WASHINGTON – Fearing nightmare scenarios, such as attacks on voter registration databases and the status with results, U.S. officials are conducting mock education training to prepare for November 3.
The “tabletop exercises,” to be held virtually because of coronavirus, will include thousands of state and local election officials in addition to intelligence and cybersecurity officials in Washington amid concerns about threats from Russia, China and other countries.
“We are looking to make this day bad enough,” said Matthew Masterson, an advisor to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, which is a component of the National Security Decomposer. CISA is guilty of helping the country’s critical infrastructure against cyberattacks and physical attacks, adding its electoral systems.
However, Masterson and other experts say the United States is now much more prepared to deal with imaginable electoral interference from Russia or other foreign adversaries than in 2016, when the Kremlin hacked democratic party emails and orchestrated a complicated disinformation crusade designed to help elect then candidate. Donald Trump.
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CISA officials worked with the state and local electoral government to identify vulnerabilities in voter registration databases, sent cybersecurity experts to look for intrusions, and increased communication between U.S. states, campaigns, and intelligence officials. In the risk landscape. Educational training will offer scenarios, adding uninformation campaigns abroad, cyberattacks on electoral infrastructure, or simply overcrowded and understaffed polling stations across the country.
But the risk has also changed, with adversaries like China, Iran, and North Korea joining Russia to meddle in U.S. politics. And the tactics and the team are constantly changing. Meanwhile, some worry that America’s political climate is so polarized, due to coronavirus and tensions similar to police violence and other divisive disorders that U.S. enemies will have plenty of fodding to paint while seeking to stoke discord.
“They don’t want to make fake news this time because there’s only misinformation consistent in the political landscape,” said Clint Watts, a researcher at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, an expert group. “These are loose ammunition.”
Here’s who can play with the 2020 presidential election.
Russia remains the top foreign player concerned in terms of interference in U.S. elections, The concentrate is increasingly in China and Iran, according to a U.S. intelligence official. That it wasn’t officially legal to speak.
Intelligence officials told house lawmakers in February that Russia is already entering the 2020 crusade to verify that Trump is re-elected, according to the New York Times and other media outlets.
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In a recent analysis, Watts noted that last year, Facebook deleted accounts related to a Kremlin troll farm that sold Trump, denigrating his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, and reinforcing Bernie Sanders, one of Biden’s top opponents. And in March, Facebook shut down another Russian troll farm that gave the impression of looking to infiltrate U.S. minority teams on Facebook and Instagram, “presumably hoping to divide the political left and influence the electorate in the run-up to Election Day.” he said.
Rob Davis, CEO of Critical Start, a Texas-based company that monitors security breaches in the country’s states and advises clients on defensive measures, said Moscow, in a new edition of 2016, will use competitive social media campaigns and specific cyber operations. to denigrate applicants and increase social tensions over issues such as race and immigration. Russian hackers can also renew their attempts to hack electoral databases and compromise U.S. election infrastructure.
“Russia’s purpose is to be disruptive. He often doesn’t have a program beyond that,” Davis said.
China insists it has no interest in meddling in the U.S. election despite repeated accusations from Trump that Beijing prefers Biden and that “China will do anything they can do to have me lose this race.”
Google revealed in June that Chinese-based hackers sought to infiltrate the email accounts of staff members running on Biden’s presidential campaign. But there is little additional concrete evidence that China is striking a complicated operation for an express candidate or needs to withdraw Trump, even though Washington and Beijing have led to a new Cold War amid tensions over the coronavirus pandemic, industrial and territorial disputes in the South China Sea, and human rights.
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China dislikes Trump, the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s watts said, but because Trump oversaw America’s withdrawal from the world stage, it gave Beijing a freer hand to increase its own influence. And Chinese President Xi Jinping is more interested in crushing Chinese dissidents, stealing high-value assets, and expanding the success of his 5G network than influencing the U.S. election, he said.
