Shashi Jayakumar Transcript: June 23, 2025
Kevin Johnson, National Press Foundation (00:00:00):
So far, we’ve looked at how international trade has been implicated by politics and extreme foreign policy strategies and the risks associated with those, but there’s more to what’s impacting international trade than that. Mounting threats from adversarial nation states, far flung criminal groups require constant monitoring, assessment and mitigation. Dr. Shashi Jayakumar has spent a career immersed in international security. He is founder and executive director of SJK Geostrategic Advisory, a security and political risk consultancy for more than a decade. Before that, he served in the administrative service of Singapore’s government. Much of that time in the Ministry of Defense, his work in government and now in the private sector has ranged from geopolitics and extremism to disinformation and polarization. Earlier this year, I wanted to give him a shout out. The government of Singapore appointed Dr. Jayakumar as the non-resident ambassador to the Republic of Cuba. So at the end of this, you can all hit him up for cigars and rum or whatever you want. He promised to follow through.
Shashi Jayakumar, SJK Geostrategic Advisory (00:01:34):
You have to take a number. Yeah.
Kevin Johnson, National Press Foundation (00:01:36):
Well, please join me in welcoming Dr. Jayakumar.
Shashi Jayakumar, SJK Geostrategic Advisory (00:01:42):
Thanks very much for that generous introduction, Kevin. I tend to mumble, my wife tends to scold me about this all the time, so if you don’t get the volume, you don’t get what I’m saying, please just raise your hand and give me a shout. We’ll throw something at you. Sure. So long as it’s not fruit. Yeah, I’ve done a few things in my life, just 30 seconds by way of background, I was a budding historian. I only wanted to be an academic studying for my PhD in the UK in history. Wanted to be one of those three jacketed pipe smoking dons, and that almost happened except I now realize it didn’t make sense at the time, but it sort of does now. I saw the second tower, I think on TV fall down on 9/11 and very soon after that, I can’t remember, it might’ve been the next month or perhaps the next fortnight, I cold called the Singapore Ministry of Defense, which gave me my first job, obviously as someone just finishing a PhD in a very esoteric discipline, medieval history, I’m probably the only Singaporean trained medieval Anglo-Saxon historian, which is my specialty. I had to do some fast talking to get into government service, but I did, and I’m grateful. That was a very, very interesting time to be in the Ministry of Defense. The 9/11 attacks was one thing, but I’m not sure how many of you know or remember other Singaporeans in the room. OK,
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So let’s make this a bit interactive. What happens in the same year? What gets discovered in Singapore in the same year as 9/11? Soon after 9/11, the JI “Jamaat-e-Islami” plot, JI being the key Al-Qaeda — which our Indonesian friends know as well Malaysian friends know well as well — gets discovered in Singapore. They came — I think this tends to be forgotten, it was worth reemphasizing — they came very, very close to creating a tragedy and havoc and unrest in communal harmony in Singapore. Singapore Muslims, not all Malay Muslims, but that’s a separate issue from the first batch were detained. And of course, these were the same guys in the Indonesian cell who did actually succeed in carrying out what they planned to carry out in the shape of the Bali one bombings, the Bali two bombings, the Jakarta Marriott bombings and so on. Malaysia, they came close as well.
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In Singapore, they were interdicted for a variety of reasons. Well, three reasons. One is one chap who was under surveillance same year as 9/11. After the 9/11 attacks fled to Afghanistan. He was caught by the Northern Alliance. Interrogated information was shared with us. Second reason, and this is the most important, someone who knew things that were happening in the Singapore Malay Muslim community came forward with information that he shared with the authorities. There is a third reason, which I will come to in a second, but being an administrative defense, being an analyst and later a section head doing various things including in the so-called CT and counter-terrorism beat was very, very interesting. And to emphasize, because this tends to be forgotten, the Singapore group which got caught there were about 50 detentions of JI individuals over the next several years. And there’s more than one batch of arrests.
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These were serious people. They were deadly determined in terms of what they wanted to do. The Singapore conception of CT counterterrorism was very much like the conception that other nations had. We were kind of starting from scratch and if you recall this sort of vocabulary which quickly came to be ‘lone wolves,’ ‘homegrown terrorists’ and so on and so forth, self radicalized that is very much an offshoot and an outcrop of the post 9/11 cottage industry in counterterror and radicalization, which sprang up. A vocabulary was constructed on these issues, and from the Singapore point of view, I can tell you that we were really starting from scratch. And I think if you take one point away, it would be that the Singapore government realized that they could not do this on their own. And so very quickly they had to do backroom discussions with especially the Singapore Malay Muslim community.
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And that was very important. It tends to be forgotten. Why was it important? There was a sense of disbelief and denial in the Singapore Malay Muslim community that the JI were even Singapore Muslims or that they were actually one of us. And so some of the Singapore Malay Muslims actually felt that this is actually part of a government plot to discredit the Singapore Malay Muslim community. There were a lot of hard years and hard discussions done by top civil servants, secretaries, government officials to bring the community to understand that this was an issue that they had to take some ownership of. And this was important because — I wouldn’t say antidote and there’s no silver bullet to radicalization — but the religious rehabilitation group, which laid the groundwork and the seeds for the de-radicalization story in Singapore, which has been very successful, which I will come to — actually was seen and indeed had to be seen as not a government effort, but a ground up effort that the community led by — well two, one is passed away — inspirational Malay Muslim clerics led.
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And that institution has gone from strength to strength. So here, just to make the point that in terms of Singapore’s immediate post 9/11 national security perspectives, if you were to ask any government “natsec” practitioner in the initial first few years, what is Singapore’s national security strategy, its imperatives? The strategy has never been published, but in as much as it’s been revealed and partly published – you’re a journalist, so you can look this up – there’s a seminal speech by coordinating minister, then coordinating minister for national security, Dr. Tony Tan in parliament. You can again look this up, 2004 – it’s made very, very clear. National security is about fighting terrorism. Of course this is at the risk of seeming to be overly reductionist or simplifying things. So within the strategy, which again is an internal strategy, but I can share some with you.
