Around the time of the annexation of Crimea in March 2014, Russia’s leadership came to a pivotal conclusion: They had the resources and opportunity to directly influence politics in the West. That spawned a campaign to support and create influential political organizations in Europe with financial and political aid from Moscow. The ultimate aim was to put the United States and the European Union under pressure, and to help elect European governments that would recognize the annexation of Crimea as legal – just as France’s right-wing populist candidate Marine Le Pen recently did in an interview with CNN. Legitimizing Russia’s move in Crimea would mean a step toward lifting sanctions, after all.

The Kremlin’s strategy swung into gear at the height of Europe’s migration crisis in 2015. Extremist and populist parties gained traction with anti-immigration messages, planting the seeds of skepticism and doubt concerning the EU – and Moscow stood behind them. It was opportunistic but successful. Nationalist movements that were once considered fringe groups made significant strides in some EU countries, threatening to undermine the European project.

Russia made no secret of its support for Donald Trump in the US elections either. President Vladimir Putin publicly heaped compliments upon Trump; before his brief time in office, National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was paid handsomely to speak at a 2015 RT (formerly Russia Today) dinner, where he was seated next to Putin; at the Russian Embassy in Washington, staffers reportedly met with members of Trump’s campaign team. The most brazen act, however, came when hackers linked to Russia’s secret service intercepted the Democratic National Committee’s email servers, targeting Hillary Clinton and campaign chairman John Podesta and flooding the media with compromising material.

Russia’s IT industry is hardly considered advanced, but these hackers were highly skilled. Using them is part of a larger strategy to build a powerful tool that allows the Kremlin to wield great influence and quash opposition. In a country where censorship is increasingly commonplace, social media and video blogs alone offer the opposition a platform to expose corruption and cronyism. It is no wonder, then, that Moscow is increasingly clamping down on Internet freedoms. The government has used a sweeping anti-terrorism law to massively expand the legal framework of what is allowed and curtail civil society and political engagement online. In June 2016 a new law was passed that forces mobile phone operators to store the calls and text messages of Russian citizens, and security authorities can request access to encrypted correspondence. The Kremlin also has an array of tools at its disposal to block dissident websites, all without judicial oversight.

Deepening Persecution

Meanwhile, the state’s persecution of its opponents has deepened. The Russian supervisory body for telecommunications, Roskomnadzor, has blocked several opposition sites, including the Internet newspaper Grani.ru and Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny’s blog on LiveJournal. Activists regularly face criminal charges for their own comments on social media, and even for reposting what others have shared. Some of the accused are sentenced to volunteer in the community; others end up behind bars.

The government wastes no chance to tighten its grip on social media. Pavel Durov, founder of Russia’s largest social networking site VKontakte, says he was fired, forced to cede his company to Putin’s close ally, Igor Sechin, and flee the country. Since then, state media have repeatedly published opposition activists’ private contact information from VKontakte in a bid to discredit them.
The chief ideologist behind the Kremlin’s online strategy is Putin’s Internet adviser, German Klimenko. He has argued in favor of banning foreign social media from Russia entirely and has threatened to block Telegram, Durov’s popular messenger service, because the company refused to move its servers to Russia.

It is important to remember that Russian leadership believes Washington controls the Internet. Putin was quoted in 2014 as saying: “The Internet started as a CIA project and continues to develop as one.” He has promised to invest more in Russian IT companies.

Russia’s obstruction of the Internet has hobbled the country’s IT industry; many of its brightest minds leave the country to find success abroad. Russian Internet companies are so strictly regulated that they struggle to keep up with international competitors. At the same time, a state-sponsored IT industry has emerged. The secret service is working to bring more IT specialists on board. Some are won over by money, while others are forced to work for the state or face criminal charges.

According to a study conducted by Zecurion Analytics, a company that analyzes the global role of cybersecurity in defense budgets, Russia is among the top five countries in cyber spending, along with the US, China, the UK, and South Korea. China’s “hacker army” costs Beijing around $1.5 billion a year and counts some 20,000 “cyber soldiers.” The UK employs 2000 people in cybersecurity and spends $450 million. South Korea invests $400 million in about 700 people, while Russia’s program cost $300 million and employs around a thousand people.

Opposition as Guinea Pigs

The very technology that has driven innovation in the West has been used to quell dissent in Russia, helping the Kremlin collect information on individuals and organizations, vilify independent politicians, and launch politically-motivated investigations against critics.

In 2011 and 2012, the Gmail accounts of both Navalny and his wife were hacked and years of private email correspondence went public. Navalny says around ninety percent of the emails were genuine while some ten percent were fabricated. It was the start of a large-scale campaign to undermine Navalny. State media networks featured daily programs picking apart Navalny’s emails to colleagues, employees, friends, and family, with Kremlin-friendly experts providing analysis. It was a brazen attempt to slander Russia’s best-known opposition politician.

The hacker attack behind Navalny’s email leak clearly violated his right to privacy, which is protected under the Russian constitution. But authorities argued Navalny was being investigated for his communications with an advisor, Nikita Belykh, governor of the western Kirov Oblast. Their communication caught the eye of investigators and led to trumped-up charges of embezzlement. Navalny was found guilty and lost his right to run for office. The European Court of Human Rights criticized the ruling as arbitrary, and it was later annulled.

The spokesman for the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation Vladimir Markin went so far as to admit that Navalny’s conviction was political: “Politics certainly play a role in these proceedings, and it has to do with the defendant. He is trying with all his might to attract attention and provoke the power of the state,” Markin said in an interview.

Andrey Pivovarov, an opposition leader in St. Petersburg, recently saw his account on VKontakte’s messenger service hacked. His emails, too, were analyzed in great detail on state TV, and his criticism of other opposition activists, expressed in private, were published shortly before a large demonstration. It was a bold-faced plot to divide Russia’s protest organizations and demoralize their supporters.

