[MUSIC PLAYING] (SINGING) When you walk in the room, do you have sway?
kara swisher
I’m Kara Swisher, and you’re listening to “Sway.” Vladimir Putin’s recent invasion has been playing out at various levels. In addition to horrific ground attacks that have led more than a million people to flee their homes, there are also two other theaters of war. The first is an information battle playing out on screens and social-media platforms as Putin seeks, unsuccessfully, in my opinion, to lie about the reasons for this war and hide his losses. And then there’s the evolving cyber threat evident after Russian malware targeted Ukraine’s government, websites, and banks. We’re still understanding exactly how these information and cyber conflicts will escalate, what damage they’ll do, and what the right role is for the U.S. government and American companies. I wanted to discuss this all with my guest today, Clint Watts. He’s a research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, specializing in Russian disinformation. And he has a background in military and intelligence, having previously served as a U.S. infantry officer and F.B.I. agent. We taped this conversation in two parts. The second half, which deals largely with the cyber threat, was taped last week. But the first half, about the information war, was taped over the weekend. No, that’s not because Clint and I had nothing better to do with our Sundays. It’s because, on Friday, Russia ratcheted up information crackdowns in a number of ways, including a block on access to Facebook in the country. The Russians also sent warning letters to Google and TikTok. It all suggests that Putin may be trying to drop a new information Iron Curtain between Russia and the West. So lots to talk about today. Clint, welcome to “Sway.”
clint watts
Thanks for having me, Kara.
kara swisher
Thanks for coming back to tape with us as the news moves so quickly as it has over this weekend. When we last spoke, I think the war itself, the physical war, is not going well for the Russians. But brute force does tend to win out. But the information war becomes ever more important, correct?
clint watts
So week two and week three will be the inflection point of how the war goes forward, both militarily and in the information-tech space. On the military space — I’ll start with that first — the convoy we all hear about is bogged down. But there’s another axis of advance coming in around Chernihiv. And if it links up with the convoy, it’s going to change the game against the Ukrainian army. They’ll start to get that envelopment they’re pursuing around Kyiv. Separately, the Russians — where they didn’t have success in the North, they’re having success in the South. And they may be able to essentially seal off Ukraine from the South to the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. And that would be devastating long run for them, militarily. On the upside, you see the Ukrainian resistance getting more missiles. They’re getting humanitarian support. So maybe they can last out, because in terms of — their military performance has been underestimated. On the information space, it really comes down to, does the West stay engaged in this conversation? Do they still care about what’s going on in Ukraine? And then can Zelenskyy stay alive? Can his administration stay up on its feet? Can it keep broadcasting and inspiring? It’s an influencer-led sort of diatribe that’s coming on both sides.
kara swisher
All right, so just let’s revisit the news that broke Friday and over the weekend. Let’s get a bit of a TikTok. So first, Putin is cracking down with a block on Facebook. What is he afraid of?
clint watts
Putin is worried that Russians back home will learn what’s really going on with Russian soldiers being killed inside Ukraine. And that’s one part of it. The second part of it is, Facebook has started putting in controls on their platform on Russian state media. And so this is a cross-check, essentially a retaliation against Facebook to say, you put controls on me. I’m going to put controls on you.
kara swisher
All right, so Facebook has put some things in place. Russia blocked them. But they left Instagram and WhatsApp up. Why is Putin doing that?
clint watts
Putin knows there’s not many Russians on Facebook. The percentage is very low. They have VK, which is essentially a copy of Facebook, but it’s the Russian version of Facebook. And that’s for older folks. And Instagram is one of the most prolific and most important platforms inside Russia, because that’s where social-media influencers and sports stars and everybody communicates, essentially on Instagram. There’s a lot of affinity for it. And WhatsApp is a communication platform worldwide. And it’s a way that Russians can communicate. And if you take that off, you’re looking at a massive populous pushback inside Russia.
kara swisher
OK, so as you said, Facebook is small potatoes in Russia. Estimated 1 in 10 people use it. They also sent warning letters to the bigger platforms — Google, which has YouTube, and then also TikTok. Is this the beginning of an Iron Curtain, or is it impossible now to have one drop?
