DEF003 - Molly McKew Interview Transcription

INFORMATION WARFARE

Interview date: Wednesday 11th Sep 2019
Interview location: Taiwan

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Molly McKew, an expert in information warfare. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email us. You can listen to the original recording here.

In this interview, we discuss propaganda in the digital age.

Interview transcription

Peter McCormack - 01:39
Good morning, Molly. How are you?

Molly McKew - 01:41
Doing well, thanks.

Peter McCormack - 01:42
Thank you for coming on the show.

Molly McKew - 01:43
Happy to do it.

Peter McCormack - 01:44
Right, so information warfare, this is your area of expertise.

Molly McKew - 01:48
In theory.

Peter McCormack - 01:48
I've been doing a lot of research, I've got so many questions for you. The first starting point for me, it doesn't feel like this is actually anything new, it just feels like there are more advanced tools available.

Molly McKew - 01:58
Absolutely. I think that's the piece that is sort of the fight and the debate, and also important to understand from the discussions the last few years is the psychological tactics behind all of this are the same. The informational tactics are the same, propaganda tactics, the same, but you put them all in this blender with the power of data driven targeting on social media, and the new ways that you can sort of launder information and hide the origins and hide where it's coming from. Some combination of all of those things is just incredibly effective.

Peter McCormack - 02:32
Right. There's going to be a whole bunch of areas I'm going to want to explore with you, but one of the interesting things I was thinking about when I was preparing for this is that is it a fight against information warfare or is it about educating people about information warfare? I couldn't figure out in my mind which is it, because it feels like something you can't actually beat.

Molly McKew - 02:53
I think that's right. There's sort of a couple different things in that basket, and I think in terms of defeating it, this idea that there's a counter camp, no. Once information is in front of you, there's incredibly good studies done of whether it's selling you a Cheerio or a sophisticated political argument. The thing you see first you're more likely to believe. It's really hard to undo that. So I think there is this sort of fundamental truth underlying all of what we're looking at in the information warfare categories where, sure, you can do your fact check newsletters and your debunk the myth things and send it, but it doesn't really matter because nobody really reads it or absorbs the content of any of that. Once you see something, it is a piece of the truth of your brain.

Molly McKew - 03:35
I think that there's that whole thing that you need to accept, and then it's, what do you actually do about that and what does it mean? I think the core of that is just resilience to these tactics is actually knowing what you stand for and what you believe. There's just been an erosion of fundamental values and beliefs that I think used to be incredibly powerful at pushing back against this, particularly in the West. You see good examples of this in places where there is a more certain sense of history and identity like the Baltic States, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, where there's more awareness of information warfare but also more awareness of who they are and what is bullshit information when it's in front of you.

Molly McKew - 04:17
I just think there's places where we're much less good at this, and I think the United States is a really good example of it because it's a really open, naïve, optimistic country, which is actually sort of a good thing a lot of the time, but it's terrible when it comes to providing any sort of resilience or internal defence to propaganda and people trying to influence you with coercive narrative.

Peter McCormack - 04:38
One of the interesting things there is obviously, in doing my research, a lot of the information I found was related to what was happening with Russia during the elections. Obviously you're a specialist in that area, but also sometimes I really enjoy the synchronicity that life gives you in that a week ago I discovered the TV show The Loudest Voice with Russell Crowe playing Roger Ailes, and actually it was happening internally in the US as well. Many of the tactics that have been employed by Putin also were employed by Fox News to, I guess, mislead people and create the division. Do you see a difference between the two?

Molly McKew - 05:13
I think there is a longer term case study/analysis of the effect that Murdoch has had on the Anglo's fear writ large, which I'm not going to go into right now. No, there is this, again, there's this commonality of psychological tools that are part of politics, that are part of governing, that are a part of marketing that work really effectively, but the core of what was in Ailes's vision of how to realign conservative thinking in the country is this sort of fear mongering, identity based phobias of everything. This idea that, if you can convince people of what people are trying to take away from you and talk about it all the time, that it makes them a more compliant, controllable population.

Molly McKew - 05:59
It's worked really effectively. I think you can start ... there's sort of a longer term analysis of the US conservative media environment that is really worth doing and having. It kind of started with the wacko bird radio, talk show, Rush Limbaugh types that then bled into TV news. That became the next fix, was news got a little crazier on TV, and when that wasn't enough anymore, you have this new ecosystem of farther right news emerging. Things like One America News Network and Info Wars and Breitbart. When the news no longer feels as extreme as it did, people look for a new outlet, but the through line of all that is the use of conspiracy to capture minds and influence people. It's been an incredibly effective way of, I think, perverting and corrupting the baseline conservative narrative in the United States until you have this chaotic mass that is Trumpism, which has no values and no morals and no real core. It's just a bunch of people who are forced to say yes.

Peter McCormack - 07:03
Wow. There's going to be a whole bunch-

Molly McKew - 07:05
Sorry.

Peter McCormack - 07:05
No, no, no, that's great. I think in fairness, what I should ask at that point is therefore, and you can tell me it's none of my business, but historically have you voted Democrat?

Molly McKew - 07:16
No. I came out of ... I mean my origins in Washington were at a conservative think tank.

Peter McCormack - 07:21
Wow, okay, interesting.

Molly McKew - 07:23
I supported the Iraq war. I know, I know, but I very much came out of the post Cold War, freedom in the world, rah rah rah mindset that used to be a conservative thing and now is not anymore. On politics, I'm personally very progressive, a lot of stuff Obama did was great. I vote both sides, but I don't know how anybody right now could sit in the United States and say that they're a Republican.

Peter McCormack - 07:49
I think one of the things that I've noticed with this is there are certain people who will vote for anyone as long as they're Republican. They're not going to switch sides and they're not going to abstain.

Molly McKew - 07:57
In both parties.

Peter McCormack - 07:58
Yeah, yeah, both sides. Really, the fight is always about the middle ground, the people you can sway.

Molly McKew - 08:03
But it isn't, and that's the thing that's so interesting about the Trump movement, about the Brexit vote, about the disruptive parties in Europe that are very effectively commandeering governing structures, is that you don't need half. You don't need majority plus one, whatever that is in your country. You need a radicalised 15%, and if you can get that, you can really effectively disrupt the formation of parliamentary coalitions if a parliamentary country, or control the narrative within a core in a non parliamentary system. I think that's what's so crippling fascinating about the Trump movement, is it really has shown that. If you have a radicalised base, it's much more effective than winning moderates.

