Transcripts For CSPAN Chicago Council On Global Affairs - Election Security 20180221

Make preparations that someone needs you there, and i felt that way. To end a, sunday night on cspan. Next, a look at Election Security ahead of the 2018 midterms, i Security Officials warned that russia and others tried to influence the 2018 elections and set the department is trying to limit those threats to election systems. Well hear from former nato deputydor and the assistant security at home and security, and Cyber Security advisor to the pentagon. From the Chicago Council on global affairs, this is one hour. Evening our panel will examine the issue of critical importance of United States, democracy, the portal systems to external interference. Our panelists will discuss the and how the threat government should respond with. Midterm primaries a few weeks away in some states this is an important subject. Where joint and a panel of experts, but unfortunately two beour panelists will not able to attend tonight, but nonetheless we are excited with todays discussion and are excited with the panelists joining us for the conversation. With that, we are got to be joined by our panelists. From the Committee Outreach coordinator, we have dick durbin, who serves as dick durbins liaison to elected and other constituencies throughout the chicago and metro region. Richard, who is from the office of Cyber Security with the Homeland Security, and he supports the development and the limitation of operational programs designed to strengthen the security and resilience of the nations Critical Infrastructure. Doug flutiebassador who is the senior ambassador of the future project at the Harvard Kennedy School Center and a Senior Adviser at and isge Global Advisors a former career army officer and former representative to nato. Our moderator today is jake, he is the coo of cambridge advisors and is the faculty member of the university of chicagos Harris School where he teaches summer Security Policy and also former white house liaison to the department of what security he develops policies and programs related to National Security and Cyber Security. And discussionn will be followed by an audience q a, and with that i would like to welcome our panelists for this evening. In joiningome me this palace. [applause] these panelists. Welcome, and ask for having me, and as i mentioned, i am jake brown and teach Cyber Security at the university of chicago and coo of cambridge advisors. Out the fact that counsel for having us here today. I want to put in a plug for the organization, one of the relevant things i want the circle i encourage everybody here and anybody watching to join. It is worth every penny and time. With that, it is fitting we are having this event here in january in 2018 because the first event i did on Election Security last year was in january on the stage. A lot of people are try to figure out what is going on with hiking the elections and so irth, and that panel, which think was one of the first in the country, was the first one saying, what the heck just happened . Tried to get a sense of what is going on and what russia is trying to do and so on. And since a lot has happened, we have come full circle. This event today is relevant for several reasons. Let me walk you through what has happened since the first event we did in january of last year. Devcon, the largest hacker conference in the world got their hands on a bunch of Voting Machines and were able to hack into them within minutes. The first one there were able to get into minutes remotely, didnt have physical access and were able to hack into it in minutes. Every mission was taken down by the weekend and the hackers were so shocked at how vulnerable the machines were, they were playing tricks on them at the and, getting them to play cap cartoons and music. It was pretty scary. Subsequent to that, one of the biggest things about defcon, is transparency, and weve put together a report of all the vulnerabilities we found, and at the council, we said that and we are going to help with it, needs to come up with best practices. Specifically administration votingls can secure our ballots, and think tax before were able to put out a best cook countyn the Clerks Office here in illinois, without my knowledge, put together what we believe is frankly one of the best Election Security councils and i think was the first released. We at the university of chicago released that plant i was who works atoah, the countys office, and they wrote that out before the holidays at the university of chicago. Have after the ruler firsttier saying what the heck just happened . After we see what the vulnerabilities are, some folks came out with impressive plants to tell is what we should do about them. We are back in two they cannot about what the federal government is actually going to help to do to protect our votes and our democracy in the space. It is actually not an accident we are here having this conversation today, to our knowledge we did some looking at the this, is the first time whereof had both the executive branch and legislative ranch together publicly talking about this issue and about what both or two or three parts of the federal government are going to do that our elections. On top of that, illinois were the first states to vote on primaries in 2018. Illinois and texas in the first two states, as starting in march. With that, i will turn it over. To talk ambassador about National Security implications of Election Security. Jake, and i am not in the president circle but i am going to find out. It sounds like a