Worried about election interference in Idaho? Disinformation poses the bigger threat | Opinion
.jpg "Jen Easterly, director of the federal Cybersecurity, Infrastructure and Security Agency, speaks Wednesday at the Capitol in Boise along with Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane about election security efforts.")
Jen Easterly, director of the federal Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency, and Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane held a joint press conference Wednesday at the Capitol to talk about election security efforts.
I thought they were going to talk mostly about computer hacking, firewalls and ransomware.
They did talk about that a lot, but I noticed that Easterly kept coming back to a recurring theme: “malign foreign influence,” not necessarily to hack into elections systems to change votes but to hack into American culture to change the way Americans think.
“The threat environment that state and local jurisdictions are facing is as complex as it’s ever been,” Easterly said. “Cyber threats, physical threats and very real threats from our foreign adversaries, from Iran, from Russia, from China, who we know are very intent on doing two things: undermining American confidence in the security of our elections and in our democracy, and frankly, in trying to stoke partisan rancor. And it’s really important that we not let them.”
In fact, CISA became involved in elections because of Russian attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election. That’s when election infrastructure was designated as critical infrastructure, and CISA was designated as the federal agency responsible for protecting it, according to Easterly.
Easterly on Wednesday pointed to the recent indictment of two RT, formerly Russia Today, employees who are accused of secretly funding and directing a U.S. company that published thousands of videos that supported Russian interests.
Every patriotic American should read the indictment. It should make your blood boil.
RT, a state-controlled media outlet funded and directed by the government of Russia, spent nearly $10 million to covertly finance and direct a Tennessee-based online content creation company to publish English-language videos on multiple social media channels, including TikTok, Instagram, X and YouTube, according to the indictment. RT paid American social media influencers and podcasters to spread their propaganda.
The company has posted nearly 2,000 videos that have more than 16 million views on YouTube alone.
Topics of the videos vary widely, from immigration to inflation and other topics related to domestic and foreign policy — including, you guessed it, the war in Ukraine.
But perhaps more importantly, according to the Department of Justice, the videos are meant to achieve the publicly stated goals of the government of Russia and RT — to amplify domestic divisions within the United States.
It’s reminiscent of another indictment, from 2016, of the 13 individuals associated with the Internet Research Agency, another covert Russian internet attempt to sow discord and misinformation in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election.
Every patriotic American should read that one, too. It’s infuriating that Americans could be so easily duped by a group of 13 Russian trolls clacking away on their computer keyboards in some post-Soviet office building in St. Petersburg.
In a twist of irony, the very notion that U.S. elections are not secure actually comes from our foreign adversaries, including Russia, Iran and China.
“I have high, high, high confidence that actors would not be able to hack into election infrastructure to change votes,” Easterly said. “I do not think that that is a real threat at all, but I think we have to recognize that our foreign adversaries may attempt to make Americans believe that.”
Easterly said that the voting systems that are used to cast ballots and count ballots are not connected to the internet, so there isn’t a worry about someone hacking into those systems and changing vote totals.
But other systems, such as voter registration and election night results, could be targets.
“Those things could be affected by things like distributed denial of service attacks, so overwhelming websites with volumes of information,” Easterly said. “But of course, none of that will actually affect how votes are counted, but will affect the perception of whether there’s actually something that’s happened to the votes.”
Again, that goes back to the attempt to make Americans less trusting of the election results.
“Foreign malign influence operations, as we’ve seen, is a very real threat,” Easterly said. “We know that our adversaries are intent on specifically undermining American confidence and democracy and sowing discord.”
That may be the biggest threat to our national security.
