Politics
Russia Sees Midterm Elections as Chance to Sow Fresh Discord, Intelligence Chiefs Warn
WASHINGTON
— Russia is already meddling in the midterm elections this year, the
top American intelligence officials said on Tuesday, warning that Moscow
is using a digital strategy to worsen the country’s political and
social divisions.
Russia
is using fake accounts on social media — many of them bots — to spread
disinformation, the officials said. European elections are being
targeted, too, and the attacks were not likely to end this year, they
warned.
“We
expect Russia to continue using propaganda, social media, false-flag
personas, sympathetic spokespeople and other means of influence to try
to exacerbate social and political fissures in the United States,” Dan
Coats, the director of national intelligence, told the Senate
Intelligence Committee at its annual hearing on worldwide threats.
Mr.
Coats and the other intelligence chiefs laid out a pair of central
challenges for the United States: contending with the flow of Russian
misinformation and shoring up the defenses of electoral systems, which
are run by individual states and were seen as highly vulnerable in 2016.
“There
should be no doubt that Russia perceives its past efforts as successful
and views the 2018 U.S. midterm elections as a potential target for
Russian influence operations,” said Mr. Coats, testifying alongside Mike
Pompeo, the C.I.A. director; Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director;
and other leading intelligence officials.
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“Throughout the entire community, we have not seen any evidence of any significant change from last year,” Mr. Coats said.
The
warnings were striking in their contrast to President Trump’s public
comments. He has mocked the very notion of Russian meddling in the last
election and lashed out at those who suggested otherwise.
Mr.
Trump has not directed his intelligence officials to specifically
combat Russian interference, they said. But Mr. Pompeo said that the
president has made clear that the C.I.A. has “an obligation, from the
foreign intelligence perspective, to do everything we can to make sure
there’s a deep and thorough understanding of every threat, including
threats from Russia.”
Russia appears eager to spread information — real and fake — that deepens political divisions. Bot armies promoted partisan causes on social media, including the recent push to release a Republican congressional memo critical of law enforcement officials.
The
bots have also sought to portray the F.B.I. and Justice Department as
infected by partisan bias, said Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top
Democrat on the intelligence committee.
“Other
threats to our institutions come from right here at home,” he said.
“There have been some, aided and abetted by Russian internet bots and
trolls, who have attacked the basic integrity of the F.B.I. and the
Justice Department. This is a dangerous trend.”
Russia does not, however, appear to be trying to penetrate voting machines or Americans’ ballots, United States officials said.
“While
scanning and probing of networks happens across the internet every day,
we have not seen specific or credible evidence of Russian attempts to
infiltrate state election infrastructure like we saw in 2016,” Jeanette
Manfra, the chief cybersecurity official at the Department of Homeland
Security, said in an interview last week.
Right
now, Mr. Pompeo said, Russia is trying to focus on what are known as
influence operations — using social media and other platforms to spread
favorable messages — not hacking.
“The things we have seen Russia doing to date are mostly focused on information types of warfare,” he said.
Intelligence
officials and election-security experts have said both the states and
federal agencies have made significant progress in addressing voting
system vulnerabilities since 2016, when state-level officials could not
even be warned of attacks because they lacked the necessary security
clearances.
The
intelligence community was focused on gathering information about
potential attacks and then sharing it with local and state election
officials, Mr. Coats said during the hearing.
Mr. Coats called Moscow’s meddling “pervasive.”
“The
Russians have a strategy that goes well beyond what is happening in the
United States,” he said. “While they have historically tried to do
these types of things, clearly in 2016 they upped their game. They took
advantage, a sophisticated advantage of social media. They are doing
that not only in the United States but doing it throughout Europe and
perhaps elsewhere.”
Mr. Pompeo was also asked about reports last week by The New York Times and The Intercept
that American intelligence agencies spent months negotiating with a
Russian who said he could sell stolen American cyberweapons and that the
deal would include purportedly compromising material on Mr. Trump. The
negotiations were conducted through an American businessman who lives in
Europe and served as a cutout for American intelligence agencies.
Mr.
Pompeo called the reporting “atrocious, ridiculous and inaccurate” and
said the C.I.A. had not paid the Russian. The Times, citing American and
European intelligence officials, said only that American spies had paid
the Russian $100,000 for the cyberweapons using an indirect channel.
Those weapons were never delivered. The Russian did provide information
on Mr. Trump, which intelligence agencies refused to accept and remains
with the American businessman.
“Our
story was based on numerous interviews, a review of communications and
other evidence. We stand by it,” said Dean Baquet, the executive editor
of The Times.
Mr.
Pompeo did appear to acknowledge the operation itself, saying that “the
information that we were working to try and retrieve was information we
believed might well have been stolen from the U.S. government.”
He
and the other intelligence chiefs, including Adm. Michael S. Rogers,
the departing director of the National Security Agency, also addressed
the slew of other threats they see facing the United States. They cited
North Korea’s nuclear program, Islamist militants in the Middle East and
even illicit drug trafficking, especially the smuggling of cheaply made
fentanyl, a powerful opioid responsible for thousands of deaths each year.
But as has been the case
for years, the intelligence leaders presented cyberactivities of rival
nations and rogue groups as the foremost threat facing the United
States. They warned that such risks were likely to only grow, citing
China, Iran, North Korea and Russia, along with militant groups and
criminal networks, as the main agitators.
To
ease the flow of information, the Department of Homeland Security is
trying to get at least one election official in each state a security
clearance. To date, 21 officials in 20 states received at least interim
“secret”-level clearances, Ms. Manfra said in the interview.
The
federal government is also working to provide states with enhanced
online security “to ensure the American people that their vote is
sanctioned and well and not manipulated in any way,” Mr. Coats said.
Homeland
Security has added 32 states and 31 local governments to a system that
scans internet-connected systems in the federal government every night
for vulnerabilities, offering weekly reports and fixes to any issues
they find, Ms. Manfra said.
Specialists
also spend weeks auditing cyberdefense systems in both federal agencies
and state elections offices, and last month, the department decided to
prioritize requests for the latter to ensure that they get done swiftly,
she added.
Virtually
every state is taking steps to harden voter databases and election
equipment against outside attacks and to strengthen postelection audits.
When the National Association of Secretaries of State holds its winter
meeting this weekend in Washington, half of the sessions will be devoted
wholly or in part to election security.
New
standards for voting equipment were approved last fall that will
effectively require manufacturers to include several security
improvements in new devices. States are moving to scrap voting machines
that do not generate an auditable paper ballot as well as an electronic
one; Virginia has decertified most of its devices, Pennsylvania has
declared that all new devices will produce paper ballots, and Georgia — a
state whose outdated equipment produces only electronic voting records —
has set up a pilot program to move to paper.
But
a host of problems remains. Roughly one-fifth of the country lacks
paper ballots, and replacing digital-only machines costs millions of
dollars. Federal legislation that would allot funds to speed up the
conversion to paper is crawling through Congress.
Many
experts, meanwhile, believe that Russian meddling in the presidential
race was but a foretaste of what is to come — not just from the Kremlin,
but also from other hostile states and private actors.
“Russia
learned a lot last year in what really, I think, can be seen as a
series of probing attacks,” Douglas Lute, a retired Army lieutenant
general, deputy national security adviser to President George W. Bush
and ambassador to NATO under President Barack Obama, said in an
interview. “I think we should expect that they learned and they’re going
to come back in a much more sophisticated way.”
Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting.
On Twitter, follow Matthew Rosenberg @AllMattNYT, Charlie Savage @charlie_savage and Michael Wines @miwine.
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