good thing, to be in the president s circle. [laughter] today is simple, we are missing the main message of russian interference of our 2016 election campaign. I think him as someone who spent 40 years of my adult life in the National Security region, what happened in 2016 in our election process is as serious a national as serious a threat as any ive have seen in my 40 years, and active duty in the military or the white house for diplomatic service. They say that because physical attacks on america, and that is to think back 9 11 or pearl harbor, you suffered tragic damage, but it is physical damage, loss of life and loss of property. We are Strong Enough to recover from that, it is still tragic but we can recover from physical attacks. Is attack i am worried about the one in 2016 which could erode the confidence in our election system. This is the connection between the voting public, the individual voter, and the democratic process that has that voter contributing to an election result. The election of an official. If you lose confidence as an american, i think that loss of confidence, that erosion of confidence is a more serious threat than any physical threat the United States has ever suffered. Now, i want to make that case in five quick parts. Why is this so serious . First of all, it is a proven threat, what happened in 2016 has happened. National agencies for the first time in my 40 year career, agreed on something. This in itself is newsworthy. A great that not only are there hiking attempts and penetration attempts in our reporting system, but russia was responsible and the decision had been taken at the head of state level, Vladimir Putin. That is unusual for the Intelligence Committee to come together like that without dissenting views. A threat isary, defined as a capability to do something and the intent to do it. So the threat is capability and intent. Vladimir putin past that standard and he meets the definition of a threat because he obviously has the capability, they tinkered with and attempted to interfere with 21 state Voter Registration systems. We know that he clearly has the intent and has demonstrated. It is not academic, were not talking about a theoretical problem, brooklyn about something that actually happened, so this is a proven and credible threat vulnerability in any key national systems, think about our nuclear capabilities. If they be outraged were as vulnerable as our election system of to be, or our command and control systems or even personnel systems are still security systems. If they were asand yet we havent quitet awakened to the vulnerability of our elections. The second reason this is a National Security threat is russia is not going away. Also in march, illinois holds primaries, russia holds elections, and this is not suspenseful. We know that Vladimir Putin is going to win, he will go in 2018 for another six year term, he is not going away. Even if he had an unfortunate physical accident and one of his heroic outdoorsman performances, horseback or hunting tigers or whatever he does. The leader who replaces Vladimir Putin, because of their nature of the russian state, will very much be like Vladimir Putin and will have to be like that in order to stay atop this steadily declining state structure. In russia an autocrat for the first civil future, probably for the rest of our lives. Russia is not going away. I think the attacks in 2016 can be characterized as probing attacks. There were clumsy and elementary. There were kind of sophomoric. But one thing about russia is they learn, it will have taken lessons and 2016 and come back at us in 2018 and 2020. He does come back, they will not be as clumsy, they will be more targeted and sophisticated. Not going away. Third, others are watching. He does come back,it is not lie potential opponent with Vladimir Putin and russia, north korea, china, the islamic state, they all have cyber potential and quite frankly, our election system proved to be so vulnerable that we might even have domestic groups who attempt to weigh in on Election Security. Fourth, time is short. We are months away from the 2018 election season, 2020 is just behind that. We are behind the power curve in terms of corrective defensive measures given the severity of this threat. My final point is, we as americans think this is all about us, but there is a whole set of other democracies, our closest allies around the world also hold elections were also vulnerable. Yep european allies, asian allies, whose democratic ascesses could be just potentially vulnerable as ours. This is a National Security office for all those reasons, so to follow, what is interesting we bring the executive branch, the department of Homeland Security, to the panel, but also a representative of the legislative branch to really answer the fundamental question, what is the u. S. Government if this is a National Security threat what government, the level of government responsible for dealing with National Security . The federal government, what is it going to do about it . I am anxious to hear from a panelists tonight. I appreciate that. Good evening everyone, and the beauty secretary of Cyber Security office out of the department of Homeland Security. Our department is responsible for eliminating threats to the nations infrastructure and the designation of critical election infrastructure, that includes the election systems as well. As pointed out by both the ambassador and jake, we understand that russian activities to undermine the 2016 president ial election has been well documented. We know those threats are out