Vídeo: A Rússia está a sabotar os cabos submarinos da Europa – especialista em ciberespaço da NATO

🗣️ Transcrição automática de voz para texto.

[Music] 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 NATO expert on Innovation cyber and hybrid threats James paay 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 uh 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 in inreased 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 rhin metal 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 uh the German weapons um manufacturer um how did these get found out and how do then they get interrupted so basically it’s intelligent services that are doing their work but uh it’s a really good question because what we don’t want to do is uh play whacko 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 very very focused on ensuring that the information that we have is accurate so uh when it comes to one incident for example the rhin metel 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 uh what we call hybrid or gry 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 uh so we need to intensify and we are intensifying our intelligence and other efforts to uh 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 well look if we just back off from our 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 introduce to the sabotage because of your support for this war well you’re not safe uh things can happen here uh and if you’re an industry leader you might not be safe uh and I’ve gotten calls from the top level uh officials from other companies saying am I also at risk uh so it has an effect uh and we need to ensure that of course our populations are safe we’re doing that uh but second to respond to the attempt to uh create this dis quiet and you mentioned there wacka because that’s appears to be a little bit of what’s happening because the the threats or this the the attacks are more frequent yes I I think we were in a position of wack-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 uh are we doing as well as we should no 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 uh 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 DET returns 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 that and 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 um Threat by President Biden because we know 99% of the world’s data is transmitted through the subc cables um 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 go 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 uh $4 trillion a day so the impact of those cables being cut is not nothing uh 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 uh unmaned or un crude remotely operated Vehicles they have divers uh and explosives uh so we all know this uh anyone can Google it and you can see it um so they’re I think the most active threat to our infrastructure uh you might have seen that a Chinese ship uh cut the Baltic connector cable uh the Chinese have come forward to to admit that uh 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 uh 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 uh 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 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 uh I think all NATO governments have expressed really profound concern about disinformation and 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 uh it’s not just across the Atlantic it’s around the world and all our populations are very vulnerable to it so um 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 uh so of course it’s up to National governments up to the EU uh 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 NATO 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 we’re a little bit in campaign mode uh still but uh what I would say is is this support for Ukraine is almost existential for European security it is absolutely crucial for EUR Atlantic security and NATO of course is the essential pillar uh for defending uh the Euro Atlantic area so we’re quite confident uh 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 disinformation because that is transforming disinformation it is and I could go on at length about this but I I’ll say maybe three things one one is generative AI itself is very quickly creating deep fakes that even the companies that make it can’t detect second it is posing a big risk to large parts of the world that were not watching English or French or German language Chinese language uh video and audio and haven’t actually over time built up the same understanding of the potential for disinformation and deep fakes that other societies that basically Ed 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 uh 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 that within four years 90 90% 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 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 uh in the US a 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 it’s making a point that I want to make so to a certain extent we’ve already reached a point where we’re posttruth because of AI because they know it’s fake but they don’t care so we have uh interesting Waters ahead of us we do indeed well James athid thank you very much for joining us on the Europe conversation thank you [Music]