Countering foreign attempts to influence US political process

A Q&A between Deputy Director Dr. Donald Kerr and an attendee at the National Counterintelligence Executive (NCIX) Counterintelligence Symposium, Washington, DC, October 29, 2008:

Q: Thank you. I think we focus on many of the hard targets, the theft of secrets, the thefts of intellectual property, the thefts of industrial secrets, copyrighted material, et cetera. What about the counterintelligence threat to our political process of foreign hostile influence operations, the use of, you might say, covert action to influence our political process, whether it be money coming in overseas on the Internet to campaigns, the use of lobbyists, use of media placement operations, the kind of soft power tools that appear to me – when I pick up the Post this morning and see eight pages paid for by the Russian government. What’s being done in this area of counterintelligence?

DR. KERR: To be honest, I think you’ve picked a good point. And by the way, the eight pages will probably be China tomorrow, because they’ve done their supplement, as have other countries. You might really ask the question in another way, which is, how do we prepare those who lead us to understand when they see these messages coming that they may not be news?

The United States, of course, has used covert influence itself as a tool. So we can hardly not expect that it would come back at us from time to time. And so the question is, how do you induce a healthy state of skepticism amongst those in the Congress and executive branch who are going to be subjected to this kind of information? There’s nothing we can do about that. But how do they become skeptics and fact checkers and really understand that people are trying to influence them? What’s K Street all about after all? (Chuckles.) It’s chock full of people who want to influence our elected representatives.

So, learning to explain to people how they might think about information they receive, how they may need to do some vetting of their sources, just as we do in the intelligence community, I think, is going to be a key, because there’s no way to shut it off. And, you know, there’s no way to do, if you will, counter propaganda. It comes from too many directions. So I think at the end of the day it’s going to be how we prepare people to live in the environment where people are trying to influence their behavior and their thinking by the messages they’re delivering. I don’t know any other way. Well again, thanks for your time and attention. Good luck.

Source

Posted on 03 November 2008 @ 12:13