“I haven’t got any particular piece of intelligence that says that somebody is going to target the European parliamentary election next spring (...) but, if you look at the track record, you have to say that there is a chance (...), and I think that we won’t be doing our due diligence if we don’t work hard to make sure that we are as prepared as we can be against that contingency”. It was with these words that European Commissioner for Security Julian King opened the high level conference on election security in Europe, in Brussels on Monday 15 October.
The aim of the conference, which is to continue on Tuesday, is to bring the parties concerned together to discuss concrete solutions.
Action must be taken on three fronts, King says: building cyber resilience, preventing risks of manipulation during elections, and protecting personal data. For this, he called for cooperation between the national authorities, the private sector and civil society. He also called on co-legislators to adopt the measures presented by the Commission in its “elections” package as soon as possible (see EUROPE 12094).
This call for cooperation was reiterated by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Co-Chair of the Transatlantic Commission on Election Integrity and former NATO Secretary General, who called for countries to pull together to find concrete solutions. He also said one should not focus on the past but rather concentrate on the future.
“Nations whose leaders pledge to respond with fire and fury to military attacks yet are muted when their own citizens’ right to choose their representatives is under assault. (...) We must defend our democracy as robustly as we would defend our borders”, Rasmussen said.
With this in view, he set out three recommendations. The first is to increase resources allocated to cyber security. While the EU has only allocated €1.1 million to its East StratCom Task Force against Russian propaganda, Russia has allocated almost ten times that amount to its internet research agency which broadcasts propaganda on-line, he stressed. When it comes to the United States, although it has dedicated $120 million to this fight, “it has not spent a single cent of it”.
Rasmussen then called on the EU to affirm its “leadership” in this matter but it is still necessary to know who within the EU should be responsible. Is it the European Commission, the European External Action Service or another totally new structure? In his view, it might be an idea for the EU to designate a special representative for cyber threats and misinformation on-line.
Finally, he believes continued cooperation with the United Kingdom in this matter is crucial. In this respect, he trusts the European leaders will soon realise that cyber security is important, irrespective of whether the Brexit outcome is a “hard, soft or brutal Brexit”.
Russian propaganda. It came as no surprise that discussions turned to Russia, which is said to be responsible for 80% of misinformation activity in Europe, Rasmussen said.
Addressing the press, Commissioner King explained that the measures discussed did not only target a “single source of misinformation”. Nonetheless, he added, “there is a particularity about Russia (...). They are proud of using this kind of approach. They’ve talked about it openly and they put it in their military doctrine. So I think we should take them at their word and worry seriously about information coming from Russia”. (Original version in French by Marion Fontana)