there and we know theyre going to continue and be other thread actors that are going to try to undermine future elections. The question is what are we doing now and Going Forward to preserve confidence of our election systems. Given the role of elections play in a Free Democratic society, on january six, 2017, the month security determined that the election infrastructure should be designated as Critical Infrastructure. The designation means that election infrastructure has become a party on our planning and policy efforts as well as how we allocate resources and also enables the department to Security Services to state and local officials. By the state and local officials that request support from the department. Finally, the best provides the protections to key state holders. Since 2003, the part of, security has been working across all 16 critical and for such are sectors outlined in the National Infrastructure action plan as well as working with owners and operators state local officials to secure our nations Critical Infrastructure. We have developed joint exercises across mutations and information technology, energy, Financial Service sectors, to enhance our coordination for seizures and we have also byrdination procedures partnering with information sharing and analysis organizations. Now more than ever, our efforts to support state and local officials in the security of infrastructure is quickly important. We see that as a Vital National interest, several attacks on his country as pointed out are becoming more complex. They range from not only nationstates, but also cyber hacktivists. D ja and theyre becoming more sophisticated and dangerous. The Digital World has reshaped our lives, common tasks have been streamlined and the way we communicate has changed. The continuing evolving digital age has improved our quality of life, but it has also changed the Threat Landscape and expanded the adversaries attack surface to damage. We certainly havent been resting on our laurels, we have been engaged with the elections that took place last year. Thespecial elections and senate and Congressional Elections in alabama and utah, and were operationally posturing ourselves to support from an interagency perspective. The state and local elections and official summer security efforts are going to primary and special elections throughout 2018. Our department has engaged local and state and private sectors stakeholders across the increase ande to expand awareness of potential vulnerabilities and to enhance security of the u. S. Election infrastructure. Wilson continue to offer state and local governments our Cyber Security systems which include on suchjinks scams, risks, technical assistance, information sharing, coordination resources. Also participate with our own hackers and the voting machine hacking we remain interested in working with the Vendor Community and security researchers to understand vulnerabilities, share information, and mitigation tactics. 30 seven security personnel brought the state and are ready to provide actual information and connect Election Officials with tools and resources for summer Security Preparedness of election systems as well as physical site Voting Machines and polling places. Dhs is sponsoring security clearances for secretary of states as well as state senior elected officials to facilitate the passing of classified information. A referred earlier to the National Interest that your protection plan, that is referred to as the nip, it outlines for a sector to have councils, one is government focused, the other one is a sector coordinating council, which is private sector focused. Governmentablished accorded the council that is made up of department of Homeland Security, to u. S. Election assistance commission, the National Institute of standards and technology, the federal bureau of investigation, and as well as the department of defense and key state and local affected officials local elected officials. They developed a plan for partnership as well as laid the groundwork for developing the election and for such are sector specific plan. Bhs is also working with the commission to foster the sectorment of coordinating council which will include representatives from the voting machine Vendor Community. Relatedsector security to an embedded system security, as well as other relevant private sector partners. I dhs we recognize that the United States, elections are run officials anded have taken a number of steps to secure their election of a sector and replace those. The fundamental line for citizens to be hurt by having their vote accurately counted as at the core of american values, ensuring that electoral system process is secure is a Vital National interest. We have confidence in the overall security of the electoral system and 40 f researcher as diverse, it is subject to local control and has many checks and balances. Threat environment evolves, we will continue to work with state and local partners to enhance the understanding of a threat to provide a summer security tool and resource available to the public and private sectors to increase security and resilience across this particular space. I appreciate the opportunity to be here and i turn it over to greg. My name is greg bales, and im here from u. S. Entered the durbins office, you may have seen them in the news daily. [laughter] the view this morning, i havent watched it yet. Is this is the assistant democrat leader, number two Ranking Member in the caucus of the u. S. Senate, and voting rights, voting issues, electoral issues are Top Priorities for him. Something we have been looking specific. Linois in pa get a reminder of the history of why we are here and talk about this it goes back to 2002 and 2016. 