Laura Rosenberger, director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy and a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, clearly remembers the day she sat in a classroom in Pennsylvania State University's Schreyer Honors College when she heard rumors about a plane hitting the World Trade Center. She was confused, but sat through the class, which had already started.1

Forty-five minutes later, Rosenberger walked out of class and to a nearby building where her classmates were crowded around several television sets. She watched the same video feed replaying planes slamming into the towers and people fleeing the streets of Lower Manhattan. Then the footage flipped to show the Pentagon burning. She saw the panicked faces of anchors whose broadcasts were unscripted, and saw the way they struggled to find the words to describe what was happening. Her classmates also lost their language. Many of them were sobbing.

During the hours that passed, Rosenberger's classmates frantically called family members who may have been on the scene of the World Trade Center attack. Several professors held class early so the students could build community. They were in shock. It was hard to wrap their heads around what had happened. They didn't have any real sense of how many people were dead. They didn't know what might follow the attacks. Like many Americans, the trajectory of the world had shifted.

In the clarity of the next morning, Rosenberger, who had always had a deep interest in domestic and foreign policy but had been struggling to pick a career path, decided what she was going to do with the rest of her life.

“I woke up the morning of September 12, and I was like, ‘Well, that decision's made.’ I need to do everything possible to ensure that that never happens again,” she said.2

Rosenberger went to graduate school at the American School of International Studies, and later entered the State Department, where she worked for eleven years. She didn't always work specifically on counterterrorism, but instead worked on a broad scale for “our nation's security and for the American people, doing everything we could to make our lives secure and…sow greater prosperity and stability and security around the world, which I believe makes us safer.”³

This included working for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign as her foreign policy advisor.

Today, Rosenberger is a studious thirty-seven-year-old woman who is often recognized by her gold-rimmed glasses and thick black hair, and by the pride she takes in being a Yinzer (someone from Pittsburgh) and her love of the Steelers. Her efforts to defend the country have transcended party lines. She runs the Alliance for Securing Democracy with partner Jamie Fly. It is a bipartisan (Rosenberger is a staunch Democrat, while Fly is a staunch Republican), transatlantic organization devoted to interpreting the impact of Russian-led interference on the 2016 election and how to protect the country from future invasions. Like Michael Morell, the former acting director of the CIA, she believes it is akin to what happened on 9/11.

When I asked her how she became involved in the fight against Russian cyber spies, she explained how the attacks on the Democratic National Committee's (DNC) computer system and on democracy overall, while she was advising Clinton, resonated for her because it felt just like 9/11.⁴

No one died in this attack, but I believe that this is existential. I believe that our democracy is the core of our entire being as a country. This is essentially a war without firing a shot. This is an adversary that has attempted to basically implant a cancerous tumor inside of our country and is basically helping it metastasize to kill the body that way.

And that's how I see it, to use a clichéd metaphor. But that's why I'm doing this. This is about our democracy. This is about the centrality of our democracy to our national security. I'm going to do everything possible that I can to preserve it.

I asked her how she gets people to understand the scope of this threat.

Rosenberger: I think it's hard, and that's one of the reasons why it's been difficult in general, I think, to get people really rallying to this challenge. I mean, again, to use the 9/11 comparison, after 9/11, everybody came together. People realized the scale of the problem.

Pegues: Do you think it was because that was easier for us to see?

Rosenberger: Exactly. Yes. I think that's exactly right. This is a much more insidious thing. I mean again, we go back to the cancer inside the body. Sometimes you don't see it till it's too late. It's hard to detect. Even once you know that the tumor's there, you might not feel it. You might feel just fine….

And it's hard to know that it's there. I think that's part of it. I think part of it is that democracy itself is hard to see. I mean, it's an invisible good from which we all benefit on a daily basis. But it's also therefore very easy to take for granted. It's one of those things that we just know so well, and it's been so long since it's ever been challenged that we don't necessarily feel the threat to it in a sort of visceral way.

The discussion then turned to the Alliance for Securing Democracy and the reason why the team is bipartisan.

Rosenberger: I believe it's really strategically important that we respond to this challenge in a unified, bipartisan, transatlantic way. But let's just start with the bipartisan piece. You know, part of Russia's strategy really is sowing and exploiting divisions in societies….

And so much of what we see in Russian information operations and some of their other tactics really has nothing to do with Russia. I think this is a bit of a misconception; people think that when we talk about Russian information operations we're talking about propaganda about Russia. And most of what we're actually talking about has nothing to do with Russia….

It [involves] operations or attempts to turn Americans or Europeans against one another. And part of the response to that has to be refusing to be divided. And that's why what we're doing at the Alliance for Securing Democracy is bipartisan in its very nature.

Rosenberger explains how in the past she never would have dreamed she would be working together so closely with Jamie Fly, who was Marco Rubio's foreign policy advisor and who served in the George W. Bush administration.

