Ahead of the 2024 US elections, the US intelligence community and law enforcement were on high alert and prepared to share information across agencies and the public. Foreign malicious influence operations emergeTech giants like Microsoft also got in on the action, collaborating with government partners and publishing their information election propaganda campaignThe speed and certainty with which authorities were able to implement these efforts against threat actors in Russia, China, and Iran was unprecedented. But the researchers also caution that not all properties are created equal.
Today at the CyberWarcon security conference in Arlington, Virginia, researchers from the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Lab are presenting preliminary findings on the role of attribution. 2024 US electionsTheir research compares the impact of quickly naming and shaming foreign influence actors to other recent US elections in which government blame was much less common.
“We're building on a project we did in 2020, where there was concern that the Trump administration was not being forthcoming about foreign attacks,” says Emerson Brookings, DFRLab's strategy director and resident senior fellow. “Unlike 2020, there was now an abundance of claims of influence campaigns being run by various adversaries of the US government. “So when considering attribution policy, we wanted to look at the question of overcorrection.”
In the lead up to the 2016 US presidential election, Russia's mass influence operation-which includes Hack-and-leak campaign as well as strategic disinformation– surprised the US government. Law enforcement and the intelligence community were largely aware of Russia's digital investigations, but they There was no extreme sense of urgencyAnd the bigger picture of how such activity might affect public discussion has not yet emerged. after russia Democratic National Committee hacked In June of that year, the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security took four months publicly attribute the attack To the Kremlin. Some officials said in the weeks after the incident that there had been formal confirmation from the US government. may never come,
Even in the highly politicized scenario that followed at the federal, state, and local levels Cooperation around election security Expanded dramatically. Researchers say that as of 2020, 33 of the 84 influence operation attributes related to the 2020 US elections, or about 39 percent, came from US intelligence or federal sources. And this year, 40 of the 80 tracked by the group came from the US government. However, DFRLabs resident fellow Dina Sadek says a key factor in assessing the usefulness of US government properties is the quality of the information provided. She says that the substance and specificity of the information are important for how the public views the fairness and credibility of the statement.
Researchers say the specific information confirming that Russia made a video that showed ballots being destroyed in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, was a high-quality, useful attribution because it was direct, Was narrow in scope and came too quickly to reduce speculation. And doubt. The repeated statements from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's Foreign Malignant Influence Center warning broadly and generally about Russian influence operations are an example of the kind of allegation that might be less helpful, and here That can even serve to amplify campaigns that might not otherwise register with the public at all.
Similarly, in the lead up to the 2020 elections, the researchers point out, U.S. government statements about Russia, China, and Iran playing roles in Black Lives Matter protests may have been mismatched at this time because they did not include the extent of activity or Details on the specific objectives of the actors.
However, even with all this in mind, researchers say valuable progress was made in the 2024 election cycle. But with the new Trump administration in the White House, such transparency may begin to trend in a different direction.
“We don't want to come across like rearranging deck chairs titanicBecause the situation that was is not the situation that will be,'' Brookings says. “And from a public interest perspective I think we're very close to disclosure in 2024.”