Biden administration weighing ‘information czar’ for national security

The Biden administration has considered creating a new “information czar” for national security to combat foreign disinformation operations about elections and other issues, according to White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan.

Asked about creating such a post on the National Security Council on Thursday, Mr. Sullivan said the idea has been a topic of debate throughout the intelligence and defense agencies.

Mr. Sullivan gave an audience at the National Defense University a rare glimpse inside the hidden debate about how to police foreign speech that the U.S. government finds abhorrent.

“I think on the ’czar’ [proposal], that’s something we’ve been grappling with and thinking about across the national security enterprise,” Mr. Sullivan said. “And under [National Security Memorandum-2], most decision-making does get kind of brought into the NSC process, but this may be an area where actually a lead agency model is a more effective way of setting up for long-term success that insulates this from the … politics on both sides.”

In 2022, Mr. Biden’s Department of Homeland Security established an ill-fated and short-lived “Disinformation Governance Board,” which was disbanded in under a year amid widespread criticism that it infringed upon First Amendment protections for free speech.

Nina Jankowicz, who was appointed to run the disinformation board, registered as a foreign agent later that year to work for a British-based nonprofit focused on disinformation.

But the Biden administration’s desire to designate a single official or unit to focus on disinformation threats has not ceased. Mr. Sullivan said Thursday the administration strongly wants to combat foreign influence operations, but it is struggling to overcome the problem of not being able to control the flow of information.

“We are a democracy and it’s not a situation where a small group of unelected people sitting in a foreign capital are saying, ’This is what we’re going to go drive, just go do it and lie and cheat and hide and so forth,’” Mr. Sullivan said. “We can’t do that. So we have to have something that’s kind of consistent with the political system that we’re dealing with.”

Information operations about elections are far from the only subject matter that the Biden administration wants to manage. Mr. Sullivan said the problem also includes the broader issues of “how we decide messages we communicate [and] how we decide what messages we combat.”

Mr. Sullivan spoke to national security officials on Thursday charged with implementing the president’s new National Security Memorandum on artificial intelligence. The memo is designed to give agencies new guidance for managing AI risk for national security.

AI-powered influence operations before, during, and after Election Day are a matter of concern for security officials monitoring foreign adversaries’ efforts to manipulate and disrupt the U.S. political debate in a bid to heighten domestic divisions and distrust of government.

Time is running out for the Biden administration and it is unclear whether Mr. Sullivan and his colleagues anticipate designating a new czar or disinformation office before a new president is sworn in next year.

Mr. Sullivan told the National Defense University that the U.S. government has made progress against information operations by hostile powers during the last eight years, but that the country is still not where he thinks it needs to be.

Regardless of whether the new czar is ever appointed, Mr. Sullivan encouraged people to raise alarms about the origin of speech online.

“A big part of success here is not just stopping every tweet or video, … it’s raising resilience by raising awareness, having people understand when they’re looking at something or consuming something, ’Hey, this very well have a foreign actor provenance to it,’” Mr. Sullivan said.