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Emphasis number one, we are fighting not just one group but networks of terror. And therefore it’s very, very important for government to have a networked and coordinated approach. So it’s at that time that you first have the coming into being of agencies which are meant to be platforms for sharing. And the reason is for CT in particular, not just Singapore but worldwide, there’s always a risk of stovepipes. That’s number one, interagency clearing houses where you pave the way for information to be shared. And these start to become much more important in the years after 9/11. There’s another plank which I should mention and that’s resilience. And resilience is very, very important. It’s important now, but when resilience starts to come to the fore, roughly 2004, 2005, and new government agencies and think tanks are present to work to look at resilience, it’s really Singapore looking at the experience of other nations which have suffered terror attacks and how they bounce back, particularly where there’s the risk of a rent in communal harmony in multicultural or plural societies.
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And in particular, I don’t know if you remember this, the terrible 7/7 tube subway and bus bombings in London in 2005. Singapore government agencies, not just the security ones, but the ones interested in society, cohesion and culture start to pay a lot of attention to that. Resilience is really at the heart of the terrorism response, not just arresting people. And I think that needs to be stressed. And I really think that at that point in time, the government’s key concern was, and you can still hear them saying this, ‘it’s not a matter of if, but when.’ You’ve probably heard this before if you follow the Singapore radicalization scene. But when that eventually happens, when that thing, when one or two individuals actually get through, particularly if they’re not that concerned about getting caught, what about the bounce back ability of society? I don’t think I invented that word, but I think it’s an apt description for the day after scenarios and how you put the delicate porcelain vase if you use Lee Kuan Yew’s analogy back together again in a manner where nothing happened.
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So a lot of the – although if you believe Lee Kuan Yew it can’t be put together again, you can come back to that issue in a second. But if large numbers of one ethnic group are killed in a violent incident and the perpetrators are seen to be from the other, what do you do about it? And I really think of all government’s preoccupations at the time for day after scenarios that was actually really, really important. If you want the numbers roughly, well, about 60 JI members were interdicted and placed under various orders for the internal Security Act. The most serious order is the detention order, which technically allows government to detain you without trial. Don’t try this at home. Yeah, so it’s a useful kind of relic left to us by the British. When the British went back, they got rid of it back home, but we kept it.
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Of course the criticism is that, well how about oversight? There is by the way, judicial oversight. That’s another story. And the appellant can challenge the detention. But the point is to put you through a rehabilitative process, which I will come to in a second. And the success rate is actually very, very high by my calculations because government doesn’t often release data, so you have to do your own calculations. Success rates between 85 to 90%, 9-0% meaning of all the JI detainees ever placed under DO detention order about 90% are back free working, contributing members of Singapore society. What was the big cleavage? What changed? I think still in the Ministry of Defense at the time 2007 individual by the name of Abdul Bashir, he went to a good school, actually meant to be the best school in Singapore, it’s called Raffles. It’s my school actually, I didn’t know him, don’t get me wrong.
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Or I think found to be self radicalized, plotting attacks and very keen to go to an unnamed Middle Eastern country to wage jihad. So there was a lot of surprise in the Singapore security establishments at the time and as their establishments because there’s more than one agency involved. He was interdicted, he was brought back. Self radicalized individuals tend to be harder to crack. About a hundred just under have been dealt with under various ISA orders of the two known recidivist cases and Bashir was one, meaning they seemed to be back on the wagon, then they fell off again and they backslider had to be re-detained. Why exactly we can come to, but of the two non recidivist cases, both were self radicalized cases. What we find after 2007 almost exclusively is that you start to get self radicalized individuals and JI, I hesitate to say is no longer a threat, but it’s mainly lone wolves, individuals.
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It’s a trickle. It’s very, very small numbers. A slight pickup around the time there’s Tahrir Square, civil war in Syria because that’s simplifying, seemed to be a war fermented by the Shia against the Sunni in South Syria and so on. And then an uptick roughly 2013, 2014 when ISIS starts to become an issue. For those of you who may or may not be familiar, about 1,500 Southeast Asians went up to join ISIS. If you just want to narrow down on the men who are the fighters, it’s roughly seven to 800. The vast majority were Indonesian, maybe a hundred or so, Malaysian maybe a bit more than that, small number of Singaporeans, all of whom are thought to be dead. The issue with the individuals who were trying to join ISIS, the Singaporean cases is that even when they failed, no worries. They had a plan B, which was put out widely by ISIS leaders including someone called al-Adnani who was the ISIS defacto number two for a while: no problem. Use your kitchen tools, implements whatever you have and go and kill individuals in your home country, which is what some of the key and earliest ISIS or pro ISIS linked plots in Singapore were actually about.
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And the worrying thing is unlike the generation of JI detainees, the ages start to get younger and younger. You’re talking like 15, 16 and for the first time women start to be involved, women start to be implicated. And I would also add that for the first time, there seems to be the needle moving in terms of the time taken to radicalize. I’m talking about online self radicalize, because the online space has been directly implicated in every single Singaporean post 2007 whom I’ve studied. For the JI chaps, it was charismatic face-to-face networks of persuasion, meaning ‘this mosque is just boring. Let me show you the real religion.’ And you feel part of a selected group and you feel very important.
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That’s the JI. Pro-ISIS types is different. So the internal security department, the ISD is basically the interior ministry and the RRG clearly have to evolve as they have done to deal with this. So given that, and this tracks what’s happening in the west for the pro ISIS cases, given that there’s a lot more interest in eschatology, deep seated conspiracies, the idea of end times, given that there’s a lot more of that and given that the understanding of religion for a lot more of the younger pro ISIS types now, including in Singapore, is actually shallower than the JI types. There are actually issues if the JI chap in the middle of a rehab process is confronted by a well-known Muslim clerical starts and you — OK respected figure that’s maybe you can talk. ISIS guys are not like that and again in the west it’s like that as well.
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You’re like, I’m a fighter, I want to talk to fighters, right, you are cleric. My side also is cleric. You go and talk to the counterpart on my side and there’s quite a bit of that. So what seems to have, I would say improve it’s certainly a good thing is that while the religious aspect of rehab has been kept, there is a lot more emphasis placed on shaping behavior when it comes to the psychological vectors for radicalization, if you like, because for a lot of these younger chaps, religion might be the initial first few lines of code, but below that you’ve got issues with coping, the kin group, friends or indeed the normal, I wouldn’t say normal, but the processes that happen when adolescent goes through a tough period. And again, this tracks what you see in certain parts of the West and what you see in Europe and social workers know a lot about this. Indeed in the cottage industry for radicalization, some of the most important things I’ve heard are not from so-called counterterror experts, but actually from social workers and youth mentors.
