Last week, the drop-in audio chat app “Clubhouse” enabled rare unfettered Mandarin-language debate for mainland Chinese iPhone users, before being abruptly blocked by the country’s online censors on Monday February 8, 2021.

Alongside casual conversations about travel and health, users frankly discussed Uighur concentration camps in Xinjiang, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and personal experiences of being interrogated by police. The Chinese government restricts open discussion of these topics, maintaining a “Great Firewall” to block domestic audiences from accessing many foreign apps and websites. Although last week Clubhouse had not yet been blocked by the Great Firewall, some mainland users worried the government could eavesdrop on the conversation, leading to reprisals. 

In recent years, the Chinese government under President Xi Jinping has shown an increased willingness to prosecute its citizens for speech critical of the regime, even when that speech is blocked in China. Clubhouse app’s audio messages, unlike Twitter posts, leave no public record after speech occurs, potentially complicating Chinese government monitoring efforts.

The Stanford Internet Observatory has confirmed that Agora, a Shanghai-based provider of real-time engagement software, supplies back-end infrastructure to the Clubhouse App (see Appendix). This relationship had previously been widely suspected but not publicly confirmed. Further, SIO has determined that a user’s unique Clubhouse ID number and chatroom ID are transmitted in plaintext, and Agora would likely have access to users’ raw audio, potentially providing access to the Chinese government. In at least one instance, SIO observed room metadata being relayed to servers we believe to be hosted in the PRC, and audio to servers managed by Chinese entities and distributed around the world via Anycast. It is also likely possible to connect Clubhouse IDs with user profiles.

SIO chose to disclose these security issues because they are both relatively easy to uncover and because they pose immediate security risks to Clubhouse’s millions of users, particularly those in China. SIO has discovered other security flaws that we have privately disclosed to Clubhouse and will publicly disclose when they are fixed or after a set deadline.

In this blog post, we investigate the possibility of Chinese government access to Clubhouse audio, both via Agora and Clubhouse app itself. We also explore why that might matter. We will address these key issues:

1. What is Agora, how do we know it provides back-end support to Clubhouse, and why does that matter?

2. Can the Chinese government access audio stored by Clubhouse?

3. Are mainland Chinese users likely to face reprisals for speech on the app?

4. Why did the Chinese government ban the app?

What is Agora, how do we know it provides back-end support to Clubhouse, and why does that matter?

What is Agora?

Agora is a Shanghai-based start-up, with U.S. headquarters in Silicon Valley, that sells a “real-time voice and video engagement” platform for other software companies to build upon. In other words, it provides the nuts-and-bolts infrastructure so that other apps, like Clubhouse, can focus on interface design, specific functionalities, and the overall user experience. If an app operates on Agora’s infrastructure, the end-user might have no idea.

How do we know it provides back-end support to Clubhouse?

SIO analysts observed Clubhouse’s web traffic using publicly available network analysis tools, such as Wireshark. Our analysis revealed that outgoing web traffic is directed to servers operated by Agora, including “qos-america.agoralab.co.” Joining a channel, for instance, generates a packet directed to Agora’s back-end infrastructure. That packet contains metadata about each user, including their unique Clubhouse ID number and the room ID they are joining. That metadata is sent over the internet in plaintext (not encrypted), meaning that any third-party with access to a user’s network traffic can access it. In this manner, an eavesdropper might learn whether two users are talking to each other, for instance, by detecting whether those users are joining the same channel.

An SIO analysis of Agora’s platform documentation also reveals that Agora would likely have access to Clubhouse’s raw audio traffic. Barring end-to-end encryption (E2EE), that audio could be intercepted, transcribed, and otherwise stored by Agora. It is exceedingly unlikely that Clubhouse has implemented E2EE encryption. 

We expand on the technical details of these findings in the technical analysis appendix at the end of this post.

Why does Agora’s hosting of Clubhouse traffic matter?

Because Agora is based jointly in the U.S. and China, it is subject to People’s Republic of China (PRC) cybersecurity law. In a filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company acknowledged that it would be required to “provide assistance and support in accordance with [PRC] law,” including protecting national security and criminal investigations. If the Chinese government determined that an audio message jeopardized national security, Agora would be legally required to assist the government in locating and storing it. 

Conversations about the Tiananmen protests, Xinjiang camps, or Hong Kong protests could qualify as criminal activity. They have qualified before.

Agora claims not to store user audio or metadata, except to monitor network quality and bill its clients. If that is true, the Chinese government wouldn’t be able to legally request user data from Agora — Agora would not have any records of user data. However, the Chinese government could still theoretically tap Agora’s networks and record it themselves. Or Agora could be misrepresenting its data storage practices. (Huawei, a large Chinese software company with close links to the country’s military, also claims not to hand data to the government. Many experts are doubtful.)

Further, any unencrypted data that is transmitted via servers in the PRC would likely be accessible to the Chinese government. Given that SIO observed room metadata being transmitted to servers we believe to be hosted in the PRC, the Chinese government can likely collect metadata without even accessing Agora’s networks.

In summary, if the Chinese government can access user data via Agora, mainland Chinese users of Clubhouse could be at risk. It is important to keep in mind, however, that having the potential to access user data is not the same as actually accessing it. The Chinese government is a large and sometimes unwieldy bureaucracy, just like the U.S. government. It is easy to overstate the Chinese government’s internal unanimity and organizational coherence.

Can the Chinese government access audio stored by Clubhouse?

The short answer is: probably not, as long as the audio is stored in the U.S.

Clubhouse’s Privacy Policy states that user audio will be “temporarily” recorded for the purpose of trust and safety investigations (e.g. terrorist threats, hate speech, soliciting personal information from minors, etc.). If no trust and safety report is filed, Clubhouse claims that the stored audio is deleted. The policy does not specify the duration of “temporary” storage. Temporary could mean a few minutes or a few years. The Clubhouse privacy policy does not list Agora or any other Chinese entities as data sub-processors.

If Clubhouse stores that audio in the U.S., the Chinese government could ask the U.S. government to make Clubhouse transfer the data under the U.S.-China Mutual Legal Assistance Agreement (MLAA). That request would likely fail, however, due to the MLAA’s provisions allowing the United States to reject requests that would infringe on users’ free speech or human rights — such as requests involving politically sensitive speech on Clubhouse (Tiananmen, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, etc.). (The Chinese government could not demand audio clips directly from Clubhouse, as U.S. federal law prohibits such disclosures.)

The Chinese government could, however, legally demand audio (or other user data) stored in China if the app’s creator, Alpha Exploration Co., has a partner or subsidiary in China with access to the data. Besides Agora, there is no known evidence to suggest that Alpha Exploration Co. has a Chinese partner or stores user data within China.

In sum: assuming the app maker doesn’t have a Chinese partner or store data in China, then the Chinese government probably could not use legal processes to obtain Clubhouse audio data. Depending on just how “temporary” Clubhouse’s storage is, Clubhouse might not have data to hand over through legal processes in any event. However, if the Chinese government could obtain audio directly from Clubhouse’s backend infrastructure on Agora, it might not resort to using international legal channels to seek the data.

Are mainland users likely to face reprisals for speech on Clubhouse?

For the Chinese government to punish Clubhouse users who visited or spoke in sensitive chatrooms, at least two conditions would need to be met.

First, the Chinese government would need to know which users were present in which chatrooms. It could gain this information manually, through reporting from other users present in the room, or from the back-end, via Agora, as discussed above. 

