Franklin, Andrews, Kramer & Edelstein

[scion]

How Facebook Changed the Spy Game

I fought foreign propaganda for the FBI. But the tools we had won’t work anymore.

By ASHA RANGAPPA September 08, 2017
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/08/how-facebook-changed-the-spy-game-215587

ny doubt that Russia has been running a strategically targeted disinformation campaign in the United States was erased on Wednesday, when Facebook revealed that it had deleted 470 “inauthentic” accounts that were based in Russia and had paid $100,000 to promote divisive ads during the 2016 presidential election.

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia called Facebook’s report the “tip of the iceberg,” and he’s right. As a former FBI counterintelligence agent who investigated foreign propaganda cases, I’ve seen firsthand how foreign intelligence services leverage American freedoms—and the constitutional limitations on the FBI’s investigative power—to their advantage. The rise of social media platforms makes the pervasiveness and impact of these operations today exponentially greater. And it leaves the FBI without the legal tools to stop it.

The vast majority of counterintelligence cases I worked in the FBI involved a foreign intelligence service (FIS) conducting what we called “perception management campaigns.” Perception management, broadly defined, includes any activity that is designed to shape American opinion and policy in ways favorable to the FIS home country. Some perception management operations can involve aggressive tactics like infiltrating and spying on dissident groups (and even intimidating them), or trying to directly influence U.S. policy by targeting politicians under the guise of a legitimate lobbying group. But perception management operations also include more passive tactics like using media to spread government propaganda—and these are the most difficult for the FBI to investigate.

My experience investigating foreign propaganda operations predated the proliferation of social media platforms. But understanding how investigations worked before the information explosion is critical to understanding the magnitude of the Russian threat today. In the “old days” (i.e., 10-15 years ago), a disinformation operation typically involved an FIS tasking one of its agents to recruit a journalist and become his or her source. In this way, the FIS could essentially make the journalist an unwitting mouthpiece for foreign government interests.

The FBI has few options in this kind of situation. There’s no law preventing a journalist from publishing whatever they want. The most the bureau can do is warn the journalist they are being targeted by foreign intelligence, in the hopes that their professional standards will at least cause them to account for their source’s bias in their reporting. Frankly, though, the FBI is wary of getting too close to a reporter’s free speech rights: Since the Church Hearings, the FBI and the First Amendment are two great tastes that don’t go great together, and approaching a journalist in a counterintelligence investigation has all the ingredients of a PR disaster. Given the extensive internal authorizations and bureaucratic paperwork required merely to talk to a journalist, most FBI agents are loath to go down this path. I did it only once.
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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/08/how-facebook-changed-the-spy-game-215587