Democracy Digest

The tragedy of Venezuela

Last weekend, Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro dragged his Socialist government into a third decade in power by winning elections that were boycotted by the opposition, ignored by most of his countrymen and rejected by the international community, notes Anatoly Kurmanaev. As sluggish voting drew to a close, a smiling and confident Mr. Maduro posted a video of himself waving not to throngs of adoring supporters but to a largely empty public square. It was a fitting metaphor for the five years I have spent reporting from the country, he writes in a must-read essay for the Wall Street Journal:

Venezuela’s collapse has been far worse than the chaos that I experienced in the post-Soviet meltdown. As a young person, I was still able to get a good education in a public school with subsidized meals and decent free hospital treatment. By contrast, as the recession took hold in Venezuela, the so-called Socialist government made no attempt to shield health care and education, the two supposed pillars of its program. This wasn’t Socialism. It was kleptocracy—the rule of thieves.

RTWT

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Egypt makes ‘totalitarian turn’?

Following his sham re-election in March 2018, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is deepening his crackdown on dissent, says the Project on Middle East Democracy. Citizens involved in peaceful pro-democracy activism, research, or government criticism on social media have been detained under shadowy National Security Case 621/2018, while others have been handed harsh prison sentences in unfair military trials. Those targeted have diverse political profiles and include prominent figures previously left alone by the regime.

POMED’s newest fact sheet, “Egypt’s Totalitarian Turn: Al-Sisi’s Crackdown Deepens,” details this latest wave of arrests, a crackdown which suggests that al-Sisi is aiming to transform Egypt from an authoritarian system that limits independent political space into a totalitarian one that wants to eliminate it entirely.

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How Britain lets Russian kleptocrats hide dirty money

Guardian

British financial complicity with Russian kleptocrats is undermining the country’s national security and democratic institutions, says analyst Oliver Bullough. Over the past decade, £68bn has flowed from Russia into Britain’s offshore satellites such as the British Virgin Islands, Cayman, Gibraltar, Jersey and Guernsey. That’s seven times more money than has flowed directly from Russia into the UK, he writes in a Long Read analysis for the Guardian:

This means that there is not a single sewer pumping dirty Russian cash into the UK to which we can attach a meter, so as to measure its output. Instead, the cash is diluted into the great tidal flows of liquid capital that pour in and out of the City of London every day, from every corner of the globe. The ordure churned out by Russian crooks and kleptocrats is thus, thanks to the skilled attentions of the tax havens’ best brains, indistinguishable from ordinary investment.

Malaysian police found 114 million ringgit ($28.6 million) in cash in 35 bags seized from a luxury condominium linked to former Prime Minister Najib Razak, the Commercial Crime Investigation Department said Friday. Another 37 bags are said to contain watches and jewelry worth a yet-to-be-calculated amount, the Associated Press reports.

In a statement tweeted by the U.S. Embassy in Malaysia last week, the Justice Department reiterated a commitment to the probe into the 1MDB corruption scandal to ensure “the United States and its financial system are not threatened by corrupt individuals and kleptocrats who seek to hide their ill-gotten wealth.”

The scale of the initial asset seizures was “shocking”, said Cynthia Gabriel (left), executive director of the nonprofit Center to Combat Corruption and Cronyism, who was appointed to the new government’s council investigating 1MDB. She expects “more to be uncovered”, she told the FT. The case highlights the “wanton greed, abuse of power and impunity” of Mr Najib and his government “at the expense of the poor citizens of Malaysia”, said Gabriel, who examined the government’s kleptocratic money laundering, in the National Endowment for Democracy’s Journal of Democracy.

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‘Disinformation Wars: Western democracies ill-prepared for coming wave of ‘deep fakes’

Credit: IRI

Western democracies are ill-prepared for the coming wave of “deep fakes” that artificial intelligence could unleash, according to Chris Meserole, a fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy, and Alina Polyakova, the David M. Rubenstein Fellow in Brookings’ Center on the United States and Europe. Deep fakes and the democratization of disinformation will prove challenging for governments and civil society to counter effectively, they write for Foreign Policy:

Because the algorithms that generate the fakes continuously learn how to more effectively replicate the appearance of reality, deep fakes cannot easily be detected by other algorithms — indeed, in the case of generative adversarial networks, the algorithm works by getting really good at fooling itself. To address the democratization of disinformation, governments, civil society, and the technology sector therefore cannot rely on algorithms alone, but will instead need to invest in new models of social verification, too.