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I raised the last point on mentors because if you track what government has been saying and what ISD has been saying for the most recent self radicalized cases, clear emphasis on mentoring — and that’s not religious, that’s ‘can I help you?’ Let me make some minor interventions. They might be helping you with your homework or whatever talk to you — that might bump you off what down the line might have been an even more serious radicalized trajectory. Again, the relevant authorities, which would be the RRG and the ISD have clearly learned from the experiences of others, not least given that for a couple of the most recent cases there’s a serious element not just of conspiricism but gamification as well. They draw succor and sustenance from the fact that they are in this online world. In a couple of cases it’s been ROBLOX and they shape their own pro ISIS memes and imagery including killing the kuffar and so on.
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Sometimes they have been noticed and warned by the ISD and sometimes they continue because they continue to consume ISIS propaganda and engage in ISIS radicalization material. Therefore later on they have to be detained again. For reasons which haven’t been worked out, as I mentioned, deradicalizing the so-called online self radicalized is actually quite a bit harder even with the psychological interventions that I am talking about. There is good work done besides by the ISD and besides by the RRG, by the aftercare group. These are people after you’ve let out to make who kind of meet you from time to time or even when you’re in detention they make sure your kids have scholarships or that your wife is in gainful employment. And that’s actually really, really important because if you are a detainee and the kuffar is the person who is detained you — Singaporean, Singapore government, Singapore Chinese or whatever, and you feel your family being treated really, really well and they tell you this when they come in for their familial visits, that sets an important kind of thing going on in your mind. What exactly are you fighting for?
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So for the radicalization, because I do want to move on to a couple of other things including cyber that I do want to talk about, but I want to stress that what I’ve described to you are probably the first two ages of the Singapore radicalization story, pro JI and then the pro isis. That itself is changing if you’ve seen or followed news reports or MHA administrative of home affairs press releases regarding the most recent radicalization stories, it’s not actually pro Islamist the pro ISIS, it’s pro right wing. Actually there have been four cases like this. One of the most important interesting was Singaporean but Indian and also a Protestant detained at the beginning of the pandemic who idolized Brenton Tarrant, the New Zealand Christchurch mass murderer. In fact, all four have an affinity for Tarrant and all four subscribe to sort of pro right-wing great replacement theories.
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Something very, very odd is going on. I want to stress that the four are not mental cases. They’re deadly serious about what they wanted to do and in the first case, a Singaporean Indian was going to do an exact imitation of the Brenton Tarrant attack, which is March 15th against two mosques. The only difference is he couldn’t get the guns, right? So he was trying to get machetes or something on the local app, which is called Carousel, and he was interdicted and stopped. For a couple of the other more recent right wing chaps — very, very young, willing, Singapore and Chinese, willing and keen to go and fight overseas for the white people in a race war. Now you have to think about this very, very seriously. How is it that the only documented pro right-wing radicalization stories you see in Southeast Asia are actually Singaporean cases not reported in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand?
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Of course the cultural context is quite different but it’s worth asking. Maybe you might have some answers, maybe we can discuss this in the Q&A. From my point of view, we need to continue to learn from the paragon or exemplars of deradicalization success stories. It may well be, and we can argue this point out, the answer may not be deradicalization but actually a disassociation or bumping you off from a trajectory, because as you know in certain countries — this is a bit controversial but I can say it here — radicals actually built society. They felt that they were fighting for something. I’m not in any way excusing the pro-ISIS types or the pro-JI types, but one case whom I did study, his name was Wang. Singaporean, but naturalized, originally Chinese from China, had some personal difficulties, failed business and he was interdicted when he was about to go to Kurdistan, actually northeast Syria to fight against ISIS with Kurdish militia.
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Now as you know, if you follow this, there have been hundreds of western [inaudible]. This chap Wang, if he had succeeded, would’ve been the first, not just Singaporean, but first ever southeast Asian. It’s worth asking the question, was he radicalized? He’s been let out, right? But he was detained briefly. So the milieu I’m trying to sketch out for you as I end my part on terrorism is in future, I’m not trying to scare you here, we are all radicalizable. We may well be confronted, and this is sort of happening in the West by eco-accelerationists, antifa types, incels — maybe not the incels — but some of the others are absolutely convinced that they are at the vanguard of doing something important, terribly important and for the eco types maybe because they feel that the certain generations have failed them, and at the edges of those you may well get people who think you guys are not doing anything.
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Therefore I have to rightly and rightfully take matters into my own hands if necessary, including violence, because it’s the last resort and I have to do it. And I think that’s the future that we might be heading for because trends here tend to track what’s been happening in the West for some time already and that’s the direction that the West is going into. I’m going to switch tack here and I’m mindful of time. I do want to leave time for Q&A, but when I finished my government career, I was trying to second myself out, which did actually happen. I was a government secondi to think tanks, the Centre of Excellence for National Security, part of the major RSIS security think tank in Singapore. So the center I headed was the first, I think, to set up its own cyber program. This is 2015 and we began to work very closely immediately with the Singapore Cybersecurity Agency, which is also set up in 2015.
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They set up, they recently celebrated their 10 year anniversary. It shows you how things have passed or how quickly times have changed. I’m thinking it’s changed that I can share with you 15, 10 years ago it was almost impossible to get funding for a cyber program in any think tank. People just didn’t really believe it was an issue. Anyway, things have changed. What changed in Singapore — I can only speculate here — to me it cannot be an accident that the setting up of the Singapore CSA 2015 followed immediately on 2014 a major hack of the Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which I can talk about because it got reported –probably a state-sponsored attack. The state has never been identified. The CSA was an amalgamation of technical department which formally sat with the Ministry of Home Affairs and some others as well. Did that solve the problem? Well, not really.
