As the war in Ukraine rages on and Donald Trump
prepares to take over the White House again, the threat
to the rest of Europe from Russia is growing.
For the Europe Conversation, I catch up with NASO experts
on innovation, cyber and hybrid threats, James Patharai, who says
we're in uncharted territory.
James, look across Europe, we're seeing, we're hearing reports about
much more increased sabotage, Russian sabotage against European countries.
Can you tell us a little bit about what you're
seeing and whether it's been on the increase?
So absolutely, first thing to say is the sabotage comes
on top of everything else that we've seen.
So cyber attacks, disinformation, political interference, forced migration, GPS jamming.
So that's the baseline and all of it higher than
it used to be.
What's new is an increased Russian appetite and for and
campaign of sabotage.
That means arson, derailing trains, attacks on politicians, properties, attempts
to assassinate, for example, the head of Ryan Matal.
So industry leaders.
So we see more of it and we see a
much higher appetite for deaths and massive damage in our
countries.
And how are we detecting these?
Because even you mentioned there the potential assassination of the
German weapons manufacturer.
How did these get found out and how did then
they get interrupted?
So basically it's intelligence services that are doing their work.
But it's a really good question because what we don't
want to do is play whack a mole in one
country.
Oh, look, I see something over here, I react to
that.
Oh, look, I see something over there, I react to
that.
So what we're doing is putting together patterns and trends.
So if there's one derailment of a train in one
country that is used to take supplies to Ukraine, that's
an incident.
If we see seven in seven countries, that's a pattern
and we know who's behind it.
So on the one hand, we're stepping up our intelligence
activities.
On the other hand, we're aggregating information and putting together
the patterns and trends.
And then we choose what to make public and what
not to make public.
And how do we know this is definitely coming from
Russia?
Is it coming just from Russia?
Is it China as well?
But also, how do we know the source?
So we're very, very focused on ensuring that the information
that we have is accurate.
So when it comes to one incident, for example, the
Ryan Mattel incident, the intelligence services are confident enough that
our politicians can go out in public and say it.
But as I said, we need the patterns and we
need the trends because what we call hybrid or Gray
zone attacks are predicated on ambiguity.
What the Russians or others are trying to do is
make it not so clear it's them.
So it's hard to attribute.
Therefore it's hard to act.
So we need to intensify and we are intensifying our
intelligence and other efforts to to be able to detect
it and be more confident.
So just give an example of how the Russians are
acting to turn the populations of member states away from
support from Ukraine.
You're talking about a big attack, an energy source where
civilians will get scared and say, we'll look, if we
just back off from our support from Ukraine, Russia won't
target us.
Is that what you're saying?
Or just give us an example of how this works
and what the Russians want the impact to be.
So what's important to know about the way Russians have
always acted in the last century, Soviet times and now
is that they use all tools to achieve a cognitive
effect.
It's to change your mind.
That's the way they look at things.
And therefore all tools can be used, including a nuclear
threat, very early.
And we've heard this now dozens and dozens of times
from the Russians.
So they will have a disinformation campaign to say, because
of your support for this war, energy prices are up.
Because of your support for this war, food, food prices
are up.
And then they introduced to the sabotage.
Because of your support for this war, well, you're not
safe.
Things can happen here.
And if you're an industry leader, you might not be
safe.
And I've gotten calls from the top level officials from
other companies saying, am I also at risk?
So it has an effect.
And we need to ensure that of course, our populations
are safe.
We're doing that.
But second, to respond to the attempt to create this
disquiet and you mentioned there whack a mole because that's
appears to be a little bit of what's happening because
the, the threats or the the attacks are more frequent.
Yes, I, I think we were in a position of
whack a mole.
I think we're better now at both building resilience in
our cyber infrastructure, critical infrastructure and in in sort of
managing potential escalation and, and in putting together all the
pieces into a coherent puzzle.
Are we doing as well as we should know?
Because as I say, the Russian risk appetite is going
up.
The activities that they're carrying out are getting a little
bit more dangerous and certainly more frequent.
So I can assure you our political leaders are aware
of it, focused on it, and we are looking at
steps to take to establish better deterrence and manage escalation.
What kind of deterrence?
Well, you might remember, for example, President Biden spoke to
President Putin a few years ago, and he said this
critical infrastructure is off limits.
