The information wars, fake news and the end of globalisation

It is a chilling realisation that Trump’s election to power and Brexit are both, in part, reputedly a result of a series of information interventions in the internal democratic political processes of the US and Britain, undertaken and engineered by the Kremlin’s growing team of covert media hackers. James Kirchchek (2017) suggests that the Kremlin wants nothing less than a ‘reversal of the momentous historical processes begun in 1989,’ to destroy the transatlantic alliance, and replace it with a ‘post-Western world order’ (Lavrov’s words).¹ Both Theresa May and Barack Obama have accused the Putin Government of meddling in US, EU and British elections to ‘undermine free societies,’ plant fake stories and ‘sow discord in the West.’² The Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) report ‘Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections’ (2017), coordinated among the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National Security Agency (NSA), are emphatically of one mind:

Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow’s longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order, but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations.

The report makes clear:

Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.

https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf

The Cold War had been dominated by secret information of the State and its propaganda ministries, with well trained personnel and intricate webs of systematic surveillance aimed at maintaining domestic security. At its height during the  Cold War, the totalitarian state encouraged and rewarded citizens for spying on one another. The figure of the ‘informant’ is central to State security and to the police state (Polizeistaat), understood as an administrative concept and theorised in accordance with the history and science of surveillance.

The Soviet Union and its satellites, including East Germany, had extensive intelligence agencies and operated secretly as a repressive arm of the State to limit freedom of speech, eliminate political opposition, abolishing political exchange and impeding public liberties. Fundamentally, the police State represents an abrogation of the rule of law especially through processes of the arbitrary excercise of power, including arrest and detention of political prisoners without due process. In essence, the police State as a repressive state apparatus is a late development that deviates from the model of policing as an administrative concept, which was decisively influenced by Cameralism (the science of public administration) and directed at the rational organisation of a polity, taking on an interventionist role and generally being devoted to the welfare of its population. It also differs from the Peelist model, after John Peel, who established the police system of the London Metropolitan area. Its theoretical function and legitimation is to focus on the interests of citizens rather than the state, to police through the consent of the people, by upholding order and protecting the safety of the people (Frame, 2016). By contrast, a police State obtains where governmental control is absolute such that the law gives police, often secret, powers to arrest, detain and imprison—sometimes to execute—political prisoners without due process. Under this model, the ruler operates as the absolute power in the interests of the general welfare of people and protection of the state without codified or statuary constraints.

Glasnost, literally openness, ‘the state of being open to public knowledge,’ was a traditional concept in Russia reclaimed by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986 to bring about greater governmental transparency, including the public scrutiny and criticism of leaders and policies, and the amelioration of abuses of administrative power. As such it was a movement toward freedom of speech built on the principle of freedom of information even although control of information remained a function of the central State until the break-up of the Soviet system in 1991. Glasnost as political openness also provided a platform for an assertion of independence and autonomy by the Baltic states under Boris Yelsin.

Vladimir Putin served as president of Russia from 2000 to 2008, and after a stint as prime minister was re-elected to the presidency in 2012. Putin federalised Russia into states ruled by governors appointed by himself. He also narrowed the governing structures into a vertical hierarchy and revolutionised information warfare creating new forms of cyber-sabotage (Pomerantsev, 2014). Putin’s information warfare in the Ukraine demonstrates a new form of hybrid information warfare based on ‘reflexive control,’ including a range of old and tested strategies: denial and deception, concealment of the Kremlin’s goals, ‘retaining superficially plausible legality,’ using threats of military power and using threat of nuclear weapons, deployment of resources globally and through social media a recrafting of the narrative of conflict in the Ukraine (Snegovaya, 2017).

The evolution of Russia’s soft power has been augmented by a huge increase in budgets to influence foreign governments; modernisation of Russian media and the State media machine; the growth of psychological know-how, especially to exploit the propensity toward conspiracy in the under educated; and, the systematic exploitation of the openness of Western media, including social media, to launch an aggressive information war against the West. Marcel Van Herpen (2016a) documents the main elements of Russia’s new propaganda offensive against the West, beginning with the launch of Russia Today in 2005 as a global competitor to CNN, BBC World and Deutsche Welle. The initial budget of $70 million in the first year was increased to $380 million in 2011. Its undeniable success was followed by revamping Russian radio –The Voice of Russia—and Russia Beyond The Headlines, a project that was initiated by the official Kremlin newspaper, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, with an eight-page supplement every month in English and French, alongside influential Western newspapers. ‘Kremlin trolls’ also sell the Kremlin’s policies to various Internet communities by ‘writing blogs, attacking opposition websites, and posting comments on Facebook and Twitter’ (p. 35). Some 400 trolls of the ‘Internet Research’ company based in St Petersburg use fake Facebook and Twitter accounts, working 12 h shifts, to spread propaganda. Russia has also hired Western communication firms to plan for podcasts surrounding important international meetings, (Van Herpen, 2016b).

