On Wednesday, members of the US Senate Intelligence Committee questioned senior national security officials about how they plan to respond to attacks on election infrastructure and attempts to influence the election using deepfakes, generative artificial intelligence and disinformation. While everyone in the room seemed to agree on what the threats are, senators expressed concern about how exactly government agencies would respond.
In a wide-ranging session, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly, and FBI Deputy Executive Director Larissa Knapp focused especially on the broad availability of tools increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence that facilitates the creation of more people. Convincing and misleading fake videos and audios. Senators pressed them on what they would do if one of those AI-generated deepfakes went viral in the middle of a presidential election.
“I don’t think I have a clearer understanding of who is in charge and how we would respond,” said Marco Rubio, a Florida senator and vice chairman of the committee. “I don’t want there to be any gray area.”
Haines targeted an American government”notification framework” which provides guidance for making public disclosures taking into account the sensitive intelligence collection methods used by the United States government.
Following Rubio’s question, committee Chairman Mark Warner, a senator from Virginia, praised the Trump administration’s response after Iran-linked actors posed as the Proud Boys in an attempt to intimidate voters. In a move unprecedented at the time, senior law enforcement and intelligence officials publicly attributed the impersonation to Iran-linked actors within days.
Sen. Angus King of Maine called the framework “a bureaucratic nightmare” and pushed for faster disclosure of influence efforts.
“What I want to urge is that sources be released when they become aware of it immediately,” King said.
Haines responded that the framework may “sound quite bureaucratic,” but that the government has been able to speed up the decision-making process in just two days.
Warner noted that it is now easier than ever for other countries to try to interfere in elections. “The barriers to entry for foreign malign influence, including electoral influence, have become almost evanescently small,” Warner said. “The scale and sophistication of these types of attacks against our elections can be accelerated several times with what are now cutting-edge artificial intelligence tools.“
He also criticized efforts to downplay the severity of election interference in 2016. “I think there has been a rewrite after 2016 that somehow some of the activities in Russia, or even in 2020 with Iran, were a kind of trolling.” harmless,” Warner said. saying.
Haines agreed, pointing to Iran as an example of a foreign actor seriously trying to sow discord among Americans.
Iran is “increasingly aggressive in its efforts to stoke this kind of discord and promote chaos and undermine confidence in the integrity of the process and use social media platforms, actually, to issue threats (and) spread disinformation,” he said. . .
And Iran is not alone; The officials offered an overview of other countries seeking to influence the upcoming presidential election. Haines said Russia “remains the most active foreign threat to our elections.”
