from Hacker News

Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy

by yungchin on 11/27/18, 12:51 PM with 133 comments

• by rrggrr on 11/28/18, 8:21 PM

  The only counter-measure that works against polluting the polity with influence operations is earnestly educating people to be critical consumers of information. Why? Because one cannot empower government to counter-message influence operations without risking an abuse of power.

  My son's middle school appears to be tackling this problem to some degree by teaching students to: (a) not accept 'facts' without multiple sources of information; (b) consider the perspective/bias of the story-teller in the sources you consume; and (c) understand that most messages are persuasion.

• by tareqak on 11/28/18, 7:36 PM

  I'm glad that someone of Schneier's reputation and ability is taking this issue seriously enough to at least co-author a paper on it. I know that the focus of this forum is technology news and whatever hackers find interesting, and I know (and have seen here) that the more political a particular post is, the more inevitable it becomes for the discourse to devolve into something non-constructive and toxic. At the same time, I strongly feel that as part of the community people who have designed and implemented the technologies that have had such an major impact on civil discourse and politics today, I find the reluctance to discuss and own up to the fact disappointing. Even the scientists behind the Manhattan Project felt and expressed some responsibility and remorse for the nuclear weapons that came about from their work.

• by tareqak on 11/28/18, 9:04 PM

  There was one idea that came to mind when I read The Second Half of Watergate Was Bigger, Worse, and Forgotten by the Public posted here 8 days ago [0][1]. The first part of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) requires corporations to keep accurate financial records in order to not be able to hide bribes [2]. If a corporation can be compelled to be truthful in their financial records, then why can't a news organization be compelled to be truthful when proclaiming to disseminate news? If the news organization still wanted to publish something inaccurate, then they could label it as satire, but at least they would have surrender the appearance of being truthful. I understand that there would be freedom-of-speech / first amendment implications, but isn't a public financial record a kind of speech and corporations are effectively being told how to say (be truthful) what they want to say (their finances)?

  My idea definitely sounds a little far-fetched even to me, but I'd appreciate any input, additions, or criticism that anyone might have.

  [0] https://longreads.com/2018/11/20/the-second-half-of-watergat...

  [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18498796

  [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act

• by darawk on 11/28/18, 7:00 PM

  Ya, i've been saying something like this for a while. China, for instance, is uniquely invulnerable to this sort of attack. Because the state is already in charge of censoring information, it is much more difficult to flood them with misinformation. It's one of the many reasons i'm concerned that models like Chinas will actually flourish more than they otherwise would in the coming years.

• by nbp234 on 11/28/18, 6:50 PM

  Link to discussion on Bruce Schneier's blog: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/11/propaganda_an...

• by blackholesRhot on 11/28/18, 8:41 PM

  I respect Schneier but this is basically 10x-ing the word count on Terry Tao’s 2016 blog post:

  https://www.google.com/amp/s/terrytao.wordpress.com/2016/06/...

  Unacceptable to me that it wasn’t referenced as it certainly made the rounds in security circles.

• by baby on 11/28/18, 7:16 PM

  It'd be interesting to see a formal threat model of a Democracy like we write such documents for our applications and protocols.

• by pessimizer on 11/29/18, 12:39 AM

  It's a huge flaw that this paper keeps referring to the "US" and its intentions, even explicitly distinguished from the FCC or its president in the blog entry linking the paper[1]. Baked into the examples used to illustrate its premise is a United States that is never specifically located or identified; it just makes appearances as "some Arizona Republicans" and "national security officials" and only intends to spread its "liberal and democratic values" with its "pro-freedom" bias.

  The idea that Americans are now soaked in more or more vulnerable to intentional misdirection due to ideas flooding the internet from twitter and facebook is completely ahistorical. If anything, American "consensus" beliefs have always been dictated and enforced from above, and have never been a consensus.

  I hope that he reads some Walter Lippmann before he continues to treat politics like a computer program. We are and have always been constantly under attacks from people who want to define the facts that we base our decisions on, including all parts of government. Additionally, those attackers do not always have bad intentions, and may be using deceptive simplifications in order to trick us into doing what they think is best for us.

  The evaluation of a flood of information coming from actors with a full range of motivations to manipulate that information is the basic dilemma of democracy. This paper itself is soaked in and re-enforces a bunch of questionable common knowledge, especially as it seems to be addressed to an American flag when only people are available to read it.

  [1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/11/propaganda_an...

• by forapurpose on 11/28/18, 8:01 PM

  We are strongly concerned with accuracy (correctness, completeness, consistency) on the network layers but I've been thinking that we need to apply the same emphasis to accuracy on the data layer. We'd never accept the data layer's error rate on the network layer.