Today a new Cold War media strategy can easily disrupt internal political processes and events within Western democracies to create ‘fake news,’ build social media constituencies, and cast doubt on the truth status and role of the Fourth Estate. Putin has invested heavily in the subterreanean undermining of the information infrastructure of Western democracy, sparking and releasing right-wing, anti-globalisation sentiments that bring together groups that share in a generalised politics of exclusion and activate old and deep ‘we-they’ attitudes, associated with fundamentalist Christian, white supremacists and alt-right organisations. Much of this activity which began long before Trump came to power aims to create discord in the Western alliance, to take sides in elections where there is a favoured candidate, and to encourage any activity that might help displace the liberal internationalist conception of world order based on globalisation and world media freedom. Peter Pomerantsev (2015) in The Journal of Democracy writes:

The underlying goal of the Kremlin’s propaganda is to engender cynicism in the population. Cynicism is useful to the state: When people stop trusting any institutions or having any firmly held values, they can easily accept a conspiratorial vision of the world. The state-television channels actively encourage such a vision—for example, by finding the hidden hand of the CIA behind all the world’s prodemocracy movements. In showing that democracy is so easily manipulated, that everyone and everything is for sale, the Kremlin is dashing people’s hopes for the possibility of an alternative politics while simultaneously insisting that the West is just as corrupt as Russia.

The fact is that whether or not Trump aided by Steve Bannon has learned from Putin’s information tools and strategies, both recognise the need to control the media and to constantly craft their image. Trump has started his own TV channel. He customarily attacks the liberal media. He famously uses Twitter as his preferred ‘soap-box.’ Trump uses the attribution of ‘fake news’ to flatly contradict the liberal media when he disaprees with them (not that they speak with one voice). While he did not invent the term ‘post-truth’ he is by far the greatest political and perhaps, practiced, exemplification of it. ‘Fake news’ maps so perfectly onto national populism, even feeding the deep vein of conspiracy that characterises the alt-right platform.

In this context we should not forget the military and scientific beginnings of the Internet. The US Department of Defence awarded contracts as early as the 1960s for packet switching networks like ARPANET which sent its first message in 1969. The Internet protocols were invented in the 1970s and interconnectivity was provided by the 1980s. Computer surveillance involving the monitoring of data and traffic on the Internet began soon after. Automated Internet surveillance sifts and filters process vast amounts of intercepted Internet traffic highlighting bits of information pertaining to people and topic words. Web 2.0 surveillance is massive self-surveillance (Fuchs, 2011). A new generation of ‘policeware’ that has developed from secretly installed programmes like Carnivore now provide multiuse spyware to police citizens by monitoring online activity.³ Some critics argue that the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act 2016⁴ is the basis of the new surveillance state and the most extreme form of state surveillance in Western democracy.⁵ Information is the new warfare both against civil society and other countries—a new form of the panopticon, after Foucault, or what Deleuze (1992) called ‘the control society.’

There is no doubt that part of Putin’s success as a leader is due to his information war strategy. As Standish (2017) argues:

With elections coming up this year in France, Germany, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, and perhaps Italy, European intelligence services across the Continent have been sounding the alarm about Russian attempts to influencethe outcome though targeted disinformation and propaganda, as they appeared to do in the U.S. presidential election.

Standish (2017) uses Finland as an example of a country that has developed the tools to resist information attacks by Russia. He reports how Jed Willard, director of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Centre for Global Engagement at Harvard, was hired by Finland to develop a public diplomacy programme ‘to understand and identify why false information goes viral and how to counter propaganda.’ Willard suggests that Finland’s education system, reportedly the best in the world, provides a ‘combination of widespread critical thinking skills among the Finnish population and a coherent government response makes a strong defence against concerted outside efforts to skew reality and undermine faith in institutions.’

When it comes down to it critical thinking and critical pedagogy, albeit nearly obliterated by neoliberal education reforms in favour of STEM, still carries an edge as the best defence against the weaponisation of information. There is no doubt that critical theory needs to formally introduced to digital media (Berry, 2014) to formulate a new vision of citizen journalism and participatory democracy based on a commons-based alternative Internet and the collective ownership of the means of social media production.

Michael A. Peters
Zhengzhou University, University of Waikato
[email protected]
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1482-2975

Notes

1. https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-plot-against-the-west-vladimir-putin-donald-trump-europe/

2. There are a huge number of reports. For example, see https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/heres-what-we-know-about-alleged-russian-involvement-in-brexit; https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/04/russia-election-europe-us/524208/

3. For a list of government mass surveillance projects see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_government_mass_surveillance_projects

4. https://services.parliament.uk/bills/2015-16/investigatorypowers.html

5. See Edward Snowden’s remarks https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/19/extreme-surveillance-becomes-uk-law-with-barely-a-whimper