The Digital Maginot Line

Everyone is focusing on the Maginot Line metaphor, and possible historical inaccuracies in what the author wrote. However, the important word from the title is not "Maginot", it's "Digital".

In reading the author's assessments of a wide range of topics, including free speech, digital militarization, and more, I found that there was actually quite a lot of valuable takeaways from their perspective, even for the reader that doesn't agree with 100% of the content.

However, if you are finding yourself roadblocked by the comparison to the Maginot Line, I encourage you to disregard this portion of the text and skip past it; the loss of the metaphor is not fatal to the rest of the content.

Key pull quote rather than arguing over the historical Maginot line:

"This particular manifestation of ongoing conflict was something the social networks didn’t expect. Cyberwar, most people thought, would be fought over infrastructure — armies of state-sponsored hackers and the occasional international crime syndicate infiltrating networks and exfiltrating secrets, or taking over critical systems. That’s what governments prepared and hired for; it’s what defense and intelligence agencies got good at. It’s what CSOs built their teams to handle."

The thing that worries me even more is that more and more diverse types of content will be susceptible to algorithmic amplification in more and more sophisticated ways. Right now it's still relatively easy to tell what is a bot and what isn't because it's hard to generate credible text and video (and many other kinds of) content, but that's rapidly changing. It's a game of cat and mouse clicks.

This pervades every single sphere of life. Soon, it will become more and more difficult to distinguish the truthfulness of digital representations. In Baudrillard's words, I suspect that big data is becoming hyperreal. It is not that data is misrepresenting reality, but that it is actively influencing it, changing it to fit its representations.

Furthermore (and somewhat orthogonal), distinguishing fake content is getting harder because you don't even necessarily need bots (technological capital). If I started a restaurant and I wanted to acquire the maximal amount of attention and I had no moral qualms, I could hire 10,000 MTurks (or MTurk-equivalents) to write reviews for me on Yelp, and it will drive a positive feedback loop of legitimate good reviews. (This is exactly what's happening with Amazon rankings and reviews.) Amplification isn't just algorithmic, it can be produced by the application of many different kinds of capital.

The following is a paraphrase from a Quora answer. Sadly, the source has since left Quora and I've been unable to locate it. Here's what I have from memory.

French military planners did not believe that the Ardennes was impenetrable. Tanks were used in WW1 and they were considered a grave threat, the whole point of the Line was to defend against a mechanized assault force. The battle plans they drew up had a variation extending the Line to cover the forest. It was dropped when a deal was reached with Belgium so that they could cover that part of the defense. Years later the deal was forgotten and so the forest wasn't defended.

A French division was stationed at the forest but it was recalled for cost concerns. It wasn't a failure of military planning, it was a failure of the government to follow through.

The problem with fighting disinformation is that it requires an entity that has the authority to stamp something as true or untrue. This entity will be made of humans and therefore susceptible to disinformation in the same way as the people it is intended to protect and also prone to abuse of its power. If it's between the order of one centralized authority determining truth (China) and the chaos of thousands of competing entities, I'll take the chaos.

> If combatants need to quickly spin up a digital mass movement, well-placed personas can rile up a sympathetic subreddit or Facebook Group populated by real people, hijacking a community in the way that parasites mobilize zombie armies.

Why do we and the author seem to keep dancing around the fact that Facebook must be refusing to garbage collect bogus nodes on their own social network?

The company presumably still has access to its own social graph, to reams of data from site/app/like button/audio/webcam/key&mouse events, and whatever else it purchases from third parties. How in the world can a troll farm employee proxied through a hacked router in Branson evade detection? An employee who isn't cross-referenced in photographs, videos, phone calls, PMs, contacts, browsing patterns, games, purchase histories, smart tv ad beacons, and whatever else Facebook sniffs up?

In light of that, the article seems like a distraction. While I don't know how to get social media companies to garbage-collect their graphs I know if they did it would diminish the fragility of the system. If that raises the cost of subsequent information attacks such that they must happen in a different domain that the social graph, that's not a Maginot Line. It's an improvement.

