If The US Government Can't Figure Out Who's A Russian Troll, Why Should It Expect Internet Companies To Do So?

A few weeks back, following the DOJ's indictment of various Russians for interfering in the US election, we noted that the indictment showed just how silly it was to blame various internet platforms for not magically stopping these Russians because in many cases, they bent over backwards to appear to be regular, everyday Americans. And now, with pressure coming from elected officials to regulate internet platforms if they somehow fail to catch Russian bots, it seems worth pointing out the flip side of the "why couldn't internet companies catch these guys" question: which is why couldn't the government?

Declan McCullagh has an excellent article over at Reason pointing out that all these government officials trying to blame internet companies should probably look a little more closely at their own houses first.

In the bowels of Washington officialdom, despite billion-dollar intelligence budgets and a peerless global surveillance apparatus, very little appears to have been done. No Russian nationals associated with the disinformation campaign were deported from the United States. (Three were improvidently granted U.S. visas.) No official warnings appear to have been sent to social networks or payment processors. And no indictments were made until a few weeks ago.

Facebook notified the FBI about Russian activity in June 2016, but no U.S. law enforcement or intelligence officials visited the social media company to compare notes. During the 2016 presidential campaign, the State Department pulled the plug on a project to combat Russian disinformation. The New Yorker concluded that the FBI, despite its $9 billion budget and 35,000 employees, simply "is not up to the job of detecting and countering Russian disinformation." The Washington Post summarized the bureaucratic failures: "Top U.S. policymakers didn't appreciate the dangers, then scrambled to draw up options to fight back. In the end, big plans died of internal disagreement."

So it's a surprise to see senior members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, which are charged with providing "vigilant legislative oversight" of the nation's spy and counter-espionage agencies, pointing fingers approximately 2,800 miles westward instead.

Of course, you can argue that now, way after the fact, the DOJ has brought out this indictment. But, so too, have most of the internet platforms now been able to research and investigate what happened. But looking back retrospectively is quite different from proactively determining any of this on the fly.

McCullagh notes, correctly, that this doesn't mean internet platforms should do nothing. They obviously all are scrambling to figure out what to do going forward. But it does raise questions as to why the government seems to think the internet platforms can magically figure all of this out when they themselves could not. And, it's particularly telling that it's the two Congressional Intelligence Committees, which are supposed to oversee the intelligence community -- but usually just bolster or shield the intelligence community from criticism -- that are doing the most finger pointing. Perhaps it's more because they want to distract from the failures of the intelligence community.

I'm sure that some will argue some version of the "nerd harder" excuse for why internet companies should be better at detecting foreign influence than the NSA, but (1) any "nerd harder" argument is automatically void for being specious and (2) come on, the NSA has much great ability to connect these threads than any internet platform, no matter what some people will tell you.