2016 when itust of was reported that illinois and arizona were the two states that have been hacked by a foreign entity. Illinois state Board Election files have been compromised. It is alleged that it was russia as the actor who did this. Fast forward after the election, mind you order rules are separate from the tabulation, so it is consensus that appellation was that appellation was not interfered with, it was registration and those databases. So fastforward, National Agencies can take consensus we had been hacked, this is generate when he 17 this is january 17. It was 21 states that were compromised we worked with the illinois General Assembly with michael hastings, the chairman of the Cyber Security subcommittee in the illinois senate. They had a hearing with the state board of elections to get answers, what happened . Who did you talk to . Whatyour find out did you find out . Was there a pattern . Fastforward to june, we partnered with the state senator to send a letter to all 109 or 108 election authorities. There are 102 counties in illinois, 109 authorities. It is helpful to understand how we do have a decentralized electoral system. Every local Election Authority has some the restriction jurisdiction with what the government they buy and what they use. Illinois, we have paper records even if you are casting your vote on an electronic screen. Some states dont have that paper trail, so we missed out to local election authorities and asked, where you hacked . What do you do if you were hacked . W protocols . Sponsored registration legislation for increased local authorities, and people like dhs. I think the big take away from the response we got was, they needed more money. 2017, butout 2016 at lets go back to 2002 when the help americans votes act passed. We voted for it, and create a stream to improve Voting Systems. Many states havent spent that money, so fastforward to 2018, they still need new equipment. A lot havent bought new a clement, so what is the role of congress and what should be doing . Pieces to add of to the list making sure state leadership is working with federal government to ensure there is quick information sharing between local, state, and county election authorities, provide security clearances when necessary to local action authorities to be able to steer information. Develop a panel of experts and create an open process, replacing the outdated electronic Voting Machines like the ones we heard were tinkered with or hacked in las vegas. So, we think that kind of stuff is important. We think there needs to be better coordination between all branches of government on this. I think the latest bill that will likely cosponsor is for, asan centerline democrat and republican, we want to be working together on this because boyd is a bipartisan, american issue, it is an issue we all need to be working to protect. And we to make sure no outside actors like russia are meddling in this very important process in our democracy. We are excited that dhs is engaged. In generate it was noted that they declared our election systems as part of Critical Infrastructure. That includes things like our electric it, so this is good stuff that we are working together to mother needs to be more, and alternate over to jake. Thanks, everybody. Question it speaks to what i think is a challenge of fitting a square peg into a round hole. Pretty much everybody in the panel has alluded to, if you have a nationstate touches a existential threats three has states, which russia is. Attacke trying to certain parts of our Critical Infrastructure are the foundation of our democracy, which is voting. That is a National Security issue, obviously. Who does National Security . The military, Homeland Security, and so forth. Ok, that is it does National Security, but who administers elections . State and local governments. Ifk the great line is the russians invade, we not going to call out the Illinois National guard to fight them off, were going to be calling nato and everybody else. So if the local election are administering elections, and want to keep it that way, we dont want dhs to administer elections. But where not going to local administers securing threats, and how you make this thing work . I will go to you first, rick. How do you, without imposing, undue restrictions . How do you secure elections . Is a complex issue, no doubt about it. It is context because the election is so distributed and there are so many coordination points even in one state, let alone getting down to the county and local township level. It is a very complex from that perspective. This is why the designation of the election if researcher as a Critical Infrastructure allows us to have certain authorities that the department of Homeland Security has to provide state and local officials, and Election Officials certain tools and services, read them and classified briefings and things of that nature and allow that to happen. It allows us to share vulnerability information and that information is protected from all kinds of different things, read a poor use, things like that. Regulatory use. We have counsels setup, one is government focused, and i read the list of those government entities. The other is bringing in the private sector. There is three legs on the stool, the vendor and private sector entities developing these systems that are updating the systems that in some states have on contract to protect and respond if there