If you cross this line, there will be real consequences.
The Russians backed away.
So you can establish areas where this is too far
and then make it clear that there will be a
response.
Make it clear what the response might be.
And the Russians do back away when they meet steel
because you mentioned their critical infrastructure and this threat by
President Biden, because we know 99% of the world's data
is transmitted through the subsea cables.
What is the threat to those?
So you're quite right to say 90% of the world's
data.
But to put it into a more concrete term that
people I think might feel a little bit more, every
day, $10 trillion worth of economic activity goes through those
cables and across the Atlantic.
So from Ireland, principally in the UK, over in France,
a little bit over to the US and back, it's
$4 trillion a day.
So the impact of those cables being cut is not
nothing particularly for for economic activity.
The Russians are continuing to carry out a program they
have had for decades.
It's called the Russian Undersea Research Program, which is a
euphemism for a paramilitary structure, very well funded, that is
mapping out all of our cables and our energy pipelines
and it has so-called research ships.
They have little submarines underneath.
They have unmanned or uncrewed remotely operated vehicles.
They have divers and explosives.
So we all know this.
Anyone can Google it and you can see it.
So they're I think the most active threat to our
infrastructure.
You might have seen that a Chinese ship cut the
Baltic connector cable.
The Chinese have come forward to to admit that in
the context of the No Limits Russia, China partnership.
We always have to look at these with I think
a little bit of concern incidents like this.
But I think the Russians are are most clearly the
threat, just disinformation because obviously that's your area of expertise
as well.
We've seen since Elon Musk took over Twitter that there's
been a much stronger rise in hate crime and itself.
Twitter is not no longer as regulated as it was,
you know, for things like hate crime, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and
so on.
Is it a concern now that he is so close
to the new White House?
I think all NATO governments have expressed really profound concern
about disinformation.
And what we've seen in the US election and in
all of our elections now is a lot of disinformation,
including using social media platforms.
It's not just across the Atlantic, it's around the world.
And all our populations are very vulnerable to it.
So we are looking at disinformation, including on social media
platforms, as part of this whole deck of cards that
adversaries and strategic competitors are using against us.
So of course it's up to national governments, up to
the EU to decide how they regulate these because we're
hearing that JD Vance is saying that, you know, Europe
or the US will remove support for Ukraine through NASO
if the EU continues to regulate Twitter or X Yes.
Well, I mean, I, I saw that and, and, you
know, they haven't taken office yet.
So I think they were a little bit in campaign
mode still.
But what I would say is, is this support for
Ukraine is almost existential for European security.
It is absolutely crucial for your Atlantic security and NATO,
of course, is the essential pillar for defending the Euro
Atlantic area.
So we're quite confident based on everything we've heard that
the US support for NATO will continue.
Just finally on generative AI, because that's an area of
your expertise as well.
And I wanted to ask you that in relation to
this information, because that is transforming disinformation.
It is.
And I could go on at length about this, but
I'll say maybe three things.
1 is generative.
AI itself is very quickly creating deepfakes that even the
companies that make it can't detect.
Second, it is posing a big risk to large parts
of the world that we're not watching English or French
or German language, Chinese language video and audio, and haven't
actually overtime built up the same understanding of the potential
for disinformation and deepfakes that other societies that basically use
widely used languages have.
So a lot of communities around the world are suddenly
being exposed to perfect fakes in their dialect and they
are not used to it.
So they're very, very exposed to disinformation.
I think the third thing which interests me a lot
is we called in a number of tech firms and
we asked them what the future looked like.
What they said was it within four years, 99, zero
percent of what's on the Internet will be fake, will
be false.
70% of what's being produced for the Internet now is
being produced by AI.
So all of this is now going to be what
we see and it's going to be very difficult to
tell what's true and what's not true.
And then the final point is if you look at
what happened, for example, after the storms in the USA,
number of false images were created and politicians posted them.
But when they were told that they were fake, they
said, I don't care.
It doesn't matter.
It makes making a point that I want to make.
So to a certain extent, we've already reached a point
where we're post truth because of AI, because they know
it's fake, but they don't care.
So we have interesting waters ahead of us.
We do indeed Well, James of Pathroyd, thank you very
much for joining us on the your conversation.
Thank you.