Peter McCormack - 08:44
We're already heading down the rabbit hole with this. I think it's useful because people are going to listen to this who don't know you. Before we start going into the detail, can you just give me your background and how, what's brought you to this point now where this is what you do? With regards to information warfare, where do you see your role in this? What is it you are ... what are your goals?

Molly McKew - 09:07
In terms of goals, very much helping to expose what's been happening, help people understand what these tools are and how they work so that people can become more critical of understanding how people are trying to manipulate them with information. That can be governments, it can be adversarial actors however you want to define that, it can be marketing campaigns. It can be political parties you don't agree with. It can be dark shadowy forces doing all sorts of weird shit, but I think for now, that has to be the critical goal, is understanding that combining capabilities with older tactics and it just applies behind a whole range of objectives that are not helping anyone.

Molly McKew - 09:44
I came out of school with a couple of Russia degrees, so useful. I finished my master's degree about a week before 9/11 and came to DC about a week after 9/11, because what else are you going to do with your Russia degrees? Then I ended up working at a conservative think tank, not because I was actually a conservative having gone to Stanford, not so much anyone is a conservative in California, but because they were there and they hired me. Since that was right after 9/11, I very quickly got shifted into working on Middle East, on the wars, and ended up doing kind of Arab democracy and Iraq stuff for about five years.

Molly McKew - 10:22
After that, I left, went to work for a small consulting firm mostly in West Africa. This was the, "I just want to get the Hell out of DC and do interesting things," time period of my life, and then got recruited to go to a bigger firm. That got me back into the post Soviet world because my first big project there was Georgia. I started working in Georgia just after the Russian invasion in 2008. I was there, left the company I was at at some point, opened my own firm during that time period. I worked with the Georgians until sort of the end of the Saakashvili administration.

Molly McKew - 10:54
During the time period that was the time period from the war to the interlude to the political war against Georgia where the Gazprom oligarch took over the country. Then was sort of in the region working with people who were fighting against the Kremlin through this whole period where the Kremlin was testing and adapting its new political warfare tools, including learning social media, learning how it worked, which they very much learned from watching the Obama campaign in 2008, which was really interesting.

Molly McKew - 11:24
Through that whole period, through Crimea, through some of the actions in the time period, and I don't think anybody was really an expert in any of this stuff in 2010 when all of it started, but if you're there watching what the Kremlin does, you have to learn real fast. Now I try to explain Russian influence to people in a way that makes any sense.

Peter McCormack - 11:43
What would you say the key difference is between, say, what Russia is doing with regards to information and, say, what the US is doing? Because obviously the US does have a history of also meddling in elections and propaganda. What is the key difference here? Personally, what happening in Russian seems to be a little more sinister.

Molly McKew - 12:02
Yeah. Well, there's this, "How do you define sinister?" I think for me, the key difference in the, everybody tries to equate, "Well everybody meddles in elections," narratives is what were the goals? Even if you go to those, I did a radio show with one of these guys once, the academics that do these, "Well in fact, Russia has meddled in X number of elections, the United States has meddled in X minus three numbers of elections, so it's all the same." But when you ask them about goals, why were they doing those things, for the most part what they will say is the United States was intervening in places where they believed there was an interest, promoting a democratic thing ... but something more along those lines. Not always. Obviously we have a not great history in Latin America certainly, but there is sort of a more ideological approach to who we were supporting and why we were doing what we were doing.

Molly McKew - 12:46
I think on the Russian side, the goals are one aspect. It is much more transactional, but there's the, "But how are they doing it and why?" For the US side, it's supporting political parties and their own operations sometimes. It's trying to change systems so that there's more competition. It's helping with information support, whatever, whatever, whatever. If you look at, for example, what Russia was doing in the United States in 2016, which had different versions of that in the past, it's creating fake outlets to launder information to people so they don't know where it's coming from. It's creating fake narrative to attack environments, to attack opponents, to create false perceptions.

Molly McKew - 13:26
It is this much darker, more sinister basket of things that are not just standard political tactics. It's not just throw some crap at your opponent the day before the election and hope for the best, but it has a much longer through line of psychology and tactics behind it that is meant to have a more devastating impact on an environment.

Peter McCormack - 13:46
Right. We'll get into the 2016 election. One of the things, though, that I noted is that, I've just been out to Vietnam, did a tour of the war tunnels and also got the chance to be shown a lot of the propaganda at the time that the US were dropping over various parts of Vietnam just to try and spread information. Obviously there is a long history of propaganda in war. In my mind, I was thinking what felt like the key difference here is that rather than this being a tool of war, this almost is feeling like a proxy war itself, and that information is like, you could fight a whole war over information. Is that a fair observation?

Molly McKew - 14:25
Absolutely. I think it's sort of hard to separate out information warfare as its own thing because, in any conflict, there is an informational conflict that is happening. A battle for narrative, a battle for minds, however you want to define it, there is always an information war. It certainly evolves and adapts in different environments. The pamphlets and leafleting of the old days are no longer necessarily the case, although we still do use that in a lot of places. But yes, there is always an information war, and I think it's always ... certainly I think, if you look at Russian doctrine and Soviet doctrine, there's much more of a focus on this because there is this understanding that, as they define it, the spiritual resources of a population matter a lot. If you can't win minds and motivate people, or if you can demotivate a population, you will win. I think there's always more focus on that in their war doctrine then there is in ours.

Peter McCormack - 15:18
You probably took a keen interest in the recent documentary about Cambridge Analytica?

Molly McKew - 15:23
Yeah. I know a lot of the background that went into that, but yes.

Peter McCormack - 15:27
Okay. So one of the most interesting parts of that whole story to me wasn't Brexit, it wasn't the Trump campaign, it was what actually happened in Trinidad where they actually demotivated a large part of the population to vote because that was the only way that they, is it the Indian?

Molly McKew - 15:44
I think so, yeah.

Peter McCormack - 15:45
The only way, because they didn't have enough people to win the election, so they demotivated the population. They had a campaign to not vote, a campaign of apathy. That for me was more concerning than anything else I'd seen on there.

Molly McKew - 15:57
Absolutely.