A Hybrid War

The strategy worked so well against its own opposition that Moscow started to employ it further afield for geopolitical gains. The emails won from the US Democratic National Committee hack were handed over to WikiLeaks; after the election, US intelligence agencies made public their conclusion that the attacks were carried out at the behest of Russian leadership, with direct orders from Putin.

Of course, Russia’s secret service was not entirely responsible for the outcome of the US election. Donald Trump’s shock victory was rooted in the intrinsic ills roiling American society. In fact, Putin probably did not expect that Trump would actually win. There is, however, no doubt that the Kremlin attempted to interfere in the campaign.

Putin is pursuing a type of hybrid warfare with the West. Attacks are carried out under the cloak of secrecy and encryption so the Kremlin can officially distance itself from illicit activities. Putin believes that by demonstrating his power to the West, their governments will become more accommodating.

The US has maintained its sanctions on Russia and stepped up rhetoric, but that has done little to bring an end to the Kremlin’s manipulation. In France, Russia’s secret service supported Marine Le Pen and used strategies learned from the US election campaign to target pro-European centrist Emmanuel Macron. He has been critical of Russia, and in February 2017 Macron’s aides accused Russia of repeatedly attempting to hack their candidate and his En Marche! movement’s website.

Humpty Dumpty

For the Kremlin, hacker attacks are one of the most efficient ways to undercut opponents; Western countries are still struggling to identify the best way to counter attack. The Obama administration expelled 35 Russian diplomats before leaving the White House, imposing sanctions on high-ranking Russian intelligence agents and their private IT companies as well.

But this Kremlin strategy has backfired. Factions within the government have employed hackers to win the upper hand in internal power struggles. In 2014 the prominent Humpty Dumpty group leaked information to the public about Russian officials and state ministries. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, his deputy Arkady Dvorkovich, Putin adviser Vladislav Surkov, and Timur Prokopenko, a high-ranking official in the Kremlin’s interior administration, were all targeted.

The leaked information blew the cover off the government’s corruption and rampant abuse of power, and Humpty Dumpty was promptly branded as opposition. Yet in 2016 it emerged that the hackers were connected to the FSB intelligence service, which acted, according to the hacking group, as a “handler.” Nearly every member of the group was arrested during the investigation, including Sergei Mikhailov, the deputy head of the agency, and Dmitry Dokuchaev, another FSB officer.

Humpty Dumpty aside, there has been much hand-wringing in the West over how to counter Russian cyber attacks. It is important to accept that almost every message sent online can be made public. The Russian opposition has long since come to the conclusion that the only effective way to protect itself is maximum transparency – in other words, do not send anything in an email you would not be willing to repeat in public. It is a strategy that only goes so far, however. If the Kremlin no longer has access to incriminating material to ruin opponents, it will simply fabricate news.

Read more in the Berlin Policy Journal App – May/June 2017 issue.

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It was a case that shocked German politicians across the spectrum: In January 2016, a Russian-born teenager in Berlin reported that she had been raped by three immigrant men. Russian media outlets picked up coverage immediately and the Russian-speaking community in Germany took to the streets in outrage. It escalated to the governmental level when Moscow accused Berlin of trying to sweep serious problems under the rug, and Berlin shot back with a warning against political propaganda. In the end, it turned out that the assault had never taken place.

The “Lisa case” revealed how Germany has underestimated Russia’s ability to influence the information space for far too long. In fact, some German lawmakers still question the existence of Russian disinformation campaigns, despite of what has happened during the US presidential elections and a wealth of comprehensive analysis and information regarding Russian activities in Europe that serve as proof. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, those doubts contribute to growing uncertainty in Germany over the credibility of Western politics and mainstream media – and this is precisely the Kremlin’s goal.

Russia’s efforts to manipulate and influence public opinion are only part of a larger security strategy that emerged from a self-perceived weakness. In the run-up to Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, anti-government protestors took to the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg to stage major rallies. As a result, Russian elites felt they were under increasing pressure from Western media, NGOs, and critics. It is important to understand this perception in a larger context. Russian policy makers and security officials realize that they are technologically and militarily weaker than NATO and the United States. They have responded to that sense of imbalance by modernizing the country’s nuclear arsenal (the only area where Moscow is on a level playing field with Washington) and by using elements of coercive soft power and hybrid warfare to compensate for conventional deficiencies. In an address to the Russian parliament, the State Duma, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu confirmed in February that the Russian military has created forces tasked with waging information warfare.

Russia’s leadership realized somewhat late in the game that 21st century warfare could no longer be won with conventional weapons, but rather with a combination of covert and classic military strategies and information manipulation. It has since put this insight into practice with remarkable consequence. For the Kremlin, it is a far more cost-effective and efficient way of waging war, particularly because modern technology assures that disinformation has a far greater impact than it used to during the Soviet era. The information war we see today was tried, tested and refined in Russia, then exported to the post-Soviet space. Now it has been expanded to Europe and beyond as well.

A Public-Private Partnership of Sorts

Russia’s security apparatus built a public-private partnership of sorts with commercial hacking groups and troll factories that allowed them to sharpen a series of powerful tools. Together, Russian security officials and hackers have orchestrated systematic cyber-attacks on European politicians, institutions, and media; they have used platforms like WikiLeaks to disseminate damaging information; they have wielded social media bots and trolls as well as fake news to discredit leading figures, like French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron. He personally has been deluged with “fake news” and cyber-attacks stemming from Russia.

In addition, Russian media outlets like RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik disseminate conspiracy theories and provide a platform for populist parties like Germany’s right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) or pundits critical of the West. These outlets do not bother themselves with large audiences or impressive click rates. They focus instead on ensuring that their stories are shared among like-minded groups on social media networks and perceived as fact, strengthening support among their base; some of those stories, however, also spread into the mainstream media. It is still unclear whether these targeted social media campaigns have a real impact on electing leaders like Donald Trump or taking down leaders like Angela Merkel.

