the vote margins are pretty narrow. And it turns out those are the states where a lot of election falsehoods really gain traction because there's a reasonable chance that even a small regularity could change the outcome in terms of who gets what electoral votes. No one's claiming that people are stealing elections. There's not popular claims that people are stealing elections in the state of Maryland or the state of California. But there are claims in these states that we know already that they have narrow vote margins. And so what I think needs to be done in many cases is further investment in those states to increase the barriers for people to actually have falsehoods that are going to gain traction. And again, we do the scenario-based planning, we work with local, state, federal governments, and we identify the states that we pretty much are sure are going to have a very narrow vote margin to begin with and invest in those states. I think we can do a lot to tamp down on some of these election faults.

20:38 Paul Brandus: Let's take a short break here. When we come back, a chat with Brady Roberts, the Chief Operating Officer of Emergent Risk International.

20:48 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.

21:11 Paul Brandus: Welcome back, let's bring in Brady Roberts, the Chief Operating Officer of Emergent Risk International. Brady, this RAND report shows that AI's increasing capabilities are such that they have, and I'm quoting from their report, the potential to significantly increase the persuasive power of disinformation, unquote. Is that persuasive power, in your view, accelerating faster than our ability to discern between fact and fiction?

21:42 Brady Roberts: I would argue, yes, today it is. The ability for groups, for organizations, for individuals to create content for whatever the purpose, whether it's for a legitimate business purpose, or whether it's for influencing voters in the election, or selling narratives in the media, or simply creating content as an individual in social media The ability for us to be able to create content and whatever narrative that we want to choose to create has rapidly, rapidly expanded and increased and become so much easier now. And so that does lead to so many different narratives out there. And absolutely, I think your your average consumer of content, your average American and definitely is bombarded with far more information than they ever have been before. And they only have so much time. to read and to absorb.

22:47 Paul Brandus: So therefore, their ability to cut budget, the average layman here, their ability, again, to discern fact from fiction, you were saying, is almost impossible given just the sheer scale of things that they're exposed to.

23:07 Brady Roberts: Absolutely, especially when you consider the fact that so many laymen are still receiving information via social media, which is algorithmically driven. Meaning for business purposes, it's producing content or showing you content that you want to see alongside ads that you've hovered over in a recent use. And so it's driving that content, and so that's what you're seeing. And so it's not giving you different sides of any equation. It's tending to give you more of one side, and that makes it very hard, I think, for most anyone really to discern, is this fact, is this fiction? Am I seeing both sides? Am I able to kind of evaluate a certain piece of information?

23:54 Paul Brandus: It's also quite easy to use large language models, these LLMs, to quickly generate what Rand calls, and I'll quote again from their report, eloquent, false, and misleading claims about significant topics in the news. These are obviously going to be election-related issues. Ukraine, for example, school shootings, immigration, and so forth. In your judgment, what can be done about this? We just agreed that this information is proliferating at a scale beyond the average person's ability to comprehend. So what can we do about it?

24:31 Brady Roberts: And that is such a broad question. And I'll take that back to my perspective as someone that spent their entire career in the intelligence field. As an intelligence analyst, we're taught first and foremost to use critical thinking. And we're taught what critical thinking is and how to apply it to anything that we're evaluating in order to make judgments on. And the first principle of critical thinking is objectivity. In other words, being able to look at a piece of information and think about and investigate and determine how factual it might be and whether or not That piece of information could have bias behind it. And so as someone that is an intelligence professional, This world that we live in today, the information that I myself am bombarded with, it's not so scary because I understand that anything I look at, anything I view, anything that I read could have a motivation behind it. And it's up to me to be able to sort that out, look at that source, evaluate, think objectively, and move on to make my own personal decision in whatever it is I'm making a decision about today. I believe that What can we do about this? I'll get back to a comment I've made in a previous episode of this podcast. I think we start with education. Taking this tradecraft that we as intelligence analysts and intelligence professionals understand that underpins our career profession, and teaching that, and increasingly teaching that at a younger age in this country. When we go back to thinking about those old civics courses that once upon a time so many of us went through, I think we need to look at whether or not we should be teaching in the schools at an early age, especially as kids are being introduced to social media, this idea of critical thinking. And looking at that from the lens of what does this mean for how we think about our government, what we think about the world around us, how we think about how that's going to make us better participants in our own US democracy, as we become adults and looking at that through a civics lens.

