Ahead of the 2024 US election, the US intelligence community and law enforcement were on high alert and ready to share information, both interagency and publicly, as foreign malign influence operations emerged. Tech giants like Microsoft also got into action, collaborating with government partners and publishing their own information on election-related disinformation campaigns. The speed and certainty with which authorities were able to attribute these efforts to threatening actors in Russia, China, and Iran was unprecedented. But researchers also warn that not all attributions are equal.
At today’s Cyberwarcon security conference in Arlington, Virginia, researchers from the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Laboratory present initial findings on the role of attribution in the 2024 U.S. election. Their research compares the impact of rapidly naming and shaming foreign influence actors with other recent US elections in which government attribution was much less common.
“We’re building on a project we did in 2020, where there was a lot more context of concern that the Trump administration was not being forthcoming about foreign attacks,” says Emerson Brooking, chief strategy officer and senior resident fellow at DFRLab. “Unlike 2020, there were now abundant claims by the US government about influence operations carried out by different adversaries. “So in thinking about attribution policy, we wanted to examine the question of overcorrection.”
In the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, Russia’s extensive influence operations – which included hacking and leak campaigns, as well as strategic disinformation – took the US government by surprise. Law enforcement and the intelligence community were largely aware of Russia’s digital research, but they did not have an extreme sense of urgency, and the big picture of how that activity could affect public discourse had not yet come into view. . After the Russian attack on the Democratic National Committee in June of that year, it took four months for the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security to publicly attribute the attack to the Kremlin. Some officials had said in the weeks after the incident that the U.S. government’s formal confirmation maybe it will never come.
Even in the highly politicized landscape that followed, federal, state, and local collaboration around election security expanded dramatically. For 2020, the researchers say, 33 of the 84 influence operations attributions they studied were related to the 2020 US election, or about 39 percent, came from federal or US intelligence sources. And this year, 40 of the 80 the group tracked came from the US government. However, DFRLabs resident Dina Sadek points out that an important factor in evaluating the usefulness of the US government’s powers is the quality of the information provided. The substance and specificity of the information, he says, are important to how the public views the objectivity and credibility of the statement.
The specific information confirming that Russia had fabricated a video purporting to show ballots being destroyed in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, was a useful and high-quality attribution, researchers say, because it was direct, limited in scope and came very quickly to minimize speculation. and doubt. The repeated statements by the Office of the Director of the National Intelligence Foreign Malignant Influence Center warning very broadly and generally about Russian influence operations are an example of the type of attribution that can be less useful, and even serve to amplify campaigns that otherwise they wouldn’t register with the public at all.
Similarly, in the run-up to the 2020 election, researchers note, the US government’s statements about the role of Russia, China and Iran in the Black Lives Matter protests may not have matched the timing. because they did not include details about the scope of the activity or the specific objectives of the actors.
Even taking all of this into account, however, researchers point out that there was valuable progress in the 2024 election cycle. But with the arrival of a new Trump administration in the White House, that transparency could begin to trend in a different direction. .
“We don’t want to give the impression that we are rearranging the sun loungers in the Titanicbecause the state of things that was is not the state of things that will be,” says Brooking. “And from a public interest perspective, I think we get much closer to disclosure in 2024.”