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If you follow the Singapore cyber scene, we were hit by even larger, more alarming cyber attacks, not least the 2018 IHiS SingHealth hack where the data of 1.5 million Singaporeans was exfiltrated and accessed. Within that, the data of our prime minister then pm, PM Lee Hsien Loong was repeatedly accessed in a manner where I suspect they wanted us to know and to find out. So the cyber hacks have continued by the sheer fact that Singapore is, I don’t know what you want to call it, a big events venue, a locus, a beacon, a convenient point for security related discussions. You would’ve followed, I mean you probably have followed the sensitive German defense call which was intercepted probably by the Russians on the sidelines of the Singapore Air Show and this is a very interesting case, actually, you should look this up. Last year the cyber hacks have continued partly because of the way in which Singapore is developing.
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It’s a venue for international foreign discussions, Shangri-La, APAC discussions, ASEAN and so on. The issue is that when as a former government official, when one agency is set up and you think it’s going to deal with the problem, every other government agency starts to think, ‘fine, someone else is going to take care of it. Now that’s just great.’ And the problem is, it’s not quite like that. CSA — and we work with them very closely for many years when I was in the think tank scene — we’ll be the first to admit that many, many agencies have to have some skin in the game. I printed this elsewhere, but CSA’s CE is a very capable man, executive called chief executive David Cole. Every time he says cybersecurity is a team sport, if I had a dollar for every time he said this, I think I would be retired somewhere in the Caribbean.
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If you have a ransomware attack against you or your company, do you report or file an incident report with the CSA or the Singapore police? Any answers? People tend not to go to CSA, they tend to go to law enforcement. And look, for example — I’m talking about collective responsibility again — look for example at the SingHealth hack. Now the report on that, the very thorough report, there was overseas expertise, top tier talent was called in to write the report. It’s 400 pages long, it’s still online, you should read it because it reads like a thriller, basically. The SingHealth hack was actually not CSA’s failure, it was the IHiS SingHealth cert computer emergency response team’s failure to comprehend what was actually going on within their systems. And even when one person who was a bit more resourceful than the rest had some conception, some dawning realization of what was going on within the system, she had no capability of realizing the massive resources of a state.
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And I say it was a state because the public version of the report that was released says it was a state actor that was raid against SingHealth. So that state point is actually important because in the public version and the public version of all the major hacks, it’s always state actor, state-linked APT advanced persistent threat. That’s cyber vocabulary. And I want to dwell for 30 seconds on this because this issue of attribution tends to hang over, not so much terrorism, but cyber and disinformation as well. There are APT actors from the very, very big powers for the SingHealth hack. We know which one it was very, very well, well resourced, active in this part of the world and active particularly in Singapore, targeting government linked data, commercial data and increasingly health data because some of the state linked APT work in coordination or consonance with criminal syndicates as well.
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And you know this if you pore through the technical reports issued by Mandiant and FireEye and so on, these are things which rarely get talked about but there are APTs and they’re indeed Southeast Asian government linked APTs — things that we never talk about, right ?– active in this part of the world, including from states that we happen to be — in fact usually — from states that we happen to be on very, very friendly terms with. I want to pause here and let this sink in for a second because this is the great dichotomy between terrorism and cyber. Two issues that I’ve, I think you can hold that slide. You can go back to the first you think about it, right? I gave you a couple of reasons why the JI plot was uncovered. That was a great turning fork in the road for Singapore history. Actually it tends to be under remote. But the reason I held back, which I’ll share with you now, is that information from a videotape, a surveillance videotape of a subway station here that was frequented by American servicemen.
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It was a casing video sent out for approval for the attack to Al-Qaeda HQ discovered in the bombed out house of Mohamed Atta, key alqaeda lieutenant, found by the Americans and shared with us. So that’s people helping us liaison service in analytical work. This kind of help often happens. Now take that thought and hold it and look at cyber attacks. If a third party sees us being interdicted about to be interdicted or being cased or in systems being recon by another party — might be hostile, might actually be very friendly — that third party, which ordinarily for the terror information might have shared stuff with us, may have good reasons not to be doing so in this case because you never know, despite being friendly why they might need this kind of access or information one day in some time to come. So I think that’s very, very important.
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The difference between terrorism and cyber, the kind of help that you might get. But terrorism we can be tipped off and we have been for cyber it’s a bit more murky. There is, before I move on to disinformation, which I think would be my last part, there is something which we have actually done very, very well which tends to go rather unremarked. Well two things. One is the nurturing of the cyber talent ecosystem. The next generation of our cyber defenders. When I did national service, which used to be two and a half years in Singapore, you went where you were told to go, so I was an infantry officer. Now if you have a particular aptitude for cyber or the technical side, you can be drafted into that part of the cyber service and you are co-opted even as a national serviceman into the cyber defense service and I think that’s very, very important.
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That’s one. I have quite a lot of confidence in how our cyber defense is shaping up. I have an equal amount of confidence in something which tends not to be talked about but I will hear that’s Singapore up upping its game when it tends to be trying to be a real player in the international norms, discussion for cyber. There are various international red lines, rules of the road, what you can do, what you can’t do in terms of cyber and peace time in terms of cyber and conflict, won’t bore you with it but that tends to be a Western dominated discussion. Singapore CSA at a certain point decided that Singapore needed to have some skin in the game. And part of it was a U.S., UK, maybe Japan-backed UN discussion, the Group of Governmental Experts, it’s called the GGE. Singapore has made crucial contributions to that. When the GGE, because of big power machinations, seemed to be failing or failed in 2017-18, Singapore played a key role in making sure that the discussion came here during what became our Singapore International Cyber Week, all the ASEAN ministers for cyber gathered responsible and we issued for the first time any regional blocker issued anything like this and edict saying that we voluntarily agreed to abide by the 12 or so GGE norms.
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So that’s one. There’s another also winding its way through the United Nations, that’s the UN for you, which is kind of composed or comprising a rival bloc — the Soviets, the Chinese to some degree. Why did I say Soviets? The Russians. It’s a historian talking here. So that Singapore also insists on playing a role. In fact the president of the GGE process who has been lauded for I think the neutrality with which he’s conducted himself is Burhan Gafoor who’s Singapore’s, among his other roles, Singapore’s ambassador to the United Nations. He’s based in New York, so that’s cyber for you. A lot of work to be done. There will continue to be cyber hacks but in certain things we are punching above our weight. I’ll leave you with one thought on cyber because it’s also relevant to disinformation and to some degree terrorism as well.
