Up next, intelligence and cybersecurity leaders testify on foreign threats to the 2024 elections. The most significant foreign actors targeting u. S. Elections include china and most notably russia. Remaining the most active threat the hearing is one hour and 45 minutes. I want to call this hearing to order and i want to welcome todays witnesses. I want to warn them we are finishing up one vote. We will have another one. We will work through that process. People slipping in and out, i think you understand. The director of National Intelligence, director of cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and lisa knapp executive assistant director of the National Security branch at the fbi. Welcome to all of you. Todays hearing builds on the bipartisan effort and 2016. To educate the public on the intentions of adversaries seeking to undermine the integrity of our systems. And to ensure that u. S. Government is postured to protect our elections from those foreign threats. An Interagency Task forces tasked with protecting two forms of election interference. We have seen this since 2016. Interference efforts often cyber enabled that target election infrastructure and separately influence efforts that seek to affect elections through covert or other illegal tactics. Since 2016, we have held both open and closed hearings. The head of each federal election. Between testimony of open source resource executives. This is the first open hearing of this Campaign Season but more will be coming. I want to start by recalling the fact that i fear times the 2016 cycle so long ago that the Public Perception of past foreign election meddling has too often been treated as something trivial or not of major league. As this committee exhausted bipartisan investigation into russias meddling into 2016 and as declassified Intelligence Committee showed, foreign influence efforts go well beyond simple online trolling or traditional propaganda. For election efforts in the last eight years, among other things involved, efforts to infiltrate both online and in person u. S. Organizations on both sides of political spectrum with the goal of stroking Political Polarization in the United States and promoting social strife. We have seen as well successful impersonations of u. S. Political and social with the russian ira back in 2016 having twitter and Facebook Accounts for the tennessee gop and black lives matter. Both of those were actually bigger than the real organizations. We have seen harassment and sting operations against u. S. Candidates. Particularly when we saw just the last cycle. The prc influence operatives tried to set up a sting operation to bully and humiliate a congressional candidate of chinese heritage. We have seen successful efforts to organize real world political rallies. Back in 2016 again, one almost coming to real life violence. Russian efforts orchestrated simultaneous rallies in houston. One with an antimuslim event taking place at exactly the same time and place as a muslim cultural event. Luckily, Law Enforcement intervenes. We have also seen personalized email set in 2020 by iranian influence actors. They did a good job winning that out. Globally, we have seen many of the same influence actors aggressively. The prcs influence actors aggressively shaping the outcome of the outcome earlier this year promoting narratives as election day neared. More recently literally in the last few weeks, officials have disclosed efforts of russian operatives to shape the outcome of the eu elections with the goal of undermining european support for ukraine. A wide range of media open Source Research and other sources similarly pointed to russian influence operations. They invaded 75 . A few years later due to russian efforts. They think the United States started the war in ukraine. Fresh off the presses a couple of hours. Testifying a new russian effort geared at somehow saying zelensky and the cia are working on trying to undermine again our elections. The barriers to entry have unfortunately become small. Since 2016 we have seen declassified intelligence assessments who have engaged and or at least contemplated election influence and interference activities. Not only russian, not only iran or prc but also cuba, venezuela, terrorist organizations like hezbollah. Profit motivated cyber criminals why think this hearing is so important, in many ways, our adversaries could be more sophisticated and aggressive in both scale and scope. Let me tell you why i think that is the case. It is more incentivized than ever to intervene in our elections. They can understand that it can affect their particular national interest. In the case of russia, putin clearly understands that influencing Public Opinion and shaping elections in the United States is a cheap way to erode american and western support for ukraine. Similarly, weve seen the conflict between israel and hamas as Fertile Ground for disinformation since october 7. The scale and sophistication of these sorts of attacks against our elections can now be accelerated by ai tools. The truth is the manipulation and clearly eight years ago still a challenge. Due to ai tools unprecedented. Literally not a week or month that went by where the tools do not continue to improve. On a personal note i fear that congress inability to pass any new guardrails in the last 18 months for ai enabled mischief. President trump embracing doctor fauci, we have seen audios of President Biden telling people in New Hampshire higher. The truth is, these tools are out there going in their