clint watts
I think both the tech companies and Russia are trying to thread a narrow needle inside those two, and it’s not going to happen. All the Western companies are going to have trouble trying to do content moderation evenly and consistently. Meanwhile, Putin knows that if he shuts all those platforms down, he’s going to have an information revolt internally. And he doesn’t have a good substitute in that information environment. Imagine if you spend five hours a day on your phone, and suddenly, there’s nothing to look at for three of those hours. And you want to know what’s going on, and all you’re hearing is very lame Putin content. Putin has got a problem at home.
kara swisher
OK, talk about the role of platforms like Google, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, because they’re trying to ensure they can play everywhere. But playing in some places means policing content in other places. For example, it was after pressure from the E.U. that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok, and even Telegram, scrubbed Russian state media. What is going on within these companies? Because they hadn’t wanted to act before, and now they are.
clint watts
For transparency, I have advised some of these companies as they’re working through their policies. They don’t take my recommendations all the time. But I think the era of, we want to be a global company, is over. And it’s finally landing on them. There’s three internets today. There’s the Western, E.U., U.S. internet. There’s China’s internet. And there’s distorted internets in between, namely Russia, where authoritarians are always trying to control it or shape it or move it. And for a very long time, they’ve all tried to do two things. One, compete with each other as if they’re equals, even though they offer different services, and that’s not correct. And two, act like you can mold your company and be consistent and talk about freedom and democracy and all these things in open internet and contort to whatever gets you the most eyes on your platform. Those days are over. And I think this is the rupture, you know, that tipping point where you’re seeing them all swing back and say, OK, is this market in Russia worth it to me, as a platform, if my values were to — let’s buy the world a Coke and sing in harmony? The answer is no. They can’t do it anymore. And what I don’t understand and what I don’t like about social media, as an industry, is, they don’t work together. When I’ve worked in cybersecurity, and you show up, all the banks are there. And what do they do? They all try and protect the entire ecosystem against cyber attacks, because they’re not competing on security. The biggest weakness with social media is, they don’t work together. If they did, if they coordinated — and you see them all now like a domino, right? They all are trying to figure out what to do —
kara swisher
Which is their way, yeah.
clint watts
— which is their way. Like, hey, if you really want to do something to Russia and be consistent, have a meeting, a Zoom call, whatever. Get everybody on there and just be like, hey, we’re going to do something with Russia. What do you guys want to do? Let’s talk this through. Let’s do it together. It would be so much more consistent, because if you don’t, the bad actors go, OK, slip and move. Duck over here. Change my techniques. This is their terms of service. Adapt around that. Go to this platform. That’s the audience I want to reach.
kara swisher
OK, so the platforms are doing well now? They just aren’t coordinated enough, from your perspective.
clint watts
Yeah, I think they are moving as quickly as they can in a crisis to try and figure out what to do, one. Two, I think it’s way too early to know what the effect is, in terms of the information environment. I think, third, we need to kind of look at, are we doing too much harm? So this is both in sanctions and in tech, right now, is, are we shutting ourselves off from the Russian people to where now we’re essentially making them vulnerable to where they can be manipulated? They’re basically under Putin’s control. And I think the last part is just, they’ve got to decide. This idea that they’re going to represent democracy and human rights and the best values of the world and then also try to play to every single market — they just need to come down and make a hard decision that our profits and growth are not about market access anymore. It’s about making better services for people that share our values and share what we believe in.
kara swisher
The other big news that broke Friday was bigger than any one platform. Cogent internet announced Friday, it would cut off internet service to Russian clients. This is an American company. It’s the second-biggest carrier out of Russia. It’s a big deal. Can you talk about Cogent?
clint watts
Yeah, I think what’s important is, we’ve been talking about social media as applications and platforms, right? Now we’re talking about infrastructure. Totally different, which means, this is infrastructure not just in terms of internet access, but all services, like booking tickets, airline flights, things that would make your economy run are getting turned off by outside. So they became reliant on services — global services and tech, like Cogent — that are backbones of all of their systems. And that’s why you see lines, like, at subway stations. They need cash for the first time. I believe it was Mastercard and Visa — are making changes. This is devastating. So we focus on the information environment. But I think, over time, the economic impact of all these tech companies that provide the backbone of everything in the economy pulling out is going to cripple the country, to a degree.
