Sep 01 2022 26 mins 1
Our final guest this season is Eric Greenwald. Eric is a distinguished cyber security fellow with the Strauss Center at the University of Texas at Austin who has served with the National Security Council staff, the FBI and U.S. Cyber Command. In the private sector, Eric Greenwald has worked as a litigator and an international trade lawyer and more recently, as a producer for the CBS News program “60 Minutes” and National Public Radio (NPR). With this varied background at the intersection of security, cyber, policy and journalism, he was the perfect person to serve as an advisor for this podcast project. In early 2021, I pitched him an idea of a podcast exploring the issue of informationnoye protivoborstvo. This mouthful is Russian for “information confrontation,” an umbrella term to define their proven strategy of information disruption in grey-area conflict zones (which are also sometimes kinetic conflict zones). Informationnoye protivoborstvo encompasses both cyber hacking AND disinformation. Eric suggested we focus on disinformation, as the solutions to address hacking and disinfo are very different, with the disinfo solutions a bit more sparse. Disinformation in this case, and always on our podcast this season, means falsifying a narrative and spreading it for one’s own goals and interests. Sometimes it can be as innocuous as a joke, or sometimes it can seek to drive a wedge between Americans on hot button issues like race and gender and sexuality. On this special wrap-up episode, we discuss solutions to minimize disinformation in the U.S. and mitigate some of its harmful effects. We discuss ideas like civic engagement and media literacy courses in schools. We talk about content moderation with 1st Amendment considerations. We also tackle Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Thank you, Eric, for not only marveling at the complexity of the issue but for also exploring policy solutions and providing important context for all of us. The answer is truly, we ought to do a lot of these things to test and see what works. With incremental steps, we can begin to chip away at the issue to right our wobbling ship.
