The National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command recently reestablished their election security team to help secure the 2022 midterm elections. In light of Independent Sen. Angus King’s push for Cybercom to produce unclassified reports connected with each biennial election, which comes on the heels of increased alarm about foreign election interference and diminishing faith in the integrity of U.S. elections, this is the last time the team should be reassembled. U.S. democracy would be more secure with a permanent, not periodic, presence in preventing and mitigating foreign interference attacks.
First, foreign interference is a strategy, not a tactic – and that means attacks are executed over a continuous time period, and are not episodic in nature. So must be our defenses. While discussion of nation-state influence operations may often focus on efforts to interfere with major U.S. elections, adversaries, such as Russia, have repeatedly demonstrated that they seek to undermine democracies and their institutions on an ongoing basis through any number of means, including disinformation, emerging technologies, malign finance and cyber-attacks.
