Are Russian information operations against the US a war?

Molly McKew defines herself on her Twitter account @MollyMcKew as an "information warfare expert." She has a couple of articles I want to highlight here: Brett Kavanaugh and the Information Terrorists Treying to Reshape America Wired 10/03/2018, giving a summary of some important alt-right contemporary history, from Gamergate to QAnon; and, Putin’s Real Long Game Politico 01/01/2017, a piece from just after the 2016 election on Russian information operations.

McKew also advertises herself as a "Foreign Policy and Strategy Consultant." Wired's author bio notes, "She advised Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili's government from 2009 to 2013 and former Moldovan prime minister Vlad Filat in 2014–15." The Politico description of her includes, "She is a registered agent for Georgian President Saakachvili’s government, which she advised from 2009-2013, and for former Moldovan Prime Minister Filat, who has been in prison since 2015." She begins her Politico piece by recalling "sitting on my front porch with a friend best described as a Ukrainian freedom fighter." So it's not surprising that she is sharply focused on Russian online propaganda messaging.

I try to be cautious with terms like "information warfare" or "information terrorism." Because what is being described is generally less immediately fatal than bullets and bombs, which are involved in actual war and terrorism. What is usually called information warfare is otherwise known as "propaganda." It deserves to be taken seriously. But it's effects play out in different ways than shooting people with guns. It's a distinction worth preserving.

Cyber-warfare is a broader concept, and some caution is appropriate in what to include in it, as well. Spying, espionage, sabotaging vital infrastructure, disrupting military operations, all those can be understood as part of warfare. Whether a foreign power monkeying with the computers at a power plant should be considered an act of war that justifies the guns-and-bombs kind of military response is another question.

The Wired article is a longread that explains a process that the alt-right currently uses to spread outlandish conspiracy theories. She talks about the online networks the alt-right has developed as a "runaway narrative architecture":

Gamergate became Pizzagate became QAnon became entrenched modern narrative architecture ripe for exploitation. The cadre mobilized a movement of misogyny and white nationalism and intimidation — of angry boys who reveled in the chaos god of Roger Stone — and cultivated the narrative to make it acceptable to a wider lane of conservatives. This is triggering violence and identifiable forms of extremism that we can no longer ignore.

Free speech discussions often bring up the famous line by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes from a case called U.S. v. Schenck (1919). “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”

Trevor Timm explains in It's Time to Stop Using the 'Fire in a Crowded Theater' Quote The Atlantic 11/02/2012:

In 1969, the Supreme Court's decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio effectively overturned Schenck and any authority the case still carried. There, the Court held that inflammatory speech--and even speech advocating violence by members of the Ku Klux Klan--is protected under the First Amendment, unless the speech "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action" (emphasis mine).

The text of the Brandenburg v. Ohio decision is available online. As it happens, that ruling overturned a conviction of a Ku Klux Klan leader for advocating political violence in the abstract.

Freedom of speech in US law does not give immunity to criminal conspiracies, whether the crime involved is stealing money or a mob boss ordering a hit on someone.

And we need to keep in mind that distinction when it comes to "information terrorism". Being a verbal scumbag is disgusting. But it's not the same as directing someone to commit an act of violence. Responsible people should also keep in mind the likely consequences of spreading inflammatory and/or crazy conspiracy theories on some of the human loose cannons out there. That doesn't mean we should minimize the irresponsibitlity of people like some of the political actors McKee describes in Wired. It does mean that a term like "information terrorism" should be used narrowly for direct incitement to violence or direct threats of violence. Not everything that makes people uncomfortable should be called "terrorism."

Also, if you're going to brag very publicly about hanging out with a "Georgian freedom fighter" at your residence in Washington DC, it might be prudent to exercise caution about encouraging expansive definitions of terrorism.

When it comes to foreign policy and the issue of Russian interference in elections via propaganda, McKee's January 2017 article was already engaging in threat inflation, one of the most damaging characteristics of US foreign policy since the Second World War:

What both administrations [Obama and Trump] fail to realize is that the West is already at war, whether it wants to be or not. It may not be a war we recognize, but it is a war. This war seeks, at home and abroad, to erode our values, our democracy, and our institutional strength; to dilute our ability to sort fact from fiction, or moral right from wrong; and to convince us to make decisions against our own best interests.

I've always maintained that Russian interference in the US Presidential election in 2016 was a serious issue that needed to be seriously invetigated and countered. Much more information about that Russian effort is now in the public record than was the case when her Politico article was published.

But we also need to be realistic about it. Is there any way to reliably measure the influence of those notorious Russian bots? Not that I've seen. Direct intervention in the physical election systems is a more serious problem, but there is still no real evidence in the public record of which I'm aware that Russian hackers changed or erased votes or otherwise directly affected the voter count. But hacking election systems is illegal in itself. So are foreign donations to American political campaigns, and it appears that the NRA still has to account for its conduct in the matter of Russian money in the 2016 Presidential election. And, of course, there are numerous cases established by convictions in the Special Council's probe of Russian interference that involve inappropriate involvement by US political actors with foreign money adn actors.