is some type of incident and monitor. Their state and local officials were quite frankly in charge of the election and election infrastructure. We want it to be like that, and there is the federal government that can bring all of the National Level assets, the Intelligence Community and that information, as well as Additional Resources and subject matter expertise. It is making sure from a cornish and perspective all of that is working well. Acrossave transparency those three entities and we are actually providing services that are needed at the state and local level so we can make the election infrastructure more secure than it has been. Respond, although im not an election official or a Cyber Security expert. Containing less, this comes down to is couple of simple steps. Get the machines off the internet, there is nothing on the internet, from your wifi network to the office of Personnel Management at the federal government, to sony, two equifax, which is secure on the internet. Get our Voting System off the internet, it is not necessary to be shiny and new and cool. This is too important, get it off the internet. Protect Voter Registration rolls. Ules. The easy target is not to change the rally in cook county or the city of los angeles, it is to delegitimize our disenfranchise groups of people because you can go and and corrupt the registration database, which who has aborder, drivers license, doesnt even gets about, so stop them at the front door. Dont worry about tinkering bots, stop corrupting the big database. Finally, moved to paper. You, saying in a 21stcentury, go back to paper ballots, seems counterintuitive. It seems it cant be the way to go. Because itay to go leaves off the internet and it leads you to what is required to do an audit. Do those three steps, often internet, protected databases, and create an audit trail, will go a Long Distance to being a much more well defended from the sorts of things we saw in 2016. This is not rocket science. We are here in cook county in part because your system is a National Example of the kind of hygiene and defensive steps that ought to be taken by something s across the noah country. You should be voting under his guidelines. [applause] that point, there are specific next steps, and the this is on is, paper ballots are not expensive, but the other stuff as. There are multiple bills out there, is Congress Going to put up the dollars that are necessary to do everything that needs doing . We are struggling to fund the government through friday right now. [laughter] to help america vote, we did that before, and we did it in a bipartisan manner. The bill i talked about earlier, there is a funding mechanism we want to support that has bipartisan support. I think there could be movement, if there is enough pressure you can get consensus. Sets not unprecedented to stipulations on what the procurement process looks like. I would agree with doug on the paper about peace, you are right. They included a thing in provisional ballots, which if you have been unfortunate enough to cast ballots and you are not on the water registration, you can cast a ballot, but the onus is on you to come back improve that you are who you are. The percentage of people who do that are able to do that is difficult. In illinois where fortunate to have good water registration loss, and in fact we passed through automatic registration, which helps, but other states dont have it as easy of a system. Im going to be Optimistic Congress will come around to this, but there is headwinds we are battling in washington against it. We will see. There is certain things like paper ballots you will see orning steam in congress, protective water registration databases . Legislation out there now, i do think there is stipulation on what you purchase, and the procurement peace dictating what type of i do think we are there yet. When he can force the conversation, and where hopefully going to start the conversation. We should be frank here. The amount of money where talking about, granted from the federal government, down to the people do the voting. Error. Rounding i am a defense guy. They paid my salary for 40 years, it is great, but were talking about hundreds of millions against a 700 billion defense budget. This is really a National Security issue. Lets take our green eye shades and stare into the sunlight. This is a more severe National Security issue than any of that 700 to that end, i think you mentioned before, there are a bunch of other democracies that are at risk at well. Do you want to talk a little bit about that we have seen in western europe in the last year . This did not start in 2016. Rossa is predecessor was the soviet union and it did all sorts of thing in terms of sponsoring opposition across our western european allies. More recently, russia openly sponsored and funded the opposition, a party that did not win the elections in france. They openly funded the nationalist party in a france. They even went as far, in the most recent nato ally, the small Little Country of montenegro, to try to take over by force of arms the parliament building. This is just nuts. There is russian interference at multiple levels. In our case, trying to learn creatively about our election system and its vulnerability. It goes all the way through violent measures, hacking, misinformation, we are beginning to learn how our social Media Networks were used to spread misinformation and how that was used to further influence our electoral politics. Right . Look, as americans, we only have to look at washington right now and ask, was the attempt in 2016 to gridlock washington and to cast doubt on the credibility of american electoral process . Did it work . From arlington, virginia, which is just across the river from washington, where we live, it worked. I think it was a rather unsophisticated attempt in 2016. We should not expect that we need to prepare for the sort of thing we saw in 2016. 