Disclaimer:The Eqbal Ahmad Centre for Public Education (EACPE) encourages critical and independent thinking and believes in a free expression of one’s opinion. However, the views expressed in contributed articles are solely those of their respective authors and do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the EACPE.
In 1960, the Democratic Party leaders confronted a problem — how to make their presidential candidate, John F. Kennedy, more popular and likeable among the people of colour and other minorities? Ithiel de Sola Pool, an enterprising MIT political scientist, approached them with a solution: a mathematical predicting model. He would gather data from earlier presidential elections, feed it into a digital processing machine, develop an algorithm to model voting behaviour, predict what policy can produce the most favourable results, and advice the Kennedy campaign to act accordingly. Pool started a company — the Simulmatics Corporation — and his efforts bore fruit: Kennedy was elected.
Ithiel de Sola Pool — the man who helped tip the balance in Kennedy’s favour
Fast forward 56 years to 2016 — this time the tide turned. In June, July, and October, a few months before the U.S. presidential election, thousands of stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee were released by DCLeaks — operated by a Kremlin-backed cyber-espionage group dubbed ‘Guccifer 2.0’ — and WikiLeaks. A total of 33,000 pages of confidential emails from Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee for the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, and John Podesta, the chair of Clinton’s presidential campaign, surfaced in the media. These emails revealed embarrassing details about the Clinton campaign: its biases, bickerings, and inner workings; the text of Clinton’s paid speeches to Wall Street bankers; her disclosure of the details of Osama Bin Laden’s assassination in Pakistan, a federal crime in the U.S. Constitution; Podesta’s secret Risotto recipe (the key to the creamy consistency of the rice is slow adding and stirring), among other things.
The 2016 hack revealed — among other embarrassing details — Podesta’s secret to a Creamy Risotto recipe
Before relinquishing the Oval Office to his successor Donald Trump, President Obama directly accused Moscow of the hacking of the DNC and the Clinton campaign and foisted new sanctions on Russia in December. In January next year, a joint declassified report by the U.S. intelligence community — CIA, FBI, and NSA — stated that Russia, Vladimir Putin specifically, conducted a sophisticated fraud campaign with the dual aim of damaging Hillary Clinton’s campaign — therefore boosting the candidacy of Donald Trump — and enervating the U.S. democratic process. “Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump,” the report said.
In May, the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed the former FBI Director Rober Mueller as special counsel to investigate the Russian interference in the elections, and scrutinize possible criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. To assert his electoral legitimacy, Donald Trump repeatedly downplayed the accusations and launched a Twitter war on the investigation, calling it a “POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!” and lambasted the allegations of Russian interference as “ridiculous”, a “total phoney story”, and a “big fat hoax”, meanwhile maintaining that other than Russia, other countries or even “somebody sitting on their bed who weighs 400 pounds” could be behind the hacking of the Clinton campaign and the DNC.
Two indictments and a 448-page report later, Special Counsel Robert Mueller confirmed that Russia had indeed interfered in the 2016 elections and concluded that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, but made clear that Trump associates were “receptive” to offers of assistance from the Kremlin. This is frightening. How and why a band of roughly 100 people firmly seated in Glavset some 7000 miles away were able to influence the presidential election of the most powerful and technologically advanced country in the world? The answer, simply put, is democracy.
‘Down with the American democracy. Skol!’
America’s susceptibility to cyber sabotage is deeply embedded in its identity as a democratic state which, by its very nature, relies on hinges and balances to limit the excessive concentration of power and slows down governmental decision-making. In contrast, authoritarian states — like Russia or China — are relatively less encumbered by the laws that their democratic counterparts are beholden to. Free flow of information is the trademark of democracy — it is crucial for informed public decision-making, but it also leaves the democratic societies vulnerable to cyber sabotage. In a country like the United States, the media enjoys significant freedom; journalists, experts and the public can openly question the government decisions and criticize the administration wherever they see fit. This freedom of opinion and information is why only two investigative journalists were able to bring down the 37th president of America — and why an obscure reporter could bluntly ask Trump: “…do you regret at all, all the lying you’ve done to the American people?”
Malicious elements can easily exploit the free flow of information in a democracy for propagating disinformation and swaying public opinion, which is partially why the U.S. is so rife in conspiracy theories (Pizzagate and QAnon were the two upshots of the Russian interference campaign). This is exactly what happened in 2016 — the Moscow-sponsored massive influence campaign hijacked the American democratic system through specifically targeted fraudulent advertisements and by leaking politically damaging information about the Democratic presidential nominee, not to mention the controversial outreach to the Trump campaign. In the months following the elections, Clinton trumped Trump in almost every poll and had an 85% chance of winning at one point. But as the election date neared and the Kremlin’s influence campaign gained momentum, Clinton’s popularity went in a downward spiral and America ended up with a bombastic crackpot as the president who can’t differentiate between England and Britain. Russia’s “cyber pearl harbour”, as some call it, was fought on three fronts: the hacking and leaking of Democratic documents… check; running a massive influence campaign on social media… check; and outreach to the Trump associates… somewhat vaguely, not check.
Glavset — the place where it all happened
The pliant and liberal nature of a democratic government dilutes its power between the administration, which slows down the decision-making process to a snail’s pace, barring the authorities from a quick, knee-jerk response. Freedom of information is a double-edged sword — on the one hand, it is crucial for informed public opinion; and on the other hand, it is a maneuverable instrument for anti-democracy actors. These loopholes, if one can call them that, leave democracy vulnerable to external influences. Pool’s Simumatics Corporation helped the Kennedy campaign in modelling voting behaviour and in forming policies congenial to the minorities, without any esoteric technical trickery. The technological advancements of the subsequent decades have granted us Artificial Intelligence and social media — alarmingly accurate and astoundingly far-reaching tools that can shape the broad public perspective and, if used nefariously, potentially cripple democracy. All in all, it seems that In the age of AI and algorithms, democracy seems to lose ground.
