How Russia is using artificial intelligence to interfere in elections

Moscow’s attempts to interfere in U.S. and other elections are nothing new, though their tactics and strategy are constantly evolving. Special Correspondent Simon Ostrovsky recently sat down with an investigative journalist who’s spent years uncovering Russian operations about yet another effort to sow doubt and chaos, this time using artificial intelligence.
Geoff Bennett:
Today’s Justice Department indictments alleging ongoing Russian efforts to spread disinformation come just two months before Election Day. Moscow’s attempts to interfere in U.S. and other elections are nothing new, though their tactics and strategy are constantly evolving.
Before today’s announcement, special correspondent Simon Ostrovsky recently sat down with an investigative journalist who spent years uncovering Russian operations about yet another effort to sow doubt and chaos, this time using artificial intelligence.
Simon Ostrovsky:
Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service has a new plan to influence Western countries in this election year. Russia’s CIA, which goes by its initials too, SVR, plans to use artificial intelligence to mask a sophisticated effort to interfere in a third straight U.S. presidential election.
First, a quick tour of 2016.
Donald Trump, Former President of the United States (R) and Current U.S. Presidential Candidate: Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing.
Simon Ostrovsky:
Russian intelligence hacked the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair. Thousands of e-mails were then dumped in a coordinated fashion to influence the race.
And that’s not to mention the operations of Russian troll farms that created thousands of digital sock puppet soldiers to repeat and repeat and repeat messages that boosted Donald Trump, at Hillary Clinton’s expense.
Christo Grozev, The Insider:
They have declared war, full-scale, hot war, information war on the rest of the world.
Simon Ostrovsky:
The man who helped uncover this new effort is Christo Grozev, an investigative journalist who’s unmasked many intelligence operations. Perhaps most famously, he found the operatives who poisoned the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2020 and helped Navalny, who died in a Russian prison this past February, confront one of his assailants.
You have discovered a program that the Russian security services are trying to develop. What is this program actually about?
Christo Grozev:
We got access to a mailbox belonging to a senior intelligence officer working under cover of a commercial company in Russia.
And that mailbox contained initially reports that criticized the handling of the global propaganda effort by Russia, saying, we’re losing to the West, we’re losing to the Ukrainians, everybody loves Ukraine, everybody hates Russia. We have to change something about this.
They have decided to use A.I. and use all kind of new methods to make it indistinguishable from the regular flow of information we’re getting.
Simon Ostrovsky:
We know that Russia has been trying to pit Western societies against themselves at least since the 2016 election. What’s different about this new effort that you have discovered?
Christo Grozev:
They will infiltrate Western organizations, some of them organizations that are even in defense of Western values. They’re going to infiltrate pro-Ukrainian organizations and within those organizations create disruption.
They’re going to make unreasonable demands to Western leaders, making Western societies tire and get annoyed with these “Ukrainian demands” — in quotation marks. They’re no longer going to defend Russia. They’re going to just cause disruption within Western societies.
Simon Ostrovsky:
They’re no longer going to be trying to convince our societies that Russia’s great. They’re just going to use various different methods to make us angry at each other, angry at our allies, angry at Ukraine?
Christo Grozev:
That is exactly so. And that’s both bad news and good news. The good news part of it is that they realize that the ship has sailed on trying to convince the rest of the world that Russia is a powerful good.
Simon Ostrovsky:
Who’s taking the lead in this project? Who’s running it?
Christo Grozev:
This is the Foreign Intelligence Service of Russia.
And, traditionally…
Simon Ostrovsky:
SVR.
Christo Grozev:
SVR.
They’re essentially criticizing the other agencies as having failed so far. And they have propositioned this to the Kremlin as, let us take care of this. We know how to do it better.
And, initially, we thought this may be just one proposal that may not have been accepted, but full of documents that we found show us that the program has been approved, recruitment has started, and there’s even a document which is a letter to the head of the SVR, Naryshkin, which instructs him to allocate particular people to this program who will work under the cover of Kremlin officials.
