A leading Democratic senator is asking the Biden administration to do more to help state and local governments detect and respond to online disinformation campaigns aimed at manipulating voters in the November election, according to a letter obtained by NBC News.
Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, urged the federal government’s civilian cybersecurity agency to step up support for state and local election officials who he said are facing a flood of false information – from domestic and foreign actors – threatening to disrupt this fall’s vote.
“Unfortunately, we have witnessed an unprecedented increase in targeted election disinformation campaigns throughout this election cycle,” Warner wrote to Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
“I strongly urge you to use all tools at your disposal to provide state and local administrators with the necessary resources to expose, build resilience against, information manipulation campaigns in the run-up to the elections and beyond build and respond quickly,” Warner wrote.
Warner’s call comes after repeated warnings from intelligence officials that Russia, Iran and China are conducting covert information operations to try to shape the election outcome, and after revelations that Iranian operatives hacked former President Donald Trump’s campaign and attempted to push stolen information widely media channels. The senator’s letter coincides with growing concerns among nonprofits and lawmakers that the federal government and social media technology companies are taking too passive an approach to the threat of disinformation. They say some understaffed state and local election agencies are ill-equipped to tackle the problem and are unsure how much they can rely on federal agencies for help.
In his letter, Warner said state and local governments are struggling to keep up with rapid advances in artificial intelligence-generated information operations. State and local cybersecurity teams operate “with limited staff and resources, making it extremely difficult for smaller teams to respond to sophisticated AI-enabled campaigns targeting elections,” Warner wrote.
The lawmaker said the scale of domestic and foreign attempts to manipulate information not only threatens the stable conduct of elections, but also threatens to suppress turnout and intimidate voters. The senator cited recent elections that have been plagued by false claims, including Florida in 2020, when tens of thousands of voters received emails telling them to change their party affiliation and vote for a particular candidate or face physical violence .
The senator commended CISA for providing educational materials and other information to local governments, and called on the agency to build on these efforts and expand its work with associations representing state elections.
CISA has previously said the agency has focused on educating the public and training state and local election officials about the tactics used in disinformation campaigns.
“At CISA we have certainly not stopped prioritizing this as a threat vector that we are taking very seriously for this election cycle,” a CISA official told NBC News in June.
A coalition of nonprofits and good government groups has organized a bipartisan, national network of former officials, technology specialists and others to help local election authorities quickly detect deepfakes or other false claims and respond with accurate information.
U.S. authorities said last week that they had taken a series of measures to disrupt Russia’s disinformation efforts, including shutting down web domains, imposing sanctions and charging two Russians who allegedly funneled money to U.S. influencers while running the concealed Moscow’s role.
But the Biden administration has no firm plans to warn the public about deepfakes or other false information ahead of November unless it clearly comes from a foreign actor and poses a sufficiently serious threat, current and former officials said. Instead, it will likely be up to state and local election officials to report misinformation originating in the U.S. to voters. FBI and Department of Homeland Security officials worry that if they speak out, they will face accusations that they are trying to tilt the election in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris, current and former officials say.
Under pressure from Warner and other lawmakers, the intelligence community has released material on foreign disinformation and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has for the first time held regular media briefings on foreign adversaries’ efforts to influence the 2024 election.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