Edit: same logic applies to the input coming in from ads. Facebook presumably has just as rich data on the organizations buying them as it does on its userbase. Prune the fronts and information attacks move again to a different domain.

People are generally gullible. Most people fear originality, strive to maintain commitment, and conform to a group narrative. These are all irrational noncognitive behaviors strongly aligned to perceptions of security. It’s hard to fix stupid.

Before people obtained most of their news from social media they were getting it from pseudo journalism comedy television. The primary motivation of the supplier then was advertising revenue just as it is of social media now.

The article first says that "Academic leaders and technologists wonder if faster fact checking might solve the problem", implying that false information is not the problem, and then "the human mind is the territory" - if you're fighting over peoples' minds, and using factually true information, then what is the problem? That sounds like logical persuasion to me.

(obviously, I'm missing some nuance - I was hoping that a more intelligent HN denizen would be kind enough to point it out to me)

> Our most technically-competent agencies are prevented from finding and countering influence operations because of the concern that they might inadvertently engage with real U.S. citizens as they target Russia’s digital illegals and ISIS’ recruiters.

The author seems to fully have bought into the anti-Trump narrative that the only problem about the bots is that they were /Russian/ bots, and things would turn out all right if only the US developed a reliable mechanism to keep them foreigners (Russian bots, ISIS recruiters...) out of its internet; I'm not sure if the usage of the term "digital illegals" here is to be taken as a sign of self-awareness just how much this mentality mirrors "build the wall" and Brexit and what-not.

Is there any reason to assume that there isn't plenty of potential and will within the borders of the US to attack its society's ability to "operate with a shared epistemology"? I remember debates between internet creationists and evolutionists back in the '90s, and they looked exactly the same as red-blue debates look nowadays: every side had access to its own endless stream of well-written sources constituting a backdrop against which their own worldview was obviously true and the opposition's worldview was obviously false, and each side treated constructing another such prop that would contribute to the picture that their interpretation is the only reasonable one as a pro-social act regardless of how unsound or badly argued it was. This is the era for which the phrase that "arguments are soldiers" was quipped. I take it nobody contends that PZ Myers or Ken Ham were Russian plants, but all the qualities of the present situation were already there back when they were the biggest fish of memetic warfare. And this was made possible just by academics with a lot of time vs. small-time evangelical tax evasion bucks; we still only have a sketchy understanding of how much the public epistemology was polluted by American corporate interests.

There's some interesting analysis in here but overall, I think it's focused on the wrong points. I don't want to ignore the danger posed by propaganda committees like those described in the article, but the author’s dismissal of bots/automation in this space as passé seems totally wrong. She writes: "bots are of increasingly minimal value...". Sure, in 2018, this is true for simple bots, but I doubt bots have said their final word. AI could power bots that are massively more sophisticated than their cousins that spam retweets, not to mention better at slipping through filters designed to catch them. Such next-gen bots might be able to read an article or view an image, decide what it’s about, formulate an "opinion" on it, then generate some sort of response - maybe a comment that's passable for (at least Internet-level) real human discourse.

Imagine such a bot on reddit, for instance. Imagine it's the stereotypical Russian bot, trolling the internet to sow discontent in the West. It might upvote anything about racial strife or immigration issues. It might show up in the comments to support Euro-skeptic candidates in the EU. It would pipe up about the Deep State in the US. Now imagine there's hundreds of thousands of similar bots, across a variety of sites. They would be able to control online discourse to a huge extent and dictate the media/opinion diet of millions of people. An army of these bots would be more powerful than any current propaganda arms, even those with State-level support.

Nothing new here. Ideologies are mind viruses that infect their hosts and their goal has ever been to build an organization to perpetuate themselves and fight off any competing ideologies that pose a threat. Humans are expendable.

What I want to see is a systematic epidemeological study of ideologies. Including Liberal Democracy.

