Intelligence agencies warn of election threats from active Russia, aggressive Iran

The government’s top intelligence official on Wednesday outlined active threats to U.S. elections from Russia and an increasingly aggressive Iran.

Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said the U.S. has “never been better prepared” to address challenges to election security, even as threats multiply from new technological tools and a potentially growing pool of adversaries.

Ms. Haines told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that Russia represents “the most active foreign threat to our elections.”

“The Russian government’s goals in such influence operations tend to include eroding trust in U.S. democratic institutions, exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the United States and degrading Western support to Ukraine,” Ms. Haines told lawmakers.

Iranian efforts to undermine the U.S. political debate are “becoming increasingly aggressive,” said Ms. Haines, noting repeated attempts to undermine public confidence and stoke discord.

“They continue to adapt their cyber and influence activities, using social media platforms, issuing threats [and] disseminating disinformation,” she said. “And it is likely that they will continue to rely on their intelligence services in these efforts and Iran-based online influencers to promote their narratives.”

China’s sophisticated influence apparatus appears relatively dormant, she said.

Ms. Haines told the committee that China did not seek to covertly influence the 2020 presidential election’s outcome because it feared blowback. She said the intelligence agencies did not have reason to think that would change.

“Thus far, we have no information to suggest that the PRC will take a more active role in this presidential election than it did in 2020, even as they continue to engage in efforts to promote politicians at all levels who are taking positions favorable to China on key issues,” Ms. Haines said. “Needless to say, we will continue to monitor their activities.”

President Biden has signed legislation forcing China-owned video app TikTok to be sold or shut down in the U.S. over concerns about its ties to the communist government in Beijing, but the deadline to sell or divest is months after the November presidential election.

The explosion of commercially available artificial intelligence tools in the past two years has made digital propaganda campaigns possible for a greater number of adversaries around the world. Rather than trying to hack voting machines and directly change election outcomes, foreign malign influence efforts include attempts to sway minds or trick people into believing false information about a campaign or a candidate.

To combat the foreign threat of generative AI-powered influence campaigns, Ms. Haines said, the government created an intelligence community group “focused on multimedia authentication.” The group uses the latest technology to enable the agencies’ ability to understand manipulated content online.

“If state and local officials have concerns, for example, about media that is suspected to be synthetic or manipulated and violates a law or is tied to a foreign actor, they can request authentication assistance through the FBI,” Ms. Haines said.

Senators expressed concerns about whether the intelligence agencies’ leadership would take responsibility for publicly declaring that they know some information to be false, even if discovered in the final moments of a hotly contested campaign.

Ms. Haines told lawmakers she did not want to be the arbiter of fact and fiction for American voters.

“I don’t think that it’s appropriate for me to be determining what is truth and what is false,” Ms. Haines said.

Sen. Angus S. King, a Maine independent who caucuses with Democrats, told Ms. Haines he didn’t want the intelligence community to become the “truth police” but instead to focus on explaining who is behind content spreading online.

“It strikes me that the role you can play, however, is disclosure of sources,” Mr. King said. “That if you know through your intelligence sources and your attribution that a particular piece of information, true or not, is coming from a foreign source, that’s the role where it’s important for you to notify the public so they know the source.”

Such attributions in cyberspace grow hazy and could become even more difficult with new entrants looking to manipulate people online.

Sen. Mark R. Warner, Virginia Democrat and chairman of the intelligence committee, said last month that he had evidence that he could not share that some of America’s “quasi-allies” were also seeking to interfere in U.S. politics. He did not identify the countries.

India and Pakistan have been accused of attempting to influence voting in Canada’s 2019 and 2021 elections.

Unclassified documents from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service showed that Canada detected Pakistani efforts to interfere in 2019 and India sought to interfere in 2021, CBC News, the Canadian public broadcaster, reported in April. India disputed the allegations.