3.08 | 10.31.19
Without free, fair, open, and trustworthy elections, democracy itself is in peril. But the scary truth is that at this moment of extreme political polarization—with a history-changing U.S. presidential election in the balance, and with multiple actors striving to sway voters through means both legitimate and nefarious—we can’t be 100% sure that the voting process will work the way it’s supposed to in November 2020. In this episode we hear which threats election security experts are most worried about, and how we might imagine a way out of the current mess. Listen in your browser using the player above, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.
The moment in the voting booth when you put your pen to your ballot (or put your finger to the electronic touchscreen, as the case may be) is democracy distilled. It’s the act that makes America a republic. But while the casting your vote is critical, it’s everything that happens before, during, and after that moment that makes up the larger election system. And these days there are whole armies of people working to influence and disrupt that system—and opposing armies working to protect it and make it safer and more accessible.
In this special Halloween 2019 edition of Soonish, we look at the scary vulnerabilities in the U.S. election system that were exposed after the 2016 presidential election, and we meet a company working to make it possible for everyone to vote securely on their smartphones.
We hear from a retired U.S. Air Force major general who’s deeply worried about the lack of good “cyber hygiene” within state election agencies, and national security experts who fear the 2020 presidential vote could once again be manipulated and distorted by social media misinformation and disinformation.
And we meet a science fiction author who says democracy is always a work in progress, but argues there’s an urgent need now for better media literacy and clearer thinking about how to strengthen the key beliefs, norms, and institutions behind democracy.
Mentioned In This Episode
J. Alex Halderman, University of Michigan
Maj. Gen. Earl Matthews, USAF (Ret.)
After Resisting, McConnell and Senate G.O.P. Back Election Security Funding, The New York Times, September 19, 2019
Voatz white paper: Under the Hood: The West Virginia Mobile Voting Pilot
“A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming, Just In Time for the Midterms, Vanity Fair, August 2019
…And Other Disasters, short stories by Malka Older, paperback coming November 21, 2019
Twelve Tomorrows, Wade Roush, ed., The MIT Press, 2018 (includes “Disaster Tourism,” a short story by Malka Older)
Malka Older, The United States Has Never Truly Been A Democracy, The New York Times, October 24, 2019
How to Fix Social Media, Soonish Episode 3.05
Defiant Zuckerberg Says Facebook Won’t Police Political Speech, The New York Times, October 19, 2019
Chapter Guide
00:00 Hub & Spoke Sonic ID
00:13 Opening Theme
00:22 A Scary Story from the Senate Russia Report
02:49 E-Voting Machines Without Paper Trails
03:38 The Nightmare Scenario
04:20 Maj. Gen. Earl Matthews on Cyber Hygiene
06:33 More Money for Election Security
07:23 The Big Question: Can We Achieve Fair Elections?
07:52 The Anti-Sikh Riots of 1984
09:47 Nimit Sawhney at SXSW
10:58 The Founding of Voatz
13:58 How to Vote on Voatz
22:03 Baby Steps and Criticisms
24:19 Meet Centenal Cycle Author Malka Older
27:58 Elections as Systems, and the Dangers of Disinformation
30:59 Adapting to New Communications Platforms
32:32 The Fragility of Legitimacy
33:45 End Credits, and a Shout-Out to Open Source
Notes
The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.
Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.
Episode logo photograph by Element5 Digital on Unsplash.
Sound effects / foley from Freesound.org.
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Please check out Open Source, one of the newest additions to the Hub & Spoke audio collective. Try the episode Do we want democracy or two-day shipping? with Matt Stoller from the Open Markets Institute.
Full Transcript
Wade Roush: You’re listening to Soonish. I’m Wade Roush.
It’s Halloween, and do I have a scary story for you!
This comes straight from the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Part of the report looked at the computer systems run that state election agencies use to store voter records. In July of 2016, hackers affiliated with the GRU, Russia’s military foreign intelligence service, scanned these systems in all 50 states.
One witness told the committee that the activity was like
[Quote] somebody walking down the street and looking to see if you are home. A small number of systems were unsuccessfully exploited, as though somebody had rattled the doorknob but was unable to get in. However, a small number of the networks were successfully exploited. They made it through the door.