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The CSA’s chief executive David Koh, and please watch him on YouTube or other, he gave a very good talk in Oxford recently at the Blavatnik school and you should look this up. He keeps saying we need to assume breach, assume breach. You know what that means, imagine or assume we are in a compromised environment where the adversary is already in your systems. So in this gray zone, the principle encourages you and CSOs and CTOs and so on to be vigilant and to be able to ensure continuity of business process or the normal process of everyday living for government in what you assume to be an everyday compromised environment without necessarily descending into paranoia. And I think that’s very, very important here. I will come to this maybe in the Q and A. Actually not just normal conditions, the think tanks have their own vocabulary and invented one term.
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The supernormal conditions that you have in Singapore, nothing ever happens to you in Singapore. They actually work against us. CSA surveys and you can look this up, this is public information, shows that when Singaporeans at the individual level are actually asked to, ‘Hey, can you spot this phishing attack, this ransomware attack, this watering hole attack?’ They consistently report above how they actually perform when they’re tested and push comes to shove, and I think this is on account of the supernormal conditions. Now for disinfo, this has become a much maligned and somewhat hackneyed term. The beginnings of the Singapore story in my view were actually with the Trump 2016, Trump first presidency because very quickly after he becomes president there are all these whispers and innuendo about Cambridge Analytica and the Russians and so on. You remember that seems an eon ago now. I’ve just got back from one last week major conference which talks about these things, asymmetric warfare or disinfo, whatever you want to call it in Riga where the NATO center of excellence, COE for Stratcom strategic communications has its annual shindig and I was asked to talk about the Singapore experience, and I wanted to because we all know about info and Russian attempts to influence Brexit and the power of Russian malign operations, let’s say in its former eastern bloc and so on.
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But for obvious and perhaps understandable reasons that Singapore or the global south or the southeast Asian situation for disinformation doesn’t get talked about so, so much. To go back to the background, there was a major dawning realization that this could be a vector by which other malign powers could kind of intercede or intrude within the Singapore body politic and potentially peel off one ethnicity or one group using, let’s say civilizational calls or so on and so forth, and undermine all the good work in terms of cohesion nation-building which had been done by the first and second generation of Singapore leaders. There was a major parliamentary select committee on malicious online falsehoods in February and March 2018. The key videos actually online on YouTube you can find this and the eventual report, again, 400 pages long. I dunno why we really should have executive summaries, but luckily if you look there is an executive summary for this one.
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I’ll summarize some of the discussions for you. It was a wake up call because lots of us from think tanks testified my own oral testimony and written testimony is online. You can find it, but that wasn’t the seminal moment. The seminal moment was actually when Facebook, Facebook in particular came before select committee and they said, this shows you how things have changed. They said content is not our business. We’re an innocent platform, an intermediary and we’re not going to take responsibility for this. It’s very, very important because I think this set the seal on government thinking that the platforms, to put it bluntly or crudely, were not to be trusted. So the eventual passage of the POFMA, the protection against online Falsehoods and Manipulations Act, Singapore’s fake news law can be directly traced to that exchange. Simon Milner, the Facebook Asia Pacific head versus Minister Shanmugam, the law and home affairs minister is on YouTube.
(00:37:05):
It’s well worth watching. But very quickly we realized that — and there have been take down orders issued as you know as a result of the POFMA — but very quickly we realized that actually fake news disinformation is just part of it. There’s actually other things going on linked to hostile influence and information campaign. So there’s another law it comes to pass in 2019, which is the Foreign Interference Countermeasures Act. So it’s the foreign interference law and I think this is timely. The law has been used. You look at what happened with the, I think this is quite seminal, the completely illegal invasion of Ukraine by the Russians and Singapore takes this quite, in my view, principled the only a ASEAN country to sanction Russian interest and to say something quite strongly at the UN, but very quickly I think this becomes a wake up call for Singapore government.
(00:37:58):
It becomes clear that wide swathes of the population don’t necessarily agree with the call that Singapore has taken. They might give lip service to it, but amongst certain groups and certain demographics, there’s a sense that why are we getting involved? You meaning government keep saying that we are a small country, you government keeps saying that we should be neutral, although that’s never been said. So why are we inviting retaliation in this manner? So number one, there’s stuff actually happening on the side. Foreign linked or foreign owned accounts, mainly TikTok, but there are others as well disseminated content. Those of you who are Singaporean might remember mocking puny Singapore that daring to stand up to the force of Putin’s might and of course the pro-Russian sentiment was stronger in our Muslim neighbors for reasons of history, culture, anti-colonial sentiment, liking for the strong leader, the dictator if you like this.
(00:38:51):
This is history. But the influence campaigns if you like, although small in Singapore are seated down. And the one takeaway where Singapore government I think was really forced to act for the first time in my view, they realized that strategic level communications of foreign policy calls can no longer be an elite preserve. You need to explain in a down to earth ground up manner to the people in a readily explicable way, what’s going on and why certain calls have to be made. I’m happy to go into later into how foreign policy communication has become clear. The principle of non attribution, which I said I will come back to, I want to come back to it here because if you look at the final report of the parliamentary committee I mentioned and I did my homework, so I counted the number of times Russia appears in that PDF. You want to guess how many times, 38 times, how many times does China appear in that report?
(00:39:51):
Anyone want to guess? Zero. So if you are the Russian ambassador here, whom I don’t know by the way, there’ve been a few ambassadors since you’d be actually very offended by what you see in the PDF. Singapore is saying that we are the main vector for disinfo operations in this part of the world, but it’s not the case. So I think the think tanks, and I have my views and government have their own views, who is going to build the attack. But you have the fact that 75% of Singaporeans are actually Singapore and Chinese. If you know anything about Singapore, you’ll know that they’re actually very, very different from China-Chinese. But if you know things about Singapore, there are certain segments within which cleave to the civilizational call of China. I actually have more, but actually in the interest of saving time for, because I see Kevin hovering and I suspect I might be able to get some of my last points in the Q&A anyway.
(00:40:42):
Why don’t we skip to the last slide and I tried to explain some of what’s going on in my thinking and I apologize for the very, very small font, and this is part of a project which I was doing for another institution and the thing started when I was trying to prove or disprove the contention is sometimes a criticism that Singapore government, whenever you have a problem, you always make a law for it. So what I can see on my right are laws and it says counter at the top, counter disinformation, anti polarization efforts. But actually some of it on the furthest right is linked more to the extremism side. You’ve got the restriction orders, the detention orders and all that. You’ve got some institutions, this is more towards your left, which actually we didn’t create left to us by the British, the IRO, the interreligious organization.