danger. Third, we have seen increasingly large numbers of americans of all political stripes across the political spectrum that simply do not trust u. S. Institutions from Law Enforcement to Mainstream Media who increasingly rely on the wildest conspiracy theories that pop up on the web. We have seen a concerted Litigation Campaign the ability. The vital threat information with platforms. We have seen from some of the same social media platforms considerable disinvestment and in certain cases other this interest in platform integrity by some of those social Media Companies. An area where the vice chairman and i work very closely together , we have seen the rise of a dominant social media platform tiktok with ownership based in a country that is clearly adversarial in terms of the intent on our elections. It is these kinds of attempts by foreign actors and adversaries to so disinformation undermined elections and see discord that americans can expect their federal agencies both Law Enforcement and intelligence to help detect and defeat. Thats more easily understood and then there is this whole topic. Its not just in elections it was also during covid and we see it here on a range of topics. The propaganda has always been a weapon of war. I think they do it at scale faster and more convincing and in ways that spread quickly and are difficult to contain in particular. We have seen increasing amounts of damage thats being done to the reputation of the United States and parts of by a very active effort to undermine and make life difficult for our diplomats. Our military personnel in so many countries where the recent have gained greater influence. All of that is happening at a global scale and the chairman is talked about some of the countries that have faced efforts to meddle in their elections and try to influence the outcome and sometimes being successful. Today the focus is how its used in an election in policy debates do lets focus in on focus on elections for a moment. We hear a lot about the tools that are available capabilities that someone have to put in ai out to spread narratives that are difficult to knock down and so forth. The weaponization of this information. I hope to learn more about when this happened, did this happen, whos in charge of her sponsoring and happily thought through the process of what do we do when the scenarios occur . I dont think i have a clear understanding of whos in charge and how we would respond who would take the lead. I know for hurricane is headed towards United States the National Hurricane center will put meteorologist on the air who will describe to us this is a hurricane and this is what it looks like and this is how strong its going to be when he gets here and put up a forecast issue warnings and republicans and democrats will take the appropriate steps. If Something Like that were headed towards our election i dont know whos in charge of putting it out there. More importantly i think no matter who puts it out there to candidate or issue on the other side of it their followers are going to question whether its the government interfering in the elections themselves and its not helpful. I use this as an example and the recent one when the whole laptop situation happened under bidens laptop. A number of former intelligence officials. That title carries weight alternative letter saying this has all the hallmarks of russian Disinformation Campaign. We know now that is not a Disinformation Campaign. We now know it was not a Russian Misinformation Campaign but the result of that was social Media Companies would not allow anyone to post articles and it could not be reported except for one place. What happens as a result of weather had an influence on the election are not the result of it is we have a part of the segment of the country is said repeatedly says the Intelligence Community interfered so wide that is relevant here is because no matter who this Disinformation Campaign is geared toward the other side is going to say people issuing a warning or the people who are interfering in the elections on behalf have the candidate they favor or they think we have to begin by understanding if something were to happen if tomorrow there was a video of very convincing video for candidates and lets not say presentday u. S. Senate or congress and the video comes out with 72 hours to go before election day of that candidate saying some or doing something. But its fake. Who is in charge of letting people know this is fake, this thing is not real. So that we can have people coming to the ballot box believing that something is not real is real and influence our election. I asked myself whoever is in charge of this what are we doing to protect the credibility of the entity that whoevers whoever is in charge of saying it so the other side does not come out and say our own government is interfering in the election. I think we will be struggling with this for very long time because the rations are the best at doing it and have been doing it a long time so they perfected it every election cycle more and more cast of characters are joining the parade here in terms of getting into the business and i think in the years to come we will see more and more nationstates and maybe nonstate actors begin to not just come after us in our elections and political process that those of other countries as well. This issue is not going away anytime soon and i think it will accelerate and its going to get worse and we need to rail out some lay out some parameters about how we will respond