One of those doors was at the Illinois Board of Elections, where cyber attackers were able to break in and steal voter registration data.
They got names, addresses, birth dates, driver’s license numbers and partial social security numbers for up to 200,000 Illinois voters.
The hackers got so far inside the Illinois system that they could have deleted or altered actual voter data.
And you can imagine what kind of chaos that might have caused when people showed up and tried to vote on election day.
But for reasons nobody understands, they didn’t change any data. They just kind of rummaged around.
A witness from Department of Homeland Security told the Senate committee that the Russian hackers
[Quote] almost certainly could have done more. Why they didn’t is sort of an open-ended question. I think it fits under the larger umbrella of undermining confidence in the election by tipping their hand that they had this level of access or showing that they were capable of getting it.
And even after the 2016 elections that brought Donald Trump to power, the break-in attempts continued.
Spear-phishing attacks. SQL injection. denial of service attacks.
Hackers used all of them to target election infrastructure in the runup to the 2018 midterm elections.
Homeland Security officials say that multiple elements of U.S. election infrastructure are still vulnerable today to cyber intrusions.
And the intruders who were just casing the joint last time around could cause a lot more damage next time.
And here’s another scary fact. The electronic voting machines used in many states are disturbingly vulnerable to hacking.
The intelligence committee brought in a University of Michigan computer scientist and election technology expert named J. Alex Halderman. And here’s what Halderman said.
[Quote] We’ve studied touchscreen and optical scan systems, and in every single case we found ways for attackers to sabotage machines and to steal votes. These capabilities are certainly within reach for Americas’ enemies.
A lot of states use voting machines that leave a paper record.
And in those states the paper ballots given officials way to audit elections after the fact and detect vote stealing.
But almost of the quarter of the states are still using machines that don’t produce paper trails.
The 2020 US national elections are just over a year away. And there’s a battle going on in Congress over whether to hold President Trump accountable for his attempts to get a foreign government to influence those elections by smearing his opponent Joe Biden.
But here’s the real nightmare scenario: At a time of extreme political polarization, we can’t be 100 percent confident that the voting process will work the way it’s supposed to next November.
I’m not talking about people trying to vote in places where they’re not registered. That’s an obsession for President Trump, but the problem is so rare it’s virtually nonexistent.
I’m talking about Russia or other adversaries tampering just enough to make people wonder whether the winner….really won.
Earl Matthews: I think sometimes we just assume that the only thing that needs to be secured is the voting mechanism, the device itself.
Wade Roush: That’s Earl Matthews. He’s a retired major general who formerly directed cyber operations and information security for the United States Air Force.
Earl Matthews: When we look at it from a practitioner standpoint there are three major areas that make up the whole entire election system. First, you have the voting machine, the software, the hardware. But then you also have the election administration. So you have election commissions within the state. You have electoral registers. Then the third part of this is really kind of the national side, which are the election campaigns itself, not only by the individual, but you have news organizations, you have the political parties. We have a lot of social media platforms. And then we have the PACs and donor groups. All of those make up what I would consider the election system for us in the US. And all of those are going to get targeted at different times.
Wade Roush: These days General Matthews has a job as the chief strategy officer for a computer security firm called Verodin.
And he says there are things all the players involved in US elections could do to make their systems more secure.
One step would be for election agencies to act more like real businesses, and keep their software up to date.
Earl Matthews: what we've long said is that if we could just get cyber hygiene under control, we would knock down 85 percent of what we have to deal with every day from a security perspective. And now we can focus our resources on that other 15 percent that really matter. Cyber hygiene comes down to, do I actually have my security controls, my products, configured like they're supposed to? Have I applied every patch that needs to be applied? And have we communicated every time that we've made a change to the network. So we're basically automating cyber hygiene.
Wade Roush: So cyber hygiene is sort of like changing the locks on your building and making sure everyone has the right key.
And the states are about to receive a little extra money to get more hygienic.
Back in 2018 Democrats in Congress proposed spending an extra $250 million to help states replace outdated voting machines and invest in better cybersecurity.
But they were blocked for more than year by Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell.