  Another way of looking at it: We do emphasize accuracy in data in business databases - again, we'd never accept the error rate common in 'general' information. Why don't we put the same emphasis on data elsewhere?

• by jedharris on 11/28/18, 6:45 PM

  Great model! Simple enough to understand, fits a lot of recent phenomena. Scary implications, but we should be able to respond effectively.

  Unexpected but good to see Schneier doing this kind of work.

• by zyxzevn on 11/28/18, 8:08 PM

  I disagree, but I see the problems totally different. That is because I don't see the US as a democracy but as an oligarchy.

  The whole problem with US implementation of democracy is that the actors are centralized around a system that encourages corruption. The corruption is due to the power and money that is governing politics.

  And this again causes secrecy to hide the differences between the advertised politics and real practices. And to hide problems and responsibility within the political decisions.

  The corruption and secrecy again causes the media to publish on actors in a very biased way. It is even seen as bad to be positive or unbiased on the policies or events. If something goes wrong it is always the other's fault.

  The media earns now money by presenting the stories to support certain opinions and ideas. Not by presenting the complex and multifaceted reality. This is emphasized by the two party system. And sometimes also by the CIA propaganda system that is still active.

  This goes so far that there is a lot of staging of the presentation of events. Which makes the news far more dramatic. But it also makes it fake, whether the story really happened or not. The media also tends to emphasize minor problems, just to trigger emotional reactions.

  And then there is the problem of the over-militarization of the US government and its foreign policies. This is visible in the excessive amount of money going into this. And the huge amount of money lost in it. This gives the problem that the military and their corrupt sponsors rule the politics, instead of the people that are part of the democracy. It is also the reason why the military (&CIA) controls the media narrative on foreign politics so strongly.

  The first step would be to get the money out of the politics. http://represent.us has a good way of doing that.

  The media circus can be stopped by allowing more factions/parties and different viewpoints simultaneously. But that means stepping away from the two-party idea. That way different opinions become less hostile against each other. Separate military propaganda from the news. Now it is completely mixed up, because the military don't want to be unmasked.

  That is opposite of what the paper seems to be stating.

  "Stable autocracies will have common knowledge over who is in charge and their associated ideological or policy goals". In Europe the democratic parties have clear ideologies and goals. In the US this is not so much.

  In the US it is clear that democrats or republicans are in charge, but neither represent the people. Both represent the companies and organizations that pay them.

  If you want people to get more informed and involved with democracy, you need to decentralize the democracy. Make local people's votes count. And give people more autocracy/ self responsibility. That works in countries like Switzerland. In the US there is also a lot corruption on local levels. Give the people power and knowledge to stop that! That is democracy.

  A major problem in the US is that many want to control how others live. They want to control what drugs they use, or how they reproduce (or not). Who pays for who. Often mixed with people paying money to certain companies and monopolies. This is politics directly against self-responsibility. Instead the politics should be directed towards cooperation and build-up in a way that encourages self-responsibility.

  This is also represented in the information. Spread information that is self-responsible and cooperative, instead of information that is controlling, biased and/or emotional. For example: Wikipedia (even with its errors) helps the people around the world understand most of the world. But certain biased information sources also give information of how other people may be thinking. That way we understand each other, by learning more.

  This is also complex and multifaceted. But it is something that people are very much interested in dealing with themselves.

  I do not have a good idea, how the excessive military expenses and its influences can be reduced.

• by gumby on 11/29/18, 12:14 AM

  Are words like "epistemology" (or "philosophy") scary for American students (or teachers?). French and German kids have philosophie or Ethik from an early age.

• by johnchristopher on 11/28/18, 9:40 PM

  The confidence attack has a patch: drop electronic voting.

• by tareqak on 11/28/18, 7:24 PM

  I don't know why nbp234's comment with the link to Bruce Schneier's blog is dead, but I think it is pretty valuable, so I'll post it again: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/11/propaganda_an...

• by liftbigweights on 11/28/18, 8:07 PM

  Ironic considering SSRN is owned by Elsevier, which is renown for trying to limit/control information for profit.

  It even published fake journals to spread "fake news" ( aka ads ) for the pharmaceutical industry.

  "The company has fought legislation designed to open up academic research, offered scholars money to file positive reviews, sued libraries for oversharing, and allegedly published fake journals on behalf of the pharmaceuticals industry."

  https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/when-the...

• by peterwwillis on 11/28/18, 7:18 PM

  Democracy is doomed, but not because of advanced attacks. Autocracy/nationalism/monarchy/etc are just the natural order of human societies. We've had a good run, but so did the Greeks and Romans.