The president of the Movement for Change (PzP) and one of the leaders of the Democratic Front (DF) Nebojša Medojević participated in the work of the round table "Cybersecurity for political parties and elections - How to best protect democratic processes against malicious participants" in Washington, PzP announced today.
The announcement states that Medojević presented the digital campaign that DF conducted with the help of Israeli campaign expert Aron Shaviv, via tablet computers with GSM cards and special applications for data collection and processing by field activities, which enabled DF to communicate with to potential voters almost in real time and to align their political messages with the expectations and perceptions of voters.
"Here we have come to a new phenomenon. The regime that was faced with the loss of power and which is facing for the first time the digital campaign of the opposition and the loss of power that they have held by force and corruption for 30 years, is creating a false narrative that behind our campaign there is a hybrid war Russia. And if our campaign was led by an Israeli political strategist who led multiple winning campaigns for Netanyahu, the last communist regime in Europe decided to stop our digital campaign very simply, they stopped internet communication and banned the use of Viber and WhatsApp on election day. See here that the narrative of cyberattacks, in the conditions of undemocratic and totalitarian regimes, can very easily turn into paranoia and endangering democracy. DF paid special attention to the development of applications for targeting potential voters and communication via social networks, and this was an effective strategy for us in conditions of media isolation and persecution. We expect that by the next election, the current regime will ban the Internet again and thus try to prevent our expected result," Medojević pointed out.
The announcement adds that Mike Gilding, deputy director for IT of the Republican National Committee, Gini Badanes, director of strategic projects for cyber security and democracy at Microsoft, spoke at the conference.
PzP said that Gilding presented hacking protection measures that were used by the election staff of the President of the United States of America (USA) Donald Trump in the 2016 election campaign and which proved to be very effective because there was no intrusion into IT from the outside or any more serious ones damage to the Trump campaign.
"In election processes, the most important thing is good organization, which must be based on so-called multilevel mechanisms and isolating access to different information from disadvantaged users. This requires discipline in work, especially in the part of collecting data from the field campaign where tens of thousands of activists participate." , Gilding said.
Gini Badanes from Microsoft, as stated in the PzP announcement, presented the technological solutions and experience of this company when it comes to cyber security in campaigns in the USA and pointed out that threats from hacker intrusions from many different external addresses are the reality of contemporary politics taking place in the digital world. environment and that Microsoft, in cooperation with the academic community, did a whole series of research aimed at protecting the electoral process and democracy from cyberattacks.
"As particularly dangerous, Badanes pointed out the misuse of videos and materials that, with the help of cheap and accessible technology, are increasingly used to discredit political opponents, and the credibility of altered recordings can only be determined by specialists," the PzP press release states.
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