“Bots are already yesterday’s medium for spreading disinformation,” said Camille Francois, director of research and analysis at Graphika, addressing the TNW Conference today.

During the US presidential election, Russian operatives bought dozens of Facebook ads targeted at the Hispanic community seeking to further inflame tensions, according to a USA TODAY analysis. The aim was to stir outrage on both sides, says propaganda expert James Ludes.

“Because at the end of the day, the Russians don’t really care what the policy is, they care about the divisiveness that the issue itself engenders,” says Ludes, vice president for public research and initiatives at Salve Regina University. “They want to amp up the divisiveness and give it as loud a voice as they possibly can.”

IRI

Polling by the International Republican Institute – a core affiliate of the National Endowment for Democracy – is revealing how disinformation spreads through networks and identifying who is most vulnerable to it, according to IRI’s Katie LaRoque and Josh Solomon, and Bret Barrowman of the Center for Global Impact.

“With this data, we work closely with our partners in Ukraine to counteract the spread of false narratives and strengthen government responses at the national and local level,” they write for IRI’s Democracy Speaks. “This data-driven approach marks the first step in developing effective programming aimed at mitigating the harm of propaganda and defending the information space that is crucial to a free society.”

CIMA’s latest report — A New Wave of Censorship: Distributed Attacks on Expression and Press Freedom – by disinformation expert Daniel Arnaudo of the National Democratic Institute (NDI), analyzes case studies from Ukraine, the Philippines, Turkey, Bahrain, and China. Arnaudo explains how new digital tactics are changing how we think about censorship with profound implications for global media development.

As China ramps up its political warfare ops, check out NDI’s Battle of the Bots,* a discussion with Taiwan’s g0v on using chatbots to counter disinformation.

“European media: Russia has become the West’s last hope,” was the headline in an analytical commentary published by the Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti. The problem, however, is that the headline is simply not true, notes StopFake. Manipulative headline writing is a classical disinformation trick: a headline has the power to frame the understanding of the entire article that follows.

Genocide, Nazis and the 2018 FIFA World Cup serve as sources of inspiration for pro-Kremlin disinformation campaigners intent on creating a smokescreen around the violence in Ukraine, the EU East StratCom Task Force DisinfoReview reports:

As we have seen before, the increased violence in Donbas – like recently – is preceded and accompanied by an intensified disinformation campaign in pro-Kremlin media. The disinformation campaign presented Ukraine as the main aggressor against Russia and Donbas, stating that Ukraine is to launch a “large-scale offensive in Donbas during the World Cup” to provoke a “humanitarian disaster and an exodus of the population”,

Credit: CSIS

Disinformation is a key element in the authoritarian playbook, which is used (with some variations) in Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela and Russia, says the Washington Post’s Michael Gerson:

Dismantle checks on executive power. Control the criminal-justice system. Scapegoat minority groups. Co-opt mainstream parties. Discredit the independent media. Call for opponents to be jailed. Question the legitimacy of elections. Claim to be the embodied soul of the people.

To get ahead of emerging threats, Europe and the United States should consider several policy responses, they Brookings analysts Meserole and Polyakova suggest:

First, the EU and the United States should commit significant funding to research and development at the intersection of AI and information warfare. In April, the European Commission called for at least 20 billion euros (about $23 billion) to be spent on research on AI by 2020, prioritizing the health, agriculture, and transportation sectors. None of the funds are earmarked for research and development specifically on disinformation. ..As long as tech research and counterdisinformation efforts run on parallel, disconnected tracks, little progress will be made in getting ahead of emerging threats.

Furthermore, the EU and the U.S. government should also move quickly to prevent the rise of misinformation on decentralized applications. The emergence of decentralized applications presents policymakers with a rare second chance….A model could be the United Nations’ Tech Against Terrorism project, which works closely with small tech companies to help them design their platforms from the ground up to guard against terrorist exploitation.

