In this episode of Intelligence Matters, host Michael Morell interviews former FBI Special Agent Clint Watts, current Distinguished Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and Non-Resident Fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democra [...]
The final U.S. presidential debate provided significant fodder for Russian, Chinese, and Iranian state media to criticize the current state of U.S. democracy. Russian state media provided the most extensive coverage of the debate, with the majority [...]
Media and Digital Disinformation Fellow Bret Schafer spoke to WPTV about malign foreign actors' attempts to use local news outlets to spread disinformation ahead of elections. Schafer told Contact 5 one technique foreign actors use is to tag legit [...]
Geopolitics over the next several decades will be defined by competition between democracies and autocracies. This contest is already playing out across the military, economic and diplomatic domains—and in the information arena as well. As former Pr [...]
With just days to go before the U.S. presidential election, Americans are once again scrolling through news feeds full of stories about foreign operations that seek to undermine their country’s electoral process. Some of the reports raise questions [...]
On Wednesday night, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe called a news conference to warn Americans that foreign adversaries were actively interfering in the U.S. elections. Ratcliffe noted that two countries, Russia and Iran, have launc [...]
Head of External Affairs Rachael Dean Wilson spoke to Spectrum News after the DNI announced Iran and Russia are attempting to interfere in the 2020 U.S. election. “It’s very easy to get sucked into this trap of which country is trying to support whi [...]
Social media's attempt to stop false information around a New York Post story on Joe Biden and his son has left them open to censorship allegations. "Content moderation didn't work here, even if if you look at it as the only go goal is to stop the s [...]
Program Manager and Fellow Nad’a Kovalčíková joined a number of experts in a panel discussion on Russian disinformation during the coronavirus epidemic and beyond. Read an article summary of the event here. [...]
Russia has been trying to weaken the United States since the first days of the Cold War. But in that entire span of three-quarters of a century, even with the success of its spies and counter-espionage measures, it has never had a series of successe [...]
The New York Post’s publication of salacious and unverified personal materials from a laptop allegedly owned by Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, was covered extensively by Russian state media, which focused both on the “explosive” contents of the story, as [...]
Partisanship has made it more difficult for social media platforms to react to hacked and leaked materials, Media and Digital Disinformation Fellow Bret Schafer argues in New York Daily News. Baked into Russia’s hybrid warfare strategy is the ide [...]
U.S. intelligence agencies say that Russia, China and probably Iran are trying to interfere with the 2020 presidential election. A recent poll found 59 % of Americans believe foreign governments are trying to interfere. One of the strategies used to [...]
The media plays an essential role in every democracy; but in an election season marked with uncertainty on many different levels, the responsibility of the press corps to preserve the truth while getting the story right is even greater. Now armed wi [...]
Russia’s disinformation tactics, techniques, and procedures are evolving. Stakeholders of all types—journalists, regulators, and researchers—must see the full picture of Russian activity as it is changing to anticipate what might be to come. Intro [...]
Executive Summary The United States, like many other democracies, faces concerted and sophisticated operations aimed at disrupting, delegitimizing, and in some cases altering the outcomes of its elections. While foreign interference operations are [...]
Last week, Russian and Iranian diplomatic and state media accounts and outlets primarily focused on regional issues, while Chinese accounts and outlets concentrated on U.S.-China disputes as well as President Trump’s coronavirus recovery. Russian st [...]
Overview On September 29, President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden sparred in the first of three (now two) presidential debates. The event, which was labelled a “debacle” and a “total disaster” by the U.S. news media, unsurprisingl [...]
Director Laura Rosenberger and Non-Resident Fellow Clint Watts joined a panel entitled "Combatting Disinformation and Misinformation in Elections" at CISA's National Cybersecurity Summit with Alex Stamos, Jorhena Thomas, and Olivia Gazis. [...]
President Trump’s positive coronavirus diagnosis was covered extensively by the Russian, Iranian, and Chinese networks monitored on Hamilton 2.0, with most of the content covering factual updates or well-wishes from diplomats and world leaders. Russ [...]