Simon Ostrovsky:
And is there anything you can tell me about how you got this information?
Christo Grozev:
Since the war started, the source of data from Russian databases has become both harder to get and easier to get, harder because there’s a lot of clampdown on data providers, and easier because there are so many whistle-blowers and hacktivists, actually Russian hackers, who go and hack mailboxes of government officials.
And the latter is what happened with us right now. The name of the author of the program is Mikhail Kolesov. And, interestingly, he admits to being a high level SVR officer in his own C.V. that I have made available to you.
Simon Ostrovsky:
In his resume?
Christo Grozev:
In his resume.
Simon Ostrovsky:
Incredible.
Kolesov’s resume states that he’s worked for the Foreign Intelligence Service of Russia since 2001 and oversees 40 agents. He lists among his achievements the rollout of 1,500 propaganda campaigns that supported achieving Russia’s goals in the international arena.
He also boasts of receiving a medal in 2019 for developing new sources of information for the country’s top leadership. Grozev was also able to obtain Kolesov’s I.D. badge from an e-mail attachment, revealing the SVR agent’s face for the first time.
Christo Grozev:
Notably, he has two different resumes in his mailbox, one for the common people like you and us.
Simon Ostrovsky:
Yes.
Christo Grozev:
And for the real bosses, he actually admits to having worked for the last 19 years as a senior officer in the SVR.
And the SVR officer who is delegated to this program, seconded to this program and travels around the world, his name is Andrey Shcherbakov (ph). And he has a diplomatic passport, and we expect he will be able to travel to Western Europe and the United States, maybe not after this program.
Simon Ostrovsky:
I read in one of the documents that you got access to that they plan on actually hijacking our personal communication devices. What does that mean?
Christo Grozev:
They plan to do insertion of advertising, which is in fact hidden as news, and in this way bombard the target population with things that may be misconstrued as news, but are in fact advertising content.
They plan to disguise that advertising content on a person-to-person level as if it is content from their favorite news sites. Now, we haven’t seen that in action, but it’s an intent, and they claim they have developed the technology to do that.
They’re very explicit that they’re not going to use Russia-related platforms or even separate platforms. They’re going to infiltrate the platform that the target already uses. And that is what sounds scary.
If they have developed anything like that, then we would not know that one sentence from what we use on the read in The New York Times, for example, has been altered just for you as a reader to mislead you in what the content, the meaning of the article is.
Simon Ostrovsky:
Then the target is you and I and the general public?
Christo Grozev:
The target is the general public on a mass, but custom — custom-made scale. They specifically talk about using A.I. to customize the message based on the biases and preferences of each individual user.
And while, before, they couldn’t do that even with a troll farm run by Prigozhin in St. Petersburg of 10,000 people, because you can only customize it to 10,000 targets, now with A.I., you can do that to tens of million of people.
Simon Ostrovsky:
The documents hacked from Kolesov’s inbox describe in stilted bureaucratic language an ambitious plan to shake the so-called main adversary, AKA the West, to its very foundations by secretly influencing key figures with new disinformation techniques.
The text reads:
“It is proposed that the theme of our campaign and countries of the main adversary be the stimulation of fear in recipients, the strongest emotion in human psychology.”
Christo Grozev:
The same team from Russia’s foreign intelligence that is behind this global program is doing specific hit jobs on specific enemies of the Russian state.
This — these hit jobs go under the cover program named Ledorub, which means ice pick, because ice pick is what Stalin organized the assassination of Trotsky with last century. And there’s no doubt that this is the meaning of this character assassination tool.
Simon Ostrovsky:
Now it seems like they’re being much more targeted and trying to essentially send disinformation to specific, key individuals around a target.
Christo Grozev:
They have a term in Russian, which is to make him unhandshakeable, somebody that nobody will want to engage with on a day-to-day basis.
Simon Ostrovsky:
The program’s goals are, of course, much broader than individual Kremlin opponents, and is one more thing for U.S. news consumers to watch for as the election approaches.
For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Simon Ostrovsky in New York.