18 and 20 are going to be more sophisticated. We have work to do. We better get on with it. We can hold only so many of these panels. We need to get on with the hard work. To that end, specifically about the sophistication of these attacks, they are multilayered. Rick, putting this effort and in Homeland Security as opposed to the election assistance commission, a 30 Person Agency that does a lot of election policy, it was the right thing to do. Dhs does not do everything. Who else are you working with across the National Security community and what other things are you working on . Do you work on the fake news issue . Is that somebody else . How are you leveraging intelligence and so on the other agencies are gathering to help state and locals defend against this stuff . We do not work on this fake news issue. Our lane is security. That is where we focus our efforts. It is important with these election things. We work this is a whole government approach. The fbi is heavily engaged in the work were doing, as well as the Intelligence Community, getting that information as declassified as we can so we can share it as broadly as we can, so that the state and local officials can take action where needed. We are doing a whole host of things. One of the things that we stood up inside the organization is an Election Task force to bring everybody together very quickly to get things organized and provide resources so that we can come up with a plan of how we are going to engage with the state and local community. This was mid last year. We brought the fbi in that. We brought dod and the National Guard in on that. From an administration perspective, this is a priority for us. We are using the whole of government and any resources we can find, anybody who is in this lane. We are leveraging it to provide support to the state and local Election Officials. Fantastic. Greg, one last thing for you. It seems that there has been some bipartisan cooperation on this. As we were saying in the green room, or whatever that room is over there, this thing is dead in the water if there is not bipartisan cooperation. You mentioned lankford is cosponsoring this bill. Are you seeing both sides of the aisle willing to Work Together on this . If so, how does that look . It is hard to say right now. The last iteration of the bill came out right before the holiday. Congress goes on vacation over the christmas break. We just came back. Everyone is allconsumed with the dream act, chip, and the funding bill. There are some supporters out there. If you look at senator rubio, he was a cosponsor to the deter act, which dealt with sanctions against russia. If they were to meddle anything in the u. S. Again you do have some republicans that are willing to get in board. It will be easy to get votes from the democratic caucus. We just need to get enough from the republicans and enough so that mcconnell will call it for a vote. I am going to be optimistic about it. I mentioned some headwinds, they come from pennsylvania avenue. I think we can get there. All right. We have time for questions from the audience. I think online as well. Why dont we start . You, in the black shirt. Thank you. Thanks. My name is sanford, i am a novelist and a filmmaker. Im currently working on a film about election hacking. Ambassador, please when you talk about paper ballots, remember, paper ballots are counted by computers. The only way for paper ballots to be by the way, if people think a hacking problem is electronic voting touchscreens, i would bet that 90 of the vote today is cast on paper ballots. Paper ballots, in terms of security, are useless. Unless they are mandated to be audited. You mentioned auditing. Paper ballots are counted by computers, the same computers that are equally as vulnerable to hacking as the touchscreens. To you secretary, the department of Homeland Security and its checks and balances, there is the small issue of article two section two of the constitution. It says the states determine the manner of their elections. Despite the help america vote act of 2002, a state like pennsylvania does not require paper ballots. Pennsylvania was crucial in the last president ial election. The states determine how the manner of elections, including what machines are used, what audits will be used, if any. This has to be solved, not by by the federal government. We have 50 states. It has to be solved in a way that takes into account the constitutional mandate of article two section two. Let me just just quickly comment. You are right. I shorthanded the move to paper argument. Most paper ballots are fed through machines, optical scanners. That is how your vote is red. The key here is that those optical scanners do not have to have a direct connection to the internet. That is what i meant by taking it off the internet. As you mentioned, the real value in the paper is that, if you mandate Risk Reduction audits, because you had the paper and the capability to do that audit, with a relatively small sample size, back up the outcome of the election and backup the confidence of the voting public in the casting of the vote. That is the beauty of paper. It is not simply the direct connection to the internet. One of the things that i think is critically