11/9/2018 How Putin meddles in Western democracies - Russia’s dirty tricks

Russia’s dirty tricks

How Putin meddles in Western democracies

And why the West’s response is inadequate

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Feb 22nd 2018

IN THE late 1980s, as Mikhail Gorbachev launched perestroika, Russia made peace
with the West. It was possible to believe that each would give up trying to subvert
the other with lies and cold-war conspiracy theories. With the indictment of 13
Russians on February 16th by the American special counsel, Robert Mueller, it is
clear just how fragile that belief was.

Mr Mueller alleges that in 2014 Russia launched a conspiracy against America’s

democracy, and he believes he has the evidence to withstand Russian denials and a
court’s scrutiny. Perhaps because Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, thought the
CIA was fomenting an uprising in Ukraine, the Internet Research Agency, backed by
an oligarch with links to the Kremlin, set up a trolling team, payments systems and
false identities. Its aim was to widen divisions in America and, latterly, to tilt the
vote in 2016 from Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump.

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Europe has been targeted, too. Although the details are sketchier, and this is not the
focus of the Mueller probe, Russia is thought to have nanced extremist

politicians, hacked computer systems, organised marches and spread lies (see
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Brie ng). Again, its aim seems 12 weeks
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11/9/2018 How Putin meddles in Western democracies - Russia’s dirty tricks

It is futile to speculate how much Russia’s e orts succeeded in altering the

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outcomes of votes and poisoning online
politics.
and The answer is unknowable. But the
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conspiracies are wrong in themselves and their extent raises worries about the
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the West is going to protect itself against
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cry.

Trolleology
They hold three uncomfortable lessons. One is that social media are a more potent
tool than the 1960s techniques of planting stories and bribing journalists. It does
not cost much to use Facebook to spot sympathisers, ferret out potential converts
and perfect the catchiest taglines (see article). With ingenuity, you can fool the
system into favouring your tweets and posts. If you hack the computers of
Democratic bigwigs, as the Russians did, you have a network of bots ready to dish
the dirt.

With a modest budget, of a little over $1m a month, and working mostly from the
safety of St Petersburg, the Russians managed botnets and false pro les, earning
millions of retweets and likes. Other, better-funded, groups exploit similar
techniques. Nobody yet knows how the outrage they generate changes politics, but
it is a fair guess that it deepens partisanship and limits the scope for compromise.

Hence the second lesson, that the Russia campaign did not create divisions in
America so much as hold up a warped mirror to them. It played up race, urging
black voters to see Mrs Clinton as an enemy and stay at home on polling day. It
sought to in ame white resentment, even as it called on progressives to vote for Jill
Stein, of the Green Party. After Mr Trump’s victory, which it had worked to bring
about, it organised an anti-Trump rally in Manhattan. Right after the Parkland
school shooting, Russian bots began to pile into the debate about gun control (see
article). Europeans are to a lesser degree divided, too, especially in Brexit Britain.
The divisions that run so deep within Western democracies leave them open to
intruders.

The most important lesson is that the Western response has been woefully weak. In
the cold war, America fought Russian misinformation with diplomats and spies. By
contrast, Mr Mueller acted because two presidents fell short. Barack Obama
agonised over evidence of Russian interference but held back before eventually
imposing sanctions, perhaps because he assumed Mr Trump would lose and that
for him to speak out would only feed suspicions that, as a Democrat, he was
manipulating the contest. That was a grave misjudgment.

Mr Trump’s failing is of a di erent order. Despite having access to intelligence from

the day he was elected, he has treated the Russian scandal purely in terms of his
own legitimacy. He should have spoken out against Mr Putin and protected
America against Russian hostility. Instead, abetted by a number of congressional
Republicans, he has devoted himself to discrediting the agencies investigating the
conspiracy and hinted at ring Mr Mueller or his minders in the Justice
Department, just as he red James Comey as head of the FBI. Mr Mueller is not
done. Among other things, he still has to say whether the conspiracy extended to
the Trump campaign. Were Mr Trump to sack him now, it would amount to a
confession.

How to win the woke citizens vote

For democracy to thrive, Western leaders need to nd a way to regain the

con dence of voters. This starts with transparency. Europe needs more formal
in estigations ith the authorit of Mr Mueller’s Although the risk re ealing
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11/9/2018 How Putin meddles in Western democracies - Russia’s dirty tricks
investigations with the authority of Mr Mueller’s. Although they risk revealing
intelligence sources and methods andtomay
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success sows mistrust—they also online

lay theand our apps.
ground for action. Party-funding laws
need to identify who has given money to whom. And social media should be open
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to scrutiny, so that anyone can identify who is paying for ads and so that
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researchers can more easily root out subterfuge.

Then comes resilience, which starts at the top. Angela Merkel successfully warned
Mr Putin that there would be consequences if he interfered in German elections. In
France Emmanuel Macron frustrated Russian hackers by planting fake e-mails
among real ones, which discredited later leaks when they were shown to contain
false information. Finland teaches media literacy and the national press works
together to purge fake news and correct misinformation.

Resilience comes more easily to Germany, France and Finland, where trust is
higher than in America. That is why retaliation and deterrence also matter—not, as
in the cold war, through dirty tricks, but by linking American co-operation over,
say, diplomatic missions, to Russia’s conduct and, if need be, by sanctions.
Republican leaders in Congress are failing their country: at the least they should
hold emergency hearings to protect America from subversion in the mid-term
elections. Just now, with Mr Trump obsessively blaming the FBI and Democrats, it
looks as if America does not believe democracy is worth ghting for.

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline "The meddler"

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