What we can indeed learn from the US election campaign, however, is to recognize how cyber-attacks are used to disseminate information to discredit a candidate. During the US campaign, Russian agents were making direct overtures to the Trump team and activating old business contacts at the same time. Russia was systematically growing its informal networks and maneuvering private, economic, and political ties to serve its own interests. It is a strategy that combines a variety of legal and illegal instruments – and one that could be used in Germany’s upcoming federal elections.

Next Stop Germany

Leading up to the September vote, the Kremlin will likely distribute information across various online platforms and Russian media outlets and activate networks and contacts that already exist in Germany. It is also likely to build new networks to influence public and political discourse. In Russia, the boundaries between business and politics, between security and information policy have disappeared both in internal and external policy. That has exposed liberal democracies’ vulnerabilities as a result, making them appear weak and fragile.

It has also led countries like Germany to overestimate Russia’s real abilities to influence elections and public opinion significantly. Putin’s power is perceived to be greater than it really is; Russia has used bluffs and lies to unsettle its opponents in Ukraine, and it is successfully using that same strategy against the European Union.

For the Kremlin, neither Merkel nor her Social-Democrat challenger Martin Schulz would be a favorable choice for German chancellor – but that is not particularly important, either. The Kremlin’s goal is not to change the outcome of the election, but rather to make its opponents believe that it can. This strategy ultimately weakens Western governments and strengthens Russia’s negotiating position on issues like Ukraine or spheres of influence. And it also serves to consolidate Putin’s power at home, distracting Russians from their government’s own corrupt structures.

Exposing Moscow’s Methods

The answer is clear: Germany and Europe as a whole will have to work together to publicly expose Russia’s methods of manipulation. They cannot allow themselves to be unsettled. They must identify and understand Russia’s strengths and weaknesses as well as they do their own. The German government has to counter fearmongering among mainstream and fringe media outlets; it must also counter politicians and institutions that believe in placating Moscow. Those who continue champion appeasement must be made to understand one key point: Putin’s regime will not change, not through compromise nor trade. It will continue to generate and export corrupt structures, infecting any country that has failed to build a robust immune system.

Finland provides an important example of how to successfully stem Russian fake news and manipulation. Earlier than in Germany the Finish government made disinformation a top priority, setting up a central agency – in Finland’s case it is located at the prime minister’s office – to collect all information and coordinate counter-measures rapidly. Thus the agency not only helps coordinating all government bodies responding to fake news stories or cyber- attacks but enables the government to respond quickly to any social media campaigns directed against Finish policy or a particular person.

In Germany, there are a number of government bodies dealing with disinformation, but they lack coordination. The fact that the line between internal and external threats is hard to draw makes it difficult for those bodies to respond while traditional intelligence or security counter-measures no longer apply. In addition to such an agency, investigative journalists, democratic institutions, and civil society groups need to work in harmony to make the Germany’s democracy more resilient.

At the same time, it is important to remember that Russia – a country that has bucked modernization and sustainable development – is not the global power it appears to be. Moscow did not cause the crisis that Western countries find themselves in, it has simply benefited from it. German and EU stakeholders must bear down and do their homework, defending and enforcing liberal values at home and abroad. The same is true for parts of the media always ready to demonize Putin and Russia but neglecting their job of soberly analyzing what Russia can and cannot do. Anything else would only serve to amplify the very campaign of fear and panic that Moscow created.

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It has become a familiar dynamic: AWD News, a website knowing for disseminating fabricated “news,” quoted Marine Le Pen of France’s right-wing Front National allegedly comparing President François Hollande to Adolf Hitler. Le Pen’s comparison quickly went viral and drew considerable condemnation. A fact-checker at the French daily Le Monde, however, debunked the quote – after all, in democracies, the principle of distinguishing between fact and fake applies to everyone, including political opponents. Le Pen, it turned out, had never made the comparison.

It is a small yet significant example of how public opinion in both the US and Europe is being roiled online. And it is not just extremist fringe groups that are to blame. Politicians and mainstream media have long neglected to address the rise of fake news and conspiracy theories that flourished after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump as the 45th US president have thrust this issue squarely into the spotlight. German parties are only now realizing just how powerful modern digital tools can be in influencing public opinion and destabilizing democracy. After the US elections, it was Chancellor Angela Merkel herself who drew attention to the problem of so-called social media bots – automated software active on platforms like Facebook and Twitter that resembles real users. Merkel was so concerned that she suggested a code of conduct for German parties in this year’s election.

For German lawmakers, the way the US election campaigns were conducted came as a sobering realization. Both Trump’s campaign and, to a lesser extent, Clinton’s employed social bots to artificially pad likes on Facebook, create the illusion of widespread support, or frighten and silence moderate politicians with relentless abuse and harassment online. “Bots contribute to a radicalized tone in debates, overwhelming more measured voices,” warned Peter Tauber, chairman of Merkel’s conservative CDU party.

Now barely a week passes without new information emerging, especially from the US, on how hacks, leaks, and fake news can affect an open, democratic political system. Until recently, German politicians only knew trolls: users who sow discord online, inciting hate and abuse and harassing others, either for money or out of conviction. Now, Germany is waking up to the various other ways that opinion can be manipulated, for example by fabricated news stories targeting certain social networks or accounts. Echo chambers prevent people from being confronted with opinions different to their own. And digital tools morph so quickly that even experts are finding it difficult to identify and assess the impact. When Merkel in 2013 called the Internet “unchartered territory,” she was ridiculed. Nobody is laughing now.

The Populist Advantage

The right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, has created its own team of bloggers and wants to found its own television network as well, just as Austria’s far-right Freedom Party did. The AfD justifies the need for these tools with the argument that mainstream media is controlled by the establishment, including the governing parties.

Merkel has warned that biased media only reinforce echo chambers and give fringe groups and their supporters the illusion that they are many, while in reality they are a minority. The anti-Islam Pegida movement’s slogan, “We are the people,” is a classic example.