kara swisher
Right, because Russia has integrated into the global tech economy, for sure, using all the backend services, whatever they happen to be, as opposed to, say, China, which has a lot of its own — has its own homegrown stuff that works just fine.
clint watts
And they have tech companies like Kaspersky, for cybersecurity, which have always been under this sort of cloud, because it’s Russian. How are they going to sell to the Western world, at this point? I don’t know.
kara swisher
And then you have both hardware and software companies getting involved here. Apple and Microsoft have stopped sales in Russia. Oracle, which is a huge database company — you wouldn’t think that would be a problem. But all these companies have links into the business in Russia.
clint watts
That’s right. So anything that’s in country stays. But if it’s not updated, it breaks. And it becomes vulnerable for things like hacking. So it really puts — a Western company that’s still trying to operate inside Russia will quickly have to make a decision in the coming weeks. Do we stay, or do we go? And I think most of them are going to go, because it’s just going to be too difficult to operate. It’s going to get pretty terrible inside Russia. And I think it just comes from everything, right? Imagine, where are they going to have to go to now to get infrastructure technology like hardware and software? It’s going to be China. China is going to be the one they have to go to. And they’re going to be so much more stressed about China watching everything going on inside Russia than they’re going to be about the West trying to watch everything that goes inside Russia, because Western companies would bend. And Huawei or any of these Chinese applications that come in are going to go, yeah, yeah, we’ll totally do what you say. That’s not true. They’re going to have all sorts of surveillance tech built into everything that they’re providing.
kara swisher
Yeah.
clint watts
Yeah.
kara swisher
Yeah, which they’re quite good at.
clint watts
For sure. In conflicts that I’ve seen, over time, where there’s been some sort of tech-enabled populism or tech-enabled resistance, it’s not long before two things happen. One, you have the hard shake-down in your face. And second, you have a complete infiltration of Russian agents in each of these platforms watching everything that’s being said. And sometimes it’s showing up and doing intimidation. Sometimes it’s even worse, particularly if you try and remain as an open journalist, I think, inside Russia, on a lot of these platforms to get the word out. It’s going to be a very, very challenging and dangerous situation for them.
kara swisher
So one of the things I noted was that Putin has to toe a very fine line here to show muscle and also not alienate. I think that day has passed for him. Is it going to backfire when Russians notice? I would assume it’s slowly — the penny drops for this population, correct?
clint watts
He’s got a disaster on his hands, for a couple reasons. Militarily, even if he is successful, he’s taking casualties. That will filter back home. You cannot disinformation your way out of 10,000 dead. It’s just not possible. And you’re going to have war-wounded. The mothers in Russia have always been the pushback against Putin during these conflicts. This is going to be next-level scale. I think the other thing is, in warfare, it’s easy to invade. It’s hard to occupy. And the big miscalculation was, he wanted to do this political coup, topple Zelenskyy, install his own government to essentially administer the people. That’s not going to happen. Now he’s in the insurgency-counterinsurgency game, even if he wins. I was on a panel with Dr. John Nagl, who wrote the “Counterinsurgency” book. He’s like, I would estimate it would take 800,000 Russian soldiers to secure Ukraine, because there’s intense resistance, and this isn’t going away. I think, third, you’ve got oligarchs, money, just the economic damage that’s been done. This will not settle down at home. And for those that have had the open markets, the open economy, you know, more open economy, more open information space — when these things start trickling and shutting off, you’re going to see two things. One, those that can flee will. Who are those that flee? Those with money. And those that stay, there’s going to be fights and wars. And so my big worry is that we’re worried about Kyiv falling today. I’m worried about Moscow falling between day 30 and six months from now. He’s going to throw everything at the wall to try and convince Russians that things are going well, that the war was justified. And if he gets into trouble or the West really mounts a coordinated defense, he’s going to say, look, they’re doing it to us. I have to defend us. It’s defensive. It’s defensive. And will they buy that? I don’t know. I think it’s starting to break. The one thing that, also, I want to add, just on the tech picture, is, we always talk about coordinated, inauthentic behavior and bots and things like that. No, no, no. This time, it’s coordinated authentic behavior, meaning, on TikTok, if you go, you’ll see Russians, influencers saying the same script over and over and over again. They did this when? During Navalny protests. They go and try and hire influencers on Instagram, TikTok, or coerce them. I don’t know how they do it. So this is going to be the problem, I think, for the tech platforms, if they do stay open inside Russia, is, how do you police something that people are voluntarily saying? I don’t know. I don’t know how they write the rules for that. And that’s where everything is going, I think, over time.