Finally the proponents of the new spending started calling him “Moscow Mitch,” the unspoken insult being that McConnell was okay with foreign interference in US elections, as long as it only benefited Republicans.
In September McConnell finally broke down and endorsed the new spending.
But in the larger election system that General Matthews was talking about, there are problems that even a quarter billion dollars for better cyber hygiene won’t fix.
Like disinformation campaigns that that could deceive voters or suppression tactics that could keep them away from the polls.
So that’s the big question for today’s episode: Can we imagine a future where elections are free, fair, and trustworthy? Or are we basically screwed?
Since it’s Halloween, some of the news is gonna be frightening.
But there’s also some hope.
And to start I want to tell you the story of a startup here in my home town of Boston that’s working to make it safe and easy for all of us to vote, using the machines we’ve already got in our pockets: our smartphones.
The story actually starts in India in 1984, when the country was locked in a brutal cycle of violence.
For years Sikh separatists had been trying to set up an autonomous Sikh nation in the Indian state of Punjab.
That year armed Sikh militants took refuge in Punjab’s Golden Temple, one of the holiest sites in the Sikh religion.
India’s prime minister, Indira Gandhi, launched an operation to remove the militants from the temple, resulting in hundreds of casualties on both sides.
Most Sikhs saw the operation against the Golden Temple as a pogrom.
And on October 31, 1984 – in fact, 35 years ago today — the prime minister’s Sikh bodyguards took revenge by assassinating Gandhi herself.
But the assassination triggered even more trauma. In four days of anti-Sikh riots in Delhi at least 3,000 Sikhs were killed and tens of thousands more were displaced.
Nimit Sawhney: There were a lot of people who were killed and houses were burned and bad things like that.
Wade Roush: That’s Nimit Sawhney. He comes from a Sikh family in India.
Nimit Sawhney: And soon after that, there were elections for the new prime minister. And during that process, ended up seeing people being forced to vote at gunpoint.
Wade Roush: What Sawhney’s talking about here is the strategy of coercion that India’s ruling Congress party adopted in Punjab and other places to shore up support for its new leader Rajiv Gandhi, the son of Indira Gandhi.
Nimit Sawhney: And so that kind of stuck in my head as something really bad. And so we kind of grew up not having a very positive opinion of government and elections.
Wade Roush: Sawhney went on to study computer science. After he moved to the U.S. he developed a special expertise in mobile payment systems.
And in 2014 Sawhney and some colleagues were in Austin for South by Southwest, and they found out about a programming contest called Hack to the Future.
One of the prizes in this contest was this funny thing called a Bitcoin.
Nimit Sawhney: So it really intrigued us, why somebody would offer Bitcoin as a prize. This was the pre-hype days, so not many people knew much about it and we certainly didn't. So we ended up reading the paper and getting pretty fascinated the morning of, and we decide to participate. What really stood out was the potential for using this for our data security mechanism. We weren't too enamored by the money side of it initially, and so the use case which came to mind was how to prevent coercion in a remote voting scenario.
Wade Roush: In other words, all this time Sawhney had been thinking about whether it might be possible to use technology to make the kind of voter coercion he’d seen in India in the 1980s impossible.
And the bitcoin prize at South by Southwest inspired Sawhney’s team to think about whether they could use the blockchain technology behind Bitcoin to finally do it.
Sawhney and his team ended up winning the hackathon and the bitcoin. And what came out of that about one year later was a new startup called Voatz.
That’s spelled V-O-A-T-Z. Which, annoyingly, sounds exactly like the word votes. So just stick with me and when I’m using the company’s name I’ll try to make it clear from the context.
Voatz is now four years old and its mission is let people vote in local, state, and national elections using just the screens of their iPhones or Android phones, without ever having to go to a polling place.
They started small, by pilot-testing the app state party convention and town meetings. But step by step they’ve been expanding to elections with more people and greater consequences.
In 2018 the company got a big break when the state of West Virginia hired them to collect votes remotely from military officers and civilians working overseas.
That’s a group that had notoriously low turnout in past elections, basically because it’s so difficult to obtain an absentee ballot and return it in time to be counted.