to these things in a coordinated way so we know ahead of time and opposed to the out hot races in which its been handled in years past in terms of responding to the misinformation piece of it. Its a tough one to handle but its one we have to get a handle on. I think dr. Haines are you going to lead us off . Sounds good. Thank you very much. I really appreciate having the opportunity to brief you on the Intelligence CommitteeElection Security work alongside my colleague says the fbi career leading efforts to take action to secure our elections and local state and local officials were on the frontline of this work. U. S. Government efforts to protect our elections have improved significantly since the 2016 president ial election and even as the Threat Landscape is becoming increasingly complicated its my view the u. S. Government has never been better prepared to address the challenge. Protecting our democratic processes from foreign influence or interference is an absolute priority for the Intelligence Community. Our efforts are effectively organize at the foreign malign influence under our fmi see which houses the election threats executive and the election threats executive lead to coordinate in emigres the activities initiatives and programs in this realm and fundamentally we support the federal government particularly david leslie genereux and fbi as they worked to secure elections as well a as state and local Election Officials across the country to manage and secure the election infrastructure and a daytoday basis. We do by ensuring our resources are aligned in the election and also so we are able to identify and mitigate foreign threats to our election and communicator assessment to our federal partners to you in congress to state and local officials and to the American People. We facilitate a framework that ensures when relevant information is collected concerning foreign influence and at our election they can take action while most of the identifications are not public here are few and to get few and to get its merits in which public notifications are appropriate and doing so would render the foreign aid operation if its part of that mandate. A course exposing a foreign actors efforts is only one way in which we counter election threats. We support the Law Enforcement reaches the disrupt operations through legal action including the disruption of Financial Networks and we also support cybercalm with a range of Cyber Operations to ensure foreign adversaries cannot use their Digital Infrastructure to attack our elections. Using every tool we have is critical as the challenge is expanding for the last several years we have seen three trends that make the Threat Landscape more diverse and more complex. First they are an increasing number of foreign actors and nonstate entities who are looking to engage in election influence activities. Second they are more commercial firms through red state actors are able to conduct election influence activities often increasing the sophistication of such activities while making it more challenging to track down the original indicator of the foreign influence effort in third perhaps most obviously relevant emerging Technology Particularly genitive ai and Data Analytics are increasing the threat by enabling influence actors who conduct targeted campaigns reducing the number of relatively sophisticated influence operations and content and further complicating attribution. Ford sample innovation and ai has enabled foreign influence actors to produce seemingly authentic and tailored messaging more efficiently at greater scale and with content adapted for different languages and cultures. In fact we party seemed genitive ai being used in the context of foreign elections. In september 20232 days before the parliamentary elections in slovakia estate audio recording was released on line in which one can discuss how to rig the upcoming election with a journalist for the audience quickly was shown to be fake signs of ai manipulation that under soapbox slovakian loggers a commentary about the election 48 hours before the polls open and since it beats deep stay was released news and government organizations struggle to stop them in a position of the victim of the deep state ended up losing in a close election. To position enabled foreign efforts we have the i. T. Group focused on multimedia that leverages semantic Forensics Technology among other tools and enables those in the iec who are working on Election Security to rapidly access media Forensic Experts to facilitate the authentication of foreign suspect media related to the u. S. Election. Members of this group regularly engaged technical experts inside and outside the government to ensure we are applying the latest techniques and state and local officials have concerns about media that is suspected to be synthetic or manipulated to violate the law or is tied to foreign actor they can request authentication to the fbi. Of course the most significant foreign actors who engage in foreign influence activity directed at the United States in relation to our elections are russia, the peoples republic of china and iran. Specifically russia remains the most active foreign threat to our elections. The russian Government Operations tend to include eroding trust in Democratic Institutions exacerbating sociopolitical divisions divisions in United States integrating western support to ukraine. Russia relies on the vast influence apparatus which consists of its Intelligence Services cyber actors proxies and social media.