How Cyberattacks and Disinformation Threaten Democracy

At last week's Code Conference, two of the sessions provided sobering looks at how vulnerable our election systems are to the threat of cyberattacks. Senator Mark Warner warned of future attacks on voting systems, and former Department of Defense Chief of Staff Eric Rosenbach suggested that such attacks may actually endanger democracy.

Sen. Warner, who is vice chairman of the Senate Committee on Intelligence, addressed the Facebook data-sharing issue, but seemed more concerned about future cyberattacks.

"Virtually everyone" agrees that Russia massively intervened in the election by infiltrating the systems of both campaigns, scanning or breaking into the electoral systems of 21 states, and using social media to spread disinformation, he said. We should have been able to anticipate more of this, he said, as many of the tactics they used in 2016 were tactics they had previously tested in Ukraine, Estonia, and other places.

I thought his view that our election systems "are not safe enough" was notable, and he said that every voting machine should have a paper trail, as well as enhanced security.

Sen. Warner, who co-founded Nextel Wireless, is concerned we're buying a 20th century military, and said that while the US spends $700 billion on the military compared with $68 billion spent by the Russians, "in the area of cyber, they are our equal." He said that for the past 15 years, the US "has not had a cyber doctrine," in part because we were concerned about escalation. However, Russia and China, in areas ranging from intellectual property theft to tampering with key systems, have been "stealing us blind." He believes there should be an international convention about which tools are allowed, and which are not.

The committee that asked questions of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was "an embarrassment," Sen. Warner argued. There is nothing inherently Democratic or Republican about a national security strategy with a cyber component—and the same is true when it comes to regulating social media. Facebook's new transparency tools were pretty good, he admitted, but transparency on paid political ads isn't enough. He said fake accounts were last year's problem, and today he's worried about deepfakes. In the 21st century, "conflict will be less rockets firing at each other, but more misinformation and disinformation."

Sen. Warner said he worries that if there's another bad event, Congress may overreact. He didn't have a firm answer as to what should be done—there is "no ideal solution," he said—but suggested a focus on identity, privacy, and competition. "The last thing I'd like to do is kneecap American companies when we have Chinese companies one step behind."

Defending Digital Democracy

Eric Rosenbach, currently of the Harvard Kennedy School and formerly Chief of Staff to the Secretary of Defense and Assistant Secretary of Defense in charge of the department's cyber strategy, gave a presentation on "defending digital democracy."

Rosenbach ran through a hypothetical scenario in which North Korea disrupted the 2018 US midterm elections. He noted that at DOD, "the country that worried me the most was North Korea," in part because it was so unpredictable.

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In his presentation, Rosenbach described where we're vulnerable, and said that the election systems of the various states are "very vulnerable." The people who administer these systems are accustomed to dealing with things like power failures, but are not prepared to combat a nation-state in cyber warfare. And Rosenbach said that social media systems, even though they are changing, are still vulnerable to "info-ops," which includes things such as sending false messages for social engineering efforts.

A few years ago, people were talking about how technology was aiding democracy, but now trends are pushing against the open internet, as exemplified by things like the "Great Firewall" in China and efforts in Russia to control the information environment.

In general, Rosenbach said, technology helps democracy, but it also makes democracy more vulnerable, as it creates a "large attack surface for the bad guys."

Rosenbach asked the audience to prioritize securing their data. "Democracy needs tech's help," he said.

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