For manual data gathering, someone in the room would need to manually record other users’ profiles. Their public profiles sometimes display identifying information, such as photos, phone numbers or WeChat accounts. (Phone numbers and WeChat accounts are real-name registered in China. Photos could be identified through facial recognition algorithms.) However, most Clubhouse profiles do not display identifying information. In that case, the government would need to access identifying information through its own surveillance mechanisms, or via Agora.

Chinese domestic surveillance capabilities are opaque, but assumed to be significant. It is possible that the Chinese government can access mainland users’ data or metadata without recourse to either Clubhouse or Agora, similar to how the U.S. government eavesdropped on web traffic, as revealed by Edward Snowden. As detailed above, the Chinese government could easily intercept plaintext metadata, such as room IDs and user IDs, sent from users’ devices. If the government doesn’t have independent access to user data, it would need to request and receive data from either Agora or Clubhouse. As stated above, it is not clear that the government could easily do so. Agora claims not to store user data, and Clubhouse is highly unlikely to provide it.

Second, the Chinese government must want to punish users of the app. Whether they would is unclear. Research has shown that the Chinese government can sometimes be tolerant of public criticism when that criticism doesn’t gain a wide following and doesn’t promote collective action. On these dimensions, Clubhouse is a grey area. Because the app is invite-only and only available on comparatively-expensive iPhones (less than 10% of all Chinese users), the app was probably not widely used beyond China’s urban elite. In addition, each Clubhouse chat room can host a maximum of five thousand users — a large number, but perhaps not threateningly large. All of these factors might mitigate Clubhouse’s severity from a government perspective.

On the other hand, the Chinese government has proven highly sensitive to apps that coordinate action in the real world, like the short-lived humor app Neihan Duanzi. Clubhouse is thus a unique space: it is a “meet-up” of sorts (which the Chinese government doesn’t like) but it is also semi-private and not yet widely distributed (which might lead to greater government toleration). Ultimately, we can only speculate.

If the government did want to punish domestic users of the app, the public might not know about it — nor might the users themselves. In recent years the Chinese government has fostered the growth of surreptitious censorship mechanisms for black-listed citizens, such as escalating users’ sensitivity indices on WeChat, an all-purpose domestic social media app. Black-listed users might send messages to their friends, only to realize that the message appeared on their screen but not their friends’. The government could also engage in threatening but not outright punishing behavior, such as inviting users to “tea.” Even if that happened, we might never know whether activity on Clubhouse triggered the invitation.

Why did the Chinese government ban the app now?

Why ban the app at all?

For years, the Chinese government has blocked websites or apps that insufficiently conform to its principle of “cyber-sovereignty,” the idea that each country should set the boundaries for cyber-activity within its territory. The Chinese government typically maintains loose definitions for illegal behavior, thus allowing itself maximum flexibility in blocking unwanted content.  

The government rarely explains why it blocks individual apps. In the case of Clubhouse, it is likely that the government objected to political conversations concerning Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Tiananmen, censorship, and others. The Global Times, a state-owned nationalistic newspaper which often reflects hardline positions within the government, published an editorial complaining that “political discussions on Clubhouse are often one-sided” and “pro-China voices can be easily suppressed.”

Why ban it now?

Most mainland users of Clubhouse, alongside foreign journalists and analysts, expected the app to be banned eventually. The pressing question was when. While many factors likely contributed to the timing of the app’s ban, here are three possibilities. 

First, government censors may not have been at the office. Research by Margaret Roberts, Professor of Political Science at University of California San Diego, has shown that censorship dips on weekends and Chinese holidays. Clubhouse went viral over the weekend, when censors aren’t at the office. This week is also the Lunar New Year celebration, when many employees stop working. 

Second, the Chinese government may have wanted to gather information on its citizens. Scholars have long noted the “autocrat’s dilemma” — the challenge authoritarian governments face in gathering accurate measures of public opinion. Because citizens fear reprisal, they lie about their preferences. The Chinese government may actually value spaces like Clubhouse for providing a brief window into (mostly elite) citizens’ authentic political opinions.

Third, banning an app may require time. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), which is responsible for banning apps with the Great Firewall, is a large and complex bureaucracy. The decision to ban may have been held up by red tape. The Great Firewall itself, too, is a large and complex technical apparatus. Redirecting its resources may require technical labor. 

The answer could also be all of these or none of the above. The preceding is only a preliminary analysis.

Appendix: Technical Analysis

According to Agora’s documentation, audio is relayed through Agora using their real time communication (RTC) standard development kit (SDK). Think of it like an old-time network operator: to reach another person, the operator must connect two users. In this case, Clubhouse app is each user’s telephone, while Agora is the operator.

Clubhouse application’s property list (.plist) file, bundled with the iOS application, contains its Agora application ID

When a user joins or creates a chatroom in Clubhouse, the user’s app makes a request via secure HTTP (HTTPS) to Agora’s infrastructure. (A “request” over HTTP is the most common way of accessing websites; it is likely how you are reading these words right now.) To make the request, the user’s phone contacts Clubhouse’s application programming interface, or “API.” The phone sends the request [POST /api/create_channel] to Clubhouse’s API. The API returns the fields token and rtm_token, where token is the Agora RTC token and rtm_token is the RTM (real time messaging) token. These “tokens” are then used to establish a communication pathway for ensuing audio traffic among users.

Image

SIO then observed a user’s phone send data packets via UDP (a more light-weight transmission mechanism) to a server called `qos-america.agoralab.co`. The user’s packets contain, unencrypted, metadata about the channel, such as whether a user has requested to join a chatroom, the user’s Clubhouse id number, and whether they have muted themselves.

A packet sent to Agora contains, in cleartext, the id of the channel and the user’s ID (see https://docs.agora.io/en/Video/API%20Reference/flutter/rtc_engine/RtcEngine/joinChannel.html)

After the user has received an RTC token from Clubhouse, their phone then uses the token to authenticate to Agora, so that the chatroom’s encrypted audio can be communicated directly with Agora via a mutually acknowledged pathway. Based on Agora’s documentation, Agora would have access to encryption keys. While the documentation doesn’t specify what kind of encryption is being used, it is likely symmetric encryption over UDP.

The only way that Agora wouldn’t have access to a user’s raw audio is if Clubhouse is employing end-to-end encryption (E2EE) using a customized encryption method. While that is theoretically possible, doing so would require Clubhouse to distribute public keys to all users. That doesn’t exist yet. E2EE is therefore exceedingly unlikely. 

Sequence and content of UDP traffic from a device joining a Clubhouse room

The SIO team received this response from Clubhouse and is including it in full. We have not verified any of Clubhouse’s statements:

Clubhouse is deeply committed to data protection and user privacy. 

We designed the service to be a place where people around the world can come together to talk, listen and learn from each other. Given China’s track record on data privacy, we made the difficult decision when we launched Clubhouse on the Appstore to make it available in every country around the world, with the exception of China. Some people in China found a workaround to download the app, which meant that—until the app was blocked by China earlier this week—the conversations they were a part of could be transmitted via Chinese servers.

With the help of researchers at the Stanford Internet Observatory, we have identified a few areas where we can further strengthen our data protection. For example, for a small percentage of our traffic, network pings containing the user ID are sent to servers around the globe—which can include servers in China—to determine the fastest route to the client. Over the next 72 hours, we are rolling out changes to add additional encryption and blocks to prevent Clubhouse clients from ever transmitting pings to Chinese servers. We also plan to engage an external data security firm to review and validate these changes.

We welcome collaboration with the security and privacy community as we continue to grow. We also have a bug bounty program that we operate in collaboration with HackerOne, and welcome any security disclosures to be sent directly to security@joinclubhouse.com. 