important in this, especially if this is part of an overall influence campaign that the russians are trying to do to make us question our democracy and elected leaders, it is to instill trust and transparency into the system. One of the things we have seen done in northern california, maybe berkeley or something, i forget, pdfing all the ballots so that everybody can go in and audit the election. That level of transparency is critically important for this. Go on, maam. Especially the dhs and the eac senator durbins bill as well, considering a chain of custody for the ballot. That is another weak point. Chain of custody, where they are placing them, how are they securing them, before any recounts or audits. If mr. Driggers, can you Say Something about vpm . Here in chicago, we transmit our results on Election Night over a vpm, and the vulnerabilities of that. Thank you. I do not want to go into a deep discussion about the vulnerabilities of a Virtual Private Network because it depends on what the if it depends on the infrastructure of that. It could be all sorts of things. It depends on how the systems are configured, the software that you are running, what type of Antivirus Software is on there, all of those types of things oh into that. Go into that. The bottomline is, the investor pointed to it, if you have a system that is connected to the internet, if it is a vpn, you are subject to a vulnerability or accepting a risk, unless you put in protection protocols and have people monitoring your network and you network and to understand what the adversary is looking for. That has to be taken into account. I want to go back to the gentlemans point here with regards to the constitution. I want to make this clear. The department of Homeland Securitys role in this is security focus. It is security focused to support the state and local officials. It is not to tell them what to do or tell them how to do it. It is to support, with our resources, the subject matter and expertise that we have and the capabilities that we have. If a state and local official requests that support. I want to take a question on twitter. Or where ever we are getting these from. The green room. They keep moving around. There is a question that is basically, what is the risk of foreign intelligence operatives compromising poll workers and Election Officials . And, more importantly, if there is a risk there, what do we do to deal with it . I suppose there is some risk of that. You probably watched the show the americans. This is not russian agents somehow compromising workers in some precinct in chicago that is going to seriously undermine to do that at scale would be so difficult that that is probably an advantage of our decentralized system. You cannot just mount that scale of cold war, vintage, classic operations. Where we are vulnerable is where the internet has given us efficiency. It has become a convenient spreadsheet. It has all the names and addresses and middle initial. It is easily hacked and easily corrupted. If you change my middle initial and it no longer matches my drivers license, i do not get to the ballot. That is a lot easier than recruiting a spy or an agent inside 8000 voting jurisdictions. It is a lot easier. You can simply hack into the Voter Registration database and suppress the vote. If you do that in a targeted way, i do not want to say that much about this in a public arena in case it caps off the russians. If you look at swing states and foldable districts, or districts with a small margin, you do not need to hack all 8000. You could go after the ones that might make a difference. That is where we are vulnerable. That is what we need to wake up as americans. Thanks. Let us see. Miss in the blue. Yeah. Thank you. Are any of your organizations working with the Census Bureau . The census is coming up in a few years. They are testing with allowing households to register online. It can have major implications for Congressional District assignments for a whole decade if that is influenced in any way. Yeah. I do not know if we are working with them or not on that specific project. If that is influenced in any we do work with the Census Bureau and help provide them tools and services to protect their network and help with other programs. We work with all of the departments and agencies, all of the civilian executive with regard to the capabilities and services we have the department of Homeland Security. You, sir. If you accept the premise that our Nuclear Arsenal keeps us safe from nuclear attack, you should accept that an offense if offensive capability would protect us from an attack. Should the United States be trying to get mickey mouse elected second in the Russian Election to demonstrate that we have powers of our own . What are we already doing . Is offense part of our defense here, the way it has been for other Security Issues . We have been talking about deterrence theory and Cyber Security a lot since the 2016 election. There is not much to say here that we can say. [laughter] i would say, i think youre onto something in terms of thinking of what might be called a cold war concept. Deterrence. If you try to do this against me, you will be sorry. I will raise the cost sufficiently so that it will not be worth your while. That approach. Speaking of how that applies to the cyber arena, not only in Election Security but also in terms of other dimensions of Cyber Security. It took us about 15 years of cold war study to figure out deterrence theory as applied to nuclear weaponry. It is going to take us a while to get our arms around how to apply it in the cyber arena. One of the big challenges here is attribution. If you do not know exactly who you are threatening, that is a problem. It is one reason why the 16 intelligence agencies are finding. It was a particular actor at a particular level, it is so revealing. We should not always expected that it is going to be so obvious. 