Experts have highlighted various tools that are increasingly able to influence ever smaller, customized voter groups. In the US, authorities essentially have free rein to gather metadata on individual voters and their opinions. The Trump campaign took profiling to the next level, creating starkly different, even contradictory, political ads to target voters in Pennsylvania versus Florida. These ads specifically addressed the emotions and desires of the individual recipients and voter groups.

Trump’s data team, Cambridge Analytica (CA), was behind that approach. The company describes its work as using “big data and advanced psychographics to grow audiences, identify key influencers, and move people to action.” Essentially, it targets individual voters based on psychological profiles. An in-depth report on CA by the Swiss news site Das Magazin quickly went viral in the German public and among decision makers.

CA had worked with the pro-Brexit campaign as well, gathering massive stores of data on voters and analyzing them to create psychological dossiers. They mined users’ clicks and likes, their purchase histories, their medical information, their smartphone usage and even information on where they live. All that data helped CA understand voters’ beliefs and desires down to the individual. Now there are fears that parties in Europe will buy up metadata on their own citizens and resort to the same measures. France’s populist Front National has reportedly already contacted the company.

At the same time, the combination of globalization and digitalization has provided external actors with new tools to interfere in national elections. In the US, 17 security agencies concluded that Russia hacked the presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. According to The Washington Post, after months of vehemently denying any involvement, the Kremlin actually deferred to the president-elect on the CIA’s assessment.

Europe is now worried that Russian hackers could sway elections in the Netherlands, France, and Germany this year, in favor of populist, anti-immigrant (and anti-European) forces. The head of Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution – the domestic intelligence service – Hans-Georg Maaßen openly warned that aggressive cyberspying and cyberattacks are threatening to destabilize Germany’s democracy. Referring to a high-profile case last year of a German-Russian girl who Russian media said was kidnapped and raped by migrants in Berlin – a claim later refuted by German authorities – he said, “This could happen again next year and we are alarmed. We have the impression that this is part of a hybrid threat that seeks to influence public opinion and decision-making processes.”

Fighting Back

Germany’s security forces are now arming themselves to fight cyberattacks. The government is trying to sharpen legislation on hate speech online and is putting Facebook under increasing pressure to take down blatantly racist, inflammatory, and inappropriate posts the same way traditional media is obliged to do. Social Democrat legislator Lars Klingbeil has proposed a mutual “no-attack” agreement for parties involved in the election campaign, and another parliamentarian, Thomas Jarzombek (CDU), is calling for a press law to hold social media in check – especially as sites like Facebook and Twitter have become primary news sources for many users.

All of Germany’s established parties have agreed not to utilize social media bots in the upcoming campaign. The question remains whether the AfD will go along with the pact. The party originally said it would make bots part of its strategy, but later distanced itself from that statement. These self-regulatory initiatives may help, but the problem is far from solved – third party actors can swoop in and create social media bots in lawmakers’ names without their knowledge, discrediting them. Still, there are key differences with the US and the UK, where societies are far more polarized and data privacy does not carry the same weight it does in Germany.

As Berlin is building up its technical infrastructure in preparation, experts and lawmakers believe education and clarification will be the most effective tools in combating all forms of interference – and they have to be utilized as early as possible. Children, too, have to learn that Facebook and Twitter do not provide objective perspectives on reality, and that algorithms generate bubbles that only reaffirm their own beliefs.

Transparency is considered the best weapon to prevent fake news and conspiracy theories from taking root. Here, too, careful, accurate journalism is paramount, as the example of Le Monde’s fact checking revealed. “The best approach is to talk about it,” said Maaßen. “When people notice that the information they’re receiving isn’t trustworthy, that they are being fed propaganda and misinformation, then the poison of lies loses its effect.”

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Professor Hegelich, what are “social media bots”? Social media bots are fake accounts on social media platforms. They try to mimic the appearance of normal users, but they are actually controlled by underlying software. The first bots were probably for mainly commercial uses – they were very simple, basically just advertisement. But many state agencies, especially in the United States, were very quick in trying to use these types of bots to manipulate public opinion or at least to find out if this were possible. The Guardian reported as early as 2011 that US agencies were developing “sock puppet software.” And there were definitely a lot of social bots active in the Arab Spring movement, where they were applied against dictatorial regimes.

In Germany and Europe, however, they seem to be a new phenomenon. We found bots on Twitter attacking German Chancellor Angela Merkel two years ago. Most of these came from the US and were connected to the so-called “alt-right” movement. This doesn’t necessarily mean someone was trying to manipulate public opinion in Germany. The refugee crisis was a big political topic in the US as well; it was discussed and stoked by social bots there, too.

Last November you briefed Chancellor Merkel on social media bots, trolls, and fake news – basically, the tools that could be used to manipulate this year’s election. What kind of reception did you get? What thrilled me is that Chancellor Merkel is so interested in the topic and very well-informed. It was more like a scientific debate. My impression was that especially Merkel is taking the whole topic of digital manipulation very seriously. And she’s not looking for simple solutions, she really wants to discuss this topic with her CDU party and convince them that something very disruptive is going on in the political sphere.

So how worried were they? How worried should they be? Everyone is getting particularly anxious because of what happened in the US. There’s no need to panic, though. It’s very difficult to influence people’s political opinions, no matter what tool you use. You can’t use a bot army to write “Lock Merkel up” online and actually believe someone will read it and think, “Oh, yes of course, Merkel has to go to prison.” The effects are far more indirect.

What is the effect, then? One danger is that you may see that a certain topic is very successful on social media and deem it very important, but in the real world it isn’t. Journalists and also politicians are taking trends from social media that don’t actually exist and are making poor decisions based on that. For example, do you really think so many people care about a remake of the Ghostbusters movie with an all-female cast? The huge social media controversy it sparked last year felt somewhat overblown. Or – far more serious – did the outrage online during the Arab Spring really reflect the opinions of the majority? Another danger is that bots can lead to polarization in rhetoric and discourse because they are very aggressive in social media debates. That could lead to a situation where bots only engage with other radical users, and more moderate people just exit the discussion entirely.

