‘Fake news’ could destroy Western society, State Department official warns

WASHINGTON - A senior State Department official has issued a harsh warning about the potential of "computer warfare" to destroy the Enlightenment that has governed Western society for more than two centuries. And he asked for an "Illustration 2.0", which brings back the ideals of the original Enlightenment - reason, civil discourse, humanism - into the digital sphere.

"We do not need to say it's Enlightenment 2.0," said Matt B. Chessen, Acting Councilor for Science and Technology to the Secretary of State. Established more than a decade ago, with publications in Baghdad and Kabul, Chessen is also a science fiction novelist with powerful ideas about the future of humanity and technology.

His comments were made during a briefing at Capitol Hill earlier this week by the Helsinki Commission, a bipartisan agency concerned with international security. The information session was titled "Lies, Robots and Social Networks: What is IT Propaganda and How to Defeat It?"

Chessen said that "the possibility of a post-truth world undermines in reality the enlightened ideals of a search for truth and reason". United, said Chessen. "They want to see this post-truth world, because in this world, one fact is what you can convince people."

It was not clear whether Chessen's comments suggested Foggy Bottom's renewed commitment to thwarting concerted misinformation campaigns by domestic extremists and foreign opponents from the United States, such as Russia and China. . Chessen did not respond to requests for clarification of his comments, but a State Department spokesman said "the department is concerned about threats to democracy, including state-sponsored threats of misinformation." and manipulated manipulation operations designed to undermine democratic institutions and processes. "

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a former Republican congressman from Kansas who supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign, did not show much concern about misinformation. As director of the CIA, he sometimes downplayed the importance of the information war in Russia in the 2016 elections.

Trump judged this possibility directly. And, sometimes, he appeared to defend a post-truth world like the one Chessen warned. In July, he told a veterans meeting that "what you see and what you read is not what happens, stay with us, do not believe the shit you see of these people, the false news ". Although the invocation of the "false day laborer" of the president refers to information about his administration, he considers that they are inaccurate or too critical, the way he has formulated his complaints against the media and the intensity of these complaints worries the guardians of democratic institutions. The president also supported conspiracy theories about Clinton and liberal financier George Soros. These tend to come out of the swamp of computer warfare.

Trump's personal attorney, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, has proposed what might well become the slogan of the afterlife: "The truth is not true". he said during an appearance in August in "Meet the Press"

The past few months have clearly shown that technology giants such as Google, Facebook and Twitter have allowed the spread of intentionally misleading news, which often serves as unintentional participants in the information war waged in the Western establishment.

But in an answer to a Yahoo News question, Chessen said it was too early to hold hearings similar to those that led the country's top leaders to smoke at Capitol Hill in 1994. Their deception finally led to the collapse of Big Tobacco. Chessen, who previously worked for the tech company Razorfish, said companies such as Facebook and Twitter did not have the "malicious" intent of nicotine providers.

Chessen suggested that the federal government may need to create a "new institution" that would treat social media companies as a public service with a "civic function". He also expressed admiration for the new General Data Protection Regulation for Europe, which he grants to Internet users. More control over your data. California has a similar law, but Silicon Valley has resisted pressure for more regulation.

In calling for a "national conversation" on technology issues, Chessen said "Congress may need to convene a commission on data privacy, information security and misinformation".

In addition to serving as a career diplomat, Chessen is the author of the science-fiction novel "Broad Horizons", described on Amazon as "a satirical and futuristic novel about cyberpunk", which "combines self-reproducing nanites. with a temporary acceleration of creation ". An intelligence in nanotechnology, with devastating effects ".

On his website, Chessen also writes about the future of technology. In an article, he predicts that artificial intelligence "will facilitate the creation of artificial realities - personalized virtual universes - so indistinguishable from reality, that most humans will choose to spend their lives in these virtual worlds rather than in the world. real, people will not reproduce, humanity will die.

The other members of the Chessen panel agreed that the notion of the unregulated Internet was coming to an end. "We thought this technology was pro-democracy itself," said Karen Kornbluh, economic development officer with the Obama administration.

Nina Jankowicz, an expert on the information war in Russia at the Wilson Center, supported this sentiment. "The self-regulation of social networks," he said, "has been a failure."