Crypto-Gram
December 15, 2025

by Bruce Schneier
Fellow and Lecturer, Harvard Kennedy School
schneier@schneier.com
https://www.schneier.com

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commentaries on security: computer and otherwise.

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In this issue:

If these links don't work in your email client, try reading this issue of
Crypto-Gram on the web.

More PromptGTFO
AI and Voter Engagement
Legal Restrictions on Vulnerability Disclosure
Scam USPS and E-Z Pass Texts and Websites
AI as Cyberattacker
More on Rewiring Democracy
IACR Nullifies Election Because of Lost Decryption Key
Four Ways AI Is Being Used to Strengthen Democracies Worldwide
Huawei and Chinese Surveillance
Prompt Injection Through Poetry
Banning VPNs
Like Social Media, AI Requires Difficult Choices
New Anonymous Phone Service
Substitution Cipher Based on The Voynich Manuscript
AI vs. Human Drivers
FBI Warns of Fake Video Scams
AIs Exploiting Smart Contracts
Building Trustworthy AI Agents
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
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More PromptGTFO

[2025.11.17] The next three in this series on online events highlighting
interesting uses of AI in cybersecurity are online: #4, #5, and #6. Well worth
watching.

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AI and Voter Engagement

[2025.11.18] Social media has been a familiar, even mundane, part of life for
nearly two decades. It can be easy to forget it was not always that way.

In 2008, social media was just emerging into the mainstream. Facebook reached
100 million users that summer. And a singular candidate was integrating social
media into his political campaign: Barack Obama. His campaign's use of social
media was so bracingly innovative, so impactful, that it was viewed by
journalist David Talbot and others as the strategy that enabled the first term
Senator to win the White House.

Over the past few years, a new technology has become mainstream: AI. But still,
no candidate has unlocked AI's potential to revolutionize political campaigns.
Americans have three more years to wait before casting their ballots in another
Presidential election, but we can look at the 2026 midterms and examples from
around the globe for signs of how that breakthrough might occur.

How Obama Did It

Rereading the contemporaneous reflections of the New York Times' late media
critic, David Carr, on Obama's campaign reminds us of just how new social media
felt in 2008. Carr positions it within a now-familiar lineage of revolutionary
communications technologies from newspapers to radio to television to the
internet.

The Obama campaign and administration demonstrated that social media was
different from those earlier communications technologies, including the
pre-social internet. Yes, increasing numbers of voters were getting their news
from the internet, and content about the then-Senator sometimes made a splash by
going viral. But those were still broadcast communications: one voice reaching
many. Obama found ways to connect voters to each other.

In describing what social media revolutionized in campaigning, Carr quotes
campaign vendor Blue State Digital's Thomas Gensemer: "People will continue to
expect a conversation, a two-way relationship that is a give and take."

The Obama team made some earnest efforts to realize this vision. His transition
team launched change.gov, the website where the campaign collected a "Citizen's
Briefing Book" of public comment. Later, his administration built We the People,
an online petitioning platform.

But the lasting legacy of Obama's 2008 campaign, as political scientists Hahrie
Han and Elizabeth McKenna chronicled, was pioneering online "relational
organizing." This technique enlisted individuals as organizers to activate their
friends in a self-perpetuating web of relationships.

Perhaps because of the Obama campaign's close association with the method,
relational organizing has been touted repeatedly as the linchpin of Democratic
campaigns: in 2020, 2024, and today. But research by non-partisan groups like
Turnout Nation and right-aligned groups like the Center for Campaign Innovation
has also empirically validated the effectiveness of the technique for inspiring
voter turnout within connected groups.

The Facebook of 2008 worked well for relational organizing. It gave users tools
to connect and promote ideas to the people they know: college classmates,
neighbors, friends from work or church. But the nature of social networking has
changed since then.

For the past decade, according to Pew Research, Facebook use has stalled and
lagged behind YouTube, while Reddit and TikTok have surged. These platforms are
less useful for relational organizing, at least in the traditional sense.
YouTube is organized more like broadcast television, where content creators
produce content disseminated on their own channels in a largely one-way
communication to their fans. Reddit gathers users worldwide in forums
(subreddits) organized primarily on topical interest. The endless feed of
TikTok's "For You" page disseminates engaging content with little ideological or
social commonality. None of these platforms shares the essential feature of
Facebook c. 2008: an organizational structure that emphasizes direct connection
to people that users have direct social influence over.

AI and Relational Organizing

Ideas and messages might spread virally through modern social channels, but they
are not where you convince your friends to show up at a campaign rally. Today's
platforms are spaces for political hobbyism, where you express your political
feelings and see others express theirs.

Relational organizing works when one person's action inspires others to do this
same. That's inherently a chain of human-to-human connection. If my AI assistant
inspires your AI assistant, no human notices and one's vote changes. But key
steps in the human chain can be assisted by AI. Tell your phone's AI assistant
to craft a personal message to one friend -- or a hundred -- and it can do it.

So if a campaign hits you at the right time with the right message, they might
persuade you to task your AI assistant to ask your friends to donate or
volunteer. The result can be something more than a form letter; it could be
automatically drafted based on the entirety of your email or text correspondence
with that friend. It could include references to your discussions of recent
events, or past campaigns, or shared personal experiences. It could sound as
authentic as if you'd written it from the heart, but scaled to everyone in your
address book.

Research suggests that AI can generate and perform written political messaging
about as well as humans. AI will surely play a tactical role in the 2026 midterm
campaigns, and some candidates may even use it for relational organizing in this
way.

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