You have to differentiate. Most bots aren’t even political – they’re driven by economic interests. In the US, some pro-Trump sites didn’t actually want Trump to win, they just found out you got more clicks that way. The same is true with bots. Some studies counted bots in relation to hashtags, and they found there were 400,000 pro-Trump users. But upon closer look, the majority are just spam bots pushing links to Russian video games, for example, without any political message. My point is, you have to differentiate between spam and noise.

At the same time, attribution is really difficult – it’s a worldwide economy. Say you need fake user accounts, and to register a lot of them you have to bypass the captcha code. You might have an office in Pakistan bypassing the captchas, and then you have a fake account generator that might be Dutch. You run your servers through the United Kingdom because they’re cheap there. You use software programs in Russia and manipulate in the US – it’s an international chain of production. This also makes it very hard to say who is behind the manipulation.

German politicians are already discussing countermeasures like fining those who spread fake news or setting up a kind of fact-checking clearing house, which some denounce as an Orwellian Ministry of Truth … There is a lot of activism. The US already has a new law for this. It has been one of the final acts of the Obama administration, so they are actually creating a sort of Ministry of Truth. I’m not sure that this will be particularly helpful, but I think it is very important to discuss the issues and increase the pressure on Facebook especially, making sure they are part of the solution. And if we are just talking about normal people, then all the necessary laws are in place: slander is an offense, be it on Facebook or anywhere else. But in the case of cyberoperations and large scale cyberattacks, it’s not a matter of law, but a matter of counter-measures.

The outgoing Obama administration has enacted some of those, making Russia responsible for the hacking into the Democratic National Committee servers … I’m skeptical as far as the “blame Moscow” narrative is concerned. If, for instance, the e-mails that were published by WikiLeaks had really been taken by a hack, then the National Security Agency (NSA) would be able to say from which IP address they came and where they went. WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange has said that they were leaked. And the fact that Russian malware was used only goes so far. If I wanted to hack something I would use Russian malware as well because you can easily buy it online …

So we should be careful pointing fingers but that shouldn’t stop us from fighting the attacks? Exactly. Then again, we should all be certain that Russia, China, indeed every country in the world is trying to get a handle on this. It’s likely there is this activity in Russia, but I doubt that the WikiLeaks stories came from Russia.

What role is WikiLeaks playing? Can we expect more data dumps with relevance to Germany? WikiLeaks is still doing what they were doing ten years ago. They’re publishing all kind of material they think is relevant and they don’t really care where they get the material from and care even less about political consequences. And we will definitely see more dumps, even though the reporting on them is not always accurate. When WikiLeaks published more than 2,400 documents on the collaboration between German intelligence services and the NSA from a Bundestag investigative committee on December 1, 2016, many people thought this material was taken during the hack of the Bundestag of 2015. But as far as I know the material that was published by WikiLeaks is over 90 gigabytes, while the whole amount of data transferred during the Bundestag attack was 16 gigabytes. If this is correct, then the latest WikiLeaks drop had nothing to do with hacking, it was a leak. Either way, there will be more of it this year – WikiLeaks has said as much, as has the famous German hacker of Megaupload fame, or infamy, Kim Dotcom, who is in New Zealand fighting extradition to the US.

Is the German government committing enough resources? We’ll find out over the next months. There is a lot going on, but I’m not sure it’s going in the right direction. For example, the German army is trying to build up a cybersecurity center and recruiting a lot of experts from various universities for each different aspect of cybersecurity. The Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) is quite busy, too. My impression is that many were very surprised by the US elections and their manipulation. And now they have just started to get active.

How influential is fake news? Fake news is where you really see disruptive change in public opinion. WikiLeaks’ slogan was, “If lies can start wars, the truth can start peace.” Now we have a situation where you have information and counterinformation for everything, and you never know what is true and what isn’t. People who get their information from social media only trust their own networks. This phenomenon isn’t completely new. There have always been political movements or parties that deny facts. But with fake news, it’s easier to be destructive in social media. It’s much easier to spread lies. You can spread more fake news in the time that it would take to understand one real news story. Also, dramatic news, even if it’s fake, gets a lot of interest. Like the story that Pope Francis was supporting Donald Trump.

Why are people so easily manipulated by fake news? I think the problem is we all still have to get used to social media in some ways. We still think quantity and quality are connected. If we read something twice, four times, twenty times, we start to think there must be something behind it, even if it’s nonsense. And the problem with fake news is, even if it’s proven to be false, there always remains a glimmer of doubt. Also, because everything is connected on the internet, we don’t have independent information anymore. Even a journalist trying to verify a story with two independent sources might have the problem that he or she cannot be sure they aren’t somehow digitally connected. During the shopping mall shooting in Munich last year, a well-known terrorism expert spread news of further – it turned out, fictitious – attacks in the city. Apparently, he had two independent sources on this, but they in turn relied not on firsthand information but on Twitter. This is a big problem in everything we do.

Populist parties like the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) are very active on social media and attract high numbers of followers. Does that mean populists are more media-savvy? First, there is a good reason the AfD and its supporters are using social media, because they consider the established media to be biased against them and not reliable. Therefore, they look for different channels. Second, a lot of this social media activity around AfD, Pegida (the anti-Islam, xenophobic movement that first emerged in Dresden in 2015), and the new right movement in Germany is created by very, very few accounts, or by very few people behind many accounts. There is a lot of automation or manipulation of these social media trends, especially when it comes to these parties. Half are fake. I can’t prove it for every user but there are users systematically liking every post on every Pegida page. Suddenly you have users that like 30,000 posts a month.