Peter McCormack - 15:57
This to me seems like the commercialisation of information warfare.

Molly McKew - 16:01
Oh, absolutely, and I think if you look at what SCL Cambridge Analytica was doing, there's a dozen Israeli companies that offer the same types of services. There's some in the US now, there's some in Canada. They all work together, they all contribute to these things. Sort of buried in the marketing materials somewhere will be some form of behavioural engineering, is what they're offing. I think that's what we need to be so focused on about information warfare is it is not just putting information into a space, but it is about changing behaviour. It is about changing how you make decisions for yourself, changing what you do, how you do it.

Molly McKew - 16:36
The easier part of behavioural engineering is in fact sort of a suppressive effect, getting you not to do something. That's so boring, I don't feel like going to vote, there's no one to vote for, they all suck, all the oligarchs are the same. Whatever version of that narrative in that country, it is way easier to get people to just be cynical and not care than it is to get people really angry or rilled up about something. It's really effective when it comes to places where voter turnout is critical. In the US, for example in 2016, there's been a lot of very quiet analysis done on the information that was targeting African American populations, women, others, but sort of the Bernie supporters, but getting people not to vote for Democrats basically.

Molly McKew - 17:17
There isn't really great analysis of overall impact of that, but it's significant.

Peter McCormack - 17:21
Isn't all communication behavioural engineering in some way though?

Molly McKew - 17:25
In some aspect, yes.

Peter McCormack - 17:26
So how do we identify what is ethical and what's not ethical, and are there any ... is there anything here that's actually crossing a legal line?

Molly McKew - 17:36
So there's not great legal frameworks on most of this, which is part of the challenge. In some places there is in terms of electioneering, things that are actually meant for party for an election that communications have to be labeled, you have to be open about what you're doing, about what the origin is. But in US politics, with dark money and packs, and whatever information can come from anywhere, I think the UK has become fairly similar in terms of the information coming from everywhere. I think, in any environment, there's always a way to inject information into a political discussion that isn't, this party wants you to think X.

Molly McKew - 18:11
I think the key difference, in terms of what is ethical is, do people know where the information is coming from. So are they able to evaluate the information being put in front of them with some sort of purpose behind it? Do you understand why X is telling you Y? I think the purpose point is actually far more critical most of the time than truth. If something is true or not matters less than why it is in front of you at a given time. I think that's kind of the piece that's lacking when you have these weird fake persona communications from social media or fake media outlets, or dark money information campaigns that are all over the place, is you don't really understand who's behind them, what they really want to achieve, and why they're trying to make you believe what you want to believe.

Molly McKew - 18:55
If it's a candidate who tells you, I'm supporting fracking everywhere because we just need to beat this energy campaign, fine, at least you understand the motivation of that information. But if it's a pro petroleum fracking campaign that's trying to argue something sort of big and ideological, but really it's just about financial gain, that's a very different thing. So I just think there has to be an openness of sourcing, but I also think the tactics of communication have to be straightforward. If it's a coercive or potentially deliberately manipulative campaign of information that is either trying to get people to believe things that are not true, that are against their own best interests, then that's sort of a totally different category of non-ethical communications. I really worry that we're getting into this landscape where it's just accepted, whoever does this the best will win things, and everybody has their own version of Cambridge Analytica or is trying to make one, and that's kind of where we are.

Peter McCormack - 19:53
Yeah. See, that's where I'm struggling with this, Molly. I'm thinking it does come down to who is best at this.

Molly McKew - 19:59
Because you mentioned Trinidad, but the range of examples that have been not at all documented, but Facebook sits there in their little security room and watches these campaigns happen in real time and, in many cases, has people embedded in those campaigns. It's the way that these same tactics that we debate whether they worked or not in Brexit and in the United States, or whatever, are being used to win African elections in a devastating carpet bomb way because nobody gives a crap and nobody is watching it or documenting it, and nobody is arguing, hey that's not very ethical, bad government X, that you're doing this to your own population.

Molly McKew - 20:36
But it is Russian, Chinese is really mercenary companies, whatever, but there are some private sectors, some state back resources being put into this using social media to completely corrupt populations, and it is devastating African democracy, and nobody gives a crap at all.

Peter McCormack - 20:53
What is the goal here? For example, you know a lot about what's happened with the Russia interference in the 2016 election. What is the goal here? Was it they had a preference for Trump to be in power? Is it more to create kind of chaos?

Molly McKew - 21:08
I think most of the time, and it's a really hard thing for westerners in general to accept because we don't make decisions the same way, but the goal first and foremost is the chaos. It is, can you blow something up and create enough internal, everybody's running around waving their arms. Look at the UK now, look at the US now. Governance is paralysed because everything is just the circus all the time. Does that really yield something that the Kremlin is rubbing their hands together over? In the chaos aspect, yes. It takes adversaries for them off the table. We are not communicating internationally. We are not contributing to the landscape of international affairs the way that we once did. But the chaos is the point, and sometimes it's really hard to accept that that is in fact an actual strategic goal is just burning things down, if that's as much as you can get to.

Molly McKew - 21:53
If you can engineer it so you get a favourable outcome or a guy who's in ... fine. But the goal is often just to screw up your opponents.

Peter McCormack - 22:01
This is state level trolling.

Molly McKew - 22:03
Basically, yeah. State level trolling.

Peter McCormack - 22:05
Because the trolls just want to burn everything to the ground.

Molly McKew - 22:07
Yes. But there's a lot of this now. Some anarchist vision of everything is now a very popular way of viewing the world because everything sucks and no one's in control and there's no leadership. The cynicism has become a key part of the system.

Peter McCormack - 22:22
Well that's when I started looking at Russia against the US, and then I was like, well then it happens between Republicans and the Democrats. And then, in the primaries, it can happen inter party.

Molly McKew - 22:33
Yeah, absolutely.

Peter McCormack - 22:35
And I'm sure within the office of individual representatives it can happen. So it's almost every level this is happening. My own personal conclusion, and it's not that I've been led to apathy in the same way, but I think the only way to play is to not play, it's to not become part of this.

Molly McKew - 22:54
Yep.

Peter McCormack - 22:54
Because something has to change.

Molly McKew - 22:55
Absolutely.

