The Future of Cyber Manipulation - Kevin Conne

                                                     The Future of Cyber Manipulation

The Russian Cyber Attack that was successfully able to undermine the United States presidential election of 2016 could turn out to be a critical turning point in how countries interact. What those Russian hackers proved is that there is a new cheap and peaceful way to influence foreign countries’ domestic affairs.  This model that the Russians used, I believe could be put into practice by any nation who was looking to undermine the credibility of an adversary or change the political climate and possibly the legislation of another country. This weaponization of social media by foreign actors can deepen domestic divides and polarize a country. A hope could be of destabilization and possibly creating a revolution or regime change without having to directly involve the meddling country.  

 Terrorism and asymmetrical warfare allowed the United States to be on an equal playing field with countries like Iraq and Afghanistan due to the use of insurgencies and terrorism. A foreign governments’ ability to potentially hack and manipulate the political agenda of another country could be used not only by the Russians to meddle in our elections, but could be used by almost anyone and in many ways could be used for even more sinister purposes. The truly concerning thing is that we do not know the true potential of this sort of misinformation campaign.  We do not know what the Russians could be capable of and if another actor was doing this, how much more disastrous it could be.  Does this type of misinformation by one government possess the power to polarize the population of this country or any country, through the use of a particularly divisive issue, into a sort of Civil War?  Can a foreign entity, through the use of hacking social media and continually planting the seeds of more and more polarization, in essence secretly pull the strings of the conflict?

While it's easy to say that Russia would never do that because Russia does not want to go to war with the United States and that could be a very real threat if we ever discovered another country actively trying to pull us into a civil war. What about a country we are already enemies with or a country that we are currently fighting?  Is it conceivable that Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea or Iran, countries that we have interfered in their civil wars or their domestic conflicts, could they use this new highly effective and relatively inexpensive weapon that is misinformation through social media to sow seeds of instability?  If a state would not consider such radical behavior, maybe a stateless terrorist organization would.  Do we not believe that Al Qaeda and Isis have not taken note of what Russia was able to do?  Don't all these terrorist organizations want to take the fight directly to the United States homeland and our government? Isn't that exactly what Russia was able to do by hacking our election? The hacking of the United States election in 2016 was horrible, but the public of the United States needs to learn to critically evaluate the news that it receives through social media and mainstream media.  The media needs to be very careful of putting news from social media on as mainstream news in order to thwart attacks like this in the future.