It doesn’t mean they are all bots. There are also trolls or people who are very engaged, sitting at their computers for hours on end posting and liking. We identified one pensioner in Erfurt who has spent at least eight hours a day for the last one-and-a-half years in front of his computer, writing hate posts against refugees. He’s not even getting paid. He thinks he serves Germany that way.

So the type of election campaign we saw in the US, extremely polarized and targeting individual voter groups on social media and manipulating opinion – are we going to see that in Germany this year too? Society in Germany isn’t as polarized or as segregated as in the US, so it will definitely be different. But our election system would allow for targeting different voter groups. I think 2017 might be the last more or less traditional campaign we’ll see in Germany. And it’s very important to have a real discussion about what’s going on in the public sphere beyond the election of 2017 because I think we’re about to witness a disruptive change in public opinion and democracy. I’m really wondering if the public sphere is changing fundamentally. Will we still have elections that are equal, free, and secret? Because all of this is definitely going to change voting – maybe for the good, but right now it looks a bit frightening.

Read more in the Berlin Policy Journal App – January/February 2017 issue.

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© REUTERS/Axel Schmidt

The specter of an attack on Germany’s critical infrastructure has long been a deep concern for security services – power plants and electricity networks offer prime targets for cyberattacks, and authorities have redoubled their efforts to make sure they are protected.

This hardware is without doubt a central piece of Germany’s basic security. But the country is now facing a larger, more menacing threat to its software. Liberal democracy – the cornerstone of our society – is at risk. And the events of 2016 have shown that we urgently need to confront this threat before it erodes the foundations of enlightened debate.

At first glance, the hacking of the Democratic Party in the US, the proliferation of fake news and propaganda on social media, the rapid rise of nationalist populist movements and parties, and increasingly aggressive Russian secret service operations do not seem to have much in common. But these phenomena are very much connected. And we as a society have taken far too little action to protect our liberal democratic order from dangerous forces.

A new, illiberal order has risen on the back of populist protest movements in the US and Europe. Russia and other anti-democratic actors have aided them, using the very framework of our open societies to their advantage. And Russia’s propaganda campaign has played a central role. It is true that there have long been illiberal movements in liberal societies, and democratic institutions bear some responsibility for the loss of trust and confidence among certain social groups. But ignoring or concealing the role that anti-democratic foreign governments have played in order to avoid confrontation (in this case with Moscow) is foolish. We have to recognize this attack as such, despite lingering reluctance to do so.

Guardians of the West

Most German lawmakers have until now shied away from calling the current turmoil a “new Cold War,” and there are indeed good reasons not to do so. Still, we should not be fooled by the fact that we are no longer embroiled in the same great-power conflicts of a bygone era. Even if it is not immediately clear what Vladimir Putin’s alternative to liberal democracy actually is, he embodies the forces seeking to dismantle our hard-fought liberties, from gender mainstreaming to gay marriage, multiculturalism, immigration, and perceived political correctness. Putin has in fact fashioned himself to be a guardian of the West, a defender against Islamization, foreign infiltration, and rising feminine influence.

It is no coincidence that Russian broadcasters like RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik have become central sources of information for the new populist movements. Even if these movements do not always align with the Kremlin’s agenda, they offer cheap and easy platforms for propaganda. From the Brexiteers in the UK to Donald Trump in the US, the Five Star movement in Italy, the Front National in France, and the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, populist movements are peddling Kremlin-friendly reports or even replicating Russian propaganda with zeal.

The links between the illiberal movements and their almost symbiotic proximity to the Kremlin are now well documented. The Five Star movement in Italy, for example, has an entire media network that disseminates Kremlin-induced fake news. One platform called TzeTze belongs to a founding member of Five Star and has amassed 1.2 million followers on Facebook alone. It beams out stories like Sputnik’s assertion that refugees and smugglers from North Africa are really financed by the US.

The propaganda does not have to be convincing – it just has to succeed in sowing doubt and calling into question the system of values behind our open societies. And as skepticism towards liberal democracy and the established political order grows, disruptive forces are finding fertile ground. In Germany, a recent poll conducted by the survey institute Forsa with the national weekly DIE ZEIT on August 31, 2016, showed that 31 percent of AfD supporters and 30 percent of left-wing voters trust Vladimir Putin more than Angela Merkel.

Western societies are now turning to the same tools wielded so effectively by Russia. In Peter Pomerantsev’s startling book on Russia’s media landscape, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia, he describes the mechanisms of political technology in a world where it matters little whether something is true or not.

What is true today can be obsolete tomorrow: one day, Putin can claim there are no Russian soldiers in Crimea; the next day, he can casually admit that Russian soldiers had been active on the Black Sea peninsula all along. If the truth is blurred, twisted, and distorted long enough, the standards by which we orient right and wrong disappear. Propaganda does not have to be consistent. As the influential political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote more than sixty years ago, the best subject of totalitarian rule was neither the convinced Nazi nor the convinced communist, but the man who could no longer distinguish between true and false, between facts and fiction.

The “Post-Truth” Era

The relativization of truth is not just a tool employed by Russia. The Oxford Dictionary word of the year in 2016 was “post-truth.” According to an analysis on Buzzfeed, in the last three months of the US election campaign the twenty most influential fake news stories generated more response on Facebook than the twenty most influential real news stories produced by traditional media.

In the lead-up to the Brexit vote, it was the seemingly farcical stories on British payments to Brussels and the economic consequences of leaving the EU that proved more powerful than facts from economic groups or the Bank of England. “People in this country have had enough of experts,” declared conservative Justice Secretary and Brexiteer Michael Gove, when he was questioned on why no economists supported Brexit.

In the US, meanwhile, the Democratic Party’s confidential emails were leaked to the public. Dmitri Alperovitch of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike warned back in July that the hacker collectives Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear were responsible. Experts said the style and approach showed all the hallmarks of Russian intelligence services.

