Using information security to explain why disinformation makes autocracies stronger and democracies weaker

The same disinformation campaigns that epitomize the divisions in US society -- beliefs in voter fraud, vaccine conspiracies, and racist conspiracies about migrants, George Soros and Black Lives Matter, to name a few -- are a source of strength for autocracies like Russia, where the lack of a consensus on which groups and views are real and which are manufactured by the state strengthens the hand of Putin and his clutch of oligarchs.

In a new Harvard Berkman Center paper, Common -Knowledge Attacks on Democracy, political scientist Henry Farrell (previously and security expert Bruce Schneier (previously) team up to explore this subject by using information security techniques, and come to a very plausible-seeming explanation and a set of policy recommendations to address the issue.

Farrell and Schneier start by exploring the failures of both national security and information security paradigms to come to grips with the issue: Cold War-style national security is oriented around Cold War ideas like "offense–defense balance, conventional deterrence theory, and deterrence by denial," none of which are very useful for thinking about disinformation attacks; meanwhile, information security limits itself to thinking about "servers and individual networks" and not "the consequences of attacks for the broader fabric of democratic societies."

Despite these limits, the authors say that there is a way to use the tools of information security to unpick these kinds of "information attacks" on democracies: treat "the entire polity as an information system with associated attack surfaces and threat models" -- that is, to think about the democracy itself as the thing to be defended, rather than networks or computers. Read the rest