Dust sweeping across the Southeast U.S. in recent days warns of a growing risk to infants and children in many parts of the world. A Stanford-led study focuses on this dust, which travels thousands of miles from the Sahara Desert, to paint a clearer picture than ever before of air pollution’s impact on infant mortality in sub-Saharan Africa. The paper, published on June 29 in Nature Sustainability, reveals how a changing climate might intensify or mitigate the problem, and points to seemingly exotic solutions to reducing dust pollution that could be more effective and affordable than current health interventions in improving child health.

“Africa and other developing regions have made remarkable strides overall in improving child health in recent decades, but key negative outcomes such as infant mortality remain stubbornly high in some places,” said study senior author Marshall Burke, an associate professor of Earth system science in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. “We wanted to understand why that was, and whether there was a connection to air pollution, a known cause of poor health.”

Understanding airborne danger

Children under 5 are particularly vulnerable to the tiny particles, or particulate, in air pollution that can have a range of negative health impacts, including lower birth weight and impaired growth in the first year of life. In developing regions, exposure to high levels of air pollution during childhood is estimated to reduce overall life expectancy by 4-5 years on average.

Quantifying the health impacts of air pollution – a crucial step for understanding global health burdens and evaluating policy choices – has been a challenge in the past. Researchers have struggled to adequately separate out the health effects of air pollution from the health effects of activities that generate the pollution. For example, a booming economy can produce air pollution but also spur developments, such as lower unemployment, that lead to better healthcare access and improved health outcomes.

To isolate the effects of air pollution exposure, the Stanford-led study focuses on dust carried thousands of miles from the Bodélé Depression in Chad – the largest source of dust emissions in the world. This dust is a frequent presence in West Africa and, to a lesser extent, across other African regions. The researchers analyzed 15 years of household surveys from 30 countries across Sub-Saharan Africa covering nearly 1 million births. Combining birth data with satellite-detected changes in particulate levels driven by the Bodélé dust provided an increasingly clear picture of poor air quality’s health impacts on children.

Sobering findings and surprising solutions

The researchers found that a roughly 25 percent increase in local annual mean particulate concentrations in West Africa causes an 18 percent increase in infant mortality. The results expand on a 2018 paper by the same researchers that found exposure to high particulate matter concentrations in sub-Saharan Africa accounted for about 400,000 infant deaths in 2015 alone.

The new study, combined with previous findings from other regions, makes clear that air pollution, even from natural sources, is a “critical determining factor for child health around the world,” the researchers write. Emissions from natural sources could change dramatically in a changing climate, but it’s unclear how. For example, the concentration of dust particulate matter across Sub-Saharan Africa is highly dependent on the amount of rainfall in the Bodélé Depression. Because future changes in rainfall over the Bodélé region due to climate change are highly uncertain, the researchers calculated a range of possibilities for sub-Saharan Africa that could result in anywhere from a 13-percent decline in infant mortality to a 12-percent increase just due to changes in rainfall over the desert. These impacts would be larger than any other published projections for climate change impact on health across Africa.

Safeguarding children against air pollution is nearly impossible in many developing regions because many homes have open windows or permeable roofs and walls, and infants and young children are unlikely to wear masks. Instead, the researchers suggest exploring the possibility of dampening sand with groundwater in the Bodélé region to stop it from going airborne – an approach that has been successful at a small scale in California.

The researchers estimate that deploying solar-powered irrigation systems in the desert area could avert 37,000 infant deaths per year in West Africa at a cost of $24 per life, making it competitive with many leading health interventions currently in use, including a range of vaccines and water and sanitation projects.

“Standard policy instruments can’t be counted on to reduce all forms of air pollution,” said study lead author Sam Heft-Neal, a research scholar at Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment. “While our calculation doesn’t consider logistical constraints to project deployment, it highlights the possibility of a solution that targets natural pollution sources and yields enormous benefits at a modest cost.”

Additional co-authors include Eran Bendavid, an associate professor of medicine at Stanford, member of the Maternal andChild Health Research Institute and an affiliate of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment; Jennifer Burney and Kara Voss of the University of California San Diego. Burke is also deputy director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment; and a fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

This posting, my eighth annual edition, comes again from our mid-sized corn, soybean, and cattle farm in Linn County, Iowa.  My wife and I may not be typical owners, but our farming operation is a fair representation of what is happening in rural America. The overwhelming reaction for 2019 is, “Wow, what a difference a year makes.”  In 2018, growing conditions were practically perfect; in 2019, almost nothing has gone right.

Not since the early 1980s can I recall seeing so many glum faces around the farmer coffee table at the local diner.   And it is more than just the lousy coffee that prompts the scowls. Our spring was the wettest in recorded history.  There was severe flooding from both the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, and from most of the streams in between.  Plantings of corn and soybeans were delayed, and substantial acres did not get planted at all—more than 400,000 acres in Iowa alone.  About 75% of the corn is typically planted by May 15th in our region. This year, less than 25% was in the ground, and the wet cold soil left crops that were planted looking yellow and puny.

“Prevented acres” (those fields that farmers were prevented from planting) became a hot topic of conversation, as everyone re-read their crop-insurance contracts to see what was needed to qualify, and who actually determined what was prevented. Discussions on whether it was wiser financially to plant late, with expectations of a small crop that could well suffer frost damage, or whether to claim prevention, led to some very interesting new principles of cost accounting!  Calculations and comparisons were complex, but farmers who chose the prevent option received about $400 per acre. Those who planted very late, and rolled the dice with respect to their regular crop-insurance, still eagerly await harvest outcomes.

If April 15-June 15 was unbelievably wet, June 15-August 15 was unbelievably dry during the critical period for corn pollination and grain filling.  Rainfall was 4 inches less than normal, and inch-wide cracks opened in the soil. Corn on sandy knolls began to burn and many stalks failed to “shoot” ears. Many of the ears that were produced were small and poorly filled with kernels. Pastures also dried up, and we began feeding supplemental hay to our cow herd in July. During the week of August 18th, we finally received two inches of rain—too late to make much difference to the corn crop, but offering some hope for reasonable soybean yields. One of my more sacrilegious friends suggested that the mid-August rain was god’s way of suckering famers into farming for another year. 

To make matters worse, eastern Iowa now has a new invasive pathogen—tar spot in corn.  Tar spot is a fungus that literally blew in from Mexico.  Spores rode winds from a hurricane into Indiana and Illinois in 2016, and now they have migrated to Iowa.  Our corn varieties have little resistance to it, and while breeders will probably breed in resistance within a couple of years, farmers are now short-run losers.  Yesterday’s debate over coffee was whether, with both low crop prices and low expected yields, it paid to spray aerially for tar spot and other fungi. (The application costs about $25 per acre for both the fungicide and for flying it on.)  For our farm, we decided to take our chances on damages and not to spray. Who knows if that was the right decision.

Perhaps the only thing that farmers agree on is that NO ONE has a good grasp on the size of the U.S. corn crop—not farmers or traders, and certainly not the Department of Agriculture (USDA).  For whatever reasons, local producers believe that the USDA is fudging the expected numbers upward on both expected yields and planted acre, with consequent negative effects on corn markets. A sad sign of the times occurred during a recent mid-western tour of crop conditions.  The tour included members of USDA’s statistical team.  But after threats to their personal safety were deemed credible, the USDA recalled its members from the tour. No one whom I know ever thought that the comment “farmers were up in arms” would need to be taken literally.