In September, at the Munich Security Conference’s special Cyber Security Series at Stanford University, US intelligence representatives and cyber experts raised the alarm over the growing influence of foreign intelligence services on American elections. Nearly a month later, the Office of Homeland Security and the CIA announced they were certain that the Russian government were behind the hacks; the scale and sensitivity of the operation indicated involvement at the highest level.

This is not the first attempt to influence public opinion in Western societies. But the ability to disseminate information through social media and online gives illiberal forces new powers and bandwidth. And it comes as social media users are increasingly divided into insular groups that quickly become echo chambers. That trend leads to greater polarization and information tribalism, where each societal group lives its own version of truth and reality. These increasingly isolated groups are especially vulnerable to propaganda and fake news.

That is why protest parties and alternative media gain such traction on social media. With the slogan “We write what others can’t print,” Germany’s far-right magazine Compact has amassed upwards of 90,000 followers on Facebook. The outlet propagates conspiracy theories and stories touting Putin as a champion of balanced dialogue and restraint, unlike the EU.

Whether it’s fake news, leaks, trolls, or automated social media bots, these instruments present a grave challenge to enlightened public debate, the core of a functioning democracy. How do you maintain the principles of balanced, democratic debate when a significant percentage of those taking part are not real people or when they cast doubt on these very principles in the first place?

It Can Happen Here

After the US elections, the German chancellor was celebrated as the “leader of the free world,” and Germany fast became the last bastion of liberal democracy. But German society is not immune to illiberal forces. On the contrary, the fact that Berlin played a central role in rebuking Russian aggression in Ukraine makes it a target for propaganda and disinformation campaigns, especially from those who reject sanctions and strive to protect Russia’s “sphere of influence” in Eastern Europe. The chancellor has already expressed concern that Russia might interfere in this year’s election campaign. And the head of Germany’s intelligence agency, Bruno Kahl, warned, “This kind of pressure on public discourse and on democracy is unacceptable.”

With pressure mounting, the building blocks of our open society must now actively fight to safeguard it. Government institutions have to take every possible step to protect our hardware and shield constitutional bodies from cyberattacks. But the task of maintaining our software is up to society.

Lawmakers and stakeholders need to publicly speak out about our democracy and the myriad ways it can be influenced. They should open up access to free pools of information as a way to discredit fake news campaigns and supplement the efforts of virus scanners that track and report false information – like the European External Action Service (EEAS), which reports on Russian disinformation twice a week. The German government should also consider how to curb websites that regularly violate constitutional laws. But in a society that nourishes and protects freedom of opinion, this will be difficult.

It would be especially helpful to employ independent, non-governmental organizations to monitor the quality and credibility of media coverage, even producing a blacklist with particularly egregious transgressions. Companies that choose to advertise on platforms that consistently disseminate disinformation or propaganda should face consequences. And lawmakers themselves should refuse interviews with questionable sites so as not to legitimize them.

The challenge will be great for television, radio and other news outlets. Populists have revived the Nazi-era smear “Lügenpresse,” or lying press, to blast what they see as biased mainstream media. But it is precisely these established outlets that play such a central role in educating society on how to parse disinformation and fake news.

German media are fortunately far less polarized than in the US; a 2014 poll from the Pew Research Center revealed that 47 percent of conservative American voters turn to Fox News as their chief source of information. Germany’s public broadcasters and national dailies still reach a broad spectrum. But established media have come up short on two fronts.

First, several outlets readily republish large leaks without taking a critical look at who or what is behind them and without differentiating between what is authentic and what is fabricated. During the Cold War, the Stasi and the KGB often tried to leak compromised material to Western media, but they wouldn’t make such information public. Now, close ties between intelligence services and platforms like WikiLeaks have renewed a debate over the ethics of leaks, and journalists can’t afford to ignore the discussion.

Second, there is a growing trend toward feigned objectivity in various talk shows and even mainstream news. Russian propaganda is reproduced without context or challenge. Germany’s popular political talk shows feature guests who are presented as independent experts but clearly hawk the Kremlin’s line. If their statements are not challenged or even disproved, the viewer is left with a sliver of doubt and the impression that the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Back to the Facts

That is not to say that we should not challenge the West’s policy on Russia. We can and must examine whether the EU’s sanctions, for example, are actually counterproductive. And an open society must tolerate the wrath of its critics (as long as they remain within the bounds of the law). We need to engage the populists in our discourse, not shut them out. But we also cannot tolerate half-truths or false information, nor can we accept foreign propaganda. In the end, there is nothing more critical than our liberal democracy itself. And it cannot survive without a fact-based, open debate.

Read more in the Berlin Policy Journal App – January/February 2017 issue.

The post Politics by Other Means appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© REUTERS/Thomas Peter

Ms. Beck, a computer in your office was hacked in 2014. How did you find out? The German Federal Office for Information Security, or BSI, informed me of suspicious activities they had observed in reference to a computer in my office, and they asked me whether I’d allow them to check the computer in question, which of course I did. I was subsequently informed that the computer had been hacked and malware then known as MiniDuke had been used. I had to find out via Google searches that MiniDuke had been used in the past, against smaller Eastern European countries and US think tanks among other targets. The hacking incident was confirmed to me by Petra Pau, vice president of the German Bundestag from the Left Party, who is in charge of informational security. And that was that. File closed.

MiniDuke was suspected to be of Russian origin even back then. The fact that it targeted a German representative known for her critical views of Vladimir Putin and her support for democrats and opposition figures in countries like Ukraine or Georgia was potentially explosive. Why was the case dealt with so slowly? Several reasons, I presume. First, there’s the legal aspect. No public statement can be issued as long as there is no clear evidence about the origin of the malware. Then there is the fact that Bundestag members and its presidium may have underestimated how determined the intelligence services of an authoritarian state can be when trying to obtain information about German representatives – which would also give them access to foreign activists in contact with those representatives. This is of course highly dangerous in countries where opposition forces face serious repression. And last but not least: There seems to be a far greater outcry over digital spying activities by the United States in the wake of the revelations by Edward Snowden than over hacking attacks from authoritarian states.

