News that Missouri Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill was targeted by Russian hackers just came out last week, but as CNN reports, she’s not alone. Republican James Lankford says that Russian hackers may have “already targeted most -- if not all -- sitting US senators.” If that’s true, it makes it hard to understand why on Wednesday Republicans voted down an amendment to provide funding to protect the integrity of elections. Either Republicans are pretending to be concerned about election interference, or they like the results that interference is delivering.
With recent court rulings making it easier to purge voter roles, Donald Trump continuing to express public doubt that Russia was behind interference in 2016, and attempts to manipulate the election through social media already underway, this would seem like the time to be putting serious teeth into new protections. CNN reports that Lankford, along with Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, is working on a bipartisan bill that should get a committee vote this month. But, with less than 100 days remaining between today and the election, every delay is only making it easier for interference of all types to occur.
And that interference has already started. As the Washington Post reports, Facebook closed down over two dozen sites this week established to interfere with the election through social media campaigns, but what they’ve stopped is the tip of the iceberg. As the Post points out, Russian social media campaigns haven’t remained static over the last two years. They started in 2014 to build the campaign that was effective in 2016, and since then they’ve continued to experiment, test, and improve their skills at manipulation. Campaigns in 2018 are likely to be not only more effective, but also more difficult to detect, as instances like the one that happened last week teach the hackers just exactly what behaviors tip off Facebook and others sniffing out false-fronts.
Senator Mark Warner: ... only three months before the 2018 elections, Russian-backed operatives continue to infiltrate and manipulate social media to hijack the national conversation and set Americans against each other. They were doing it in 2016; they are still doing it today.
The 2016 effort showed that Russia had developed a very high level of skill in multiple fronts: stealing information, spreading false information through social media, and directly attacking systems used to administer elections. All three can expect an assault this fall … by an experienced army coming off a victorious campaign.
Just because Trump officials are indicating that the temperature has been lowered ...
Doesn’t mean things aren’t actually worse. Interference efforts are going through a period of rapid evolutionary pressure, and the ones that survive are those they are effective—meaning they are not being seen as interference.
Because knowledge of Russian activities has appeared in the US media piecemeal, it’s difficult to get a sense of the whole scope of activity. But it’s clear the Russians spent years and millions learning to operate every handle of the Internet to steal, deceive, and disseminate propaganda. Republican strategists from Aaron Nevins to Roger Stone actually helped in this effort, pointing out to the Russians which items held the most value and how they could be used to maximize disruption.
On the social media side, Russia focused on racial issues to start false “groups” that were based off of actual organizations, like Black Lives Matter, but created to increase the apparent threat and potential violence. And Russia funded and formed groups on the other side of the line to “support police” using the same type of language to ratchet up the confrontation. Russia agents even came to the United States, planned, and staged genuine on-the-ground “grassroots” rallies, image and coverage of which was fed back into their social media campaigns.
Just in the last month, documents released by the Mueller investigation revealed that not only did the Russians seek voter roll data from multiple states, they went after the organizations that administer elections at a state and county level—assisted again by Republican strategists who told them exactly where to attack. In Florida alone, Russian operatives sent malware to over 100 county-level offices just in the final days before the election. The evidence put forward by Mueller suggests that the Russian operatives may have successfully altered the outcome in a very direct way, either by limiting access to polls, or affecting the vote tabulation.
Trump and members of his White House continue to send out very mixed messages about the success of Russian intrusions in 2016, because they (rightly) perceive that admitting the truth about that election makes their victory less than legitimate. But the result is that few real steps have been taken to protect the 2018 election from attacks that are likely to be smarter and better funded … because they’ve already been demonstrated to work.