Dec. 5, 2023
Taipei, Taiwan
One of the major topics of China’s cognitive warfare here in Taiwan has been inciting the worry that the Americans will not come if Taiwan is threatened. China knows this will cause the most worry to the Taiwanese amongst all topics of a military nature, and so it is often repeated as a propaganda item by the PRC’s influence operations. You can see the effect of this propaganda as it was cited by the Taiwan FactCheck Center’s Disinfo Detector in that publication’s latest release.
However the fact is that the U.S. government is required by law to come to Taiwan’s aid in a crisis across the Strait, and there is strong bipartisan desire among U.S. lawmakers and administration personnel to do so. This is the baseline agreement between the U.S. and Taiwan. But on top of that basic understanding there is also ongoing cooperation between the two countries on a host of issues in public and private interests both. The latest area of potential shared concern is what is variably called information warfare, influence operations, or cognitive warfare. In a recent speech in Taiwan, the director of the American Institute in Taiwan, the de facto American embassy in Taiwan, highlighted this domain, even stating that AIT itself had been targeted by a state actor spreading disinformation about it online. Furthermore, in her speech the Director reiterated that Taiwan and the U.S. together are on the front lines of the disinformation and propaganda war. The Global Declaration on Information Integrity Online, which Taiwan and the U.S. participated in the drafting of, is a beginning to counter this trend and restore trust in trustworthy sources of news and information.
Remarks by AIT Director Sandra Oudkirk at National Taiwan University - American Institute in Taiwan
But we should also keep an eye out for what is happening in the gray zone of information technology among computer users wearing both white and black hats, so to speak. What are the latest real threat trends, and how is technology being used for both beneficent and nefarious geopolitical ends? At the moment, 2024’s elections across the democratic world are the focus of immense contention amongst many partisans. The way technology is being used to undermine democracies, for example, by China-sponsored cyber actors, reflects the latest vulnerabilities in the infrastructure. A very recent pattern is Chinese state-backed hacking groups breaking into private routers and launching cyber attacks from there, which hides the origin of the attacks — although we also know that Hong Kong, post-National Security Law, is a favored launching point for these attacks. The other thing these hacker groups are doing is staying hidden in the networks doing espionage for nation-states. Increasingly, democratic nations with open societies will have to band together to limit and contain these threats which amount to cognitive warfare operations against the freedom of communication, and establish both technical and social norms which reduce the damage from these authoritarian attacks.
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