The intelligence community is identifying more potential indications of foreign influence efforts than ever before as the November U.S. election approaches, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Fresh off a two-hour meeting with intelligence agencies’ election security leads, DNI officials gave reporters a rare glimpse inside the spies’ work to detect and combat foreign attempts to meddle.
Hostile governments, their proxies and others are engaged in increasingly sophisticated “influence” work — the business of subversive, coercive and criminal conduct intended to skew voters’ political perceptions, attitudes and behaviors.
U.S. officials say they are encountering a growing set of overseas actors this election cycle who are interested in more than the presidential contest, as well as state and local campaigns. Polls suggest a tight and ideologically divisive battle this fall in the rematch between President Biden and Republican challenger former President Donald Trump.
The agencies are spotting a greater amount of suspicious activity, but officials declined to share specific numbers and said they are not yet sure whether this means more influence efforts are either underway or being planned.
It’s not just America’s adversaries in Russia, Iran and China looking to meddle, either: Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chair Mark Warner said in March some “quasi-allies” wanted to interfere in U.S. politics too.
DNI officials declined to identify any friendlier countries looking to sway the U.S. vote but told The Washington Times that a wide range of actors see America’s coming elections as critical to their own interests and the intelligence community will dig into instances where there is cause for concern.
The Foreign Malign Influence Center, established in 2022, is critical to the federal government’s response to election threats. It oversees the spy agencies’ election security activities.
Inside the center, the Election Threats Executive is helping to sort through “nominations,” or suspicious instances meriting greater attention for uncovering potential subversive foreign influence.
Analysts from across the nation’s 18 government intelligence agencies flag concerning material in the course of their intelligence work, ranging from the business of intercepting secret messages to gathering coveted information from human sources.
After analysts spot suspected foreign activity, the agencies’ election security leads review it. These career officials, not political appointees, decide if the flagged activity should be nominated.
Material that is nominated then gets elevated through multiple more layers of intelligence officials who review the material and decide how to respond.
The Election Threats Executive predates the center, having opened its doors in 2019, and intelligence officials are seeing more nominations than ever flood in.
The bureaucratic process moving from identification to action takes a week on average, but can be accomplished within 24 hours if necessary, according to intelligence officials.
As the nominations have swelled, the center is busy implementing its public notification framework to alert the targets of foreign influence efforts and to warn the public — when the intelligence community deems it necessary.
Before the 2020 election, national security officials publicly exposed Iranian operatives working to intimidate or mislead voters, including a video that suggested falsely that people can cast fraudulent ballots from overseas.
Many politicians and voters, however, fear their favorite candidate will face something more closely resembling a situation like that when then-FBI Director James B. Comey reopened an investigation into Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s emails in the last days before the 2016 election.
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence lawmakers grilled Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines last month about whether her team would take responsibility for publicly declaring when they know some information to be false that could spread in the final moments before a hotly contested campaign ends.
Ms. Haines told lawmakers that she did not want to be the arbiter of fact and fiction for American voters.
The DNI team at the Foreign Malign Influence Center is busy developing “media forensic capabilities” as it braces for generative AI-fueled influence campaigns. Officials said these capabilities include proprietary and commercially available tools to help the spy agencies conduct analysis on whether the content is synthetic or manipulated.
The intelligence agencies say they are drilling for the worst-case scenarios. Intelligence officials said they are practicing all operating procedures in what they said would be a “summer of exercises” before Election Day.
• Ryan Lovelace can be reached at rlovelace@washingtontimes.com.
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