Peter McCormack - 22:58
One of the things I was thinking about is that the real struggle here I struggle with is the grey area. So referring back to Roger Ailes and what happened during the Obama campaign, where Fox News specifically referred to Obama as-

Molly McKew - 23:12
Barrack Hussein Obama.

Peter McCormack - 23:13
Barrack Hussein Obama, and they constantly ... I didn't know until I watched this TV series that this was actually part of it. I don't know if I'm being naïve to actually what happened, or if that exactly did happen. But if it did, that is a manipulation, but there's no lie there.

Molly McKew - 23:30
Nope, but it is manipulative, absolutely.

Peter McCormack - 23:32
But should that be illegal, and does that become censorship? You get into all these weird kind of areas, so I don't know how things get better.

Molly McKew - 23:42
On the news side, in general, there's this editorial issue. I think the further TV news, especially 24 hour TV news has gotten from the reporting of things to the editorialising of things, the worse this gets. Just the amount of time that is filled with people talking about their opinions of things as opposed to people actually reporting on things absolutely changes what we see and how we focus on it. So news itself is absolutely broken and I think there's been a lot of discussion on this in terms of the commercial models behind newspapers and why they're all failing, but there's not enough discussion of it in terms of TV news all being owned by giant corporate monoliths of some variety that are selling air conditioners or airplanes, or something at the top. But just the cycle of news and the lack of responsibility that now goes into it because it's just a profit based model.

Molly McKew - 24:35
I don't know that there's anything you can really do about it, but you can choose an individual consumer of information to watch PBS news hour and not CNN, MBC, or Fox, but the purpose of all of it is to create the short cycle of constant, well I need to see what the update is, I need to see the thing, I need to stay engaged. So not so different than what social media is doing to your head.

Peter McCormack - 24:58
But news has become entertainment.

Molly McKew - 25:00
It's just the circus, absolutely.

Peter McCormack - 25:02
Yeah, and people have drawn into personalities.

Molly McKew - 25:06
Yeah, and they choose who they like, who they really believe, who they want to watch. They get really offended if you insult Tucker Carlson or whatever. Yeah, it's the circus of media consumption, but at least the one thing you can give Fox sort of credit for is realising early on that what they were doing was not in fact news, so Tucker Carlson, Ingraham, all those people are part of Fox Entertainment. They are not in fact part of the Fox News division. Where others are less honest about this perhaps, but it's not that the American public really understand that. For them, it's all the news.

Peter McCormack - 25:40
See, this is where I'm getting to. I don't know where you go with this. So say, during the next election, you have become aware that the Russians are meddling in the campaign again. Do you educate the Democrat party about offensive or defensive tactics? Do you educate people about what they should be aware of with regards of news they're consuming? Do you educate Facebook, how they're being manipulated? Where do you even start with all those?

Molly McKew - 26:07
I think a key ... a huge first step for the next cycle, which is probably the best you could hope for, is improving the way that what is clearly a target information campaign of some variety is reported upon. Past examples of this would include how Wiki leaks has been reported on. When there's a huge giant scandal story, a giant document dump, usually the point of the document dump is not actually anything in the documents, which will be risotto recipes or something, but the big giant jazz hands story of the dump means something, and I think news has yet to figure out how to report on something without doing exactly what the thing was supposed to achieve. Sometimes there's this skepticism of the story that's really important.

Molly McKew - 26:57
I just ... the way that I've had this ... I think the best way I can kind of explain this is the philosophical debate I constantly have with reporter friends in DC. There are a number of ... I don't know how you want to define them, Russian agents, Russian assets, Russian things due to I've been around DC a long time who have a lot of relationships, who have relationships because they launder information. They deal in information. So if you have no idea why this guy who was a Russian military officer in the 90s is now living in DC as a lobbyist who will hand you a file of information about al-Qaeda related stuff, but he does. But these people build relationships by passing useful information to journalists who are working in these areas. If often has nothing to do with Russia. Who really knows.

Molly McKew - 27:43
But if you know a Russian intelligence asset is giving you a story, even if you can verify it, even if you know it's true-

Peter McCormack - 27:49
Why?

Molly McKew - 27:50
Right. Do you report the story just because it's a story, or do you report that this is a story coming to you from someone because they wanted it to be a story? Is there another aspect to that that you really need to tell? Some reporters are better about dealing with this than others. Some are just pass through shields of bad information. There's a reporter at the New York Times who has a terrible source of information from Ukraine, and just keeps taking the information and writing about it, and writing about it, and writing about it. You can argue with him all you want that you're just laundering for the Kremlin, but if it's a story, he's going to write it.

Molly McKew - 28:24
That, I think times 1,000, is the problem we have with news right now, which is bad actors know how to inject the story, the big glitzy, it's going to cooped the news for two days story, into the television news cycle or into social media in a way that it then becomes the television news cycle. We have not really developed good mechanisms for not blowing up the story people want to blow up when it's a purposefully manipulative story.

Peter McCormack - 28:55
Okay. Wow, okay a lot talking about there.

Molly McKew - 28:57
Sorry.

Peter McCormack - 28:58
No, no, it's fine. Also, one of the, again, interesting things, there's so much when you start going down this rabbit hole. I started looking into how the Russians respond to anything negative, whether it was the shooting down of the Malaysian jet or the Ukraine where there's the annexation of Crimea whether it was the poisoning of people in the UK in Salisbury. There's so many things, so many bad things, but there's always a reason or excuse for something else. There's always a diversion tactic. Almost everything is raised as a potential full flag.

Molly McKew - 29:32
Yeah.

Peter McCormack - 29:34
I just don't know, Molly. I start to think what a fucking stupid crazy world we're in. This is crazy what's going on here, and it seems to me the Russians are getting away with anything.

Molly McKew - 29:44
They've been very good ... and again, I think a key thing with all of the Russian stuff is they exploit weaknesses in our own systems really effectively. They don't invent any of this. They don't invent our cynicism, but they really know how to get right into the spaces and just rip them apart. A key one is this one, especially in the post Iraq war environment, or in the post 9/11 environment, but this belief that your own government is a worse thing than adversaries are, which is propagated through Hollywood, through TV, through just about every British TV show. But it'll be like a double super secret layers of conspiracy is one government agency conspiracy against another government agency conspiracy. But the answer is always that your own government is terrible. All of this sort of feeds into the same environment of self doubt and cynicism and disaster that we find ourselves in.