“China’s war plan is more about spying on data and spying on political parties to gain a forward-looking perspective on U.S. policy adjustments or military-related adjustments and making plans for other outcomes,” said Davis of Critical Start.
Google also said in June that Iran-based hackers had tried to gain access to Trump’s crusade accounts, and Microsoft said last year that Iranian hackers, with obvious Tehran administration, had made more than 2,700 attempts to hack email accounts. Existing and former U.S. government officials, news editors covering political crusaders and stories related to a presidential crusade.
Previous hacking attempts coincided with an era in which Trump management imposed more sanctions on Iran after the United States withdrew from a nuclear deal with Tehran and global powers, putting a severe blow to Iran’s economy.
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But Iran, Watts said, has “a very limited scope” in terms of disseminating misinformation. “They can’t be content as the Russians and the Chinese do,” he said, adding that, in terms of cyberattacks, “they’re pretty reckless and stupid, and they’re caught, so we keep hearing about it.”
An example:
In early January, the Federal Deposit Library Program’s online page was briefly disconnected after a hacker uploaded photos of an Iranian flag and a symbol of a bloodied Trump being punched in the face.
It has also been changed to say, “Pirated through Iranian cybersecurity Iranian hackers: this is just a small component of Iran’s cyberpower!”
“Whether it’s threats of Chinese interference, Iranian interference, Russian or North Korean interference, any counterattacks, or even non-state actors who now have the ability to meddle in our elections, they know that this administration takes its duty very seriously that every U.S. vote is counted, counted correctly, and that foreign influence is minimized in its ability to have an effect on the final results of a U.S. election.” Array said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a long-term national security forum organized through The Hill newspaper on July 15.
But Trump continues to minimize Russia’s malevolent role in the 2016 election. And instead of focusing on the foreign interference imaginable, he criticized Democrats for seeking more postal voting in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, claiming without evidence that it was an invitation to fraud.
“RIGGED 2020 ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!” the president tweeted last month.
Experts and voting officials have called Trump’s accusations a false conspiracy and pointed to the safeguards states use for the authenticity of ballots and the lack of envelopes.
”Nonsense’: Election experts reject Trump’s claim that foreign countries can forge millions of order-by-mail ballots
Lawrence Norden, director of the electoral reform program for the Brennan Center for Justice at New York Law School, called Trump’s statement “meaningless” and noted that mail polls should be returned in secret envelopes created through local electoral authorities. He said envelopes are barcodes in many states with a unique identifier linking the poll to the voter.
“Trump’s (Trump’s) rhetoric is directly outside Russia’s playbook” and “designed to call into question our democratic processes and election integrity,” said Elaine Kamarck, A U.S. election policy expert and lead researcher in government studies with the Brookings Institution, a left-wing tank.
“I can’t believe what a foreign adversary can do that the United States doesn’t do” to supply the department and produce misinformation,” Watts said.
With less than 4 months to go before the vote, there are symptoms of the other bureaucracy this disorder may have on Election Day:
Robthrough Mook, who led Hillary Clinton’s presidential crusade in 2016 and is now on a Harvard University mission to expand methods and equipment to protect U.S. elections from foreign attacks, said he was less involved in Russian hacking than in major logistical upheavals on Election Day exacerbated through The Pandemic.
“We are pirates with our own choice by offering sufficiently good resources,” Mook said in an interview at the crusade headquarters, a political podcast. Local election officials “don’t have what they want to be physically powerful in the event of a problem.”
Perhaps most disturbing of all, what Davis of Critical Start called “terrifying,” is that the American public or the applicants themselves do not have the precise official effects. In an interview with the host of “The Daily Show,” Trevor Noah last month, Biden warned that army officers can take Trump out of the White House if he loses the vote and refuses to leave.
“I promise you, I’m sure he’ll be escorted from the White House with wonderful diligence,” Biden said. Trump’s crusade responded to Biden by saying, “President Trump has made it clear that he will settle for the effects of the 2020 election.”
Contributor: Joey Garrison