kara swisher
Do you have a sense of what information is trickling through to the Russian people? Can we track that?
clint watts
It is anecdotal and qualitative. It’s not quantitative. You can’t really know for sure. You don’t get the kind of views and shares and likes that you would get from analytics we get in the West. You can see posts that will go up, get lots of views, lots of discussion, and then vanish. So if you can capture that — and I think that’s for reporters, journalists, and researchers right now — capture everything in real time, because it may not be there much later. No. And I don’t think we will until we see if narratives of the Russian diaspora in the West are starting to surface and be repeated and we hit a Wuhan moment, meaning, you might have remembered when, at Wuhan, a doctor, right? He posts and says, this Covid-19 is super dangerous. You saw such a populist uprise inside China that they couldn’t police it all, because of the volume. They couldn’t take it all down. They couldn’t censor it all. Russia — I think the thing to look for in the next two weeks is, does it have a moment where populism around what’s going on in Ukraine, the deaths of soldiers, our economy, losing information — if you see an upswell of that where they can’t knock on doors and tell people to take down posts — if they can’t technically pull that stuff down, they’ve got a big, big problem. And that’s where you could see this sort of info revolution take hold. That’s where I will look for as sort of a tipping point.
kara swisher
Now, one of the things that’s been effective also, is, Zelenskyy is winning the narrative war, which must piss Putin off. He’s addressing people on Zoom. And there’s falsehoods that the Ukraine government is putting out, which is seen as adorable as opposed to what Russia does. Can you talk about this? I’m not a Russian apologist, but some of the lies are just — that’s what they are. They’re propaganda, back and forth. And much of it is clearly what’s happening there. But how do you look at this and him using information strategically?
clint watts
Whether it’s sports, politics, or war, people want their team to win. And I think that’s what you see play out in social media right now. Zelensky — he was made fun of for being an actor, comedian. Wow. It’s a great time to have an actor, comedian. He’s really good on camera. He gives wonderful speeches. He’s the guy you need in a moment like this. And you can see his popularity swing around. He’s a great influencer, and he understands the media. And if you’re going to have a president that’s under siege, this is a perfect person for it. I think he’s remarkable. He’s really galvanized the will of the Ukrainian people. He did not flee, which a lot of traditional kind of politicians would probably have done. And so beyond that, I think, in the information war, wow, Ukraine is a massive tech company. I mean, they have tons of programmers. Western companies used to outsource to Ukraine as, hey, how do we get Russian talent but not get Russian controls, right? We have to watch and fact-check as quickly on that end as we do on the Russian end to make sure that we really know what’s going on. And I can’t fault the Ukrainians for trying to use that, because they’re the underdogs, right? They’re trying to use —
kara swisher
I don’t know. I think there’s plenty of real stuff. They don’t have to make a ghost do the thing.
clint watts
Ghost of Kyiv —
kara swisher
I just think they should be as open and honest as possible to seem not like Putin. Don’t use Putin.
clint watts
I do. I’m just saying, I don’t want the Ukrainians to put out disinformation. What I’m saying is, I understand why they’re trying to use everything at their fingertips to try and combat the narrative. They should stick to truth, in my opinion, because it’s way more powerful than false. And then over time, you erode your credibility. And they need to maintain their credibility, because the opposite side — Russia — is putting out a nonstop stream of disinformation to justify their actions. So Ukraine has got to stay in that lane, or otherwise, it becomes the both-sides thing. Both sides are doing it. Both sides. Both sides. And like you said, there’s unbelievable footage, scenes, music, things coming out of Ukraine. Just stick with the easy stuff. [MUSIC PLAYING]
kara swisher
We’ll be back in a minute. [MUSIC PLAYING] We’ve seen narrative wars play out before. The Germans were experts at this in World War II, for example. We also saw plenty of misinformation during the Cold War era. And then, of course, there was the campaign for hearts and minds in the Arab Spring. So I asked Clint why this narrative war between Russia and Ukraine has captured the global imagination and why it feels a little different than the ones that have come before.