Molly McKew - 30:36
But I think the Russians have gotten really good at ... The books are written out. You can find the tactic books of propaganda and disinformation that they have written, the Soviet ones that have been slightly updated now for the digital age, but deny, deny, deny, deny, deny, deny, because we the stupid west will report the denials as part of our reporting initially, and then it's just create parallel narrative. The Russians couldn't have poisoned Skripal because they didn't really care about him. It was actually Porton Down, the chemical plant near some chemical warfare site near where this guy ... It was actually some UK thing.

Peter McCormack - 31:16
It was to divert attention away from Brexit.

Molly McKew - 31:18
Right, exactly. It's just a made up story. It was really the Americans. It was some random dude from Vietnam. Whatever. They will just create parallel narrative, and the people who want to believe those things will propagate them all online. To some people, it makes more sense than whatever the obvious truth clearly is.

Peter McCormack - 31:35
But there's no downside for the Russians because-

Molly McKew - 31:37
No, there's no cost to them to do this.

Peter McCormack - 31:39
No, and every time you see it you're like, I don't believe this shit. I know I'm being lied to. There's no down-side. It's almost like whenever I look at the responsibility of the UN. I just think it's almost like a handcuffed organisation, which can't ever achieve anything.

Molly McKew - 31:55
Yeah. No, the entire structure of the UN, I think, prevents it from achieving very much. Yes.

Peter McCormack - 32:01
How big a role has social media played in this, and how much do you worry about them? Have any lessons been learned from what happened with Cambridge Analytica? Have you seen any improvements?

Molly McKew - 32:11
So on the first piece, how much does it matter, I think the key difference that social media gives anybody trying to influence anyone is that ability to connect directly to your target immediately. It's an individual level. If you're looking at it as a warfare tactic, it's a nation versus an individual now. Not a society, not a nation. That is so incredibly difficult to fix, to combat, to defend against, but the data targeting that makes this so much more effective, even just the rapid propagation of information where you never had before, if you listen to the sort of 1980s Soviet propaganda, defector videos, and they'll talk about sort of the tactics and the playbooks and what they did.

Molly McKew - 32:57
If you're talking about a huge campaign that was meant to move the needle on the political beliefs of the society or something, but they would view it as a generational thing. You would start here, fund some news outlets, cultivate journalists, cultivate believers, find allies sort of in that area, and slowly overtime you would write stuff, get ideas in the space, blah, blah. 15 years later, maybe you have a population that believes in that stuff. You can do that now in six months. That short circuit on that cycle of moving beliefs is incredibly effective.

Peter McCormack - 33:29
Do you feel there's any need for a change in regulations with regards to social media platforms?

Molly McKew - 33:35
Yes, but I'm not exactly sure how. I think right now, we're locked in this fabulously bullshit cycle of the social media execs go, oh my gosh, we didn't know. Just tell us what you need and we'll fix it. Law makers who are not tech people at all cannot possibly tell them what they need. So they sit there and there's this dumb cycle of everybody pretending they don't know ... but I'm really tired of the tech execs who know exactly how effective this is because this is what they have been selling to people for the last five years. At the very least pretending they don't really know how effective this is. Where's your internal research, Facebook, showing exactly how you know how this targeting works? You've done it. You've paid a lot of people to do it. Don't sit there and say, oh we didn't know the Russians were going to do this.

Molly McKew - 34:23
So I think this, oh my gosh it's our first day, just needs to stop. They need to stop. This fine that Facebook got from the FTC and the United States recently, it should have been 50 billion. It should have been every free dollar of cash they had, otherwise it means nothing to them. That's where we are, is they're making money off of selling these tools. They know exactly what they're selling. They're going to keep selling them. They'll maybe make some little changes like no rubles donations to the US or whatever. They'll make some little changes around the edges, and then only put out enough data to incredibly controlled analytical interests who are reporting on sort of their now ... we're funding researchers to report on what they're doing, but they give them cleaned data and controlled stuff, and nobody really has it except Facebook.

Molly McKew - 35:12
So it's just they control, because they have so much money, the entire cycle of criticism against them, and of course political donations to everyone. I just think no one's really actually ... no one really cares about this, and so many politicians now fundamentally believe, or they themselves do not believe their campaign managers and their parties believe, we just need to do this the best because this is now how you win. This is now how you win. I just think there is no one really focused on actually fixing this problem.

Peter McCormack - 35:43
Yeah. I do also worry maybe with the social media platforms what too often they're relying now on AI or algorithms. I listed to the Jack Dorsey's view where he's talking about censorship. They can't police every single comment.

Molly McKew - 35:59
Absolutely.

Peter McCormack - 35:59
So they're having to rely on algorithms. Do you think that's the same with Facebook and that's why somebody got through, or do you think they were absolutely complicit and knew exactly what was happening?

Molly McKew - 36:09
Well, I think the Facebook cases tend to be different in that they give you a little Facebook person to sit with you and make your campaigns more effective. So they really have absolutely no plausible deniability on any of this because, whether you're talking about the Trump campaign or Russian companies, or weird campaigns in Kenya, most of the time there's a Facebook employee sitting there advising these campaigns.

Peter McCormack - 36:33
Is this some 25 year old who's helping them set up campaigns and create campaigns who really doesn't have the experience or the skills necessary to understand this is manipulation of the people? Has it fallen between the cracks?

Molly McKew - 36:46
Sure, but then that's their excuse. If you look at the great hack, at the Cambridge Analytica stuff, and all of these fabulous personalities that have come out of it where Christopher Wylie, Brittany Kaiser, whatever, where these people made the money and now get to stand outside and go, oh my gosh, what we did was so bad, but we're going to set up another company and do it again.

Peter McCormack - 37:06
So Brittany's becoming an activist for privacy.

Molly McKew - 37:09
Sure, but-

Peter McCormack - 37:11
How do you feel about that?

Molly McKew - 37:15
I'm always up for a good redemption story. I think, in general, there needs to be accountability for what people have done. I think, in general, especially if you've spend any time in Silicon Valley, the mindset there is not should you, it's can you. That will always drive innovation everywhere in science and everywhere else, but I think this entire Silicon Valley, once it becomes information, once it becomes data driven everything, is so unethical. There has never been a first meeting of all the geneticists who got together and kind of made a loose code of conduct because they knew it was going to freak everybody out, and you needed to have some perimeters that you're operating inside or your entire science was going to be thought of as weird kooky shit.