Finally, legislators should continue to push for reforms in the digital advertising industry. As AI continues to transform the industry, disinformation content will become more precise and micro-targeted to specific audiences. AI will make it far easier for malicious actors and legitimate advertisers alike to track user behavior online….RTWT

NDI

Taiwan-based gOv is a decentralized civic tech community in Taiwan that advocates for transparency of information and builds bottom-up civic tech solutions for citizens. To combat disinformation on instant messaging platforms, g0v has launched CoFacts, a collaborative fact-checking project that combines a chatbot with a hoax database, integrated within LINE (a popular messenger app in Asia). Disinformation can be more rapidly shared within closed messenger groups such as WhatsApp or LINE than on standard social media platforms, and news organizations and even platform owners find it hard to gain access for moderation or correction.

Speakers

Min-Hsuan Wu (ttcat) / Deputy CEO of Open Culture Foundation / A hackathon organizer of g0v.twan, and an activist and campaigner of a number of social movements in Taiwan, including the anti-nuclear, environmental, LGBT and Human Rights movements.
Lulu Keng / Executive Secretary of Open Culture Foundation international program / An experienced project manager skilled in cross-fields collaboration, environmental advocacy, civic movement, and indie music management.
Hsiao-wei Chiu (Ipa) / g0v Co-founder / Documentary filmmaker, writer, mom of two under three.
Yutin Liu / g0v contributor / A web developer who provides film record and live-stream technical support for civic movements.
Aaron Wytze Wilson / Journalist and Graduate Student in Toronto / A journalist based in Toronto, and currently pursuing his master degree at the University of Toronto. Formerly based in Taiwan from 2013 to 2017, and China from 2005 to 2012.

When: Monday, June 4, 2018 12:00-1:30 pm

Where: National Democratic Institute
455 Massachusetts Avenue NW, 20001
8th Floor Board Room

A light lunch will be served. RSVP

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The roots of Russian aggression

French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday met the head of Russia’s oldest rights group as well as the widow of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel literature laureate and prominent dissident of the Soviet era, Reuters reports:

Facing calls at home to send a signal on human rights and democratic values to the Russian leader during his visit, Macron posted pictures on Thursday night of his meeting with the head of the Memorial rights group, Alexander Cherkasov.

As the first non-governmental organization registered in the Soviet Union, Memorial is a symbol of the fight for democracy and human rights in Russia. It is now one of hundreds of NGOs under scrutiny for receiving funding from abroad and involvement in what is loosely defined as “political activities.”

“Memorial is really the symbol of a democratic Russia that is brutalised by the authorities. Macron can show that Russia, for him, is not only its leaders but also its civil society,” said French philosopher Michel Eltchaninoff.

The visit came as independent researchers confirmed that a Russian missile (HT: FDD) was to blame for the downing of flight MH16. The Netherlands said it and Australia will seek to hold Moscow criminally liable for a missile attack that downed a Malaysia Airlines flight (HT:CFR over Ukraine in 2014. A Dutch-led international probe determined the missile was fired by a Russian military brigade, RFE/RL adds.

“It is time for Russia to acknowledge its role in the shooting down of MH-17 and to cease its callous disinformation campaign,” U.S. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement that blamed Russian aggression in Ukraine for more than 10,300 deaths.

The roots of Russian aggression lay in neither NATO enlargement nor ‘hawkish’ US foreign policy, but in Russian revanchism, Brookings analyst Jamie Kirchick writes for the National Review. Insightful weekend reading from a former Penn Kemble fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy.

In a culture that admires strength, the president’s muscular style of nationalism resonates, Bloomberg’s Henry Meyer adds. In power longer than any Soviet leader other than dictator Joseph Stalin, he’s come to symbolize a concept of managed democracy and conservative values that compete with liberal ones.

Economist

Despite Vladimir Putin’s web of influence in the nation, Stanford University’s Michael McFaul said he is hopeful that the oligarchy will eventually fall, CNN reports.

“Well I’m pessimistic in the short run, incredibly optimistic in the long run,” McFaul said. “In the short run Putinism as a political system, I think, is pretty sophisticated. It’s not a crude dictatorship; it works effectively and he’s squashed the opposition, he’s crushed them.”

“I don’t see a scenario under which while Putin is there that system falls apart,” McFaul said. However, he noted that “one thing political scientists we know is that charismatic dictators or autocrats, their regimes do not long last as long as a one party systems. And Putin is most certainly that. And so I think after him that system falls apart pretty quickly.”

“I think change will happen and I think it’ll be in a more pro-Western democratic way. I just don’t know when that long run begins,” he said.

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