(00:41:36):
And you’ve got some of the more recent laws right down the middle, which are not just for disinformation and hostile influence campaigns. I’ll send you the slides if you like, no issue, influence campaigns, but they’re actually more broadly on online harms, online harms and the effect that they have on the resilience of society. Even if it’s organic harms, even if it’s not a fomented disinfo campaign, government agencies are paying a lot of attention to that. Now the reason why I wanted to put this together is actually to give more emphasis and weight to the social cohesion. I think this is the point which I will end on. I’ve been part of numerous forums, particularly since the outbreak of the Gaza hostilities, where office holders, some of the newer ones, I think they’re trying to test them out — come face to face with widespread of young Singaporeans, eager, enthusiastic, aspirational, talking in an unforced and unartificial fashion, contentious way about they get quite heated about these issues and it’s important to ventilate and quite often last few years it’s NGOs which take the lead in organizing these.
(00:42:40):
I have no doubt that they’re giving some help or facilitation by government. But my point is if you’re Singaporean, you might know what I mean. Talking about subjects which have risk, which are potentially contentious, which could lead to misunderstandings. If you’re Singaporean, you might recognize this term OB out of bounds markers 20, 25 years ago, no one talked like this. It was the elite preserve of government. My general impressions that government realizes that not everything can be solved with the law. You need this platform partly not just to ventilate grievances, but to rebuild the town square for civic and civil discourse because mark my words, it’s happening in Singapore, the evisceration and the hollowing out of the middle ground and it starts here. It’s arguably more advanced in parts of the west, but it is happening here along all kinds of cleavages — race, identity, privilege, LGBTQ and that’s not even the main one, class envy and so on and so forth.
(00:43:36):
And of course any vector, any malign or friendly influence which wants to test out or use Singapore as a test bed or a sandbox for its own influence methods might find Singapore quite an interesting test tube. So I think Singapore government has to go further in that direction work done by not just education in schools, but NGOs in particular, young people, aspirational who want to make a difference, whereas a former government official, I would say for the government officials, sometimes the hardest thing to do for the policymaker is to do nothing and to let go. So I think I’m going to end there and happy to take questions in the time I’ve left.
Kevin Johnson, National Press Foundation (00:44:17):
While we’re waiting for some hands, I have a question because it’s been a big struggle in the us it’s been a big struggle in the U.S. since 9/11 and that is to convince the institutions that support the economy, whether it be in the U.S. or the global economy, to partner with law enforcement, federal, international, whatever, and not being viewed as a weakness that either their systems have been breached, there’s been theft of material that obviously they didn’t want to be public. So I wondered what your sense is globally on institutions and their willingness to be partners in the effort that you described
Shashi Jayakumar, SJK Geostrategic Advisory (00:45:18):
By law under, I’m not sure whether this is your question, under the broadcast act, criminal procedure code, and I’m not even a lawyer — and parts of the FICA, the foreign interference bill, which has two parts. One is a register to register politically significant individuals, but the other is the part which can compel the platforms in particular the social media platforms to surrender technical information. POFMA has certain provisions like that as well when in an anticipatory sense there’s the sense that a hostile information campaign might be about to get underway. So the provisions are actually there and they have actually been used.
(00:45:59):
Actually, to reverse your question, I was going to say this just now. I’m actually alarmed by the about face on the part of the social media platforms in the United States where they’ve agreed, I think to abandon large parts of their content moderation efforts. I think just by Trump, American friends in the room may have a different point of view, and I’ve not reached out to my contacts in Facebook or indeed the information ministry and DDI, what is the state of play in the backrooms discussion now because the same world government has encouraged and worked with the major platforms, TikTok, Facebook in particular when it comes to content moderation because this helps to take down efforts when needed, right? If the content moderation abandonment is expanded to the global south or Singapore, where Singapore is not just a node, it’s the Asia-Pac HQ for many of these outfits.
(00:46:47):
What does that mean? In particular when we’ve just had an election as you know in Singapore where the government acknowledged that there were foreign influence campaigns. So does that mean a stepping up of the take down or does that mean more laws with sharper teeth to compel cooperation from the social media platforms? That part is a bit opaque now. I think it’s still in the process of working itself out. The well-resourced APT actors, there’s a clear introduction of AI including defects because the ones who are trying to undermine Singapore use a panoply in their toolkit. They may use cyber attacks, they may use disinformation, they may use DeepFakes or they may use, as you may have seen recently, although I think this is a criminal syndicate that our prime minister Lawrence Wong deepfaked or indeed previously our senior minister at that time PM deepfaked for a variety of reasons, saying things he did not say or peddling products, which of course he was not peddling.
(00:47:42):
But there’s also been a democratization of the ability to use AI with gen AI tools where, if you ask me, the democratization has actually meant that people who don’t actually need a great deal of technical ability will either now or in the not too distant future be able to use AI for phishing attacks, to automate at scale disinformation campaigns or for any other kind of nefarious purposes. And the same might be said about criminal syndicates as well. Now on the defense side, for some reason for the cyber side and the disinformation side, defense side, AI is always helping, but we always seem to be playing catch up. I spoke at this a little bit at Riga where the government agencies responsible for strike comms strategic communications — and there’s more than one — have done a lot of major strides, largely unadvertised when it comes to using AI tools.
(00:48:39):
And they use a combination. They’re trying out various things of AI tools to summarize news reports and in crisis situations, meaning simulations of crisis situations, using AI tools to put out the initial first cut or what might be a press release and so on and so forth. Yeah, so it’s still a space which needs to be watched. In my view, what is actually lacking to some degree or badly needed is besides the social studies and citizenship and character education that you have in Singapore schools, which is already better than it was in my time, some sense of the ethical implications beyond social and cyber cyber media hygiene. That’s already to some degree taught in schools, some sense of what’s OK and what’s not OK in schools. The early interventions is going to be very, very important when it comes to the ethical use of AI. it’s a very interesting press report you might have seen it came out yesterday regarding one of the leading universities, Nanyang, and on the facts of what was reported, the two students were implicated and they got a failing mark for this particular assignment because they had been warned full-stop no gen AI is going to help your project.
