“It’s probably going to get worse”: a former top intel official on Russia election meddling

“Election meddling is going to continue. And in the short run, it’s probably going to get worse.”

That’s according to Gregory Treverton, the former chair of the National Intelligence Council who now teaches at the University of Southern California. I reached out to him to get a better understanding of how Russia tampers with elections.

Moscow, it turns out, has been trying to meddle in our elections for decades. And the US is not the only target — the Kremlin has been interfering with elections across Europe as well.

But the difference now is that Russia has greater capabilities and new tools at its disposal, Treverton told me. Russians are using social media to exploit political, racial, gender, and religious divisions that already exist in American society.

It’s also important to note that election interference is a tool other powerful countries use time and again — including the United States. From Chile to Serbia, the US has also aimed to tilt elections in favor of candidates with more pro-American values, Treverton said.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Is it common for Russia to try to influence our elections, like they did in 2016?

In some ways, it is — but new tools have enabled new kinds of interventions. What struck me about this attack was the brazenness of it, and the fact that both cyber and social media tools have given Russia dramatically new opportunities.

When you think of the old days of the Cold War, if you wanted to plant an article in somebody’s newspaper, it was pretty difficult and probably expensive. Now all you’ve got to do is have somebody blog about something, have a bunch of bots pick it up, and hope that it trends.

So what you’re saying is that because of the new tools, it’s a lot easier for a country like Russia to interfere, not just in our elections but in elections around the world?

Absolutely. It does really lower the entry cost. For a country like Russia, all the cheaper methods to influence people like cyber and social media are bound to be attractive.

I think they’ll also be attractive to other countries who want to influence elections in general as well.

Do other countries — including the United States — meddle in elections?

Absolutely. The US has a pretty rich history of meddling ourselves.

I’ve written a lot about covert action and intelligence, and what struck me is by the 1980s, 1990s, and the 2000s, we could move openly in other countries through party foundations, through nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) quite covertly.

If you think about the election of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, that was done through a classic CIA operation with assistance from party foundations, Germany, America, and others.

This drives home that idea that the entire effort of foreign policy is to affect the politics of the other countries, which we want to do. I would hope that over time, we do it more openly — that would be better.

[Russian President] Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, thinks that civil society, like NGOs, are opponents trying to tear down his rule. He has a very different perspective about all this.

Is that because Russian NGOs or organizations abroad act as opponents of their host government?

Well, it’s more that Putin doesn’t like criticism much. I guess he shares that with our president.

Apparently one of the sources of animus is that he thinks Hillary Clinton abetted and encouraged anti-Putin demonstrations in 2011, and still holds that against her. What looks to us like regular civil society behavior looks to him like a threat.

In any case, Putin might say — and maybe even believe — that some things that Russia did during the 2016 US presidential election were not offensive, they were effectively defensive. But it certainly looks unacceptably offensive to us.

Is there a standard playbook for countries to interfere in elections abroad? Or do different countries now have different styles?

Different countries have different styles. But classically, the main ingredient in trying to influence elections is, simply, votes. You give people money and make them buy more posters, more advertising, and do all the things they would do anyway — but more of it.

I have not seen evidence that the Russians were especially active in providing money, at least not in our elections. Maybe in European elections. Their Facebook ad purchases were significant but, if you look at the total number, were pretty small by comparison to Facebook.

Even when you trace how many Twitter accounts that were linked to the Russians, the answer is probably like 50,000. That seems like a big number, but that’s less, way less than 1 percent of total Twitter accounts. It’s probably good to keep this in perspective.

For me, it’s mostly the principle that matters. It just seems like an unacceptably brazen attempt to interfere in our election.

What does discrediting our election process do? Did the US try to discredit elections in other countries too?

I think that we have, on the whole, tried to bolster and support the democratic process because we believe in it.

In Russia’s case, they support people who say things like Trump had said. The elections are rigged. They’re fake. They’re not really democratic. They’re not really legitimate. That allows Russia to say, “You criticize us for elections, but yours are no better.”

That seems to me to be the underlying law of Russian propaganda.

Walk me through what, in your mind, is the quintessential example of when the United States interfered abroad in a country.

One of the best examples is Chile. We were mostly trying to court the non-communists, which meant actually backing socialists because they would remain competitors to the communists.

We tried to prevent the election of Salvador Allende, who was a leftist but not a communist and certainly not a pro-Soviet. But, you know, this is in the context of the Cold War, so there was a pretty intense concern.

We tried mostly to adhere to supporting opposition candidates — not discrediting Allende and actions that crossed the line. Again, it’s hard — if you’re supporting one political candidate, you’re almost necessarily opposing the other. So this distinction of “dispassionate policymaking” didn’t really hold up much in Chile.

Basically, we helped provide what the opposition needed.

So we purposely backed people who were friendly to us, similar to how Russia backed a candidate that seemed friendlier to Moscow?

I think so. It was clear the Russians wanted to try and discredit our election process and wanted to try and disparage Hillary Clinton. My guess is they expected, like everybody else, she was soon to be President Clinton.

They probably felt they got lucky when Trump was elected.

Are we interfering in other countries’ elections right now?

Well, I suppose we are in many ways.

We do this by promoting civil society, and maybe most regard that as a good thing — but authoritarian regimes like Putin’s feel targeted by it.

My guess is the private sector is probably doing a lot more than government is to increase the possibilities for pluralism and openness in countries that are either authoritarian or are now illiberal democracies like Mr. Putin’s.

So, while Russia was trying to take advantage of divisions in American society, we’re in effect doing the same thing — but the way we sow divisions is by fostering a stronger democratic system?

That’s the hope, I think. It’s a pretty anarchic world out there, and it’s worth trying to support what we can: more openness, more transparency.

But the most important lesson we need to draw from what the Russians have done is to not emulate it.

Over and over again, when I have these conversations, people say that the great strength of the United States is a free press. The last thing we want to do is anything that hurts that, or appears to hurt it. If the Russians are out there promoting “fake news,” I think that it certainly would be wrong for us to “out-fake-news” them.

Going forward, how do we know that our elections are free from Russian or other countries’ meddling? How can we restore confidence that when people go to vote, or are engaging in a debate online, that they’re not being manipulated by a foreign power?

You would have thought that the administration would be doing a lot more in terms of deterrence for the 2018 election, right? Part of the issue is that the president doesn’t entirely believe there’s a problem. That makes the administration slow to do the things they should be doing.

They should be working much more with the Department of Homeland Security and the states to make sure that the infrastructure — voting machines and the like — [is] difficult to get into.

It seems to me that we need to be much more direct, like Angela Merkel was in Germany. We should keep saying to Putin, “Don’t do this here. Don’t try and interfere in the election. We’re going to be on alert for it.”

I also think the US government should reach out more directly to companies like Google and Facebook. They seem to be in an unenviable and unacceptable position. On the one hand, they say they’re just platforms with no responsibility for anything. They understand that’s not tenable.

But the other argument — that they’re publishers who should take full responsibility for what’s on their site — they probably can’t and won’t do that either.

They’re in a kind of awkward middle position.

Is election interference here to stay? Is it going to get even more sophisticated? And maybe even further down the line, will technology advance to the point that it will be almost impossible to safeguard elections?

I think election meddling is going to continue. And in the short run, it’s probably going to get worse. Here’s the next possible frontier: people producing pictures that never existed but are hard to disprove. I think that these new kinds of interference methods, which the Russians started to use when they tampered with the 2016 election, will continue to evolve.