Active defence against ‘fake news:’ The new National Security Communications Unit
In this blog, Joe Devanny explores what we know about the UK’s new ‘fake news’ unit, how it might operate, and whether it is such a good idea.
On Tuesday, the UK prime minister’s office announced the creation of a new National Security Communications Unit (NSCU). According to Reuters, the prime minister’s spokesman said that, in ‘an era of fake news and competing narratives’, the new unit ‘will build on existing capabilities’ and ‘will be tasked with combating disinformation by state actors and others. It will more systematically deter our adversaries and help us deliver on national security priorities.’
In different times, of course, this might have been an obvious task for BBC Monitoring, but the government’s and BBC’s stewardship of that organisation hasn’t exactly been helpful. No-one should be surprised, however, that the government is concerned about the phenomenon of ‘fake news:’ it is undoubtedly a high-profile issue, given the recent furore particularly about Russian information operations and their possible impact on Western democracies. But the announcement of a new unit also raises several important questions about what Western governments should and shouldn’t do in the fields of strategic communications and ‘information operations’.
The announcement has had a mixed reception and some confusion probably stems from the government’s conflation of several different things — ‘fake news,’ strategic communications, and activities better described as ‘information operations’, whether openly or covertly executed. The Oxford University media scholar Rasmus Kleis Nielsen has already cautioned on Twitter about the wisdom of the apparent decision by the government to brief out the new NSCU as a ‘fake news’ unit, and what impact this might have on the public’s perceptions of journalism as ‘fake news’.
There’s a pressing series of questions about what exactly this new unit is supposed to do, how genuinely ‘new’ its activities will be, and where it will be based. For example, the Press Gazette and Sky News both reported that the new unit would include in its remit a ramped-up focus on social media monitoring, and that it would be based in the Cabinet Office. This leaves open the (slightly geeky, but nonetheless important) Whitehall-centric question of whether it will be part of the Cabinet Office’s Government Communications Service (GCS) — the Press Gazette and Sky News both quoted the GCS head, Alex Aiken, which might suggest GCS is the chosen home — or the national security orientated National Security Secretariat (NSS) run by the national security adviser, Mark Sedwill, which would make more sense thematically — and also considering that the unit’s creation was announced after a meeting of the national security council (NSC). The unit’s institutional housing might tell us something more about the likely nature of its role.
Will the new unit merely be a case of ‘old wine in new bottles,’ as is sometimes the case when public announcements are made about the creation of this or that new unit to oversee or build on existing efforts that are already pursued elsewhere in government? For example, will this simply be a case of the Cabinet Office recruiting or re-purposing (with some or no additional training) a couple of dozen staff to set up Google Alerts and harvest social media data at scale, looking for evidence of breaking ‘fake news’ stories about Cabinet Ministers, so that the unit can police the Internet for disinformation that is potentially damaging to the UK’s reputation and national security?
There are also open questions about the new unit’s intended balance between operational and higher level, coordinating activities. Will it, for example, have the classic Cabinet Office role of trying to bring coherence and order to all the strategic communications and information operations being executed across government in the national security space?
Known unknowns
In short, we don’t yet know what the new unit will actually do. Instead, we can infer a certain amount from the way the announcement was briefed to the press. For example, it appears that the government intends the new unit to have both a passive and an active remit. That is to say, it is designed both to identify the ‘fake news’ and ‘competing narratives’ that are disseminated by the UK’s adversaries, and also to actively counter these narratives, presumably by producing and disseminating some original content itself.
It goes without saying that, a day after the unit’s creation has been announced, we won’t know for some time how big it will be, and where its staff will come from — either from within government or else recruited externally. But the capabilities and skills required to perform these different tasks will vary considerably.
On the ‘passive’ side these include: an ability to collect and analyse open source information at scale (and presumably in several different languages); to investigate more deeply and forensically the provenance of specific stories or individual pieces of online content (potentially faked images or videos); and, to liaise with the more covert parts of government to add secret intelligence into the mix, enabling an all-source assessment to be made about a particular journalist, editor, or publication and their respective roles in the ‘fake news’ ecosystem.
In contrast, on the ‘active’ side of the shop, there is a need for a similarly diverse range of talents and technologies, including: creative professionals adept at conceiving, developing and disseminating effective content (from static prose to dynamic, interactive video content); subject-matter experts, well-versed in the reading- and wider media-consumption habits of the particular target group or groups (whether that’s a particular country, or some more granular, narrowly targeted demographic), and who can therefore advise on the appropriate media to focus on, in targeting that particular group of individuals. There might also be a more covert side to the operation: if the unit is to branch out beyond publishing content on the pages of GOV.UK, then its government-generated narratives will be published in ways that are deniable or not otherwise attributable to the government. Put simply, is the new unit going to get into the business of creating its own brand of ‘fake news?’ A related question is whether the unit will be tasked to develop cosy or out-right secret relationships with journalists and publishers, to fund the creation of its own network of ostensibly non-governmental publications, or to wage a more or less sophisticated trolling or campaign against selected ‘fake news’ outlets run by or with the assistance of Britain’s adversaries? Currently, we just don’t know.