More generally, the growing frustration and anger with Washington has replaced talk about the best new tractors and pickups—no one is buying.  Farmers were furious over the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) decision to provide waivers on ethanol requirements for 31 refineries, and a failure to move more generally to an E15 standard.  And after a decades-long attempt to build an Asian soybean market, farmers feel seriously victimized by the President’s trade policy (though interestingly, it is often the USDA and the EPA rather than the President who are blamed). Farmers will certainly cash the checks from the new $14 billion Market Facilitation Plan, but they are extremely worried about the loss of long-term market shares.  Farmers who grow either soybeans or corn in our county this year will receive (potentially) $66 per acre. Only the first half ($33) of the payment is now guaranteed; the remaining half of the payment is conditional on what the USDA says are “market conditions and trade opportunities.” Farmers are still scratching their heads about the operational meaning of those concepts.

In some years, strong livestock profits help offset poor crop yields and prices. But 2019 has not been one of those years.  Whereas 2018 saw quite high profits from pigs, 2019 saw a decline in lean pork prices from $.92 per pound in May to $.62 in August. Pork exports were disrupted by trade arrangements with Mexico. And in China, despite needs arising from African swine fever, the 66% tariff caused a 4% decline in pork shipment from the U.S. during the first half of 2019. Cattle fared little better.  Prices for slaughter steers started at about $1.40 per pound in March. But by August, prices had slipped to about $1.05 per pound.  To add insult to injury, a fire caused temporary closure of a very large packing plant in Kansas, which slaughters about 6,000 head per day (5% of total U.S. capacity). This accident, in turn, caused an overnight drop of $0.10 per pound.  The $0.45 per pound drop in price between March and August of “what might have been” tallies up to the equivalent of about $500 per animal—the difference between very handsome profits and devastating losses.

Taken together, readers now understand why my report this year has taken the form of a lament. In a recent Farm Futures survey of 1,150 farmers, 53% said that 2019 was the worst year they had ever experienced. And readers will also understand why the Secretary of Agriculture, Sonny Perdue, was roundly booed for his attempt at humor during a recent farm tour: “What do you call two Iowa farmers locked in a basement—a ‘whine’ cellar.”

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The State Fair is a big deal for Iowans. (So big, in fact, that by law public schools cannot start until the Fair is over.)  In 2019, more than 1 million visitors participated in state-fair activities, which is remarkable in a state with a total population of only 3.2 million, and with only three cities of greater than 100,000 in population. Of course, this year’s attendance, in preparation for the Iowa political caucuses, was inflated by an invasion of politicians and media personnel! During fair week, 24 Democratic presidential candidates showed up—22 on a single weekend. They not only cluttered the fair concourses, but they also tied up the airway, internet, and transport systems.

It was quite a spectacle.  There were the obligatory candidate pictures—viewing the sculpted butter cow, eating corn dogs, turning steaks on a grill, and for the geographically venturesome, a shot in front of a corn ethanol plant. Some even tried the dill-pickle ice cream. And poor “Captain,” Iowa’s largest boar (1,254 pounds), was exhausted by week’s end by all of the celebrity photo ops!

With all of the visiting candidates, Soap Box Corner was unusually crowded.  Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren essentially tied in the informal straw poll at the fair, with Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders finishing third and fourth.  For the most part, candidates said what farmers wanted to hear. Speakers generally spoke in favor of ethanol (some even liked E15); were against the current trade policy; and were mostly silent on climate change. Wearing my professorial hat, I am not sure that many of them would pass Ag101—even using Stanford’s liberal grading standards. 

Few candidates spoke with much nuance about agriculture. Many seemed to be thinking about an agriculture that perhaps existed in Iowa during the 1960s—one in which younger farmers had farming systems producing a broad array of crop and livestock products. But that is hardly the current reality. What I found most surprising was the implicit view that Iowa’s 87,000 famers were a set of small homogeneous farm units. In fact, there are huge economic and political differences among three groups.

One set contains a sizable number of retired farms which typically own moderate amounts of land that they now rent to others.  For this group, health insurance, declining land rents and social security are uppermost in their minds.  A second group is a younger, more venturesome group of farmers, who may own 160 acres, but who are aggressively trying to buy or rent an additional 1,000-2,000 acres. They also carry large loans for land and for huge machinery inventories.  For them, trade policy, interest rates, crop insurance, and health insurance are central matters of concern.  There is also a third set, comprised of multiple family generations, often organized as family corporations, who are intermediate in their ownership patterns, debt obligations, and political concerns.  None of the three groups is very happy, but it is the second set that has local bankers worried, since delinquent farm loans have now risen to a 20-year high.

But farmers often sound like baseball players. “Just wait until next year.”

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Perhaps next year—god willing and the creek don’t rise—my report will be more upbeat.   At least we will know the outcome of the Iowa Caucuses. Maybe we will also know if the August 29 Bloomberg Report,“ U.S. Farmers May be Angrier, but Their Trump Love is Growing”, continues into 2020. But as 2016 showed, what farmers tell pollsters about their political preferences always deserves a fair amount of skepticism. On our farm, we will at least know the actual size of the 2019 corn crop, and whether our switch from Angus to Simmental bulls increased the rates-of-gain of our steers. 

In the meantime, it is back to Stanford—without a pitchfork—to duel with some of the brightest of the “Z” generation, and to work on a global food-security assessment for 2050.

During the academic year, Walter Falcon is the Helen C. Farnsworth Professor of International Agricultural Policy, Emeritus, at Stanford; and senior fellow, emeritus, at the the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. He is the former deputy director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment. He spends summer with his wife, Laura, on their farm near Marion, Iowa. (wpfalcon@stanford.edu) 

Twice in the past 14 years, a dispute between Ukraine and Russia has led Russia to cut off natural gas flows to Ukraine and Europe. The stage is being set for another cut-off in January. The European Union wants to ensure that gas continues to flow, so EU officials will attempt at a mid-September meeting to broker an agreement. But they face a difficult slog.

THE LOOMING CONFLICT

Gazprom, a large Russian parastatal, now transits a significant amount of gas to European destinations via Ukrainian pipelines. The volume totaled 87 billion cubic meters (bcm) in 2018, one-third of Russian gas exports to Europe.

However, the contract that governs this gas transit expires at the end of 2019. Kyiv wants to replace the current agreement with another long-term contract, preferably for 10 years. Moscow, on the other hand, wants just one year.

Russia hopes to bring Nord Stream 2 — which runs from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea — online in 2020. (The U.S. government has raised the possibility of sanctions against companies involved with Nord Stream 2, but the pipeline is already 75% complete.) Moscow also hopes that Turk Stream — two pipelines running under the Black Sea from Russia to Turkey — will reach full capacity next year. Nord Stream 2 will have a capacity of 55 bcm of gas per year. Turk Stream consists of two pipelines, each with an annual capacity of 15.75 bcm. The Turks plan to use half of the gas domestically and export the rest to southeastern Europe. If Gazprom can move an additional 70.75 BCM of gas to Europe via Nord Stream 2 and the Turk Stream pipelines after 2020, its need for the Ukrainian pipelines will drastically decline.

Gas fights between Kyiv and Moscow are nothing new. In January 2006, as a result of a price dispute, Gazprom reduced gas flows to Ukraine, charged that Kyiv was siphoning off transit gas intended for Europe, and further cut gas supplies. Fortunately, the sides reached agreement after a few days, and gas flows resumed.

A second fight broke out in January 2009. Moscow again reduced and then ended all gas flows to Ukraine, including transit gas. This time, the dispute lasted three weeks. During a bitterly cold stretch of weather, the cut-off caused particular hardships for Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece.