2016 was a little clumsy. They left fingerprints. They will learn from that. The next attack is likely to be harder to attribute and deter. I think there is a deterrence logic that we are only beginning to consider. It may have offenses and defense of qualities. Defensive qualities. We, of course, live in the classiest of glass houses. So much of our economy and society is relying on the internet, potentially more so than any other country on the planet. A couple more. Yes, maam. Thank you so much. My question is, with all of the congressional committees that seem to be focusing on russia and collusion, are any of them actually looking at what steps we should be taking to avoid this in the future . Greg, do you want to senator mark warner publicly announced the other day that they are looking to put out some proactive measures and suggested ideas as a guideline to have to stop this in the future. We should see something public this month or next from them. We are hopeful for that. There is a deterrence dimension. They have a defense dimension. It may have a deterrence dimension as well. Yes sir, in the red. My main concern is the tabulation of votes. You have talked about various aspects of this. You have been shifting around. Ultimately, the tabulation of votes is the most important thing. The solution is, handcounted paper ballots. The problem is, Cyber Security is the problem. If we have things on paper, we do not have to rely on cyber. Our votes should be handcounted paper ballots. That is what is done in germany now. In germany, there was a case in 2009 where the court decided that the electronic tabulation of votes was inherently undemocratic. As a poll watcher myself, the first time i did it when i was 18 years old, we had paper ballots that all of the poll watchers could see. Now everything is counted by machines. We see nothing. That is our biggest folder ability. There is no transparency to the counting of our votes now. Theyre counted on machines. A poll watcher in a polling place does nothing to have observed the count. In 1870s, boss tweed said, as long as i am counting the votes, what are you going to do about it . That is our number one vulnerability, not russia. Thank you. Anybody can take that. [applause] i will comment on it. No up probably remembers 2014, we had a contested state treasurers ways in illinois. The current treasurer won by 10,000 votes. It came down to a lot of manual tabulation of mail in ballots and paper ballots from across the state to figure out final tabulations. It was that close. That is to agree with you. We do look at paper ballots as important. You are right. There is an election system here. It is not the silver point of vulnerability. I have been harping on Voter Registration. Tabulation is another part. There are two broader dimensions to this problem. The physical corruption of the vote, changing the tabulation. I am more worried about the psychological dimension of this. If the american voting public loses confidence, is his or her vote going to count towards a democratic outcome . They dont always win, but it counts. The delusion of confidence is a bigger vulnerability in the longterm. That can suppress the vote nationally in a way that is an even more severe vulnerability, in my view. There is the physical and the psychological. The physical has multiple steps. Someone else mentioned the chain of custody. This stuff eventually all gets compiled. Sometimes it is compiled in mail trucks. There are many places where you could interfere with the system. The big vulnerabilities, at least in my view, is the Voter Registration database in terms of it being an internet. The second is this loss and confidence. Given as much press as this is getting, and given the 2016 experience, i wonder if we are not on the edge of eroded confidence in our system. We should be. [laughter] that is why we are here tonight. I think were out of time. Thanks, everybody on the panel for coming. I know people are missing family birthdays and everything. We appreciate that. Thank you all for having us. [applause] [no audio] [inaudible] former housing and urban Development Secretary at an event organized by the Young Democrats of her. He talks your of the partys agenda. Democrats get it. We have always known that we stand for. Number one, expanding opportunity to everybody. Behind fdr. Idea it was what motivated my fellow lyndon b. Johnson, with medicare and medicaid. It was the reason barack obama had the Affordable Care act passed into loss of that more americans [inaudible] [applause] mr. Castro is a former mayo of said obtaining, texas and is considering running for president. Watch the entire program tonight at 8 00 p. M. Of tv has 20 years featured the nations bestknown nonfiction writers for life conversations about their books. This year as a special project were featuring that selling fiction writers. Join us live sunday, march 4 at whose novelff shara was made into a major motion picture. His most recent book is the frozen hours. During the program we will be taking your phone calls, tweets, and facebook messages. Sunday, marches 4, live from 123 p. M. Eastern. Cspan, hearing from at the inaugural unrated the system summit where they discuss russians interference in u. S. Elections