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Foreign Interference in U.S. Election Heats Up  (Jack Detsch and Robbie Gramer, Foreign Policy)
Iran has joined the list of U.S. adversaries trying to interfere in the U.S. election in November, U.S. intelligence agencies believe.
The U.S. intelligence community expects that Iran and Russia are adjusting their disinformation strategies to undermine democratic institutions, foment discord, and change public opinion in light of last month’s events, said a U.S. intelligence official, who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity based on ground rules set by the intelligence community.
Different strokes. But foreign countries have different approaches for how they’re targeting the American public.
The U.S. intelligence community has already observed Iran trying to influence the election, drawing on fake online personas and troll farms in an effort to spread disinformation to harm Trump’s chances at winning another term in the White House. “Iran’s preference is focused on this core interest,” the official said.
The scale of foreign disinformation targeting U.S. elections is growing, especially with artificial intelligence powering it, and it’s getting more sophisticated, too.
“The bad news … is the power of AI, that its scale and speed can spread disinformation at an exponentially rapid rate,” Sen. Mark Warner, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said during a talk at the Reagan Forum last week. “Foreign adversaries know disinformation and misinformation is cheap and it works.”
Warner said another potential threat is “the fact that Americans believe a lot more crazy stuff.”
There are influence campaigns, and then there’s the potential for even greater harm, such as direct hacks of voting machines.
No one is discounting the possibility of direct interference. But for experts, the worst-case scenario is a complex influence campaign that casts doubt on the result. “I would be more concerned about the appearance of interference, that they could then couple with an influence campaign to make it seem like there was a significant hack that affected the outcome,” Bret Schafer, a senior fellow for media and digital disinformation at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, said.
“Influence campaigns are very much parasitic, and they’ve got to sort of latch on to something that exists in our own ecosystem,” he added. “So the more toxic the environment is, the more openings that they have.”