Rosenberger: But both of us have served in national security in our government and we believe deeply in the bipartisan nature of national security. We believe that our democracy is central to our national security interests. And, for me personally, the whole reason I get to disagree with people on the other side of the aisle is that we have a functioning democracy. If we no longer have a functioning democracy, our ability to disagree with each other disappears. So, I would rather preserve the framework and the ability for us to have these debates in the first place.

Pegues: I talked to someone who worked for the Russian-backed media organization Sputnik. He said, “Putin is using our First Amendment against us.”5 Do you agree with that?

Rosenberger: He's certainly trying to. One of the most insidious parts of this tool kit is that, in many ways, it's trying to use and pervert our free and open society, and in particular turn our media environment against us. So, if you think about information operations, we have unfettered free speech, which is one of our greatest strengths in this country. One of the main tools in the Alliance for Securing Democracy to protect our access to and understanding of media is a web dashboard called Hamilton 68.

Hamilton 68 tracks six hundred monitored Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations. These are accounts that include bots and humans and are run by troll factories in Russia and elsewhere, along with sites that clearly state they are affiliated with the Russian government. They also include accounts by the posers, a network of people who aren't necessarily reporting to the Kremlin but jump on the pro-Russian/anti-American bandwagon and join forces. They may come from Russia or anywhere in the world. These are what Putin has referred to as “Patriotic hackers.”6

Hamilton 68 also tracks people who may be using a wide variety of tools, including information operations, cyberattacks, and financial influence, often through proxy networks. Translation: they hide well and aren't necessarily easy to track. Hamilton 68 helps citizens who tend to get their information from the web (what Laura refers to as the flattening of the media landscape).

Rosenberger: As I'm sure you know, faith in media institutions is really low. People don't necessarily believe as they used to in the role of journalists and editors in vetting sources, in verifying the credibility of information….

A lot of Americans now think that they can judge for themselves. The challenge is that when you have an adversary that is deliberately trying to mislead people, it really becomes a challenge to achieve media literacy and critically evaluate the information that people are receiving. We are trying to think about ways that we can respond to this challenge, to insure that people have as much information as possible about the content they are receiving so that they can evaluate it in the best possible way.

DIVIDED WE FALL: HOW RUSSIAN HACKERS DOCKED THEIR SHIP IN VIRGINIA

Often, journalists do the hard work for the hackers who are surfing on the media super wave. Our country's crisis becomes their opportunity. Rosenberger explains how this happens.

On August 11, 2017, the Unite the Right Rally occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia, during which Klansmen, neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, white nationalists, and basically any other garden-variety white supremacist held banners with racist and anti-Semitic words and symbols on them. They carried rifles.7

The expressed purpose of the rally was to oppose the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue from Emancipation Park, and came on the heels of the removal of Confederate flags and statues throughout the country. It was billed as a peaceful event until the protestors clashed with counterprotestors. In the middle of the chaos James A. Fields Jr. drove his 2010 Dodge Challenger headlong into a crowd of counterprotestors, killing thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring thirty-five other people. Skin and blood were found on the front of the vehicle. A state of emergency was declared in Charlottesville. Fields, who has in the past expressed pro-Nazi racist beliefs, was tried for murder.⁸

Things went from bad to worse when President Trump failed to explicitly denounce white nationalists, and later made a statement about “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides,” and referred to “very fine people on both sides.” Many people believed that in doing so Trump had lit a match on the gasoline, and had given white supremacists license to commit acts of violence in the future.⁹

THE ANTIFA APOCALYPSE AND THE RUSSIAN OBJECTIVE: HOW DO RUMORS GET STARTED?

The uncertainty about the country's future lingered. Rumors flew that members of Antifa (short for anti-fascist), a group of Far Left–leaning radicals donning black costumes and prone toward counterviolence, who were at the Charlottesville rally, would commit various atrocities in opposition to Trump and Fields.¹⁰

Antifa really refers to a movement and not a group. It originated in Germany and refers to a group of Nazi resisters who later morphed into formal political organizations. There are individuals in the United States who refer to themselves as Antifa and believe in the “eye for an eye” mentality. There are also individuals who consider themselves Antifa who do not believe in violence. There are far more garden-variety survivalists who don't identify with Antifa, and many believe there will come a day when the government will fall and people will take up arms in a revolutionary manner. Antifa and the survivalists are a small subgroup within the overall pool of people whose politics veer more toward the Left.

Those rumors about Antifa died off and surfaced again or died off and morphed until late October when rumors appeared on social media sites such as Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, and a few right-wing news sites like Fox News that it was plotting to launch a civil war on November 4. The imaginary revolution was reported to include house raids, weapons seizures, and violence against random Trump supporters, Republicans, and conservatives.11

Although a few demonstrations did occur on November 4, 2017, they were relatively small in scale and little violence occurred.