clint watts
Several factors have changed over the last decade that are important. One, cell phones in everyone’s hands worldwide. Two, social-media platforms of all stripes connecting everybody at the same time. But the bigger ones, just to be honest, are, this is a predominantly white, predominantly Orthodox Christian population in Europe. And so the West cares. Having worked on Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Syria over the last 15 years, which is how I got into this, I’ve never seen so many people care about what’s going on. People see that fight, and they see themselves. It’s implicit bias in social media. You like information from people that look like you and talk like you. And you’re seeing that kick into full gear with this battle. And people can identify with themselves, particularly in Europe. Poland — very worried about what’s going on. Germany, all of the sudden, has kicked up its military commitments. We begged them to do this since World War II with NATO, and they didn’t do it. So I think that is the biggest driver of it. I think where it gets weird is —
kara swisher
Because there was imagery from these other conflict zones all the time, and horrific imagery.
clint watts
Absolutely. And I think if you went to the Middle East today and listen to discussions, they’re like, oh, everybody cares now. What about last decade when all of these invasions and battles, and Assad is barrel-bombing? Oh, you don’t know what’s going to happen in Kyiv? Maybe you should have watched Aleppo, or maybe you should have seen in Grozny. That’s their perspective on it. And I think there’s an importantness, which is the power of translate today compared to 10 years ago. You can engage with Russian content on Twitter or Google when you do a search on a website. You can read it now. It almost magically switches, right? So that’s allowing the West to engage in languages and platforms that they otherwise would have to — they wouldn’t even know existed. They wouldn’t be able to compute it.
kara swisher
Could this be a revisionist moment for platforms, something like Arab Spring, where they looked great, and they celebrated themselves accessibly, I thought, at the time? And could it pull them out of this sinkhole that’s been January 6, where many of them look— I’ve used the term handmaidens to sedition. Is this a moment for that?
clint watts
Yes, with one exception, which is, they don’t work together.
kara swisher
Yes, they do not like each other. People say big tech. I’m like, they cannot stand each other. Largely, you don’t like Facebook, but —
clint watts
Yeah, and I think the other part is, now there is a market edge to not police, right? Certain platforms are going under the auspices that we will never tell you to take anything down. And so as long as that competitive space is there, you can’t unify, as an industry, exactly, because it is about competition, then, for who can keep more content up and more eyeballs on.
kara swisher
But there is a bit of a loophole with Russia here. We’ll do what the government tells us to do a little. So they’re pushing the buck back. But here in the United States, they’re not aggressive on content moderation or other countries where it’s much more serious, like the Philippines.
clint watts
People are watching Ukraine. We could find several Ukraines around the world right now where the Rohingya, those sorts of issues in Myanmar, Maria Ressa — these are well-known but still not addressed. And so they’re going to struggle. And that is something where, if they work together, they could address those issues. They could help each other.
kara swisher
Meaning a persistent rubric rather than this kind of on the fly, which seems to be the calling card of technology companies.
clint watts
Yeah, and on the fly always puts you in a vice, because one regime or one set of regulations doesn’t coincide with the other. And you’re picking, whose disinformation do we like?
kara swisher
Yeah, let’s move from platforms, specifically, to cyber warfare, which is, of course, different than platforms. What is Russia’s cyber strategy right now? You’ve seen cyber attacks against Ukraine already — malware, et cetera. Some of it’s getting caught in the banking system. So what is their strategy here, and how much damage has it done?
clint watts
Yeah, so it’s got layers in two directions. One, it’s about availability, destruction, or espionage. You know, it’s a way to think about it and what they’re trying to achieve. Ukraine is always the center of the onion for them, for cyber. The Ukrainians and the Russians have amazing programmers and computer scientists who are very brilliant with tech. But they are stymied a bit because if they want to take over Ukraine, they don’t want to destroy all of Ukraine. So they, I think, are not going the destructive malware sort of approach inside the country too much, because they were like, well, I might want to turn the power and the water and all these things back on. Separately, I think further abroad, what we forget is, there’s not an infinite number of hackers. So Russia has been able, with their APTs —
kara swisher
These are people they — this is their intelligence service, and then they have an army of hackers they hire, correct?