Molly McKew - 38:03
That's never happened with Silicon Valley. There is no ethical code, there are no morals that they operate by. And on data, data harvesting, data targeting, data profiling, surveillance state, everything on up to China social credit system, there has been very little accountability for the dystopian level of reality that they are building, mostly because they know no one understands it or what it really means, and by the time we get there it's kind of too late to undo it. They get around a lot of this by then trying to become useful to police and governments, and they're very effective at doing that.

Molly McKew - 38:41
In the US right now, there's been not a lot of attention to the fact that, in the mass shooting environment that we now inhabit, that there are more people using sort of social media information combing tools to target potential threats. It's not always people that are reported by neighbours or friends or loved ones who are like, hey Johnny's going to go shoot somebody up. No one cares because we're so tired of the mass shooters, but predictive policing is incredibly creepy, and we pay more attention to all of this stuff.

Peter McCormack - 39:15
That's the minority report.

Molly McKew - 39:17
Yeah, but now it's totally accepted. In the US, you have Amazon doing some aspects of it, Palantier, which is Peter Thiel's creepy company. There's at least two more that have these enormous ... For them it's like, oh we're going to give you our free thing, get all of the data that we're using to train our algorithms and blah, blah, blah. But this is a conversation that everybody really needs to be involved in. Usually it's one police commissioner or a city council guy somewhere who signs these contracts, but when we're getting to the level of predictive policing, of whether or not you believe ... If data can show a person has a predilection to commit a crime, this is completely anti-Democratic and we need to have national debates about this, and we're just not there.

Molly McKew - 40:01
I think that's the far offshoot of social media targeting you with ads, but it's very much in the same bucket of things. What characteristics do you present online that can be used to target you with stuff? None of that, no piece of that spectrum has been discussed in any real way by anyone.

Peter McCormack - 40:19
So how do you change this then? How do you make the debate happen because-

Molly McKew - 40:23
I think we need some defectors. Maybe it's Brittany Kaiser, maybe it's someone else, but you need more people who have been in this to come out and say, the money from this isn't actually the most important thing. We can either use these tools responsibly, or we can all become the China surveillance state. I don't really think ... if we're looking at the Brave New World 1954, Fahrenheit 451 universe, none of us are the guy who's on the outside like, holy shit, the system's going to kill us. We're all the people consuming the four walled TV complacent to the environment that we now live in, and we need to stop that because we're really at the edge of this thing where a tech data driven universe becomes a kind of dictatorship we have anointed ourselves into where we can continue to live in free societies.

Molly McKew - 41:09
Right now, we're silently making that trade of giving up freedoms for stability, for products, for communication, for whatever, and not really understanding what that trade is.

Peter McCormack - 41:23
Why is there so much apathy because we're all aware of what's happening?

Molly McKew - 41:26
That's not true. I think if you ask an average person in the middle of a country somewhere, do you understand that all these free services you think you're getting are actually ... you're paying for it with data? You're paying for it with your privacy ... people don't understand any of that.

Peter McCormack - 41:41
No, I agree with that, but my point being is how many people will watch the Great Hack on Netflix, but they won't close their Facebook accounts?

Molly McKew - 41:46
Oh yeah, a lot. Yeah, because you don't want to give up your stuff.

Peter McCormack - 41:49
Exactly. So I feel like we talk about this dystopian future. It's essentially dystopia now. There's weird stuff happening, especially when you talk about the social credit score in China. I feel like Black Mirror is becoming-

Molly McKew - 42:05
It's like behind. It's like two generations behind, which China's doing right now.

Peter McCormack - 42:08
Yeah, but some of the shows have kind of predicted for the future. All this stuff is happening and yet a lot of people just don't care. They're just kind of accepting it. Why is that?

Molly McKew - 42:19
I think partially it's because stuff is easy. This sounds terrible, but it's been a long time since we had a really big war where you had to have a war garden and give up your tires for your car and not have sugar. That doesn't happen anymore. We live in wealthy, comfortable societies where, even if we're at war, we personally do not feel it at all. I think that, when you're in that kind of environment, the vast majority of people focus on their own fence. Is my family doing okay? Am I doing okay? Are we okay? Is everything all right? Then fine, I don't really have time to fight these other fights. That's fine. That's how society works, people focused on little communities that work well together. But right now we're just lacking the big level leadership that used to ask these questions, that used to care about these things.

Molly McKew - 43:05
There's not a Churchill or Roosevelt in the wings anywhere that I can see, and there's just ... we're faced with these huge challenging questions. If we go into this era where we're looking at climate change, at huge population issues, but at the century where AI becomes a thing, where genetic engineering and cloning, and all sorts of things that can be wonderful or fucking terrifying, we're at the edge of all of these huge ... the end of work. What are we going to do with all of these freaking people when nobody needs to do stuff anymore? We're at the edge of all of these really big questions. I'm sure every generation feels this way, but we're at an accelerated exponential scale of this that we've never had before where, right now, countries like Russia and China really want you to believe you can tackle all of these challenges better with central control because screw the people. The people are going to make the wrong decisions for themselves, but a centralised authoritarian thing can do it much faster and more effectively.

Molly McKew - 44:04
You see this even from green groups that are heralding China's steps to combat climate change where it's like, are you freaking kidding me right now. The problem is that view of, it would actually be better if there weren't the people, if only a few wealthy, smart, talented people made all the decisions for everyone, is very much echoed by the new Uber Elite that never existed before. Guys like, Bezos is not so bad, but guys like Thiel and the Facebook guy, and whoever else, who have silly money, how have I can go live in space if I feel like it money, who really believe that democracy is dumb, that people are never really doing to make the right decisions for themselves, and that at some point the smart, wealthy people who actually have a stake in this game are going to need to get together and make all the decisions for everybody else, and that's going to be the future.

Molly McKew - 44:51
We're at the edge of this, of this being a real thing, and people need to understand that that means, which is Soylent Green becomes more of a reality. But this idea of who's making the decisions about population reduction? What does that actually mean? This is something we all need to be engaged in, and it's a very real now, us, our generation, our children discussion. I just think nobody is really focused on how close we are to beyond dystopia. I don't know what the next step of apocalyptic dystopia is, but we're pretty close.