Rosenberger explains how these false rumors may have been exploited, if not started, by hackers coming from Russia or supporting Putin's goals.

One recent example that we saw occurred after Charlottesville. It took the networks a couple of days to figure out how to handle that event. But bearing in mind what I said earlier that so much of what the Russian strategy is trying to do is to exploit divisions in American society.

They are going to be pretty keen to take advantage of something like Charlottesville. They took a couple [of] days to kind of figure it out due to the scale of the event. Obviously, the terrorist attack that killed Heather Heyer was not expected.¹²

Rosenberger explained how RT (formerly Russia Today), the Moscow-based, Russian-government-sponsored news channel, started a tweet that led to a story calling for a petition to classify Antifa as a terrorist organization. It followed on the heels of the protest.

And very quickly thereafter, we saw these covert networks, the six hundred monitored accounts, begin to promote that content. That RT story got picked up and became one of the big trending stories that they were promoting. We then saw that RT stopped actually promoting it themselves, but for days thereafter we could still see it on the covert networks—and we still see it occasionally—around different protests. They keep returning to the theme of Antifa as a terrorist organization….

We saw other stories on other websites and other domains that showed up in the networks on the dashboard start to push a similar story. I think that is an interesting example of where we actually saw some overtly promoted content jump to the covert networks.13

Rosenberger went on to explain why they were drawn to that particular aspect of the story.

My sense is that they were basically trying to do a couple of things. I'm just speculating here, but it would fortify the sort of “both sides” response that we saw from Trump by discrediting Antifa as a terrorist organization. Number two is the idea of exploiting divisions and fanning the flames of extremism. Something that the Russians see as in their interest. By trying to make Antifa out to be extreme, they were throwing support to the neo-Nazi groups without actually having to overtly support them….

That would put Russia in an uncomfortable place if they were overtly supporting the neo-Nazis. So, instead of supporting them, they are going to attack the other side. We saw that happening there.¹⁴

In my own research I have seen how sometimes the right-wing or alt-right publications pick up some of these stories, and even Fox News picks up some of them. I asked Rosenberger if these trolls and bots are connected to the Russian government and if they are trying to reach Far Right news outlets.

I think they certainly found an ecosystem in the alt-right media that is favorable to their messaging and that of some other groups. We haven't really written on it ourselves, but a number of other analysts have done some really good pieces looking at the nexus between those two media environments. You mention talking to a Sputnik reporter. I don't know who it is, but if it's who I think it is, this reporter, or former reporter, has also spoken a good bit about that relationship. I think it is certainly a media environment that's favorable. That being said, the Kremlin believes in equal opportunity: this is not ideological for them. They are just trying to sow chaos, weaken us, and exploit divisions. They have made attempts on the Left as well. There are a number of reasons why they have been less successful. And again, I haven't seen any sort of really rigorous analysis of this, but some of the anecdotal points that I have heard commonly made is that, in general, on the Right, and on the alt-right in particular, you have a much more consolidated media environment with Breitbart and a couple of others….

But really Breitbart is where most people go for their sort of news. On the Left you have a much more fragmented media environment. People don't all go to the same place. That makes it harder in an information operation environment to really get a message driven in a concerted way because you just have too many different places to go for news. That's one example given. The other thing I would say in general is that if we take a step back to look at the transatlantic landscape on this, [we'll see] that similar things are happening in Europe. Russia has got some significant ties with the Far Right. I think some of that is just simply Russian opportunism. So much of what they do is taking advantage of existing vulnerabilities and trends….

Given that we have a rise in right-wing populism happening across Europe and the United States that is not necessarily caused by Russia, they certainly sought to jump on it and take advantage of it.15

IT'S NOT ALL ABOUT US: AMERICAN DEMOCRACY'S PLACE IN THE RUSSIAN WORLD ORDER

Rosenberger believes that a large percentage of the American population has no idea what really happened during the 2016 presidential election. However, even those who do know have trouble wrapping their heads around it. As when the Twin Towers fell, we have no context for it. Americans haven't really been tracking Russia's interference in democracies throughout Europe for the past decade or so.

Well, I think if we look at the polling, we see continued division among Americans. One of the things that is really concerning to me is that we continue to have a partisan divide about Russia in general and our understanding of Russia's operations that were conducted in the 2016 election….

In many cases, people may have seen coverage of Russia's activities in Ukraine. They see warfare primarily: the illegal annexation of Crimea or the Russian intervention in Eastern Ukraine. But Russians using information operations, cyberattacks, maligned financial influence, support for extremist parties, and economic coercion? That's, well, foreign to Americans. It doesn't feel real, like it fell from the sky. I think part of what we are interested in is being able to explain to people that this is in fact part of a strategy that Russia has been executing for over a decade and, in many ways, is a resurrection of the old Soviet-era playbook but using new tools and technologies.