Overview On September 18, 2020, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced that new restrictions would be placed on WeChat and TikTok, two social media apps owned by Chinese companies, effectively banning the apps from being downloaded from U.S. app [...]
Fellow for Emerging Technologies Lindsay Gorman joined Adam Segal of the Council of Foreign Relations and Clete Williams of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP in an online panel discussion at the National Press Foundation to discuss the dangers [...]
This policy paper was co-authored with Edgar P. Tam, visiting senior fellow at the Paris Office of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Please click the link at the right to view the full paper. President Donald Trump’s views on Iran hav [...]
Last week, Russian state media and diplomats continued to emphasize the safety of and demand for the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, as well as developments around a competing Russian vaccine created by the Vektor State Research Center of Virology and Bi [...]
Overview On September 17, 2020, the assistant secretary of European and Eurasian affairs at the State Department told the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs that “Europe has emerged as arguably the central front in the Chinese Communist Party’s eff [...]
Fellow for Malign Finance Josh Rudolph discusses how the rise of foreign funding distorts politics in the West, drawing on our recently released paper Covert Foreign Money: Financial Loopholes Exploited by Authoritarians to Fund Political Interferen [...]
ASD Middle East Fellow Ariane Tabatabai gives readers a short introduction to her recently released report Iran's Authoritarian Playbook: The Tactics, Doctrine, and Objectives behind Iran’s Influence Operations. In one of the first comprehensive di [...]
Introduction According to a 2013 indictment by the U.S. Department of Justice, hackers backed by a foreign power gained access to the controls of the Bowman Avenue Dam, a small dam in the New York City suburb of Rye, New York. Cyberattacks on inf [...]
Attentive moviegoers who went to see Disney’s reimagined Mulan last week made an unpleasant discovery during the end credits, namely that the corporation thanked several government entities in Xinjiang, home to the Uighur minority that the Chinese g [...]
Russian, Chinese, and Iranian government and state media accounts and outlets covered well-trodden ground last week, with each country returning to familiar topics or themes. For the third straight week, Russian government officials and state media [...]
Clint Watts joined the Wilson Center's Nina Jankowicz to discuss the aims of Russian disinformation in the 2020 Election on MSNBC's Live with Ali Velshi. [...]
ASD Fellow for Emerging Technologies Lindsay Gorman moderated a GMF Face Off Debate between Rep. Mike Gallagher (Wisconsin's 8th District) and Member of the European Parliament Miriam Lexmann (Slovakia) on the question of whether Chinese diplomats s [...]
ASD Non-Resident Fellow Clint Watts co-authored a piece on deepfakes and their impact on American democracy with Tim Hwang of the University of Texas at Austin in the Washington Post. [...]
As with most major dates in World War II, Russian diplomatic and government accounts last week put out a spate of messaging marking the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 and, more significantly, the recently changed date Russia recognizes [...]
Overview On August 9, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko declared a landslide victory in an election widely regarded to be neither free nor fair, sparking widespread protests across the country. Since that time, Russian, Chinese, and Iranian [...]
ASD Non-Resident Fellow Clint Watts joined Michael Waldman and Janai Nelson in a panel discussion on voting access and disinformation on NBC's Meet the Press. [...]
ASD Junior Fellow Jennifer Gurev and Elections Integrity Fellow David Levine discuss election integrity during the threat of coronavirus, and explore examples like the elections in Poland and the cyber attacks in North Macedonia. [...]
The major through-line in messaging from Russia, China, and Iran last week was a focus on police brutality, racial justice protests, and violence and unrest in the United States, following a pattern established earlier this year in their respective [...]
ASD Director Zack Cooper and Media and Digital Disinformation Fellow Bret Schafer joined Girma Parris of Case Western Reserve University on a panel at The City Club of Cleveland to discuss the United States' disinformation and election security prep [...]
Laura Rosenberger went on KERA "Think" to discuss Russian and Chinese interference and Americans' confidence in the 2020 election. [...]