The Global War on Truth

by Richard Stengel,

How Russia’s Information War started and how to stop it.

I had come to State after being a journalist for many years and the editor of TIME for the previous seven. My job was to help shape America’s image in the world–I thought of myself as the chief marketing officer for brand USA. But then a funny thing happened. Within a few weeks of my being on the job in 2014, the Russians invaded and then annexed Crimea, the southernmost peninsula of Ukraine. The largest violation of another nation’s sovereignty since Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. And Vladimir Putin lied about it–over and over again.

In many ways, these were also the first salvos in the global information war we are living in now. Today, we are all actors in a global information war that is ubiquitous, difficult to comprehend and taking place at the speed of light. When I was at the State Department, there were hundreds of thousands of cyberattacks a day. The Pentagon says it thwarts more than a million malware attacks an hour. About 600,000 Facebook accounts are compromised every day. More than 25 million data records are lost or stolen from businesses each day. And all that doesn’t even take into account the rising tide of disinformation, which is impossible to measure.

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