After the Justice Department unsealed charges last month in an Iran-linked hacking operation against Donald Trump’s campaign, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland offered a window into one department motivation: Calling out the threat publicly.
Federal authorities populated the 37-page indictment with granular details on the wide-ranging operation — hacking tactics, specific dates and even photos of the three defendants — as they alleged the actions were part of Iran’s ongoing efforts to erode confidence in the U.S. electoral process.
“These kind of actions have several purposes,” Garland said of the indictment. “One, and maybe the most significant, is alerting the American people to these kinds of false personas, these kind of hacking operations, these kinds of production of propaganda.”
Eight years after Russian influence efforts sought to boost Trump’s 2016 presidential run, U.S. government officials are looking to deliver more information to the public about how oversea powers are seeking to manipulate the hearts and minds of Americans during the election, according to outside experts.
David Salvo, an expert on Russian affairs and a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, said there appears to be a “whole of government effort” to raise awareness about the tactics that foreign actors are using to interfere in U.S. democracy.
“This is a top priority in 2024 for the U.S. government in ways that it wasn’t in 2016 because it wasn’t on anyone’s agenda right until very late in the game,” Salvo said.
Americans can be the unwitting target, and in some cases, the unwitting amplifier of foreign disinformation operations, said Brandon Wales, former executive director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
“A lot of what the government is trying to do is try to raise awareness, to say: We want the public to think carefully before they amplify information that they are seeing on social media platforms or on websites because that information could be part of an operation launched by a foreign country designed to weaken us,” Wales said.
U.S. government officials have leaned on traditional enforcement methods, such as indictments and sanctions, ahead of the November election, and for months in speeches and press releases have sought to highlight foreign election influence.
The high-stakes effort has taken on new salience with less than a month before Election Day, as polls show tight margins between Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump in key battleground states expected to decide the race.
Matthew Olsen, the assistant attorney general for national security, in a speech last month said that intelligence community leaders are “sounding the alarm” on attacks and commented that efforts to manipulate voters ahead of the election “present a clear and present danger to our democracy.”
“U.S. laws demand that our citizens have transparency regarding the origin of political messages from foreign sources,” Olsen said, according to prepared remarks released by the department. “That transparency empowers citizens to evaluate information and make informed decisions for themselves.”
The FBI and CISA, the nation’s cyber defense agency, have published public service announcements on election security, and CISA also has a website aimed at addressing commonplace disinformation narratives.
On Capitol Hill, administration officials have testified before lawmakers on what they say are malicious efforts from Russia, Iran and China to influence U.S. elections.
And in the Iranian-linked hacking case, the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and CISA said in August that Iran targeted Trump’s campaign.
The notice came more than five weeks before federal authorities announced the indictment. And after the August notice, the entities followed up weeks later with another statement that provided further details.
The overall U.S. approach is a striking turnaround from 2016, when the U.S. government was less prepared for such threats, said Wales, who left CISA in August and is now vice president of cybersecurity strategy at SentinelOne, a cybersecurity company.
“The government learned a lot of lessons from 2016, and I would argue that they have consistently learned lessons as adversaries have adjusted their tactics, as they’ve introduced new tradecraft,” he said.
A bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian meddling in the 2016 election concluded the U.S. government was “not well-postured to counter Russian election interference activity with a full range of readily-available policy options.”
Despite high-level warnings of potential retaliation, Russia continued its cyber activity, including “clandestine social media-based influence operations” and the public spreading of stolen emails, the report said.
When the 2020 report was released, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, a committee member, said the government “was not prepared” to face election interference efforts from Russia, and had an “overly cautious approach in its response.”
Suzanne Spaulding, a former undersecretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said the U.S. government has gotten better about regularly reporting on foreign malign influence operations. That approach does not make disclosures appear “opportunistic,” she said.
“There’s much less of an impression that you are weighing in at this moment on this because you want to influence the election,” said Spaulding, now a senior adviser for homeland security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Federal authorities have still rolled out enforcement efforts.
Last month, the Justice Department announced an indictment against two Russian nationals, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, in a nearly $10 million scheme to covertly fund a company that published videos on social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.
The videos, according to the indictment, were often in line with the Russian government’s interest in heightening domestic divisions within the U.S.
The Biden administration also announced sanctions against those two individuals and other officials of RT, a Russian state-funded media organization commonly known as Russia Today.
That same day, the Justice Department announced a move to seize 32 internet domains.
An FBI agent in court documents said Russian government and government-sponsored actors engaged in “foreign malign influence campaigns” using the internet domains, which impersonated legitimate news outlets to covertly spread Russian government propaganda.
Enforcement methods are still worth pursuing but they have limitations, said litigator Michael Vatis, who was the founding head of the FBI’s computer crime and infrastructure protection program.
“They’re clearly not going to stop foreign interference,” Vatis said of enforcement efforts. “And ultimately the most important thing we can do is to try to make the American audience to disinformation more educated, so that they don’t fall for disinformation hook, line and sinker.”
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