Nimit Sawhney: When we looked at the number of people who vote in that demographic, it was like 7 percent, which was shocking because many of them are serving the country. Arguably, they have the first right to vote. And we have made it the hardest for them to vote. And so we felt like that would be a good demographic. Similarly, the disability community, then students who are away from their homes and are not able to vote the traditional way, then potentially every absentee voter. And then maybe everybody else. But each of these phases needs to be done carefully, in kind of a baby step way, step by step. Evaluate, make sure you are confirming the security, building the trust, doing the post-election audits. So we purposefully decide to do it in a slow, methodical way.
Wade Roush: So they’re taking it slow for now. But Sawhney says the company’s long-term ambition is to put smartphone voting technology into the hands of anyone who wants to vote that way.
Nimit Sawhney: We would definitely hope that every citizen gets the choice. It still needs to be a choice, because if you like to vote in person and go to the polling station and [00:22:00] do it on paper, I think you should still have that choice. …And eventually everybody has that choice and they can decide whichever way they feel comfortable voting, which is kind of akin to how we live our lives. Eventually, if we are doing everything on our phones, then it would make sense that we want to vote on our phones as well.
Wade Roush: But, smart listener that you are, I can already hear the questions piling up in your head.
If it’s so easy for Alex Halderman and his research team at Michigan to find ways to sabotage our existing electronic voting machines and steal votes, how could it possibly be safe to let people vote on their smartphones?
And how does all of this relate back to blockchain technology and preventing coercion of the kind Sawhney witnessed in India?
Well, buckle up, because, with Nimit Sawhney’s help, I’m about to explain the whole process of voting on the Voatz app.
By the end I think you’ll agree that the technology isn’t all that radical. In fact in a lot of ways it’s safer than the election systems we currently use in the U.S.
Wade Roush [to Nimi Sawhney]: So let's say that I'm a military officer in Afghanistan or something and I have an iPhone or an Android phone. Walk me through how my vote gets from my phone all the way to the election commissioner in my home county in West Virginia.
Nimit Sawhney: Sure. So your first step is very similar to what you would ordinarily do even if the system didn't exist, which is register as absentee voter. … at that point, they add you to a list of eligible voters on the Voatz platform. You will then receive a notification to download the app on your iPhone or Android device. And the first thing you do is you use your mobile number and email to sign up for an anonymous account and then you proceed to do an identity verification process. So it'll prompt you to take a picture of government issued photo I.D. You can use a driver's license, state I.D. or passport. And then the system will prompt you take live selfie. It's a live video selfie. So it does a liveness check to make sure that it is you. And you're not taking a picture of a picture or picture of another video. It will then do facial recognition matching with the picture you took with a picture on the I.D. you provided to make sure it's the real person and you're not using somebody else's I.D.
Wade Roush: Long story short, the election agency back home makes sure your ID matches up with their voter registration data. And then the app sends a credential to your phone that can only be unlocked using a biometric input like your fingerprint or your face.
Nimit Sawhney: Soon after that, you get another notification saying here's your ballot, mobile ballot, which is basically the exact ballot you would have gotten at your precinct if you went to vote in person. So then you mark the ballot on the screen just like you would on paper. You mark the ovals. If there is an affidavit for your jurisdiction, you can sign on the screen as well. And then when you are ready to submit, system shows you a digital receipt. So you can make sure that if you marked Oval A, the system got Oval A in each of the contests you wanted to participate in. And then it prompts you again to provide a biometric credential which would be a fingerprint, face I.D., touch I.D. or whatever other mechanism you're using. And then it anonymizes your ballot and sends it off to the network and then you also receive at that point a secured digitally signed receipt which has the information about the ovals you marked. Your jurisdiction receives an anonymized copy of that receipt in a separate lockbox.
Wade Roush: Now this is where blockchain comes in. Blockchain-based systems like Bitcoin or Voatz can be complicated in execution, but the basic idea is pretty simple.
A blockchain is like a digital record book or ledger with lots of copies. It’s easy to add data to the record, but once it’s there nobody can alter it without getting caught.
In the system that Sawhney’s team built, every vote, every oval you mark, gets stored anonymously as a record on a blockchain.
