Did the Russian-affiliated groups that interfered with the 2016 U.S. presidential election want to be caught?

“There’s a reason why they paid for Facebook ads in rubles,” Nathaniel Persily, who is a senior fellow at FSI and co-director of the Cyber Policy Center, told FSI Director Michael McFaul on the World Class podcast. “They wanted to be open and notorious.”

Since the election, Americans have become more suspicious of fake news, but they have also become suspicious of real news and journalists in general. Another problem with the Russians’ success in influencing the 2016 election, said Persily, is that Americans will automatically assume that the Russians will do the same thing during the 2020 race.

“Everyone is going to be looking for nefarious influences and shouting them from the rooftops, and that actually serves the [bad actors’] purposes just as much,” Persily said. “Many of the attempts in 2016 were about fostering division and doubt, and I think there’s a lot of appetite for doubt right now in America.”

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Since 2016, Facebook, Twitter and Google have made some important changes to the way they handle advertising, including adding a requirement that all candidate ads and other ads of “national legislative importance” be identified as advertisements on users’ feeds.

But there are no standardized rules or regulations that dictate how tech companies should handle advertisements or posts that contain disinformation, Persily said, and because of this, it is up to those respective companies to make those decisions themselves  — and they aren’t always in agreement. For example, when a video of Nancy Pelosi that was slowed down to make her seem drunk was posted in late May on YouTube and Facebook, YouTube took the video down, but Facebook decided to leave it up.

“The standards that are going to be developed in test cases like these — under conditions which are not as politically incendiary as an election — are going to be the ones that will be rolled out and applied in elections in the U.S. and around the world,” Persily said.

When it comes to election security, the 2020 presidential race will be the next big test for the U.S. government and private-sector companies. But other countries should also be on the lookout for activity from foreign agents and actors in their elections.

“The 2016 election was not just an event, it was a playbook that was written by the Russians,” warned Persily. “That playbook is usable for future elections in the United States as well as around the world, whether it’s between India and Pakistan or China and Taiwan.”

Cyber Initiative grantees and researchers in the news, February 2019

Here is a selection of Cyber Initiative grantee and researcher publications and citations for February 2019:

1-30-2019:  Larry Diamond “Chinese Influence, American Interests” in The Diplomat. 

1-30-19:  Michelle Mello “Stanford’s Michelle Mello on Latest Measles Outbreak” in SLS Blogs.  

1/31/19:  Matthew Gentzkow “How Quitting Facebook Could Change Your Life” in Fortune.  

1/30/29:  Matthew Gentzkow “This is Your Brain Off Facebook” in Health.   

2/3/19:  Herb Lin “Atomic Scientists: Hunanity flirting with annhilation” in Tribune.   

2/4/19:  Matthew Gentzkow “Quitting Facebook makes people happier, study finds” in Irish Examiner.   

2/6/19:  Herb Lin “Add cybersecurity to Doomsday Clock concerns, says Bulletin of Atomic Scientists” in CSO.  

2/6/19:  Herb Lin “Add cybersecurity to Doomsday Clock concerns, says Bulletin of Atomic Scientists” in CIO.  

2/8/19:  Elaine Treharne “Statement on the Hoover Institution” in The Stanford Daily.  

2/13/19:  Michelle Mello “Stanford’s Michael Wald on Vaccinations, Children’s Rights, and the Law” in The Stanford Report.  

2/15/19:  Fei-Fei Li and Elaine Treharne “Human-centered Artificial Intelligence Initiative talks AI, humanities and the arts” in The Stanford Daily.  

2/19/19:  Fei-Fei Li “5 Women advancing AI industry research” in Tech Talks.  

2/19/19:  Fei-Fei Li “10 AI influencers you should be following on Twitter” in Siliconrepublic.com.  

2/22/19 Larry Diamond “Utah Against Health Insurance” in New York Times.  

2/23/19 Sharad Goel “Algorithms Can Decide Pre-Trial Jail” in urbanmilwaukee.  

2/25/19:  Dan Boneh “Zether developers from Stanford aim to add new layer of privacy to Ethereum” in Dapp Life.  

2/26/19:  Susan Athey “Ripple Lead on Questions – Student Seeks Clarification for Promoting XRP Over Bitcoin in Stanford University" in CoinGape.  

2/26/19:  Larry Diamond “George Pyle: Utah’s Medicaid reversal makes us a fool coast-to-coast” in Salt Lake Tribune.  

2/27/19:  Arnold Milstein “AI will not solve health care challenges now, but there are innovative alternatives, researcher writes” in Scope.

2/28/19:  Dan Boneh “New Privacy Protocol Zether Can Conceal Ethereum Transactions” in Blockonomi.  

2/28/19:  Jure Leskovec “Species evolve ways to back up life's machinery” in Phys.org.  

2/28/19: Matthew Gentzkow “What happens when you get off Facebook for four weeks? Stanford researchers found out” in Recode.  

Midterm elections pose an opportunity for hackers interested in disrupting the democratic process

Voter registration systems provide an additional target for hackers intending to disrupt the US midterm elections; if voting machines themselves are too disperse or too obvious a target, removing voters from the rolls could have a similar effect. in Esquire, Jack Holmes explains that election security experts consider this one of many nightmare scenarios facing the American voting public—and thus, American democracy itself—on the eve of the 2018 midterm elections. (Allison Berke, Executive Director of the Stanford Cyber Initiative, quoted.)

Conversational software programs might provide patients a less risky environment for discussing mental health, but they come with some risks to privacy or accuracy. Stanford scholars discuss the pros and cons of this trend.

Interacting with a machine may seem like a strange and impersonal way to seek mental health care, but advances in technology and artificial intelligence are making that type of engagement more and more a reality. Online sites such as 7 Cups of Tea and Crisis Text Line are providing counseling services via web and text, but this style of treatment has not been widely utilized by hospitals and mental health facilities.

Stanford News Service interviewed Miner, Milstein and Hancock about this trend.

Read more: https://news.stanford.edu/2017/09/25/scholars-discuss-mental-health-technology/

The Stanford Applied Cyber Team took 1st place in the Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition (CPTC) Western Regionals.