27:01 Paul Brandus: Brady, I don't want to ask about specific clients, but from a general observation for businesses in general, what are they most concerned about? Again, six months out to the election, a lot of issues in play that could affect them. What are you hearing in general that appears to be of concern with them? And again, within the parameters of what we're talking about here, which are these false narratives. Sure.

27:32 Brady Roberts: I think, number one, we are, across the board, there are concerns about the potential for another round of demonstrations, if not violence, things that could potentially impact business or lead us towards another round of mass demonstrations across the country, or simply violence. I think some of our clients are also just worried about just reputation issues in general. If they're perceived as being tied to one side of the political equation or the other, what might that mean for their business?

28:20 Paul Brandus: One of the final things I just wanted to ask about, you know, we worry about the Russian efforts, Chinese efforts in this area. Rand's report says that adversaries like them and there are others can increasingly benefit from technologies that effectively obscure their foreign origins. In other words, we try and trace the breadcrumbs of these false narratives, but they're getting awfully good. Rand's report says about covering up those breadcrumbs. What are your thoughts on kind of overcoming that? It seems like the bad guys are always a step ahead of the good guys.

29:00 Brady Roberts: Today's LLMs make the ability to create content that sounds like any voice that you want it to sound like so incredibly easy. It can also pull from more localized information to really give it a contextual flavor. that makes that content really hard to discern. I think back, for example, to the very earliest days of phishing emails, Paul. We used to teach people that when you're looking for a potential phishing email, the first thing you look for are typos, spelling errors, or does this sound like it actually comes from, in the case of an English email, a native English speaker? And if it doesn't, that's like your first red flag. Today, of course, all of that goes away and this is not something we worry about anymore because phishing emails read so much more eloquently now than they ever did. I think the same principle applies to when we think about any sort of content whatsoever. It's very easy to make something sound very legitimate or though it's coming from, in this case, we're talking about the US, making it sound as though it comes from a member of the American audience. And so that alone, much less looking at where the sourcing of that comes from, but the authenticity that you can give content makes it increasingly difficult. And I think the Rand Report is absolutely right in that it will make the layman reader, the layman viewer, much more susceptible to this content that seems so authentic.

30:36 Paul Brandus: I was hoping for some reassurance from you, Brady, and I'm not getting that.

30:41 Brady Roberts: Well, Paul, this is where I go back to. I think it's about teaching, looking at this from a long-term strategic objective in the United States and teaching our young population what it means to look at this material, what it means to think critically about it, what it means to identify your sourcing and think through what that sourcing might come from and understand motives. behind a given piece of information. I think that's our good start. I will say, if you want one piece of good news, Paul, and I say this not as an intelligence professional, but I say it as a parent raising kids of different ages right now and watching their media literacy grow, I do think that our younger population in this country really is taking on headfirst this concept of media literacy, and they're thinking about that in ways that we never would have before.

31:40 Paul Brandus: Thanks to Marek Posard, a military sociologist and faculty member at the Rand Graduate School of Public Policy, and Brady Roberts, Chief Operating Officer of Emergent Risk International. Sound from ABC News, our sound design editor, Our sound designer and editor, Noah Foutz. Audio engineer, Nathan Corson. Executive producers, Michael Dealoia and Gerardo Orlando. And on behalf of Meredith Wilson, the CEO of Emerging Risk International, I'm Paul Brandus. Thanks so much for listening.