A CHANGING GAS RELATIONSHIP

The gas relationship between Ukraine and Russia has been complex, and it has changed dramatically over the past three decades. After regaining independence in 1991, Kyiv depended hugely on gas imports from Russia or from Central Asia via Russia — 50-60 bcm per year — as its domestic production met only one-fourth of Ukraine’s needs. That dependence gave Moscow leverage over Ukraine.

Kyiv nevertheless had leverage over Russia, which needed Ukraine’s pipelines to move gas to Europe. The European market mattered greatly for Gazprom. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Russian energy giant sold one-third of the gas it produced to Europe. Most of Gazprom’s gas was sold inside Russia at artificially low prices, so European sales were key to the company’s financial health.

The 2006 and 2009 gas fights led both sides to reconsider their dependency on the other. Gazprom began to develop plans for and build undersea pipelines to Germany and Turkey to circumvent Ukraine. By 2021, Gazprom will need Ukrainian pipelines to move, at most, relatively marginal amounts of gas.

For their part, Ukrainians began taking steps to substantially reduce gas consumption and their energy dependency on Russia. Rising prices for Russian gas motivated companies to install energy-efficient equipment. Ukraine now consumes about 30 bcm of gas per year (it no longer provides gas for Crimea, which Russia illegally seized in 2014, or for that part of the Donbas region occupied by Russian and Russian proxy forces). Less than one-third of the 30 bcm is imported, and since 2015, Ukraine no longer imports gas directly from Russia, getting gas instead from Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia (ironically, much of this gas is Russian gas exported to Central Europe, from where it is exported back to Ukraine).

JANUARY IS COMING

Seeking to avoid another gas fight, the European Union hopes to broker a new agreement between Kyiv and Moscow. EU Commission officials have suggested a 10-year contract providing for a minimum transit volume of 60 bcm per year through Ukrainian pipes. Such an arrangement would win support from key EU members such as Germany; Chancellor Merkel favors completion of Nord Stream 2 but has also said that substantial flows of gas should continue to move via Ukraine.

This would be a good arrangement for Kyiv, though Russian agreement appears unlikely. Moscow’s decisions to build undersea pipelines to Germany and Turkey were not motivated solely — and perhaps not mainly — by commercial considerations. The Ukrainian pipeline system could have been upgraded at a fraction of the cost of building the new pipelines. The Kremlin, however, sought to gain a position in which it could pressure Kyiv by cutting off gas without affecting flows to elsewhere in Europe.

Moscow wants to bring Ukraine back into Russia’s orbit, and it sees gas as a possible tool. If it has no gas sales to Ukraine, it can still end transit through the country, cutting off the substantial transit fees (about $3 billion per year) that it now pays Kyiv. Russia has proposed a one-year agreement, apparently to bridge from the end of 2019 to the beginning of 2021 when it hopes to have Nord Stream 2 and Turk Stream operating at full capacity. At that point, Gazprom could all but end gas transit via Ukraine.

If Kyiv rejects a one-year agreement, which looks quite possible, negotiations could quickly hit an impasse, and the possibility of another disruption in gas flows to Europe will arise. Finding a solution to avert such an outcome confronts EU negotiators with a tough challenge.

This article originally appeared in the Ukrainian journal Novoye Vremya.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy may meet President Donald Trump this weekend in Warsaw and is expected to travel to the United States later in the fall.  This gives Mr. Zelenskyy the opportunity to reinforce Kyiv’s relationship with the United States.  It also offers the opportunity to try to establish a connection to Mr. Trump, something that has proven elusive for most foreign leaders.  Here are a few suggestions for Mr. Zelenskyy on dealing with the American president.

Mr. Zelenskyy should bear in mind that Mr. Trump lacks a strong grasp of the U.S. interest in and what is at stake with regard to Ukraine and the conflict that Russia wages against it.  His administration has pursued sensible policies in supporting Kyiv, strengthening NATO and sustaining sanctions on Moscow.  By all appearances, however, Mr. Trump does not instinctively agree with the necessity of his administration’s own policies.  Witness his recent suggestion about inviting Vladimir Putin to join with other G7 leaders when he hosts the G7 summit next year.

Mr. Trump is not detail-oriented.  He reportedly reads little, leading White House staff to resort to graphs and pictures to capture his attention.  The smart way to approach Mr. Trump is to avoid detail, sticking instead with a few clear and easily understood themes.

Flattering the American president would not hurt.  North Korean leader Kim Jong-un appears to have mastered that.  North Korea has reduced none of its nuclear or ballistic missile capabilities—in fact, they have increased—but Mr. Trump swoons over Mr. Kim’s letters and professes not to be bothered by Pyongyang’s shorter range ballistic missile tests.

That said, keep expectations for flattery modest.  No European leader invested more heavily in flattering Mr. Trump than former British Prime Minister Theresa May.  She gave him a state visit in June with all the bells and whistles.  Yet Mr. Trump could not resist sending a series of tweets denigrating her handling of the Brexit conundrum and all but welcoming her replacement.

This underscores the point that, in many foreign policy relationships, Mr. Trump is transactional.  He will be asking what can America get, or what can he get.

Mr. Zelenskyy thus should consider whether there is a topic on which he could offer Mr. Trump a win-win.  Progress toward resolving the Russia-Ukraine conflict in Donbas could provide such an issue.  Real movement toward peace would be a major win for Kyiv, but it could offer Mr. Trump a win as well.  He has repeatedly made clear his desire for improved U.S.-Russia relations, and a genuine settlement in Donbas could lift the biggest obstacle to his goal.

The question is how to shape a proposal to accomplish this.  Bringing Mr. Trump into the current Normandy negotiating format in a way that made it appear as if Mr. Trump sparked a breakthrough would appeal to the Nobel Prize-hungry American president.

However, the key to peace in Donbas lies in Moscow.  The Kremlin seems interested in sustaining a simmering conflict as a means to pressure the government in Kyiv.  Still, aligning interests with Mr. Trump on pressing for peace would be a plus for Mr. Zelenskyy.

While in the United States, the Ukrainian president should not neglect the Congressional leadership.  Both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill support Ukraine and display considerable skepticism toward Russia.  Congress could serve as a check on Mr. Trump should he choose to pursue his less well-thought-out ideas on Russia.

Mr. Zelenskyy’s American interlocutors in Congress want Ukraine to succeed, with success measured by its progress in becoming a normal democratic, market-oriented and prosperous European state.  In the past, developments in Ukraine have disappointed both Ukrainians and the country’s friends in the West.  To the extent that Mr. Zelenskyy can make a persuasive case that this time it is different—that he and the new parliament will take the tough steps to achieve success—he will return home having forged a stronger basis for the U.S.-Ukrainian relationship.  He can bolster his case by coming to Washington with one or two signature reforms under his belt, such as an end to the moratorium on sales of private agricultural land.

One last piece of advice.  Mr. Zelenskyy and his team should be wary of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to drag Ukraine into U.S. domestic politics.  That would risk making Ukraine a partisan political issue in America, which could undermine the bipartisan support that Ukraine has enjoyed since regaining independence in 1991.

* * * * *

Steven Pifer is a William Perry fellow at Stanford University and a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.

This is the first of a series of pieces we intend to publish on societies and elections at risk from online disinformation. Our goal is to draw the attention of the media, tech platforms and other academics to these risks and to provide a basic background that could be useful to those who wish to study the information environment in these areas.

Political context

On Saturday, January 11, 2020, Taiwanese citizens will vote for their next president. The contest is between the candidates of two parties: Tsai Ing-Wen, incumbent president and a member of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and Han Kuo-Yu, the challenger representing the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or KMT). While the focus of Stanford Internet Observatory’s project is the upcoming Taiwanese election, we begin with a brief summary of the historical context of these political parties. 

