United States: The US elections now face more threats than ever from foreign actors, fully empowered by enormous developments in artificial intelligence. On Wednesday, the country’s top intelligence official stated this in a testimony before lawmakers.
Federal, state, and local officials who are charged with ensuring the integrity of the voting process confront a “varied and multi-faceted” threat environment, says the Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, establishing this at a hearing held by the Senate Intelligence Committee about the risks to the elections of 2024, NPR News reported.
On the flip side, she affirmed the federal government “has never been better prepared” to protect elections, thanks to lessons after Russia fed to the voters relations bot in 2016.
Haines said this year, “Russia remains the most active foreign threat to our elections,” and they’re using a “vast multimedia influence apparatus” covering state media, intelligence services, and online trolls, where Russia’s goals “include eroding trust in U.S. democratic institutions, exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the United States, and degrading Western support to Ukraine.”
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Moreover, she highlighted the use of the new AI technologies to create realistic “deepfakes” that are aimed at candidates and commercial firms that foreign actors can use, such as through those firms, to wash away their activities and allow more powerful influence operations that are conducted at a larger scale and are more difficult to trace.
The Wednesday hearing came at the beginning of a series of hearings in the election area, as mentioned by the committee chair, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.). The lawmakers want to make sure a re-occurrence of the 2016 meddling by Russia, which occurred without appropriate readiness on the part of Congress, executive officials, and social media practitioners, is avoided.
Warner added, since then, “the barriers to entry for foreign malign influence have unfortunately become incredibly small,” as NPR News reported.
Adversary countries now have more positive reasons to interfere in US politics, and in the process, their national interests are still manifested. On the other hand, public trust among Americans has plunged, not on any partisan basis.
Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, the Committee’s senior and most ranked Republican demanded to know the dilemmas those same election custodians themselves would face during the revelations that brought such a climate of distrust. However, in two weeks, he invoked the unreal video defamation scandal involving himself or his fellow contenders’ right before the November elections.
He added, “Who is in charge of letting people know this thing is fake, this thing is not real? “And I ask myself, whoever is in charge of it, what are we doing to protect the credibility of the entity that is … saying it so that the other side does not come out and say, ‘Our own government is interfering in the election’?”