Peter McCormack - 45:26
I do find Peter Thiel concerning. I watched the documentary how he shut down Gawker, and I don't support all of Gawker's news and editorial choices. I think some of the content they put out was terrible and just a bit shitty. But at the same time, I think you have to support free press and he closed down a free press. So I find Peter Till concerning.

Molly McKew - 45:49
Also, he supports a lot of guys that are really big on genetic profiling. Yeah, it's very weird.

Peter McCormack - 45:56
So quite interestingly, on my other show, I just interviewed a chap named Balaji Srinivasan. Do you know Balaji? Okay, so he's a Silicone Valley investor. He's involved in Coinbase and Andreessen Horowitz . Interesting about that conversation that we had, you might actually quite enjoy it, is that he talked about social media CEOs in the future becoming de facto heads of state because they have the ability to control so much of the narrative.

Molly McKew - 46:24
Absolutely.

Peter McCormack - 46:24
And so much of the message.

Molly McKew - 46:25
Zuckerberg believes this now. I think Dorsey is a weirdo who doesn't really focus that much on it, but you see this in Zuckerberg and how he tries ... sometimes he tries to reinvent himself. There was this moment where he was trying to become a political thing in the US, which just failed miserably, but I think there's a point in which you realise, well I already control so much more than a government would do. I think Facebook ... I don't know about the other ones. Facebook 100% understands our competitor is not another company. Our competitor is governments. They act like it the way that they act in Washington, the way that they act other places, and it's absolutely something we need to pay attention to.

Molly McKew - 47:10
I think Google and Amazon are of scale to that, but act in different ways. But Facebook is a very challenging one, and you're exactly right, because of this narrative piece. It's not just the data, it's not just everything else. It's this ... Facebook is not trying to do deals with the American government. It is not providing cloud services for anyone. It's this totally separate thing. Zuckerberg very much believes it should be a separate thing. He believes it should be as powerful as it is, but there's a clear vision behind this, this idea of sort of a supernational structure that's more important than nations. He talks about it very openly.

Peter McCormack - 47:49
Have you followed the Libra announcement and what's going on there?

Molly McKew - 47:53
Yes, a bit. I don't know all the details. I know that no one thinks it's a good idea except Facebook.

Peter McCormack - 47:59
But what of the quite interesting things there where you've talked about them being separate from government is that they probably won't be able to launch this without having some relationship with the government. It's almost certain they won't, and I feel like the US government is in a tricky position because, if they don't allow this, they've given a head start to We Chat and Ally Pay, so there needs to be some from of district currency, which is probably a corporate currency rather than a government currency to compete with that. They're in this very tricky position.

Molly McKew - 48:29
I don't know how this is being evaluated in the US. I know it's in general there's extreme crypto currency skepticism and in officialdom in the United States. I think, if you give Facebook a framework through which it can evade international banking of any kind that we're entering a new realm of dystopian stuff. Yes, I understand this exists in China and other places, and again no one really understands why it's important. Fareed Zakaria, who is huge tech junky in many respects, four or five months ago, but did a segment on one of his shows about it's so great that China has become a cashless society and everybody just pays with their phones, and he did this whole thing not mentioning the fact that it's contributing to social credit scoring. When government can evaluate if you're eating a lot of take out or buying groceries and cooking at home, and that somehow affects your health insurance costs, this is not actually a world we want to live in where China has decided you play too many video games and aren't a good citizen, and you have to sit at the back of the train and pay more for your ticket. What the hell are you talking about? But aspects of that are being normalised in how we interact with things already and-

Peter McCormack - 49:45
How widespread is the social scoring system in China right now?

Molly McKew - 49:51
They're saying it's roll out phase, but one would assume that every Chinese person has a social credit score, that all of that data is being used to feed into those algorithms, and that every foreigner that has ever been in China has some aspect of a score from the data that's been collected on them.

Peter McCormack - 50:09
Is there any pushback coming on this tour?

Molly McKew - 50:11
China has two million leaders and, quote, reeducation camps.

Peter McCormack - 50:15
I know.

Molly McKew - 50:15
That is partially linked to the way that they're doing the social credit system, and nobody gives a crap.

Peter McCormack - 50:20
Yeah. Okay, so I can't finish the interview without asking another thing though because, preparing and researching, you've obviously been subjected to your own form of information warfare.

Molly McKew - 50:33
Oh yeah, the Kremlin doesn't like me so much. They've got lots of people that write about me all the time.

Peter McCormack - 50:37
So quite interestingly, when I first starting researching this interview, the first thing I do is put your name into Google and-

Molly McKew - 50:44
First thing that comes up is a medium blog about how I'm a crazy charlatan.

Peter McCormack - 50:48
First I was like, who is this person? Why am I interviewing-

Molly McKew - 50:53
I know. I really should spend more time caring about my own SEO, but I just don't.

Peter McCormack - 50:57
But the thing is then obviously I've spent time looking a little bit deeper, doing more research, but you've been subjected to your own. What is that like?

Molly McKew - 51:07
It's not fun. Did you watch Chernobyl?

Peter McCormack - 51:10
Yes, I did. Fantastic.

Molly McKew - 51:12
So amazing, I know. No one can stop talking about it in my part of the world.

Peter McCormack - 51:16
Have you been onto YouTube and watched the old footage from the time? That's what blew me away, the actual similarities.

Molly McKew - 51:24
They did such a good job with the visualisation of the show the writing of the show. I can't say enough good things about that show. [Crosstalk: Peter McCormack "The Russian's are going to make their own version"]. Of course they will. The version where it was a secret. It was the CIA blowing up a secret lab under Chernobyl, yeah sure it was sabotage. It was all sabotage. I have a funny story about that actually that relates to information warfare. But I think it was in the last episode, but it was sort of after the trial, and the whatever, and sort of the internal thing that was happening. They sort of take the guy away, and someone explains to him, no we don't want you to be a martyr. It's much more effective if we just disgrace you. We will discredit the hell out of you, and that's much more effective for us. That's totally true and the Kremlin knows it.