clint watts
Yes, and that’s the strength of the Russian system, is, both they have their own intel services, each with a hacker force. But then they can go after this very capable criminal underground at any moment and sort of bring them in and say, you are now a proxy force for us. They’re running into obstacles now because there’s Anonymous. And all of these populist groups that — and that’s causing them problems. Now, instead of always being on offense, they have to be on defense a little bit and thinking about defending themselves. Separately, I think they know that for the first time, there’s an escalation factor. Before, they could always hit the U.S. And we would say, let’s negotiate. You’ve got to stop it. Not this time. I think they are aware that whether it’s the European countries or the U.S., that if they touch our power grids this time or our banking system, the lights go out in Moscow. We’re going to do something. That’s my impression. So I think, for the first time, they’re having to create different guidelines about when they’re going to use it. I think the biggest factor that we’re not talking about is, what happens if Putin loses or if he’s losing? It’s three-pronged — nuclear, cyber and disinformation. It’s his three asymmetric prongs against the West. And he’ll focus in very close. So I’m now worried about Poland, for example. Lots of U.S. and Western banks have data centers, tech in these countries. Hungary is another one. Germany — absolutely, for sure. That’s where I’m worried. And it’s more, what industry do they focus on? Is it communications with availability, this DDoS kind of stuff that you’ve seen them do? Or do they go really strong and knock out something that causes pain in the West beyond oil prices?
kara swisher
Mm-hmm. What’s your worst-case scenario?
clint watts
Putin loses. And I don’t like the nuclear discussion right now, because it’s set up on Cold War dogma and classes that I had in the ‘90s. And what I see Russia doing is not what I was taught in school at West Point in 1993. So my worst-case scenario is, Putin is losing. He has problems at home. It could be a Russian coup threat or a populist uprising way beyond the Navalny protest. Soldiers are dying. Maybe 10,000 have died at the 30-day mark. And he says, I’m going to use a tactical nuke to finish this off and bring Kyiv to its knees, Zelensky to the table, and the West to stop barking at me.
kara swisher
Wow.
clint watts
I find that, in the nuclear discussion, we’re not talking enough about, Putin will not lose. He’s not going to let that happen. And you have a guy who’s isolated, rumors of health risk. Like, maybe he’s sick. If he’s isolated, worried and all that matters to him is his place in history, which is, I’m the one who retook Ukraine, I’m the one who restored Russian greatness, why wouldn’t he use a nuke, whether the West did anything at all?
kara swisher
Wow.
clint watts
And that’s where I’m most scared, I think, at this point.
kara swisher
A tactical nuke.
clint watts
Yeah. It would not be this “Day After” movie sort of thing. It would be strategic use of it to win and end the conflict.
kara swisher
But the latch is off, then, for other places. Once someone does it, that’s really, I think, the problem. One of the things — we have an enormous surface area of attack, digitally speaking. Here’s some tape from President Biden.
archived recording (joe biden) If Russia pursues cyber attacks against our companies, our critical infrastructure, we are prepared to respond. For months, we’ve been working closely with the private sector to harden their cyber defenses, sharpen our ability to respond to Russian cyber attacks as well.
kara swisher
What did you hear in that? Is Biden saying the U.S. will only get involved if Russia strikes first, defense? Or do you feel like that there’s more offensive ideas in mind?
clint watts
I took it as similar to the nuclear posture. We’re only going to do something if Russia does something first. I think the problem is, how do you brief to the world that Russia did something first? Like, it’s very difficult to know. I think the second part is, if you’re the rest of the world, you should be in a state of panic, because who can bounce back the quickest? Those with the most modern software and patches and infrastructure and better tech and professionals. Who doesn’t have that? Lots of countries in between. I think this is the difference between Russia and the U.S. Russia doesn’t mind carpet-bombing and cyber. And the U.S. has to be surgical. And how do you manage surgical in cyberspace? I don’t think we’ve ever quite figured it out. And maybe this is the conflict where we do, or maybe we don’t.
