On The Nation: Lisa Owen interviews James Scott
Youtube clips from the show are available here.
Lisa Owen: The cyber world played a big part in this campaign, with Hillary Clinton’s emails being leaked and allegations of hacking. Now, the online world is also playing a major part in terrorism these days. To discuss all of this is James Scott, who’s a cybersecurity expert. Good morning. Thanks for joining us.
James Scott: Thanks for having me.
How much do you think it hurt Hillary Clinton’s chances at the presidency to have the FBI reopening this case and delving through the whole email issue so close to polling day?
Well, I think now secrets are kind of an impossible thing to keep, so if you’re going to run for office now, especially with WikiLeaks, script kiddies, mischievous cyber actors, several criminal gangs, I think you have to be ready for every skeleton in your closet to just be dumped out into the public.
Do you think it was blown out of proportion, though?
Which part?
The fact that she was being investigated, the fact that the FBI said, ‘We’re looking at these again’?
Yeah, I think that that could’ve had an impact on it, but I think one of the things that you have to take into consideration is back in the day, even the last election, candidates were able to pretty much hide all of their skeletons in the closet, just pile them up, push it in there. But now, with technology the way it is, with email being stored on servers, it’s difficult to close that closet door, and eventually the skeletons will come falling out.
So you truly believe that nothing can be kept from the public domain?
I find very few infrastructures that we can’t get into.
Because that is a big call for people who then want to start standing for public office, as you say.
Oh, yeah. You really have to pick a candidate that’s truly squeaky clean. But, yeah, that’s one of the things. Now, I think in the future moving forward, whoever you see run for office is going to have some serious natural cyber hygiene.
The thing is throughout this campaign it was suggested that leaks were driven by Russia, and the suggestion was made it went as far up as Vladimir Putin. Is that realistic?
Absolutely not. No. It is easy to infiltrate networks where there are no defences. So you look at the DNC, you look at a hacker in someone’s bathroom closet, wherever in somebody’s house; there are no potent layers of security, from the cyber perspective, no user behaviour analytics, no multifactor authentication, nothing that would create roadblocks for an adversary to get in.
Let’s move on to Donald Trump. In terms of terrorism, he’s made some incredibly strong statements. He’s said, and I’m quoting him here, that he’s going to bomb the shit out of ISIS. That is a hard-line approach. Can it have the desired effect, or is he only going to make things worse, do you think?
I’m trying to think of how that would actually look, because ISIS is so spread out. It’s like pepper on a desert. So bombing the heck out of them would be… I don’t know how they would do that. I think right now what they’re trying to do is preserve whatever infrastructure that is left and start to rebuild. But I think ISIS, ISIL will continue to be a problem. I think that they’re depending more on the Cyber Caliphate, where they’re able to introduce this ideological perversion into new markets.
So the battle is online now?
Yeah, I think it really is. I think that we’ve done a decent job up till now of keeping the conflict over there. But I think now with self-radicalisation, here domestically and in New Zealand and in Australia, Northern Ireland were doing a lot over there as far as conversations with insider threats and things like that, I think that people that are self-radicalising themselves — wound collectors, the FBI calls them — I think what’s happening is they’re finding more extreme perversions of ideologies that they’re ready to fall in place. So you have the self-radicalisation, which the Cyber Caliphate tries to then match up their jihadisation with that. So once that happens and it connects, that’s when you have a domestic self-radicalised lone wolf terrorist.
Yeah, so, tell me, they use this phrase ‘lone wolf. You use it. Who are they, and what motivates them?
Lone wolf… Well, I think there’s a cyber and physical element to that.
Yeah, the cyber lone wolf.
Sure. The cyber lone wolf could be a person who, for example, is arrested, they were in prison, they became radicalised — radical Islam, for example — and they get out of prison. They try to find people to communicate with online that have this same type of ideology that they were converted to. And what happens is they will start these conversations, and maybe the guy has a day job or a night job as a janitor in a pharmaceutical company. So what will happen is through IRC or some other type of chat, they’ll communicate with him — someone actually within Cyber Caliphate — and they’ll say, ‘Look, all you have to do is take this malicious payload, download it, drag it over to a USB drive.’ I think the tell-tale signs of someone that is towards the end of the radicalisation phase, getting ready to act, these people will have alienated family members, friends; they do have violent tendencies and a lot of marital abuse, spousal abuse, child abuse; a lot of them will be involved with handing out pamphlets on the street for extreme ideologies. Those are the tell-tale signs.
When you say that mental illness plays a reasonably significant role in this, then that kind of sounds like it’s not a law-enforcement issue; it’s a health issue.
Yeah, and unfortunately in the United States we criminalise mental health, people with mental health, so health issues. So you’ll find people that are bipolar or just have a form of autism that can’t function in society on their own, they end up doing something that has been criminalised by the establishment, and they end up in jail.
I think it’s quite interesting. Recently in New Zealand it was revealed that we had a lone wolf threat. And people might think that these kind of incidents are rare, but we looked at some research that said between 2009 and February 2015, a domestic terrorist attack or foiled attack had happened almost every month here in the United States. So this is actually an enormous problem for your country, isn’t it?
Yeah, it is, and we have… We can’t blame guns for everything, but a lot of… In the US, because the economy is not that great, people don’t have jobs, there’s unrest, there’s more disunity now than ever, and so what’s happening is as society’s moving forward at such an expedited pace, you have these people that are left in the background that are outcasts. And I think that’s a big problem. We need to start bringing them in.
So inequality’s part of the problem?
I think inequality in all forms — race, age, geography, education. So, yeah, I think that could be a part of the issue.
Brings us right back to where we started — the politics. Thanks very much for joining us, James Scott. Much appreciated.

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