And right here we need to pause for a quick side note. At this point, when you’re reviewing your receipt with the ovals you marked, and right before your vote goes into the lockbox, you have the opportunity to throw out your original ballot.
In the election world that’s called spoiling a ballot, and it happens all the time in regular polling places, when people mark the wrong ovals by accident.
But there’s another reason you might want to spoil your original ballot.
Nimit Sawhney: Coercion of the kind we were thinking of doesn't really happen as commonly in the US, but it does happen very frequently in other parts of the world. And so the system we envision does have that provision, so if you as a voter are feeling threatened, maybe you are in your workspace or at home or wherever you are. If you feel any kind of threat, then it does give you a way so that you can proceed normally. And so the person was trying to threaten you wouldn't be able to know and it would seem like everything's normal. And then later on, you can come back and, you know, vote again. So basically in that scenario, cast your ballot as a provisional ballot and then you can come back and do it when you are in a safer location. We hope nobody ever needs to use that feature in the system, but it's there.
Wade Roush: Okay. Let’s assume you filled in the ovals correctly and your vote wasn’t coerced.
Your vote gets added to the blockchain and stored in the digital lockbox.
Nimit Sawhney: And then on election day, your jurisdiction unlocks the lockbox and they actually print the paper ballot based off your cast ovals. That's then tabulated.
Wade Roush: Let’s pause again on that point, because it’s really interesting and important.
What Sawhney’s saying is that the votes that you submitted on your phone get turned into printed ballots, just like the ones filled out by the people who voted in person at the polling place.
Then those ballots get run through traditional optical scanners. And only then does your vote get counted as part of the actual election.
Nimit Sawhney: So we don't do the counting. The jurisdiction does the counting just like they currently do. Because it's all paper, they tabulate it in the standard tabulation machines. So we felt like that was a good step, to show that even a very modern system can integrate with a legacy infrastructure so we are not increasing the work of the election officials, we are actually making it more efficient for them.
Wade Roush: Another beautiful thing about having a paper ballot is that you can do an audit after the election, where you compare all the digital receipts from the blockchain to the paper ballots and make sure everyone’s vote was counted.
Nimit Sawhney: So now for the first time, you've managed to have end to end verifiable system, which right from the voter side who are able to verify their vote, to know the jurisdiction, being able to make sure that voter intent was honored and that anonymously now we are able to audit the whole election. And so that is the whole end to end process.
Wade Roush [to Nimit Sawhney]: It sounds as if there is at least equal and perhaps more verification and security built into that process than there would be at a typical neighborhood polling place on Election Day. Can you compare the two?
Nimit Sawhney: Yes, definitely. There's way more verification steps here because on most occasions in most jurisdictions when you go to vote in person, they really don't ask you for an I.D.. All they might do is ask you for your name and the street address where you live in. And then they'll put a check mark against your name. And so theoretically, you could pretend to be your neighbor who doesn't ever vote and you could cast a fake ballot. And so there is very little verification. And this system definitely has many more layers of verification. Given that it's a remote system, we feel it's necessary because we need to be a hundred percent sure that you are who you say you are.
Wade Roush: Now, like I said, Voatz the company is starting small. The West Virginia pilot test in 2018 involved only 144 voters.
The company went on to run remote voting for county and city elections in Denver, Colorado, and as we speak the system’s being used for absentee voting in municipal elections in four jurisdictions in Utah.
As cool it would be if we could all vote on our smartphones, it probably makes sense for Voatz to grow in baby steps, especially when there are skeptics who still think smartphone voting is unsafe.
Joseph Lorenzo Hall is one of those skeptics. He’s the chief technologist at a think tank called the Center for Democracy and Technology, and he told Vanity Fair that he thinks Voatz’s technology is, “a horrifically bad idea.”
Hall said he was mainly scared that at some point in the future it might be possible to decrypt someone’s vote and tie it back to their identity.
That’s not actually possible, since the Voatz system doesn’t store identity information once a vote has been cast and added to the blockchain.
Now of course there are legitimate questions about what kinds of technology we want to adopt for future elections.
There’s a persistent criticism of Voatz and other private, for-profit election technology companies. It’s that they aren’t transparent enough, since they haven’t shared the source code behind their systems in a way that outside software experts could evaluate.