With recent reports on Russian interference in the US-election campaign, do you think this has changed now? You know, I have learnt to my surprise that the attack on my office was conducted by the same group that seems to be responsible for the attack on the Clinton campaign – the FSB-controlled hacking group CozyBear, or ATP29. And to my even greater surprise I was not informed about that by the German Bundestag, but by a US news channel.

 How so? NBC contacted me and claimed to have been informed by the BSI press office. I then inquired with Ministry for the Interior, which supervises the BSI, why the office would inform a US news channel but not the parliamentarian who was directly affected. The BSI denied having informed NBC, but told me subsequently that they now had the technical means to learn more about MiniDuke and were now sure that the 2014 attack on my office computer was conducted by CozyBear. At the same time, the BSI stressed that it wasn’t within their remit to identify who was responsible for the hacking; that would be the task of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Germany’s domestic intelligence service. The BfV then confirmed to me that they believe the Russian intelligence service to be responsible. Legally, however, this is considered still insufficient, i.e. the evidence does not allow a clear attribution in a legal sense.

Is the latest US intelligence report on Russian interference in the US presidential elections helpful in this regard – and will it raise general awareness? To be honest, I don’t think so. There’s still insufficient awareness of the political context of those hacks. One reason might be that too many still cannot imagine that the information that could be obtained would be of any interest to the Russian side. Also, most still vastly underestimate the sophisticated network for hacking and manipulating public opinion that Russia has established in Germany. In my political work, I come across so much political engineering. And the massive activity of trolls was underestimated for a long time – or not even recognized as troll activity. For far too long, their activities were thought to be a genuine expression of dissatisfaction with the reporting by German media about the invasion of eastern Ukraine, or a supposedly too critical attitude toward Russia.

Aside from the trolls who flooded the so-called “established media” with comments immediately after the annexation of Crimea, do you see “homegrown activities” as well? Take the so-called “Monday demonstrations”, supposedly in the tradition of the “Monday demonstrations” against the Communist East German government in 1989:  In 2004, they started as left-wing protests against social injustices in the eastern city of Leipzig, but in the wake of the Ukraine conflict in spring 2014 they transformed into aggressive, right-wing, xenophobic, populist demonstrations under the umbrella “Vigils for Peace.” It’s interesting to note that Jürgen Elsässer, for instance, the editor in chief of Compact magazine, which thrives on pro-Russian conspiracy theories, is a former left winger – a good example for this new “Querfront,” amalgamating the extreme fringes of the left and right. These forces aggressively attacked those who spoke out against Russian aggression in Ukraine as “warmongers” – myself included.

Did the fact that you were defamed with the term “warmonger” also play a role in your recent deselection for the 2017 elections after more than 26 years in the Bundestag?  It would be very hard to prove causality. But it’s true that in some parts of our party – and not the most irrelevant ones – the slur “Beck is a warmonger” took hold, and was spread through social media as well. I was told that in leading circles of the Green party, in my hometown and my constituency in Bremen, there was concern that my candidacy would chase away more left wing voters. There was obviously no urge to support a Green member of the Bundestag who works with Russian and Ukrainian dissidents, with democrats and civil rights activists, in order to send a clear signal. The Russian human rights group Memorial, the democratic “Eurooptimists” forces in the Ukrainian parliament, members of the marginalized Belarusian democratic opposition – they all wrote supporting letters, but they had no effect.

The hackers working for Russian intelligence may have targeted information about your contact with political figures critical of the Putin regime in Ukraine, Georgia, Russia itself, or Chechnya – all regions where you are active. Is there any indication that those activists were harmed? I’d be devastated if I personally would have put people in danger in those countries or regions.  So far I can say that this hasn’t happened – yet. I can say, however, that Natalya Estemirova, whom I knew very well and whom I supported in her struggle against Ramsan Kadyrov, was brutally murdered in 2009. I sincerely hope that it was not our communication that had put her in danger. Her murder has never been solved, by the way.

Why do you think Russian interference so far has caused much less of a stir than the revelations about the NSA spying activities? The rational explanation may be that it is more outrageous, of course, to be betrayed by friends, namely the US. But I believe it has much more to do with deep anti-Western sentiments – anti-modern, anti-representative democracy, anti-capitalist, anti-homosexuality, etc. These feelings are to be found both on the right and left fringes of our society. In polls, we see almost equal sympathy, or even support, for Putin’s policy or his persona among voters of the Left Party and the right wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The latter prefers a “strong leadership” to the consensus-seeking work of parliaments, demands protectionism as a tool against globalization, wants to return to old social patterns, to traditional “family values”, to homophobia. In short, they are longing for a less complex, almost pre-modern world.  This ideological mix has been promoted by the Kremlin for a long time, and has found resonance among both left- and right-wings fringes – and it should worry the left greatly that it also finds resonance in their own camp.

Do you think that the German public will show “democratic resilience” against this ideological onslaught? I very much hope that Germany’s middle-class center, its bürgerliche Mitte, will hold. It clearly gets dangerous when the center starts to crack. We therefore need policies that strengthens the center regardless of our political differences. “We”, the center, may fight over the necessity of humanitarian interventions, of employing military means, but we are united in the conviction that we need to deal with the complexities of modernity in a complex way – and that simple “truths” or “solutions” based on fear-mongering are not the right answers.

Marieluise Beck was one of the founders of the Green party, and first entered the Bundestag in 1983. In her work on foreign affairs she has played an important role in supporting opposition figures and democratic forces in Eastern Europe and Russia. With her deselection, the Bundestag will lose one of its most vocal critics of Vladimir Putin.

Read more in the Berlin Policy Journal App – January/February 2017 issue.

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