I see at least one market opportunity here: the social graph has, presently, assigned stronger weight to authenticatable news sources. Perhaps those news sources should start authenticated their sources? Not the HUMINT stuff, but video frames and audio segments should be cryptographically signed by the device that produced them, so you can match the camera footage to the camera, it's geolocation, etc.

> Our most technically-competent agencies are prevented from finding and countering influence operations because of the concern that they might inadvertently engage with real U.S. citizens as they target Russia’s digital illegals and ISIS’ recruiters.

JFC. They want more unchecked state surveillance of its own citizens?

Everything would have played out exactly the same even with no Russian interference. There are some big value clashes going on in America, and since there is no established way to make is-ought leaps, facts are not of critical importance in resolving these. Not that reality favors either side anyway.

> Information war combatants have certainly pursued regime change: there is reasonable suspicion that they succeeded in a few cases

I disagree with those ideas. Until now they look like made-up excuses for problems that have local origin, not external origin.

By claiming that these problems are external we do not only create a division and misunderstanding in the local politics.

We also create a non-existing virtual enemy that will cost a lot of resources. And this might be the actual goal of this article: to get military funding for these projects.

On the other hand there are companies and political organisations directly working to promote a certain idea, and to attack opposing ideas. This is independent of origin of country. These groups can be easily identified as they try to even forbid those ideas, and avoid reasonable public discussions. Discussions that can actually settle the disputes or even give better understanding of the underlying problems.

Certain big companies do not want that. Because their funding and income are directly related to how much products or shit they can sell the public. Criticism of those organisations is usually stopped by buying out media, even science media. And by paying expert to come up with certain conclusions.

The political organisations, or even political agencies try to implement a certain policy. Those are actually two different groups, but the agencies often like to support certain political organisation. They want to create an "enemy" from everyone that does not support their political idea. This does not matter on what side of politics you are. From: "They are gonna take our guns and freedom" to "all white men are racists".

The general idea is to create an enemy based on fear. The article also does it a bit similar. It is something that I rather step away from, because it does not really identify the problem.

The political groups that create "enemies" to promote certain ideas, just need to talk with each other. Putting internet barriers between them does not help. Both sides are humans. Opposing people talking with each other, in a friendly way, can even create friendships.

Then we have the last group. Agencies that want to support certain political groups to push certain political policies. There are a lot of them, even within a country. The oil-companies want to downplay climate problems. The military wants to push for more wars, maybe for strategic reasons. The CIA wants to push for regime changes, maybe to install their puppet. The Israelis want to stop discussions about Palestine. The Russians want to keep Crimea. But there are much more agencies. Even Billionaires that do their own little policies, like Soros publicly sponsoring immigration.

Each of these agencies have their own goals, and we like to defend against them. Is each agency really working for our interest or for their own? In a democracy we like to choose and have full information.

So the problem is not separated by state. Blockage of information will even prevent us from seeing what is really going on. It will even allow for increased corruption.

If you look what is really going into the problems that are reported, it is unfair politics, and the lack of good unbiased information.

Mh, war needs big resources, especially if parties involved want to win against big enemies and they have to fight for long time. In other words I do not think "terrorist"&c exists on their own. Sure lone wolves can do act autonomously without organizations but actual "info war" and "physical war" are backed by someone with big money and power.

This uses a very common, very oft quoted, but also very wrong myth about why the Maginot line was created and what its purpose was.

Its purpose was not to stop a German attack head on, it was not to defend the entire course of territory that needed to be defended. It was instead designed so that the numerically inferior French army could free up as many troops as possible to meet the expected German invasion in the north. There is a reason all of the best French and British troops were positioned to meet the expected German invasion through Belgium and not anywhere near the Maginot Line.

When compared to its actual purpose the Maginot Line performed perfectly well. The Germans did not try and attack it, they instead attacked to the north, just not quite as "north" as the Allies hoped.

Wait a minute—-missing the overall point in order to pedantically nit-pick and argue over small details is how things work around here! :-)

The Maginot line was never intended to be impenetrable. Its purpose was to slow the Germans down if they decided to attack along the French/German border, and to force them to go through Belgium again like they did in WW1.