(00:49:50):
And already the fact that, per the reports, look, they came up with completely fictitious references, it’s a clear sign, a bleeding sign, and they’re still trying to argue their way out in a very, very convincing way. And it strikes me reading the reports, they’re absolutely convinced that they did nothing wrong at all. So that’s what I mean by some early interventions regarding the ethical implications. There is a right and there is a wrong when it comes to use of AI.
Kimberley Kao | Wall Street Journal (00:50:17):
Kimberly from Wall Street Journal, I just wanted to ask, could you elaborate a bit more about the issue of attribution that you mentioned, the lack of attribution and whether AI has made the problem worse?
Shashi Jayakumar, SJK Geostrategic Advisory (00:50:30):
AI is, I’m not a technical person, right? Attribution is a technical issue, but it’s also a policy issue. I get the strong sense that for some of the major incidents, both the disinformation hostile information campaigns and the cyber hacks in particular the SingHealth IHiS attacks, we actually knew who was responsible. But if the responsible power is a large state, which we are tends to be on very, very friendly terms with. If you know the history that power may well have had reasons for wanting to teach us a lesson at that particular point in time, but that that’s a separate issue. So why would you do that? Why would Singapore want to do it now there’s a whole academic and rather two theoretical academic literature, which is developed on tested or discrete signaling behind the scenes where you make your cyber points in a behind the scenes manner, meaning, aha, we know what you did, don’t do it again.
(00:51:23):
OK, fine. Yeah, that’s a very well developed scene. And this comes up in Riga and in the western disinformation hybrid threat forums that I attend from time to time, they’re like, ‘you, Singapore, you will never call out the Chinese’ or this or that. And it’s actually a source of consternation and concern from some of our Western friends. They don’t realize that we actually caught in a very, very difficult place. And I hesitate to say that there’s Western hypocrisy involved, but disinformation and cyber threats, everyone’s doing it. I mean, one of the most interesting, although not very well remarked disinformation campaigns, which press, can’t remember whether it’s Wall Street Journal, has shown emanated from the Pentagon during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is aimed at thoroughly discrediting the China Sinovac vaccine, particularly in the Philippines. Was it Reuters? I apologize. I apologize. Which I found convincing. And to my mind, the only part which is left open-ended, but I found it convincing was actually this is a disinformation campaign which could and may actually have led to death, at least in the Philippines. Everyone’s doing it. Yep.
Franc Han Shih | Thai Public Broadcasting Service (00:52:37):
Franc from Thai PBS. Two questions here as you are the security expert, just want to understand, are you concerned over the proliferation of new wave of terrorism following Israel-Iran conflicts followed by, of course, U.S. stepping in. Second question, regional focus. Do you think ASEAN countries have done enough to do this topic as counterterrorism disinformation? Do you think they’ve done enough? Is there any more efforts put together to counter that?
Shashi Jayakumar, SJK Geostrategic Advisory (00:53:18):
Yeah, I’m being asked about the Iran question a lot. There is a sheer form of jihad, we should be aware of this. And beyond that, the Iranian use of proxies, in particular Hezbollah, is not confined to the Middle East or indeed the Gulf. If you know the history, any Thais in the room? Thai journalists? No. Oh, sorry. You are Thai. Hezbollah and Thailand have a history. Yeah, and you can look this up. It’s been a base for some time. There have been operatives and activities there. And in fact in Singapore as well, in the 1990s, again, well, this is public information, you can look this up. Singapore and the Southern most part of Malaysia Johor were used as a surveillance location with the ultimate possible objective of hitting U.S. naval assets then based in Singapore. These were demonstrably either Hezbollah or IRGC linked operatives. And surely government said nothing so far, but still very early days following the most recent escalation.
(00:54:22):
Surely it must be a concern that Iran having had its major proxies to some degree, emasculated at least close to home, unable to take direct retaliatory action in that part of the world might choose to mobilize or operationalize some of its relic or leftover assets, if it has any, in this part of the world. And as I said, Singapore and Thailand have a history with this. On ASEAN there are all the ASEAN counter-terrorism fora, and their various — in my previous role, which I had as Singapore’s human rights representative to the ASEAN body on human rights, there is such a body, it’s called the AICHR — a lot of it was on the terrorism bits, but also on the cohesion, the upstream. What we need to do first to make sure we never get to that point. I think it’s important that this discourse and symposium have to continue. But if you were talking about the hard yards of what actually gets done to stop a terrorist attack, quite often it’s kinetic. And quite often it’s operational sharing at the bilateral mechanism between two nations and the operational agencies between these nations. And I think we have to accept that. Yeah. Have we done, sorry, go ahead.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa | Sri Lanka Guardian (00:55:37):
I’m Nilantha Ilangamuwa from Sri Lanka Guardian, and you know about Sri Lanka. We fought fight in about 30 years. That was international war. And then 2019 there was the threat landscape rapidly changed with the attack of attack by suicide bombers, infiltrated by [inaudible]. My question is a bit — you were talking about conspiracy theories and all and Sri Lankan stories was just occupied with this even till today when it come to this Easter attack and all. And I was deeply gnawing in this, getting more information about this, what exactly has happened during this Sunday, and I interview a couple of victims and I just visited many families who are involved in this terrorism and radicalizations and all and talk to government officials and all. How did Singapore navigated those other conspiracy theories to convince the people and that we are talking something since, and this is the threat and it has nothing to do with the politics and all.