kara swisher
So what are the areas you’re most worried about for companies? More SolarWinds attack, Colonial Pipeline?
clint watts
I think SolarWinds was more espionage and being able to just infiltrate as many systems quickly. I’m more worried in terms of energy, because that’s the vice. Why not bring Colonial Pipeline back or bring us to our knees in terms of energy at a time of high inflation? I think that would be where I would worry the most. I think the other is in communication. Man, if you want to send the U.S. into panic, knock out any of the big platforms or communication services. Turn Netflix off for an hour, and you’ve got a gasp in this country. We’re not particularly resilient, as a society, that, OK, it will come back on. So I think he knows those are his two best weapons.
kara swisher
So stopping Netflix. Oh, no, I can’t have whatever.
clint watts
Yeah, I think if you want to get the West attention, take off the services that, you know, matter the most to them as individual citizens, where they go, hey, wait. I’m all for Ukraine, but let’s get this together. I really want to have what I want. And Americans are particularly selfish in that way.
kara swisher
I didn’t get my Amazon in 14 seconds? What is that? I just thought of it, and I. —
clint watts
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
kara swisher
— needed my toothpaste immediately. Should there be an international — the way we have nuclear non-proliferation treaties? Should there be that? And is it possible?
clint watts
Yeah, I don’t know. 10 years ago, I remember going to some of the first sessions in D.C. where they’re talking about cyber NATO, and attack on one is an attack on all. And what will we do? And it was such a coordination issue. And I think part of it was, NATO and the EU were not in alignment on tech. And a lot of that was about Huawei. I was in Brussels when they opened the Huawei transparency center. I asked a German guy — I was like, oh, you’re not going to do this? And he said, well, are you going to spy on me or China is going to spy on me? It costs me half as much if China spies on me. And that was interesting perspective around, how do we come to the table with all of these partners to negotiate?
kara swisher
So in that way, you bring us to China. And that’s my last question. When you look at the threat of global cyber warfare, Russia, to me, is a minor player. They’re very effective, small, nimble, irritating, effective in getting us to hate each other, essentially. But everyone I talked to, China is 100 percent their worry in terms of dominance, of software and hardware, dominance in telecom, our reliance on them, as a country, for manufacture. Do you think that’s correct, that that’s the worry?
clint watts
China is absolutely the biggest worry, because they have all four layers. Infrastructure, applications, content, and control of content. And so they can wall themselves off and still operate, to a degree. And we are not inside their audience space. We’re not inside their systems. We cannot retaliate in that way. At least, I’m not aware of it. Whereas, they are in all of our systems. You know, they are building the components that’s in our infrastructure. They are making the applications that we are using.
kara swisher
TikTok.
clint watts
Yeah, TikTok and other, just in terms of technical. And then they’re making content on scale now. So my team — we found social-media influencers in 24 languages doing broadcast around the world every day from the Chinese state. And they’re winning audience, and we can’t control it. So I think when I look at it, across the board, yes, Russia is going to be a big deal, and we have to worry about it. China is the — it is the juggernaut that’s coming over the hill.
kara swisher
Mm-hmm. And the one thing we should be watching out for or doing is what?
clint watts
I think the biggest thing is understanding, if we’re not allowed to be in their audience space, then why are we allowing them to be in our audience space? If we’re not allowed to have companies like Google or the big tech companies — Facebook, whatever they might be — in their space, then how are we going to allow them in ours? There’s got to be some equivalency there that we have to negotiate with them, because right now, they’re taking it to us on all these Western platforms. It’s not very effective, because they’re not particularly good messengers. But they’re learning, and they’re getting better. They’re using money to buy up media outlets and tech companies.
kara swisher
Gaming companies.
clint watts
Yeah, and where will social scoring systems come into the U.S.? It’s not going to come from the government. It’ll come through tech companies. They will march that out. I just think we’re totally unprepared and not really thought through what 10 years from now looks like. We see what 10 years ago in tech has changed. The next 10 years is China.
kara swisher
Well, we will leave it on that note. Clint, thank you so much. This has been so helpful, and I really appreciate all your insights.
clint watts
