Donald Trump’s campaign announced in mid-August it had been hacked, and the FBI has warned that Kamala Harris’s team was the target of a “foreign actor influence operation.” While the Trump attack appears to have originated the Kremlin’s sidekicks in Iran, Moscow remains the primary threat.
Harris is no stranger to the effects of foreign interference. During the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath, she served on the Senate Intelligence Committee and called on the US to invest in “election security in light of Russia’s attempts to sway the vote.” She also co-sponsored bipartisan bills on election cybersecurity in the Senate.
Eight years later, the FBI is warning that foreign entities are again seeking to disrupt voting. It is not the only authority advising both political campaigns, as well as the public, about forthcoming Russian interference. White House National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby said the US should “expect the worst” from Russia, in an interview with CNN.
Similarly, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines warned: “Russia remains the most active foreign threat” to the presidential election. She added that Moscow’s goals are “eroding trust in US democratic institutions, exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the United States, and degrading Western support to Ukraine.”
Despite these warnings, members of Congress told National Public Radio that little has been done to prepare for potential election interference.
“Barriers to entry for foreign malign influence have unfortunately become incredibly small,” Senator Mark Warner (D) said, adding that AI was offering new and worrying opportunities to foreign groups. The risks of voting machine hacking are also a problem.
There’s a history here. The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI found the Russians interfered in the 2016 presidential election. The DOJ said Moscow had obstructed the electoral process, while the FBI found it had conspired “to commit an offense against the United States.” The Senate Intelligence Committee also released a bipartisan report saying Russia had leveraged social media platforms to “interfere with the 2016 US election.”
Moscow meddled again in the 2020 US presidential election by spreading disinformation through social media.
Such action is not limited to the US. Russia has also interfered in several European countries, including attempts to influence the UK’s referendum on EU membership in 2016. Moscow donated to far-right campaigns during the 2017 and 2022 French presidential elections and promoted disinformation on social media in 2017 and 2018 during elections in Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the Czech Republic. Russia has since refined its craft and is increasing its interference across the Western world.
How might it conduct these operations? According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Russian Federation is increasingly employing “encrypted direct messaging channels” to sway the opinions of American citizens.
Its agents are also using artificial intelligence to create fake photos and audio messages related to the candidates, while accounts and bots on social media spread false information.
Given the severity of the threat, the US government and its citizens should step up efforts to stop the interference and reduce its impact.
US intelligence agencies are continuing to monitor and uncover Russian propaganda accounts, but need to do more. The DOJ seized two internet domains and searched nearly 1,000 Russian disinformation accounts in July, while the FBI raided the home of a Russian-American TV commentator in Virginia.
While the government and its agencies can act, so too can individual citizens. Many platforms now offer forums where users can submit posts for review and removal. Similarly, users can contest material on some sites.
Whatever the partisan debates of election periods, everyone can agree that American citizens alone, not the Russians, should be the only ones to elect the next leader of the United States.
Mark Temnycky is an accredited freelance journalist covering Eurasian affairs and a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He can be found on X @MTemnycky
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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