From 1945-1949, following Japan’s defeat at the end of WWII and its handover of Taiwan, the Nationalist Party (KMT) was briefly the de facto government of both China and Taiwan. However, the KMT was defeated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the Chinese Civil War, and in 1949 the KMT government fled to Taiwan. At that point, both the KMT government (in exile) and the CCP government in Beijing claimed to be the legitimate government of China, as the countries of the world split on what entity to recognize as the rightful leaders of China. In 1971, Taiwan was expelled from the United Nations, and the CCP was recognized as the ruling government of China in the UN General Assembly and the UN Security Council.

The Taiwanese government remained largely a single-party entity until 1987, when it lifted martial law and allowed competing political parties to emerge. The most significant of these was the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which in 2000 became the first opposition party to win the presidency. The DPP has controlled the presidency since 2016.

Taiwan's major social cleavages line up with the KMT / DPP party divide, and reflect Taiwan’s history as a territory distinct from the Chinese core provinces; it has robust ethnic diversity produced by immigration from both mainland China and the rest of Asia Pacific, and with the exception of the period from 1945-49 the island has been ruled by a distinct government since 1895. The KMT is dominated by Han Chinese who arrived with the KMT in 1949 from the mainland, are concentrated in the north. They speak Mandarin, have a history of dominating government positions, and have benefited the most from state-led economic programs and trade with China. The DPP is dominated by pre-1949 native Taiwanese who are concentrated in the southern half of the island, are ethnically Hoklo and Hakka and thus speak Hoklo and Hakka instead of Mandarin, and have historically been excluded from government and state-led economic development.

Incumbent president Tsai Ing-Wen’s administration has had fraught relations with Beijing since her election in 2016. The KMT party challenger Han Kuo-Yu, who won the July 15, 2019 primary process consisting of party member votes and multiple public polls, is the preferred candidate of the CCP in Beijing. Although he served in the legislative yuan (the Taiwanese legislature) from 1997-2002, he was thought to have left politics and was relatively unknown until his unexpected victory in the November 2018 mayoral election in Kaohsiung. This election attracted substantial attention within the region; Kaohsiung is the most important city in southern Taiwan and had been a DPP stronghold since 1998. Han Kuo-Yu’s victory was as remarkable as a far-left Democrat becoming governor of Texas or another deep-red state.

The election carries significant weight; China sees Taiwan as part of China under the One China Principle, and this election is partially a referendum on the nature of future ties with Beijing. The ongoing activities and protests in Hong Kong, which began to attract worldwide attention in June 2019, are also having an impact on the campaign, shoring up support for President Tsai Ing-wen.

Potential disinformation threats 

Elections are a widely-recognized target for disinformation campaigns and influence operations, and the upcoming Taiwan election carries significant weight in the region; it is strategically important to Beijing. Academic observations of past elections in Taiwan have noted the presence of astroturfing and domestically-organized trolling, and cross-strait propaganda has been a long-term issue. More recently, however, investigations into the November 2018 Taiwan elections suggest the emerging presence of social media manipulation coordinated from within the PRC. 

There are two prongs of influence operations that may present a threat to the integrity of the Taiwan 2020 election. The first is media manipulation, primarily via narrative laundering and propaganda campaigns that facilitate the placement of both strategic persuasion and disinformation narratives into local press. China has extensive experience in the dissemination of propaganda, and the world’s most extensive domestic propaganda apparatus, covering every conceivable form of media. While it has had propaganda capabilities since the Maoist era, the current approach began in 1980 with the creation of the Central Committee Outward Propaganda Small Group (中共中央对外宣传小组), which began in 1991 the State Council Information Office / International Propaganda Office (中共中央对外宣传办公室 / 国务院新闻办公室).  An August 2018 report by France’s Institute for Strategic Research (IRSEM, Ministry for the Armed Forces), provided a survey of the CCP’s capabilities and goals:

Effort on the ideological front has two objectives: first, to shape the internal political space and maintain the Party’s legitimacy (through censorship and disinformation); second, to influence international opinion and wage the “information war” in favor of Chinese interests. (p. 58)

Today, China controls more than 3,000 public television channels in the world, over 150 pay TV channels, around 2,500 radio stations, about 2,000 newspapers and 10,000 magazines and more than three million internet sites. (p. 59)

Most recently, Chinese media has been amassing substantial English-language audiences on Facebook and Twitter to convey its point of view on world affairs to English-speaking peoples. This activity includes paid promotion, such as the recent purchasing of promoted Tweets to spread its point of view on the Hong Kong conflict to the world. This is despite the fact that both platforms are not accessible from within China without the use of circumvention technologies.

The second type of interference is covert social influence via the use of bots and fake persona accounts, which can be used to disseminate propaganda in a seemingly peer-to-peer capacity, to amplify memes, articles, or videos, or to create the appearance of grassroots consensus among a community. China has a well-documented covert social influence capability; its inward-facing digital commenter brigade, known as the “50 cent army”, was launched in 2004. The effort consists of hundreds of thousands—some estimates reach as high as 2 million—of conscripted posters who comment on local Chinese social media and news articles to bolster the CCP and its leaders and policies, or to simply distract real participants in the conversation from controversial topics. On the surface, these comments appear to be the creation of ordinary people. While attribution is not always conclusive, there have been debates about the extent to which similar tactics are now being deployed in more outwardly-focused arenas, including potentially suspicious Reddit activity on posts related to China, a disinformation campaign culminating in the suicide of a diplomat in September 2018, and persona accounts (“sockpuppets”) promoting state-sponsored narratives about Hong Kong protestors on Twitter and Facebook. 

Most directly, there is early evidence suggesting the use of Facebook persona accounts in Taiwanese elections—specifically in the November 2018 mayoral race in Kaohsiung. On the surface, Han Kuo-yu’s upset victory initially appeared to be a well-run digital campaign by a charismatic populist candidate who was able to generate significant digital engagement and dominate the conversation on social media platforms. However, recent investigations claim to have detected the presence of a social media manipulation campaign that may have played a role in his rise, the source of which journalists assessed as a “seemingly professional cybergroup from China”.

During the campaign, a Facebook group named “Han Kuo-yu Fans For Victory! Holding up a Blue Sky!” grew to be a convening place for Han’s supporters, amassing 61,000 members. Writing in Foreign Policy, journalist Paul Huang described it as a place for fans to promote “talking points, memes, and very often fake news attacking Han’s opponent Chen, the DPP government, and anyone who said a bad word about Han.”  Mr. Han acknowledged the efforts of the “netizens” supporting him, saying, “I don’t know you, but I thank you”. Shortly after the election, it emerged that three of the original creators and administrators of the Han Facebook Page had LinkedIn profiles suggesting that they were employees of Tencent; however, these accounts had several characteristics that suggested they were fake (duplicated profile pictures, no contacts, language patterns more indicative of non-Taiwanese residents). 

Throughout the 2018 midterm election campaign, President Tsai repeatedly attempted to alert the Taiwanese public to the presence of interference: “There are those people who mistakenly think that if you simply shout falsehoods loudly, they’ll become real,” she wrote on Facebook. Her post describes an “Olympics” to disrupt Taiwan’s elections, with a two-pronged strategy: first, spreading fabrications and fake news stories; second, flooding the social media ecosystem and targeting anyone who “spoke up for Taiwan” with smears and attacks. 

It is possible that online boosterism for Han in 2020 will be comprised of a complicated mix of legitimate domestic support, influence from the PRC and the actions of private actors. Such a mix would pose challenges for both Taiwanese authorities and US tech platforms looking to distinguish between “authentic” and “inauthentic” activity.