(00:56:39):
And second thing is, second question is about the deradicalization process and how do you implement the necessary laws? Because immediately after Easter the attack, we tried to draft a law for deradicalization, but then NGOs and civil societies, including the Catholic church, which was mainly victims of the attack, when to the Supreme Court based on the fundamental petition and argue for it, is violating the fundamental right of people. And we are still in the process and we can just move forward with the necessary laws and all. So how did the Singapore stories change from this scenario? Wonder
Shashi Jayakumar, SJK Geostrategic Advisory (00:57:17):
The conspiracism I would put in two buckets. Immediately after 9/11 and the first wave of the JI arrest the discourse and dialogue with the Malay Muslim community to convince them to take part in the effort for the DeRa program. It’s important that the RRG, the religious rehab group be seen to be a community led effort. And the success has been shown by the fact that younger mentors and counselors are coming through who are much more tech savvy from the Malay Muslim community, not foisted by government. That’s very important. So it was not a conspiracy by government to discredit the Malay Muslim community, meaning the so-called arrest. That’s one part. There’s a different part of the conspiracy, which I’m not sure whether addresses your question, but that’s the most recent arrest, not just self radicalized from 2014 onwards, but the most recent ones, the younger ones, religion is sort of there as I mentioned, but they believe in all kinds of crazy, the black flag Army eschatology, end times, the end of days, and that seems to be an interesting subplot, which I think needs to be further worked out. All that is got from online and here because you’ve studied the Colombo Easter Sunday bombings quite closely. I think there are numerous conspiracies there, right? One is that that the Indians knew about it and that the information was not taken on board. The other, correct me if I’m wrong, is that the radicalization story for many of those involved actually stems from one particular ulama religious cleric.
(00:58:47):
I did not have time to talk about this when I was talking just now, but if you look at the case histories of the Singapore detained, the Jihad ideologues, Anwar al-Awlaki, you know his name. It’s very prominent. It fits in about 10 to 20% of the radicalization stories. But actually if you ask and you look at the press reports, people who are not necessarily terrorists or jihadi ideologues, but who are just intolerant — Ismael [inaudible] if you’re a Southeast Asian, you know these names — one of them is from India, but actually a PR in Malaysia, I think he’s still there, who preach not the jihad but intolerant — You cannot wish, you’re Muslim you cannot wish Merry Christmas to your Christian friends, that kind of stuff. Or you’re Muslim. You cannot live in a western secularized society. It’s incompatible. That strain, which is tinged with conspiricism is very, very strong and to convince I think Malay Muslims here in particular, that there is a place and role for you co-equal role in Singapore society, which is meritocratic is I think very, very important.
(00:59:46):
I think your question about how does Singapore implement the laws, I think we didn’t use the laws because the first, there must have been a call, I was not privy to it after the JI unrest, you could have put these guys on trial and the outcome would’ve been, I think terrible and the body politic in terms of racial relations would I think not have survived. So the decision was taken to put them away, but not to throw away the key, to try a rehab process away from the glare of researchers like me because no one gets to interview them. I should make this clear, and away from the glare of the media as well. And a few years later, by my calculations, on average my calculations, four or five years later, they let out why they don’t have radical thoughts in their mind anymore, but that’s an intensive process, which I must stress. It’s not just religious set of interventions, it’s psychological interventions as well.
Ara Eugenio | Agence France-Presse (01:00:35):
Hi, I am Ara from AFP’s fact checking team in Manila.
Shashi Jayakumar, SJK Geostrategic Advisory (01:00:38):
Hmm.
Ara Eugenio | Agence France-Presse (01:00:40):
So my question is on an issue you actually mentioned earlier about tech platforms
(01:00:46):
Pulling out funding for content moderation efforts, including its third party fact checking program. It has done this in the U.S. and — well, as a journalist from here in this region, I think there’s a general sense that for us factcheckers here, we’re in a far more vulnerable state than our counterparts in the EU because they actually have their governments legislating laws that directly pressure platforms to keep these efforts up. I’m not very familiar with these laws that we noted before, but could you tell me about the efforts of the Singaporean government before or maybe what’s the general sense now of how to keep this platform — to keep these programs in these platforms? I think you mentioned earlier that it’s a bit opaque now the direction that we’re going, but maybe could you shed a light on what has been done in the past about this?
Shashi Jayakumar, SJK Geostrategic Advisory (01:01:48):
Well, opaque in the sense that the avalanche, which is about to hit us, if Zuckerberg fully caves into the Trump invective and directives, and whether that’s taken away from the fact checking effort and the wider community notes or whatever you want to call it in Southeast Asia, I think that would be disastrous. I don’t know what the Singapore government’s point of view on this would be. That said, there have been certain moves made independent of the platform’s efforts, and one is various campaigns run, not necessarily by the security agencies, in fact, they’re not part of this picture by the information ministry, which is now called MDDI, the National Library Board. It used to be part of the board, various campaigns. One of them is called “Sure Anot” campaign, fact checking campaign where you can go and ask it anything. You just heard this news is this, right?
(01:02:36):
It’s this wrong. That’s one. Then you’ve got various community and really community led initiatives. Some of them operate out of WhatsApp. It’s undergraduate, started it as a sort of a side project when they were doing coding or whatever, and the fact checking and the volunteerism is wholly ground source, no astroturffing there. And later on people try to, when the undergraduates graduate, they lose interest and others try to take this up. There is a third, which I hesitate to say is primarily fact checking, but I did want to mention it. It’s like coming together in small groups sometimes run by young, aspirational, aspirational people. And I mentioned this, this would never have happened in my time when I was, I just too apathetic. Like many in my generation and this, I’m not trying to sugarcoat this, but these kinds of gatherings where sometimes there might be a politician in the room, sometimes not, but they’re talking through issues which are very, very contentious, like Gaza.
(01:03:35):
Other issues as well. It’s not fact checking, but, and not sugarcoating. People leave the room not necessarily agreeing, but a process has been started in play, if you know what I mean. If you know the literature on bridging capital and bonding capital, especially in plural societies — this person has views which seem rational, but they’re directly opposed to mine. So process has started in play where you leave the room not necessarily agreeing, but the process has started. So if you track back to what I said earlier in my remarks about building back the broad middle, I think that’s going to be a very, very important component and complimentary to the fact checking side. Of course, experimentally within the universities funded by government, there are various efforts also AI inflected, which are AI powered fact checking tools. Many of these are in the process of being rolled out. Many of these governments already internally uses them to do the first cut of what an analyst would formally have done.
Kevin Johnson, National Press Foundation (01:04:37):
Well, once again, the clock has beat us to the finish line, unless there is one quick one. Anybody and I promised Shashi we would keep it to an hour and we’re doing the best we can on that. I also wanted to let you know that I took some photos, so your wife really does know where you are today.
Shashi Jayakumar, SJK Geostrategic Advisory (01:04:58):
OK, great. I have to show my family members. I actually was. Yeah.
Kevin Johnson, National Press Foundation (01:05:01):
But please join me in thanking Shashi for sharing his time and knowledge with us. Thank you.
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