The Frontline Interview: Clint Watts | FRONTLINE | PBS | Offi... https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/clint-watts/ ((hhttttpp::////wwwwww..tthhiinnkkttvv..oorrgg )) PBS.org MENU THE FACEBOOK DILEMMA (HTTPS://WWW.PBS.ORG/WGBH/FRONTLINE /INTERVIEW-COLLECTION/FACEBOOK-DILEMMA/) Clint Watts Foreign Policy Research Institute Clint Watts is a distinguished research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a senior fellow at the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at The George Washington University. He is also a national security contributor for NBC News and MSNBC. This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE’s James Jacoby conducted on August 13, 2018. It has been edited in parts for clarity and length. TEXT INTERVIEW: Highlight text to share it. So can you just give me a little sense of what your background was getting into 1 of 41 this research and where you’d been working and who you were working for? 8/16/19, 1:30 PM The Frontline Interview: Clint Watts | FRONTLINE | PBS | Offi... https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/clint-watts/ Starting by 2013, I was studying social media influence mostly around terrorists, predominantly the Islamic State at the time. I had studied that. Many previous years I’d worked either at the FBI in counterterrorism, so I knew about it from there, or the Special Operations Command. They sometimes would fund projects when I was either at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point or outside it to assess what was the influence of social media with extremists. And that was a nascent field? That was kind of … There were just, I’d imagine, very few of you doing this type of work? Yeah. There was probably a dozen of us. We’d work on different projects. We would team up, depending on what it was. I would do assessments for the Foreign Policy Research Institute about measuring the influence of social media and how you could see ISIS, at the time, overtake Al Qaeda. That would’ve been in ’13 and ’14. So I was doing it then, but it dates all the way back to the mid 2000s when I was at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. And with the FBI, for instance, how much visibility does the FBI have in terms of the social media activity of people who are here in the United States? Zero, I think, for the most part. I mean, I don’t really know. Just to be clear, the FBI did not work on social media and extremism. I was in terms of programs, training, intelligence reform, those sorts of things. OK. And what was it … If you can bring me through the story of what sort of started to catch your eye on the Russia front as you’re looking at ISIS. In early 2014, I’d written some articles about the influence that was happening with the Islamic State online and different options. We were talking about soft power or diplomacy and how we might use it if we weren’t going to send troops into Syria and Iraq. And one of the articles I wrote was: Could we deal with a group called Ahrar al- Sham? If we weren’t actually going to engage them or engage Al Qaeda, could we do that in Syria? And when I did that, I started to see accounts emerge that didn’t look like normal extremists or counterextremist accounts. They were very much pushing a Russian line, and they were pushing it in a way that [suggested that] I was some sort of extremist supporter, that I didn’t understand the threat of ISIS. And those accounts were different from what I had seen before. It wasn’t the usual kind of content that I 2 of 41 8/16/19, 1:30 PM The Frontline Interview: Clint Watts | FRONTLINE | PBS | Offi... https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/clint-watts/ would encounter. And where was this when you say accounts? What kind of accounts and who were these people who were emerging? Right. The accounts that were emerging were on Twitter. That’s predominantly where I would put out any articles that I was writing and that’s where you would see these discussions. And in those discussions, the Twitter accounts were overlapping with accounts that were associated with the Syrian Electronic Army at the time. So in the spring of 2014, the Syrian Electronic Army was a hacker group that seemed to be very pro-Assad regime, but I wasn’t really sure if they were connected with the Syrian government or who they really were working with. The Syrian Electronic Army was hacking into lots of accounts in the United States and businesses. They would hit corporations and they’d even hit the media, the Twitter account of the Associated Press. And with these hacks they were doing a few different things. One, they would do maybe a website defacement or they would spill a database or some hacked information out there, but in that case they actually changed a story. They made a story that the White House essentially had a crisis, which caused the stock market to drop. So when watching these Twitter accounts, two of my colleagues that I worked with for a long time on social media influence, Andrew Weisburd and J.M. Berger, we noticed this patter that was emerging and it looked very different from anything we had seen in terms of extremists, whether it’s ISIS or Al Qaeda. Russian Influence Campaigns And what is an influence campaign? I mean, what were you actually studying and what was your interest about? I mean, the ability on social media. Why social media? Is that the place that you were looking at? Yeah. Social media had become the gateway for the Islamic State, and Al Qaeda before it, to connect with, radicalize, recruit and bring in, indoctrinate essentially, people online either into a battlefield like Syria and Iraq or – back during the Anwar al-Awlaki days – to do jihad at home. 3 of 41 8/16/19, 1:30 PM The Frontline Interview: Clint Watts | FRONTLINE | PBS | Offi... https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/clint-watts/ So you would see them try and connect with people so they could execute attacks worldwide and also reach a larger audience to recruit from. That was an example of an influence campaign. But what you start [to see] in 2014 and beyond were actual influence campaigns to shift public opinion. One of them might be Anonymous, for example, or LulzSec. These were hacking groups that would hack into different organizations and dump their secrets out on the internet to try and influence people’s perceptions. Islamic State was another version. But then you start to see states come online and that’s where the Russian state-sponsored efforts started to emerge. What were the early signs of the Russian influence campaigns that you were seeing? There’s several things to look for in terms of Russian influence campaigns. One is coordination of message. Even if the accounts are unattributed or hidden and you’re not really sure who’s behind it, they tend to share the same content at the same intervals about the same time. And so when they do that, they send off a signal. It actually changes the information landscape so that the discussion takes on a totally different tone or new issues emerge inside of it. The other thing that is classic of it is they will share Russian state-sponsored propaganda. So it wasn’t really hidden in terms of the accounts, but what they were sharing was RT or Sputnik News. Oftentimes, they would share this almost in unison. The other part of it is synchronization. You’ll actually see a synchronization such that you would see social bots emerge around these discussions and they would amplify the conversation, making it look much bigger in life than it actually was behind the scenes. So if you put yourself back in 2014, and as you’re looking at the Syrian issue, you’re seeing something a little bit different emerge. What were your suspicions at that time? Yeah. So from January to really the summer of 2014, the behavior of the accounts that I was encountering was different. Extremists tend to talk about an issue or maybe talk in the account for a while but they’ll generally let it go. They’ll move on to whatever the issue might be. These accounts had a sustained purpose and they tend to work almost in unison with each other. 4 of 41 8/16/19, 1:30 PM The Frontline Interview: Clint Watts | FRONTLINE | PBS | Offi... https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/clint-watts/ They would share the same content oftentimes and they would appear to be in very different locations, almost uniformly spread around the Western world. Some would appear in Europe, some would appear to be located in the United States or maybe Australia. And they would push content that was always pro-Russian. So even if it wasn’t just about ISIS and Syria, they might talk about another foreign policy issue, like Ukraine, that was important at the time. The other part that was really curious was what we stumbled onto in March and April of 2014, which was a link to a White House petition that was called “Alaska Back to Russia." We thought the petition was quite odd but there’s oftentimes prank sort of petitions put up on the website.