But whether Russian bots amplifying Republicans smears and campaign themes rise to the level of those more concrete crimes is dubious. One Russian political intervention that might reasonably be judged as effective came in early 2016 in Europe. On New Year's Eve at the end of December, there were a number of sexual harassment of women in the German city of Cologne during the outdoor celebrations there in the plaza in front of the cathedral, many of them perpetrated by foreigners (Arabs and North Africans), and many cited by the police were asylum seekers. Germany and Austria and several Balkan countries were then still struggling with how to manage the ongoing wave of refugees that coming into Europe at the time in extremely high numbers compared to the years before and after. Russian information operations in 2015 promoted the notion that Germany would accept all comers, an action consistent with Putin's goal of weakening the EU by promoting tensions bewteen EU countries, in this case greatly assisted by the Hungarian government's handling of refugees.

The critics of Merkel's immigration policy of the moment seized on the Köln incident as an example of the dangers posed by her policy, thier message facilitated by the clumsy police public information operations after the event. Then in January, Russian state media seized on a routine news story of a 13-year-old girl named Lisa who had gone missing in Berlin and then turned up the next day. They actively spread the story that she had been kinapped by foreigners and raped for 30 hours, after which the police were said to have forced her to claim the sex was consensual in order to protect the Evil Foreigners. (Alice Bota, Das missbrauchte Mädchen Zeit Online 21.01.2016; Christine Kensche, „Der Fall zeigt, Lisa ist ein Missbrauchsopfer“ Welt 20.06.2017)

The Russian government used that story to promote the Putinist narrative that Europe was allowing itself to be overrun by dangerous foreigners. (Lisa's family is Russian-German.) Alice Bota quotes a commentator on Russian Channel One saying, "Underage girls are being raped, the police do nothing, the perpetrators go free. That is the new order in Germany." Presumabley because of the age of the girl, the circumstances of her disappearance were not immediately publicly explained. But Bota reports that the Berlin police did specifically and publicly said at the time she the girl was not raped.

The story was it spread in Europe, but did it have an effect in Germany and Austria? Bota gives no indication that it was. Russian propaganda was happy to magnify the Trump-style agitation against foreigners as rapists. But how much effect the magnification of such messages promoted by domestic xenophobes in the EU had is, as in the American election, hard to measure. Still, Kensche's 2017 report adds of the aftermath in Germany:

Fünf Männer attackieren die Flüchtlingsunterkunft gegenüber Lisas Schule. Ihre Cousine spricht am Rand einer NPD-Demonstration, die Partei hält eine Kundgebung gegen „Überfremdung“ ab. Hunderte Russlanddeutsche ziehen vor das Kanzleramt, auch NPD und Pegida mischen mit. Propagandaforscher erklären, Russland mache gezielt Stimmung gegen die Bundesrepublik.

[Five men attack the refugee housing opposite Lisa's school. Her cousin speaks on the fringes of a {far-right} NPD demonstration, the Party {NPD} holds a rally against "over-foreignization". Hundreds of Russian-Germans appear in from the Chancellor's office, and the NPD and {the far-right anti-immigrant group} Pegida join them. Propaganda researchers declare that Russia is making a targeted effort to turn the mood against Germany.]

The case caused some notable diplomatic tension between Russia and Germany. So it clearly had a real-world effect on politics.

In 2017, a fuller story emerged in court. It did involve a defendent identified as Ismet S., who presumably has some kind of immigrant background. When he was 18 and Lisa 13, they carried on a romance that included sleeping together once. He was convicted for the statutory rape and for child pornography.

McKew's Wired article gives a good description of the use of rape in political and ehtnic propaganda:

Through each iteration of this [online rightwing] network, rape has been a constant theme. Rape and pedophilia are potent triggers that elicit an intense emotional response from an audience. Rape has been used to fling charges of hypocrisy—almost always involving accusations against Bill Clinton or other Democrats. It has been used to highlight examples of "fake news" by pointing to the few cases where the media has promoted unsubstantiated rape allegations. It has been used in attempts to prove elite corruption by insisting that there is a secret cabal of elites who are pedophiles and predators. It has been used to normalize racism—referring to blacks and Muslims as serial rapists and to migrants as rapists and killers. And it has been used to justify misogyny by arguing that rape is "misunderstood."

McKew in the 2017 article paints the Russian influence operations as strikingly effective. But, compared to the concrete practices of bribery and injecting funds into foreign political groups, it's hard to argue that their propaganda bots are nearly as effective.

With direct manipulation of vote results, the kinds of measures that are needed to guard against that are largelyh the same as those needed to guard against voter suppression efforts. And the efforts to counter Russian propaganda are also part of the effort to combat general misinformation and "fake news" from domestic sources.

But even beyond information operations, McKew's depiction of US-Russia relatioships as "a war ... to be won, decisively — not a thing to be negotiated or bargained," is very much threat inflation. It's not a realistic way to see US-Russian relations. She even seems to be arguing that diplomacy is useless in dealing with Russia. She writes, "As Obama did, Trump has already made the first mistake in negotiating with the Russians: telling them that there is anything to negotiate." Which strikes me as a pretty nihilistic take on the subject.