Molly McKew - 52:09
The Russian on Russian violence is something we talk about a lot. The number of dead Russians that just turn up everywhere having committed suicide by stabbing themselves 56 times or shooting themselves twice in the back of the head. Sure, it's a suicide, and nobody really cares because it's Russian on Russian and I'm not going to get into that. But it's very hard to replicate that with foreign opponent, that that's where you see ... At times, you'll see things like Bill Browder, others where they'll just embroil them in these legal scandals forever until everybody sort of assumes, well Bill Browder must have done something wrong, or there wouldn't be all this. But we like him anyway. It just sort of erode the narrative on the people over time. But disgracing opponents or discrediting opponents is far more useful for them than creating martyrs of whatever ilk.

Molly McKew - 52:53
I don't necessarily mean dead, but this eroding confidence in people who stand against them, and it's consistent. They're very consistent about attacking people that talk about what they do, that explain how they do it, that explain why it's effective, that are listened to by serious people, and that bothers them. It has always bothered them. When I worked in Georgia, they couldn't figure out why the Georgians listened to me because who the hell am I? I'm not a former something. I didn't work in government. It bothered them, but they kept quiet because they didn't know who I was.

Molly McKew - 53:21
When I got a little more exposure on what I was doing, they just went after me. And they can. I'm not an institution. I have no protection. There's no one who's going to come out and defend me, so getting stupid guys to write stupid blogs, whether they understand why they're doing it or not, constantly updating it with updates on whatever shoes I'm wearing that day or something is a way to sit there and create the narrative on your opponents so that people Google it and just say it's not like they really care if you believe I'm a charlatan or not, but they do care if the initial impression is, uh we just don't want to deal with this shit. And I get that a lot, where there's a bunch of projects and things that I should be working on, that I should be contributing to, and the answer is essentially like, we really don't want to deal with a level of shit we're going to get from them, so we're just not going to do it.

Peter McCormack - 54:08
What's the level of shit I'm going to get after this?

Molly McKew - 54:10
It depends. I think, for you, if you're just putting out a thing, it'll probably be okay, but you'll probably get trolled a bit on social media. But, if you were offering me a job of any variety, there would suddenly be dozens of people calling you explaining why I'm a charlatan and a fraud. It does get really frustrating because there's not much you can do about it except work with people who know you, except find references who can push back against that. But it's incredibly damaging and they know exactly how effective it is. But the thing that I think is so amazing about it, and the point I am constantly trying to make to people is who the fuck am I that they have this much time and energy to spend on narrative about who I am when I'm just a person who has first hand experience standing against Kremlin aggression campaigns across the region, working with people who are in the middle of the shit all the time, which is how I've learned what I know.

Molly McKew - 55:00
But I'm not an important person in the sense of someone they should be spending this much time on, but they will, and they will do it for someone much less important than me because they can, and they don't care, and they'd rather that everybody be confused and in the circus. But the amount of resources that are dedicated to every level of narrative against opponents, against critics, is absolutely flabbergasting. When you understand the deep pile of shit that Bill Browder has been under for the last decade, imagine trying to do that with no resources, without having a half a billion dollars. That's like working with Russia ever, and they know that by creating this environment most people will just choose not to, or won't write the article they should write, or won't really say the things that they should say, and it's effective, it's really effective.

Peter McCormack - 55:48
It certainly is effective. I had the recommendation to do the interview, I'm like yes, of course I want to do this. I saw you on stage in Oslo with Gary. I was like, definitely want to speak to Molly. I started doing my research and it just threw in that doubt. I was like, hold on, what about this? I didn't know about this.

Molly McKew - 56:05
Yeah, maybe I'm a crazy person.

Peter McCormack - 56:07
Yeah, exactly.

Molly McKew - 56:07
I could be a total crazy person.

Peter McCormack - 56:09
You maybe are anyway. You could be crazy and still worried about this. Okay, this has been great. For anyone ... a lot of people, this might be brand new to them. They might not have ... people are aware of what's going on, but they might be to the extent where they are now self aware, they want to be aware of the fact that they might be being targeted, they might be ... What could people do? How can they actually educate themselves better on this?

Molly McKew - 56:31
I think sort of reading more about these subjects, understanding whatever aspect of this interests you the most, whether it be the propaganda aspects or the information aspects, the data aspects, or society falling apart aspects. But the nexus of all of these things right now is so powerful in the sense of the landscape exists for the worst actors, however you want to define that. It's not just countries, it's not just terrorists. It can be political parties, it can be super malign, totally sole less mercenary actors, guys like Erik Prince, whoever Vaugner, however you want to define that. The worst possible actors are the most active and enabled in defining the space, and there is an absence of moral ethical leadership in understanding these critical juncture points that were at and trying to define what is ethical AI, what is the ethical use of data, what is the ethical use of people's information, which is essentially our labor. There is no labor anymore. It is just data. It's all being taken from us for free and creating tremendous amounts of wealth for other people who are then defining the societies that we live in and the rules that we need to play by.

Molly McKew - 57:39
I think having any vague leader that would explain any of those dynamics in a helpful and clear way would be great, but in the meantime people need to understand that for themselves and just understand that this is an incredibly powerful system of control. Not just mental manipulation, but of controlling people in populations. Looking at the Chinese social credit example is one piece, but then applying that to your own reality. If your healthcare provider is giving you discounts for entering when you're going to the gym or wearing a physical tracker device on your wrist, that's exactly the same thing as social credit. I think just understanding the way that you fit in data harvesting systems and what that is doing to society, you don't really need your Alexa listening to you all the time, and you don't really need that Ring doorbell that is providing information to police officers.

Molly McKew - 58:39
You don't need these things. You don't need to volunteer to be part of the police state that companies want to create. I just think we're not aware of that. We're really excited about technology and convenience, and I think understanding that there's trade offs that you pay for that is sort of a first critical step. But understanding more about the space and choosing leaders who are effectively going to be in that space and helping to define the societies that we're going to live in, because right now it's just a bunch of clowns sitting around having the loudest party, and we need people who are capable of understanding these juncture points that we're at and also providing leadership through them.

Peter McCormack - 59:16
Amazing. Okay. And if people want to follow your work, where can they do that?

Molly McKew - 59:20
The best thing is I'm on Twitter @MollyMckew. That's the easiest way.

Peter McCormack - 59:25
Right, and I will share that out in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on.

Molly McKew - 59:28
Thanks for having me.

Peter McCormack - 59:29
Thank you for helping me understand this.

Molly McKew - 59:30
I hope it helped.