DATA & NATIONAL SECURITY :

CRYSTALLIZING THE RISKS

September 2020

Lindsay P. Gorman
Emerging Technology Fellow | Alliance for Securing Democracy
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www.securingdemocracy.gmfus.org
@LindsayPGorman
 The 30,000 ft view: The global information contest
Democracies and authoritarians are engaged in a global contest over the information environment.

The Global Information Contest

Governance:
Architecture:
The use or the laws,
the systems,
manipulation standards, and
platforms, or
of information norms for
companies
itself (data and content, data,
that transmit
content) and
it
technology

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 Data is Power
Advances in and increasing reliance on machine learning systems have created new modes of national power
around data, and new opportunities for influence across the information sphere.

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 Data Abuse as a Boon to Authoritarians
The exploitation of just some of these forms of data are already in use for authoritarian control

Facial recognition and GPS tracking Genetic and ethnic surveillance

Urban Surveillance
Moscow to Weave AI Face
Recognition into Its Urban
Surveillance Net
May 14, 2019
“City authorities
ThermoFisher Scientific, a Boston-based DNA
say the planned
sequencing company sold machines to security
system will have
contractors in Xinjiang. A Yale University geneticist
access to all
inadvertently gave DNA samples to a member of
160,000 existing
China’s Ministry of State Security. The samples were
cameras.”
later used to prove out genetic surveillance techniques
in Xinjiang.
In March, the
Kremlin called
for “genetic
certification of
the population.”

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 A Typology of Information-Based National Security Threats
There’s a temptation to conflate a range of concerns with information apps into “security threats” or to over-
focus on data espionage. If policymakers aren’t clear about the threats, they can’t be clear on the solutions.

1) Data exfiltration and security 3) Infrastructural influence

o What type of data?

o Personal South China Sea: Vietnam airport
screens hacked
o Corporate
o National Security

o Whose data?
o National security professional
o Citizen in a democracy July 29, 2016
o Citizen in a less free state
4) Global human rights
2) Information influence

o Targeted political influence

o Disinformation
o Selective Censorship
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 A Note on Process: It Matters
In the bigger picture contest, democracies cannot afford to capitulate on values or lose sight of what they are
fighting for: a system of governance that upholds accountability and civil liberties.

Legal and policy tools available:

 CFIUS (StayNTouch, Grindr, TikTok)

 EU Data Protection Bureau (TikTok)

 IEEPA (TikTok, WeChat)

 Export Controls, eg. Entity List (Huawei, Hikvision)

 Sanctions (Xinjiang)

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