Media environment

The media environment in Taiwan is robust; there are radio channels and newspapers representing most viewpoints, as well as a variety of cable television options. 80% of Taiwanese residents watch cable TV. 

Although the media in Taiwan is considered to be one of the freest in Asia, there are popular papers that serve as conduits for mainland influence. In 2008, the paper with the 4th largest circulation, the China Times, was sold to a billionaire businessman who considers unification an inevitability. It came to be seen as sympathetic to the CCP; a recent Financial Times report asserts that the Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) of the CCP is in daily contact with the editors of the China TImes, and may be exercising editorial control. In addition, several popular online news sites write in a tabloid style, resulting in the potential for factual inaccuracies or fake news stories. The Taiwanese media ecosystem is largely unprofitable, and doesn’t have resources to devote to high-quality investigative journalism. 

Taiwanese citizens are quite active online. Taiwan has extremely high social network penetration; as of January 2019, multiple social media marketing surveys indicate that 95% of residents access the internet daily, and 89% of residents visit social networking sites. Facebook and YouTube are easily accessible within Taiwan, and are the two most popular social platforms among residents. The Japanese mobile messaging app Line ranks 3rd. Line’s offering is similar to Chinese powerhouse WeChat; it offers a digital wallet, food delivery, taxi-hailing services, and other convenience tools in addition to social communication.   

Narrative context

Malign narratives can be deployed over a long time horizon, often with the goal of shifting societal positions; this can take the form of manufacturing consensus around a topic, or exacerbating societal divides and eroding trust. The below narratives are far from the only ones we will investigate, but they are topics of debate within Taiwan that may be leveraged by inauthentic actors: 

• Ties to China (KMT supports stronger ties, particularly economic)

• The protests in Hong Kong 

• LGBT rights and gay marriage

• The US-China trade war

• Economic growth, especially in the south

• Chinese interference, which is likely to be positioned as a DPP excuse for poor electoral performance (this has become an ongoing concern, as President Tsai Ing-Wen has raised it on numerous occasions)

The other type of narrative manipulation is conducted in rapid response to a discrete event or provocation. We will also be observing emerging hashtags and anomalous distribution of content in response to breaking news or situations with the potential to galvanize audiences. One example of disinformation spread in response to a contentious moment occurred during the November 2018 campaigns, when a DPP candidate was falsely accused of wearing an earpiece to receive answers during the debates; this led to extensive chatter about the accusation on social apps.

Key takeaways and risks

• The 2020 Taiwan election is extremely important to the future of democracy in Taiwan; the Hong Kong protests have increased local concerns about future relations with Beijing.

• Activities in 2018 suggest that there is Chinese interest in leveraging disinformation capabilities to interfere in the democratic process of Taiwan’s presidential election. Both the incumbent president and Taiwan’s National Security Bureau—the country’s primary intelligence agency— have already issued warnings about Chinese ‘50 cent army’ influence operations and information warfare, pointing to several YouTube channels by name and attributing them to Beijing. 

• While the impact of propaganda and social influence operations remains difficult to quantify, the November 2018 election did see substantial losses for DPP and President Tsai Ing-wen. 

• Newly-attributed influence operations targeting Hong Kong reinforce the concern that Beijing is willing to deploy its influence capabilities to spread disinformation about regional political conflicts. 

SIO intends to monitor the Taiwan 2020 presidential election throughout the remainder of the campaign.

Challenges to studying disinformation in Taiwan

• Many popular applications in the Taiwanese social media ecosystem are opaque to external monitoring and little academic work has been done to create alternative techniques appropriate for these platforms.

• None of the major social media ad networks (Google, Facebook and Twitter) have launched their political ad transparency projects in Taiwan. There is no mechanism to browse, study or analyze political advertisements on these popular platforms targeted at the Taiwanese population.

• Estimating the impact of malign narratives is complicated by the fact that Taiwanese residents are accustomed to propaganda from Beijing, and in fact expect it. Prior efforts to discredit the DPP and promote the KMT have previously had a limited impact, if not backfired, since 1996.

For further reading

Disinformation assessments

Computational Propaganda in China: An Alternative Model of a Widespread Practice, Robert Gorwa, Oxford Internet Institute 

Computational Propaganda in Taiwan: Where Digital Democracy Meets Automated Autocracy, Nicholas J. Monaco, Jigsaw/Oxford Internet Institute 

News coverage

China has stepped up efforts to infiltrate Taiwan, president Tsai Ing-wen says, CNBC

Chinese Cyber-Operatives Boosted Taiwan’s Insurgent Candidate, Paul Huang, Foreign Policy 

Taiwan election: KMT’s Han accuses Tsai of spying, KG Chan, Asia Times 

Decoding China’s 280-Character Web of Disinformation, James Palmer, Foreign Policy

Research

King, Gary, Pan, Jennifer, and Margaret Roberts. 2013. “How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression.” American Political Science Review 107(2): 1-18

King, Gary, Pan, Jennifer, and Margaret Roberts. 2017. “How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, not Engaged Argument.” American Political Science Review Volume 111, Issue 3, pp. 484-501

Regional voices 

China using fake news to divide Taiwan, Chien Li-chung, Chung Li-hua and Jonathan Chin, Taipei Times

Made-in-China fake news overwhelms Taiwan, I-fan Lin, Global Voices

This piece originally appeared in The National Interest.

Significant progress has been made in improving the defense situation in the Baltic states since 2014, but NATO can take some relatively modest steps to further enhance its deterrence and defense posture in the region, according to a report by Michael O’Hanlon and Christopher Skaluba, which was based on an Atlantic Council study visit to Lithuania. The Atlantic Council was kind enough to include me on the trek, which began in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, and included visits to troops in the field and the port of Klaipeda. I largely concur with Mike and Chris’s comments and supplement them below with several additional observations.

First, one can understand the preoccupation of Lithuania’s senior political and military leadership with the country’s security situation. Lithuania has had a difficult history with the Soviet Union and Russia. Some in Vilnius believe that Moscow regards the Baltic states as “temporarily lost territory.”

A Russian military invasion of the Baltic states is not a high probability. However, the Lithuanians cannot ignore a small probability, especially in light of the Kremlin’s recent rhetoric, the Russian military’s ongoing modernization of its conventional forces and exercise pattern of the past five years, and Russia’s use of military force to seize Crimea and conduct a conflict in Donbas.

When the Lithuanian Ministry of National Defense (MNOD) looks around its neighborhood, it can see specific reasons for concern. Russia is upgrading its military presence in the Kaliningrad exclave on Lithuania’s southwestern border. The MNOD now counts Kaliningrad as hosting some twenty thousand Russian military personnel, including a naval infantry unit and substantial anti-access, area denial capabilities, such as advanced surface-to-air missiles. The Lithuanians assess that the Russian military could mount a large ground attack from Belarus, to the east of Lithuania (the border is less than twenty miles from downtown Vilnius). These forces are backed by an additional 120,000 personnel in Russia’s Western Military District, including a tank army. Russia has substantial air assets in the region as well as warships in the Baltic Sea.

For its part, Lithuania can muster fourteen thousand soldiers and sailors (four thousand of whom are conscripts serving just nine months). They are backed up by five thousand volunteers, similar to the U.S. National Guard. Under NATO’s enhanced forward presence program, a German-led NATO battlegroup adds 1,300 troops, mainly from Germany, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. In addition, NATO member air forces rotate small fighter squadrons into Lithuania to provide air policing for the Baltic states.

