WaPo | The United States and its allies are under
attack. The cyberwar we’ve feared for a generation is well underway, and
we are losing. This is the forest, and the stuff about Russian election meddling, contacts with the Trump campaign, phony Twitter accounts, fake news on Facebook — those things are trees.
We’ve
been worried about a massive frontal assault, a work of Internet
sabotage that would shut down commerce or choke off the power grid. And
with good reason. The recent exploratory raid by Russian hackers on American nuclear facilities reminds us that such threats are real.
But
we failed to prepare for an attack of great subtlety and strategic
nuance. Enemies of the West have hacked our cultural advantages, turning
the very things that have made us strong — technological leadership,
free speech, the market economy and multi-party government — against us.
The attack is ongoing.
With each passing week, we learn more. Russia
and its sympathizers have cranked up the volume on existing political
and cultural divisions in the West, like some psychic version of the Stuxnet hack
that caused Iran’s nuclear centrifuges to spin so fast they tore
themselves to pieces. They’ve exploited the cutting-edge algorithms of
Facebook and Google to feed misinformation to Americans most likely to
believe and spread it. They have targeted online ads designed to
intensify our hottest culture wars: abortion, guns, sexuality, race.
They have partnered with WikiLeaks, the supposed paragon of free speech,
to insert propaganda into influential Twitter accounts — including
@realDonaldTrump.
They have created thousands of phony online identities
to add heat to political fever swamps.
The genius of this cyberwar is that unwitting Westerners do most of the work.
Our eagerness to believe the worst about our political opponents makes
us easy marks for fake or distorted “news” from anti-American troll
farms. Our media — talk radio, cable news, every variety of digital
communication — seek to cull us into like-minded echo chambers. The West
has monetized polarization; our enemies have, in turn, weaponized it.
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