Senate warns of unprecedented foreign interference in 2024 election

WASHINGTON – The 2024 election likely will be the most attacked by malicious foreign forces in American history, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee warned on Wednesday.

“The barriers to entry for foreign malign influence – including election influence – have become almost vanishingly small,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said in prepared remarks. “I believe that what we may see from our adversaries going forward could be more sophisticated and more aggressive in both scale and scope.”

Warner’s remarks came as the Senate Intelligence Committee kicked off the first of several hearings on election interference that it anticipates having between now and the Nov. 5 election, which likely will feature a rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

A combination of factors, including poorly regulated social media companies and aggressive foreign adversaries like Russia, have exacerbated the threat of foreign election influence, Warner said.

In the 2016 presidential election Russia conducted a persistent campaign to meddle in various covert ways to influence the outcome in Donald Trump's favor according to U.S. intelligence agencies and a 2020 report from the then-Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee. Trump has been notably more sympathetic to Russian President Vladimir Putin's aggressive foreign policy than his Democratic opponents, including in its current war in Ukraine.

But the threat is not limited to Russia. Declassified intelligence assessments have identified a whole host of other “influence actors who have engaged in, or at least contemplated, election influence and interference activities – including not only Iran, Russia, and (China), but also Cuba, Venezuela, Hezbollah, and a range of foreign hacktivists and profit-motivated cybercriminals,” Warner said.

'More incentivized' foreign adversaries this election season

In recent years, some of those adversaries, Warner said, have become “more incentivized than ever to intervene in our elections because they understand that it could directly affect their national interest.”

That is especially the case with Russia, where President Vladimir Putin understands that influencing public opinion and shaping the elections in the United States “is a cheap way to erode Western support for Ukraine,” Warner said.

“Similarly,” he added, “we’ve seen that the conflict between Israel and Hamas has been fertile ground for disinformation” since the Palestinian militant group’s cross-border attack last Oct. 7 that launched a destabilizing war the Middle East.

Russia and its 'vast multimedia influence apparatus'

Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, the ranking Republican on the committee, also singled out Russia, saying it has been meddling aggressively in elections in the U.S. and overseas for years ? and leading the way in using new technology like artificial intelligence-generated fake content to covertly influence the outcome of tight races.

"We can have people who don't go to the ballot box believing something that's not real is real; that's influencing our elections, especially a close one," Rubio said.

"The Russians are the best at it, they've been doing it a long time and so they know, and they've perfected it," Rubio said. "But every election cycle, more and more cast of characters are joining the parade here in terms of getting into this business."

Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, who oversees all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies, also told lawmakers that Russia, by far, is the most significant foreign government engaging in election-related foreign influence activity directed at the United States, followed by China and, increasingly, Iran.

“Russia relies on a vast multimedia influence apparatus, which consists of its intelligence services, cyber actors, state media proxies and social media trolls” in order to sow chaos in the U.S. and undermine confidence in the integrity of its elections, Haines said.

China also has a sophisticated influence apparatus through which they leverage AI and other emerging technologies, Haines said, but it is too fearful of “possible blowback” to actually try and change the outcome of the upcoming U.S. presidential election.

Iran, however, “is becoming increasingly aggressive in their efforts seeking to stoke discord and undermine confidence in our democratic institutions as we've seen them do in prior election cycles,” Haines said. “They continue to adapt their cyber and influence activities using social media platforms, issuing threats, disseminating disinformation, and it is likely that they will continue to rely on their intelligence services in these efforts and Iran based online influencers to promote their narratives.”

Artificial intelligence could create widespread election mayhem

One risk to election security is the scale and sophistication of foreign efforts to meddle in U.S. elections can now be accelerated “severalfold” by cutting-edge artificial intelligence, or AI, tools such as deepfake videos.

“New text, image, audio, and video generation capabilities are not only at the fingertips of a wider variety of actors,” Warner said, “but they’ve expanded the imagination of malicious actors” in ways that U.S. intelligence officials and policymakers must keep pace with.

Also, he said, Congress’ failure to pass new guardrails on emerging technologies in the last 18 months has left U.S. elections vulnerable to “widespread, AI-enabled mischief … the first hints of which we saw conducted by domestic actors in this year’s primary season.”

In the current election primary season, domestic actors exploited AI, Warner said, in order to sow confusion in both parties – with one candidate using AI to falsely depict Trump hugging Dr. Anthony Fauci. He also cited a case in which someone used voice-cloning tools to impersonate Biden in the Democratic primary in New Hampshire.

A deep distrust of the media, law enforcement and other institutions

These factors, Warner said, have been compounded by the fact that there are “increasingly large numbers of Americans – of all political stripes – who simply do not trust U.S. institutions, from federal agencies and local law enforcement to mainstream media institutions, coupled with an increased reliance on easily manipulated internet media platforms."

And lastly, Warner said, Congress has witnessed since 2022, a concerted litigation campaign that has sought to undermine the federal government’s ability to share vital threat information with U.S. social media platforms.

At the same time, he said, “we’ve also seen considerable disinvestment – and in certain cases, utter disinterest – in platform integrity efforts by leading social media companies,” in an apparent reference to Facebook and X, formerly known as Twitter. “And we’ve seen the rise of a dominant social media platform – TikTok – with ownership based in a country assessed to conduct election influence campaigns.”

Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and the top election security officials from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, were also scheduled to testify and provide both a public and classified briefing about how they are responding to the threats.

Foreign meddling since 2016

Since Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, a bipartisan coalition in Congress has worked to protect U.S. elections from foreign threats, including interference efforts, often cyber-enabled, that target election infrastructure.

The Senate intelligence committee has played a lead role in that effort, conducting an extraordinarily thorough and bipartisan investigation that upheld U.S. intelligence community assessments of Russia’s meddling in 2016. Declassified intelligence community assessments of federal elections since then also have underscored, Warner said, that “foreign election influence efforts go well beyond online trolling and traditional propaganda.”

Foreign efforts to meddle in U.S. elections since 2016, Warner said, have included:

• Efforts to infiltrate – both online and in-person – a range of U.S. organizations on both sides of the political spectrum “with the goal of stoking political polarization in the United States, promoting social and racial strife, and inflaming extremist ideologies.”

• Successful impersonations of U.S. political and social organizations – with the Russian IRA, or Internet Research Agency, maintaining imposter Twitter and Facebook accounts for the Tennessee GOP and Black Lives Matter that had more followers than the legitimate pages.

• Harassment and sting operations against U.S. candidates, including a campaign by Chinese government “influence operatives” try to set up a sting operation to bully and humiliate a congressional candidate of Chinese heritage in 2022.

• Successful efforts to organize real-world political rallies, “in at least one case almost certainly with the goal of inciting violence,” such as orchestrating simultaneous rallies in Houston by anti-Muslim groups “at the same time and place as a Muslim cultural event Russian influence operatives also organized.”

• Personalized emails sent in 2020 by Iranian influence actors posing as the Proud Boys to intimidate registered Democratic voters.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Senate intel chief warns of unprecedented election meddling