Government and information operations
It’s no surprise that the government is thinking in these terms. Information operations have a long history, conducted by both Western governments and their adversaries. We can also read in the Edward J. Snowden revelations that the UK government has reportedly been active in the business of creating online ‘effects’ to shape public opinion. More recently, the 2015 national security strategy referred, for example, to efforts to improve UK exploitation of social media and big data, to countering hybrid tactics, and to the instrumental use of strategic communications to improve deterrence. And, of course, we should not forget the Home Office’s domestic strategic communications campaign as part of its wider counter-radicalisation strategy.
Given this backdrop, the government must very quickly clarify what kind of activities this new unit will pursue — and just as crucially, to clarify precisely which activities it will be prohibited from pursuing. A serious analytical approach to debunking instances of ‘fake news’ in official UK government reports published in the GOV.UK website is a very different undertaking to running ‘fake news’ sites and aggressively undermining the infrastructure of adversary-controlled outlets for competing narratives and ‘fake news’.
There is also a question about whether the dissemination of the more analytical kind of product is something that the government would be better advised to leave to others. This is already a crowded and expanding field, with several multilateral collaborations (on countering hybrid warfare and improving strategic communications), non-government organisations, international networks, as well as investigative reporting by media outlets, that collectively aim to shed light on and expose instances of state- and non-state propaganda. These organisations and networks already do much good work. In some cases, their credibility relies to a large extent on their perceived independence from a particular government line. Some journalists and open source analysts already suffer from disinformation and online harassment as a result of their activities.
Ambiguous public announcements by Western governments that they are moving further into the strategic communications space to more actively combat ‘fake news’ and ‘competing narratives’ need to be more carefully crafted. They are potentially not very helpful — whether for the government itself, or for the credibility and perceived independence of these other, non-governmental activities. This might be a good example of where the government’s traditional response in matters of intelligence and secret activities, to ‘neither confirm nor deny’ (NCND), would be a more sensible approach — the less said about the government’s interests and operations here, the better.
Conclusion
In due course, it will be interesting to learn more about the circumstances in which this new unit was conceived. Was it an eye-catching headline conjured up quickly by special advisers, a successful bid by an enterprising Cabinet Office secretariat for more resources by attaching the request to a fashionable issue, or a more considered, incremental reform born out of existing efforts within the national security or strategic communications bureaucracy? And who will ultimately claim credit (or apportion blame) for its activities? This will depend on whether or not the unit is perceived to be a success or a failure, a major new initiative or a drop in the ocean. Successful initiatives have many parents; failures tend to be orphans. Few want to accept responsibility for a bad idea, or an idea poorly executed.
In due course, the government will conduct its own audit of the effectiveness of this unit, at least a sanitised version of which we hope will be published. (Matt Burgess has a sensibly sceptical assessment in Wired of the challenges facing this unit and the evaluation of its activities.) There will clearly also be a role here for parliamentary scrutiny and good investigative reporting, to produce insights into the whole process, from the unit’s inception to its operational activities. The announcement referred to the unit’s potential to ‘more systematically deter’ our adversaries’ information operations, but it isn’t really obvious how a new unit of this sort, of whatever size or capability, is going to live up to the hyperbole of this announcement.
From what we already know about the threat, it is right that governments are recognising the potentially adverse impact of ‘fake news’ on national security, especially the vitality of Western democracies. It is understandable, in these circumstances, that governments will look to involve themselves more directly in efforts to defend against ‘fake news’ and to more actively counter ‘competing narratives’. But in an open society, with free media and an incredibly rich and complex web of citizen engagement with news, on social media and elsewhere, it is worth pausing for thought about the precise shape, orientation and development of this kind of unit. Part of what distinguishes liberal democracies from more authoritarian regimes is that they do not, as a rule, conduct elaborate information operations against their own citizens, especially not by using the mechanics of the national security state.
The government would arguably be better advised to focus on supporting efforts in the education and non-profit sectors to improve British citizens’ digital media literacy (a concise thread of tweets by Carl Miller, on digital literacy as the best response to online influence operations, is here). These efforts help citizens-as-consumers-of-news, which is basically everyone, to ask questions about bias, to weigh evidence and come to balanced judgements. This would be better than pumping out the government’s own version of ‘fake news’.
Update: On 29 January, the Cabinet Office responded to a series of written parliamentary questions about the NSCU that had been asked by Tom Watson MP. The questions were well focused, including: what the new unit’s remit would be; which Cabinet Office secretariat would house the new unit; how many staff at what grade would work in the unit; and what resources had been allocated for the unit. The Cabinet Office gave holding replies to each of these questions, indicating that many (if not most or indeed all) of these details remained to be worked out.
Joe Devanny is programme director for security at Ridgeway Information and a former research fellow at King’s College London. You can follow him on Twitter.
