National security adviser Jake Sullivan assured voters Thursday in the United States that the country is improving its fight against election interference.
Sullivan appeared at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., less than two weeks from Election Day. His nearly hourlong conversation surrounded the theme of artificial intelligence. During the conversation, an attendee asked the adviser to President Joe Biden if the administration would ever create an “information tsar” position to fight election misinformation. According to Sullivan, there are already working systems in place.
“I think we have actually made substantial progress over the last eight years, but there’s a long way to go,” Sullivan said. “We now have systems in place that actually can pretty rapidly identify deepfakes and call them out,” Sullivan said.
One concern is that the two major political parties in the country tend to disagree often about what messages are tantamount to “misinformation.” However, Sullivan appealed to both parties to take foreign threats seriously.
“We are not where we need to be — I acknowledge that — but I think we are continuing to move forward in a way where this is a top-flight priority for our intelligence community, for our law enforcement, for our NSA and Cybercom officials who are looking at foreign actors engaging in disruptive cyberattacks as part of this effort to undermine the U.S. election,” Sullivan said. “Regardless of whether you’re a Republican or Democrat, you should look at this as a national security issue, as an attack on our country and think, ‘what can we collectively do to harden our resilience?’”
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This comes days after Georgia’s election website experienced a cyberattack earlier this month, affecting its online absentee ballot system.
Cybersecurity company Cloudflare caught the attack before it could take the website offline completely within weeks of the election. Gabriel Sterling, chief operations officer of Georgia’s Secretary of State office, said it was a “probing attack” likely from “a foreign power or entity.”