The National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command recently reestablished their election security team to help secure the 2022 midterm elections. In light of Independent Sen. Angus King’s push for Cybercom to produce unclassified reports connected with each biennial election, which comes on the heels of increased alarm about foreign election interference and diminishing faith in the integrity of U.S. elections, this is the last time the team should be reassembled. U.S. democracy would be more secure with a permanent, not periodic, presence in preventing and mitigating foreign interference attacks.
First, foreign interference is a strategy, not a tactic – and that means attacks are executed over a continuous time period, and are not episodic in nature. So must be our defenses. While discussion of nation-state influence operations may often focus on efforts to interfere with major U.S. elections, adversaries, such as Russia, have repeatedly demonstrated that they seek to undermine democracies and their institutions on an ongoing basis through any number of means, including disinformation, emerging technologies, malign finance and cyberattacks.
If the NSA/Cybercom election security team is tracking malign actors’ activities on an ongoing basis, there would be no need for the team to stand up and down. It could also improve the team’s sharing of actionable intelligence regarding threats to U.S. elections. In 2020, when Iranian actors targeted election infrastructure and American voters in an attempt to undermine the election, intelligence was quickly analyzed, downgraded, and shared with American officials and the American public. A permanent NSA/Cyber Command election security team could help ensure that such a process is the rule, not the exception.