Second, Lithuania has a logical plan to enhance its defense capabilities. The MNOD is making good use of its defense dollars (Lithuania now meets NATO’s two percent of gross domestic product goal, having tripled its defense expenditures over the past six years). Eschewing shiny objects such as F-16 jets, the MNOD focuses on upgrading the capabilities of its two primary ground units, a mechanized brigade and a recently-established motorized brigade. The main procurement programs of the past three years have purchased infantry fighting vehicles, self propelled artillery and short-range surface-to-air missiles to equip the brigades.

In the event of war, the forces in Lithuania would likely fight a defensive holding action while awaiting NATO reinforcements. The MNOD and Ministry of Transport are working together to enhance the country’s ability to flow in NATO forces, including by upgrading the rollon/roll-off capacity at the port of Klaipeda and building a European standard gauge railroad line from Poland to the main base of Lithuania’s mechanized brigade. The railroad line, which o obviates the need to change the railroad gauge at the Polish-Lithuanian border, a cumbersome process involving changing out the wheels of railcars, ultimately will be extended north to Latvia and Estonia.

Third, the Lithuanians value NATO’s enhanced forward presence in the form of the NATO battlegroup. The battlegroup is fully integrated into Lithuania’s Iron Wolf Brigade, and in wartime would come under the tactical control of the brigade. The rotational NATO force is based with and trains side-by-side with major elements of that brigade.

One potential question is, if Russian forces were to cross the border and the Iron Wolf Brigade deployed, then how quickly would the NATO battlegroup take the field with it? The latter would need a NATO command to do so, and likely also national authorizations from Berlin, The Hague and Prague. Hopefully, those authorizations would be transmitted early as a crisis developed so that the NATO battlegroup could deploy immediately. It adds significantly to Lithuanian combat capabilities, including by providing the only armor unit in the country.

Fourth, as pleased as Vilnius is to have a NATO military presence, the Lithuanians very much would like to add a U.S. component to it. With a U.S. armored brigade combat team deployed in Poland on a rotational basis, the U.S. military has the assets to consider periodically rotating an armored company to Lithuania (and to Latvia and Estonia). These rotations would be useful military exercises in case there is a crisis that requires a reinforcement move from Poland to Lithuania through the Suwalki Gap.

Lithuania is moving in the right direction in bolstering its defense capabilities, with prudent steps taken over the past six years and sensible plans for the future. As Mike and Chris point out, modest steps by NATO and, I would argue, the United States could significantly add to the Alliance’s deterrence and defense posture in the Baltics.

This piece originally appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

As we witness the increasingly detrimental effects of global climate change, the role that nuclear power could play globally to mitigate its effects continues to be debated. The series of articles featured in the Bulletin in December 2016 aired a broad spectrum of opinions, ranging in assessment of the role of nuclear power from insignificant to mandatory. In this series, we present the perspective of a new crop of nuclear professionals who collectively represent two of the world leaders in nuclear power—the United States and Russia.

These young professionals work together to exchange views and ideas as part of the U.S.-Russia Young Professionals Nuclear Forum that we created in May 2016 to encourage dialogue on critical nuclear issues of concern to both countries. As most official avenues of US-Russia cooperation on nuclear issues were being shut down in pace with the deteriorating political relations between Washington and Moscow, our objective was to turn to the younger generation, because those in it will have to live with the consequences of a world in which their countries no longer cooperate to mitigate global nuclear dangers.

In the United States, our efforts are organized within the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, although we reach out to universities and other organizations across the country. In Russia, we were fortunate to find the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (MEPhI), Russia’s flagship research university in nuclear engineering, to be an enthusiastic partner. Its rector, Professor Mikhail Strikhanov, has an unwavering international outlook that stresses the need for cooperation, especially in higher education and research. The young professionals are students, postdoctoral fellows, and early career professionals.

Hecker has previously written in the Bulletin about the remarkable period of post-Cold War nuclear cooperation between Russian and American nuclear weapon scientists and how the termination of that cooperation by our governments threatens our collective security. We viewed engaging young professionals from the two countries as one of the few avenues of continued cooperation. It has the potential of being particularly effective because at the forum meetings, the young Russians and Americans interact in an educational and non-adversarial environment.

The first three forum meetings focused primarily on issues of nuclear non-proliferation and countering nuclear terrorism. They featured exercises in which the young professionals worked in small groups side by side to explore solutions to vexing nuclear problems. One was a simulation conducted at Stanford in May 2018 just a few weeks before the historic Trump-Kim Singapore Summit. The other was an exercise in Moscow in October 2018 to advise their governments on a hypothetical crisis related to the US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal.

At the Moscow forum, we also asked the young professionals to explore what the two countries could do to promote the benefits of nuclear energy around the globe, while cooperating to mitigate the associated risks.

Preparation for the forum included online lectures by senior mentors as well as lectures and discussion sessions in Moscow by both Russian and American specialists. In the nuclear power exercise, we assigned eight key questions to 24 young professionals. We divided them into eight teams, each composed of Russian and American participants. The central question was whether or not an expansion of global nuclear power is necessary to help mitigate the danger of global climate change. Individual groups examined issues of supply and demand around the globe and some of the big challenges posed by an expansion of nuclear power—those of economics, safety and security, potential proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the disposition of nuclear waste.

The young professionals conducted research prior to the meeting, deliberated and debated within their teams during the meeting, and presented their findings to the larger group and the panel of senior mentors at the end of the exercise. During the past six months they have captured the essence of their findings in the eight articles featured in this special presentation in the Bulletin.

Their findings are generally pro-nuclear, which is not surprising considering that most of them have strong educational and research backgrounds in either nuclear technologies or nuclear security. But we found that their views were primarily driven by their serious concerns about the dangers of global climate change and the urgent need to confront these dangers.

Their articles are of interest not so much in that they break new ground in these areas, particularly since many other  established experts have tried to tackle these issues for decades. They are of interest because they represent the views of some of the younger generation of professionals working together across cultural and disciplinary divides. We were struck by the following comment in one of the papers  that reflects on the perceived urgency of the task at hand: “We are the first generation that is experiencing the dramatic effects of global climate change and likely the last that can do something about it to avoid catastrophic consequences for the Earth and its people.”

We also note that the articles uniformly reveal that the young professionals across the board firmly believe that the benefits and risks of expanding nuclear power globally must be pursued and tackled in a concerted effort of major nuclear powers (especially the United States and Russia), other developed nations, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and all stakeholders. These younger voices stated: “The most important shift necessary to facilitate [nuclear power] expansion is an increase in international cooperation and multilateralization in the form of, for example, international reactor supply contracts, multinational enrichment conglomerates, nondiscriminatory fuel banks, and international waste repositories.”

We believe the readers will find the sentiments and opinions of the young Russian and American professionals interesting and encouraging. We certainly have found them eager and able to work together effectively—a lesson that the more senior professionals and the governments need to relearn.

Editor’s note: The Young Professionals Nuclear Forum cooperation is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Read the articles here:

• Nuclear Power and Global Climate Change
• What Countries Will Be the Most Important in Leading a Significant Expansion of Global Nuclear Power—Both From the Perspective of the Supplier and the User?
• Should Nuclear Power Be Expanded Significantly Into Developing Countries?
• What Will Be Required for a Significant Expansion of Global Nuclear Energy?
• Resolving Safety and Security Concerns About Nuclear Power
• Why Nuclear Power Plants Cost so Much—and What Can Be Done About It
• Will Nuclear Waste Disposal Challenges Limit a Significant Expansion of Global Nuclear Power? Part 1
• Will Nuclear Waste Disposal Challenges Limit a Significant Expansion of Global Nuclear Power? Part 2