What Sawhney says in reply is that the company does share its source code with paying customers who’ve signed confidentiality agreements.
He also says the lack of transparency at Voatz is actually part of what keeps the system safe. It’s a concept called security by obscurity.
Nimit Sawhney: This is this the fundamental argument we are making, that the technology to make this safe enough is here. … And so just like in a military scenario, you don't reveal your secrets to the adversary. For them to expect that we will reveal all our secrets to the public and just make it easier for our adversary to find a way to attack us, it doesn't make any sense.
Wade Roush: In the end, if Voatz wants to succeed, it’s will have to gain the trust of state and local election agencies.
And whether it does that through obscurity or through transparency is probably less important than just showing bit by by that the system works for real world elections, with results that can be publicly audited.
And that’s exactly what the company is busy doing.
But there’s one more design decision baked into Voatz’s technology that could be seen as problematic.
And it’s kind of obvious, but … you do have to have a smartphone to use it.
Malka Older: Let me start by saying that I don't actually have a smartphone. So that would be my first reaction, would be, this is excluding me. And okay, I don't have a smartphone by choice, but there are people who can't afford smartphones. Those things are expensive.
Wade Roush: This is Malka Older. She’s a sociologist and an international aid worker.
And she’s also the author of a fantastic trilogy of science fiction thrillers called The Centenal Cycle that describes a near-future world where national borders have been dissolved, people sort themselves into micro-democracies called Centenals.
Malka Older: It kind of takes away the geographic link with politics. And voting is extremely easy and allowed for everyone. Voting is done on personal devices. And the other key factor of this is this big international bureaucracy, which you can think of as sort of a combination of the U.N. and Google, which is entirely dedicated to information management and exists basically on the principle that you cannot have a functioning democracy, a properly functioning democracy without access to good information.
Wade Roush: The three books in the Centental Cycle are called Infomocracy, Null States, and State Tectonics, and the reason I like them so much is that, like all good science fiction, they make us think harder about the world we live in now.
Malka asks what kinds of social, political, and technological changes we could make right now that would help democracies function better.
So. It’s not that Malka thinks voting on your smartphone is a bad idea. In fact she thinks it might be superior to traditional voting for some people.
Her point is just that technology is only part of the solution for improving elections.
Malka Older: There are a lot of reasons, too, for us to be concerned about in-person voting in terms of the way it's used to for voter suppression in terms of, you know, people who are working jobs that don't let them get away in terms of people who are have mobility issues and can't get physically to the polls. And, you know, we're seeing states some states address that to a certain extent. They have early voting and they have voting by mail. And again, you know, none of these solutions are going to be completely perfect. We can certainly do a lot better than we're doing now. And I think that safe e-voting would be great if we can make sure that it's both safe and auditable. I like the auditable part of this. But, you know, it's still going to require a lot of a lot of effort and a lot of people involved to keep it safe once it's set up, right?
Malka Older: And I tend to think of it more in terms of systems than in terms of technology. I think the technology is really important and can do a lot for us. But, you know, I'm also thinking very much in terms of systems and I'm very resistant to the idea of some perfect system that's going to fix everything. I don't think that happens. And I think that we as a society and as people change too fast for that to stick, even if it did happen momentarily. So, you know, I think it's really important for us to realize that we have to keep interacting with the systems we create. We have to keep monitoring them and running them and improving them constantly. I think there's this very dangerous feeling that where we have a democracy, we're done. And that's not remotely the case.
Wade Roush: There’s one thing that ties together my conversations with General Earl Matthews at Verodin and Nimit Sawhney at Voatz and Malka Older. It’s that all three of them think of elections as systems.
And if we can achieve better cyber hygiene, and get the technology part of elections running better, then it is possible to imagine a future where more people can vote without fear of tampering or coercion.
But all three of my guests say there’s one last part of the larger election system that’s in extremely poor health.
Nimit Sawhney: What really worries me, one thing is the misinformation campaign, which happens on social media. I think that is a problem which is the hardest problem to solve. And I think while we can be very sure that it's really, really hard to alter a vote or change a vote, regardless of which of a system you're using, it's a lot easier to convince people that something bad happened by just spreading bad information. And so I think that's what we as citizens and officials need to be very, very careful about.
