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bostonreview.net/war-security/h… The Boston Review has posted a piece by @schneierblog and I on what we're calling Democracy's Dilemma as the kickoff for a seminar. Here are the basic ideas.
2. A lot of the despair that we see about democratic institutions and information attacks is thinly sourced. There are new problems - but we don't yet have a good idea of how deep they go. That is because we don't understand the relationship between information and democracy.
3. We need a basic account of how information and democracy are related to each other. We haven't got one, because nearly everyone has tended to assume that open information flows lead to better democracy, and left it at that. Now we know it's more complicated.
4. Some information attacks look to flood debate with bogus content (as per @mollyeroberts work. We can't just assume that democracy has self-correcting mechanisms - instead we need to start to think systematically about how democracy uses information, where agreement needed etc.
5. So perhaps we can learn from research on authoritarian states - where there has been a lot of work on informational vulnerabilities. Hence "Democracy's Dilemma" - a play on the notion of the Dictator's Dilemma, the informational tradeoffs faced by authoritarian regimes.
6. Democratic regimes face informational trade-offs too. Democracies work because they can harness arguments between people with different wants and perspectives, and use these arguments to discover good solutions.
7. Democracies - in our argument - work well when they dynamically turn argument and competition into a source of stability. They break down when argument is suppressed (the Orban equilibrium), or when disagreement gets to point where politics completely flies off the rails.
8. Information attacks that can move democracy significantly in one or the other direction are consequential. There may be self-equilibriating mechanisms that push democracy back towards stability, even after such attacks - but we need to figure out what they are.
9. One implication of this is that (as per an aside to @alexstamos a couple of days ago), what we really need to worry about are the interaction effects between information attacks and the usual democratic infighting. When attacks succeed in turning this infighting into e.g.
10. mutually reinforcing beliefs on both sides that the other side didn't win fairly, or is cheating, or whatever (so we might as well cheat too), then bad stuff can begin to happen. Information attacks that undermine democratic beliefs can undermine democracy.
11. Caveats apply. Bruce and I have been thinking a lot about these issues. But obviously we may be wrong. We are trying to get debate pointed in what we think is a more useful direction, and are hoping for pushback, disagreement and ideas we couldn't come up with ourselves.
12. What may be most useful is our underlying approach. We are saying that we need to think about democracy as an information system in more or less the same way that infosec people think about a computer system they are trying to protect.
13. That means that we need to map out the critical information processes of democracy, and what they are supposed to do. We need to then start thinking through the tradeoffs between making the system usable and making the system secure.
14. The latter involving the application of ideas about attack surfaces, threat models etc to a bundle of social processes that are different in very important ways to what infosec people usually think through in their day jobs (e.g. - the vulnerabilities of shared beliefs).
15. Doing this right isn't just going to need security people like Bruce and political scientists like myself. It's going to need sociologists, statisticians, data scientists, communications people, philosophers, political theorists, lawyers and other specialists too.
16. Getting these people talking to each other - and figuring out the rudiments of common concepts that they can use to frame problems in a generally useful way - is going to be hard, but is urgently necessary. Finis.
