Rising risk of ballot box manipulation

Wikileaks has just released thousands more documents claiming that the CIA has developed special methods to turn almost every gadget that we use in our daily lives, from TV sets to mobile phones, into a two-way monitoring device to spy on individuals.

It would be naive to think the intelligence services of other advanced countries with digital capabilities - from Russia to China, from Germany to Israel - have been ignoring this field. Indeed, a huge debate about cyber manipulation and the spread of "fake news" started after the Democratic Party campaign of Hillary Clinton accused the Russian intelligence service of intervening and revealing the personal e-mails of key candidates, including presidential candidate Clinton. Alleged Russian involvement in the U.S. election has already led to the resignation of President Donald Trump's former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.

As digital technology continues to evolve, the threat of manipulating elections in various countries becomes a serious problem that did not exist before.

Experts say 2014 was a threshold for the rise of artificial intelligence, when a computer passed the Turing test and initiated the age of "learning machines."

Some now speculate about computers spreading fake news to voters according to their weaker points.

 Instead of spreading the same deliberately produced "fake news" to 20 million people, an intelligent machine with a sufficient voter database could produce and spread 20 million different messages tailored to individual voters' preferences and aiming for a single purpose: The defeat of a rival in the ballot box.

One excellent session at the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 17-19 focused on the issue of "Hybrid Warfare and Attacks...