Earl Matthews: What actually bothers me most, and keeps me awake at night in regards to election, is social media and disinformation being able to be so quickly disseminated not only leading up to the election, but even on the day of election, where somebody could theoretically post on social media a bunch of misinformation or even disinformation about what was happening with the elections. And that might dissuade people from not even going to the polling booths.
Wade Roush: What General Matthews just said there echoes something I heard recently from another former national security official. Her name is Juliette Kayyem, and you may remember her from my July episode on How to Fix Social Media.
Kayyem teaches at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and she served as assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs in the Department of Homeland Security under President Obama. And here’s what she said in that episode:
Juliette Kayyem: What would I do if I were the Russians? How do I win, if I want Trump to win? I suppress 10,000 African-American votes in Michigan and I've won. How do I do this? I don't do it the same way I did it before. I'm going to bring down a couple of critical infrastructures. I'm going to do fake news that there is an active shooter. And maybe one other thing. The media, the social media platforms have got to get their act together on the use of their platforms to not create fake news that impacts the ability of people to get to vote, to actually do the physical act of voting. And that's where government can come into play, state governments come into play and get them to focus to get that stuff done, because that's what I'm worried about.
Wade Roush: So that’s the real Halloween horror story.
It doesn’t help at all that Facebook and Fox News and conservative talk radio have walked away from the notion that they have any responsibility to verify the truth of the information on their platforms.
But if there’s a final ray of hope here, it may be that the Internet and social media are still relatively young.
Malka Older thinks that over the long term, societies usually figure out how to adapt to disruptive new communications technologies and how to make sure their power doesn’t fall into the hands of a malicious few.
Here’s one last bit from our talk.
Malka Older: You see that there's a lot of influence in our elections and it's a big problem. And I'm sure it's going to be very problematic this time as well. But I suspect that if you look back at the other times when major communications technology revolutions happen—so like when television became popular, when radio became popular before that, when books and the printing press became popular—at each of these, there's been stages where they were they've gone through different phases in terms of being captured by the elite, having a lot of license in terms of what they propagate and people not really knowing how to deal with that.
Right now we're in a place where the potential for disinformation of social media is just exploding. And the people who do have the power, who have the money to buy bought homes and you know, who have the savvy to figure out how to play on the particular kinds of virality that are that work really well in social media, are having a field day right now. And, you know, I think slowly the understanding and the literacy about this media and what is easily faked and what can be believes and how you can evaluate the information you get from it, I think will slowly build up among the population in general. But right now we're in a very dangerous place.
Wade Roush [to Malka Older]: Yeah. I mean, even if we had completely fair and trustworthy elections, we still have politicians who feel like it's to their advantage to cast doubt on the system. Which makes it all even harder.
Malka Older: Yeah. I mean, legitimacy is this incredibly fragile sort of collective agreement about things, about what is what works, what is legitimate, what is something that we believe in. Whether you're talking about the value of paper money or whether you're talking about democracy,it's very fragile. It's very much dependent on people kind of agreeing to believe in things. And it's very easy to break parts of that. And I think that's another big reason why our voter turnout in this country is relatively low, is because a lot of people have been taught over and over again that their votes really don't matter. So, yes, it's it's a huge problem. And you know what, we need to really look seriously at our institutions. And we need to ideally decide as a country whether we do actually believe in democracy, and implement it.
Wade Roush: Soonish is written and produced by me, Wade Roush.
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And there’s been so much news at Hub & Spoke this fall. We’ve added three new shows to the collective, and right now I want to tell you about just one of them.
It’s called Open Source, and it’s executive produced by Mary McGrath and hosted by one of my real journalism heroes, Christopher Lydon.
Every week Chris talks with brilliant figures from the worlds of art, politics, and ideas, like Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Open Markets Institute who talked last week about how monopolies are eroding democracy.
The show is not just a romp through important ideas; for me it’s also a master class in how do a great on-air interview. You can listen at radioopensource.org. And you can find all of the Hub & Spoke shows at hubspokeaudio.org.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for listening and I’ll be back with a new episode…soonish.
