Crunchtime for Election Interference: October Is the Month of Mischief

U.S. officials are stepping up their warnings about foreign interference in the election, focused on three main adversaries: Russia, China and Iran.

Federal officials battling foreign interference in the coming election say they are entering what may be the most perilous period of the campaign: October, when the prospect for mischief runs high and the time to react runs short.

While the Russians make little attempt to hide their support for former President Donald J. Trump, the Iranians — among Moscow’s most important suppliers in the war in Ukraine — desperately want to stop him from returning to office, and are busy hacking into his campaign and dumping whatever they find, as well as plotting to assassinate him. The Justice Department is expected to announce, likely as soon as Friday, the indictment of an Iranian hacking group closely associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for the hack of the Trump campaign, along with efforts to attack the accounts of Washington journalists and others.

And China, once expected to be a major player in the election, seems uncertain which candidate it detests more. So, for now, Beijing is focusing on local races, conducting influence operations that have the potential to undermine public faith in the basic democratic process.

That has been the essence of a series of private intelligence briefings for election workers and members of Congress recently, as U.S. officials describe the stark, oftentimes confusing battlefield in which disinformation ramps up and the risk of cyberattacks is greatest.

At first glance, those briefings sound right out of the playbooks from 2016 and 2020. During one such meeting on Sept. 13, U.S. officials said Russia remained “the most active foreign influence threat” and other countries were flooding the internet with messages meant to “stoke discord and undermine confidence in our electoral process.”

But as the briefing went on it was clear that what may unfold in the next month and a half includes some new features that American election officials have never seen before.

Russia may be fully behind Mr. Trump, despite Vladimir V. Putin’s assertions to the contrary. But in this election cycle, its efforts might be partially canceled out by Iran — Russia’s ally in most everything these days — working the other side. China’s position is a muddle. And on the election-manipulation front, there are new worries, focusing on whether techniques used by criminals to freeze up the operations of American cities, companies and hospitals could be used to similar effect as Americans prepare to vote.

“What is going to be happening in the next two months is going to be an onslaught,” said Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He said foreign powers “are getting more active, more aggressive.”

The scenarios that worry American officials are legion. While the actual balloting processes being used on Nov. 5 seem safer than in previous elections — 97 percent of votes cast will involve some form of paper backup that makes recounts far more reliable — federal officials have been war-gaming the possibility that registration systems become locked up, perhaps in what may initially look like the kind of ransomware attacks that have closed down city services in Baltimore or Atlanta, or that have hit the Seattle airport.

The fear is that if it becomes difficult to register voters in the final weeks before an election, it could skew the results on Nov. 5 — or, alternatively, give an opening to seemingly pro-Trump election officials who have taken power in a few key states, like Georgia, and give them an excuse not to certify the vote.

Because of the threats, intelligence officials have been stepping up their unclassified and classified briefings, including a closed-door meeting for senators on Wednesday. Officials also held a highly classified briefing for the House Intelligence Committee last week, a session that quickly became contentious, with Republicans raising questions about the intelligence around Russian intentions, according to officials briefed on the meeting.

Those complaints echoed Republican criticisms of years past, as Mr. Trump has questioned American intelligence assessments of Russia and Mr. Putin, and accused the F.B.I. and U.S. intelligence agencies of falsifying narratives of Russian interference.

What is different this year is how aggressively the U.S. government is warning of possible election threats, hoping that a bit of advance education will reduce the ability of foreign actors to have much effect come Election Day, or in any recounts. That is a major change from eight years ago, when it took the Obama administration months to formally name and charge Russian actors with election interference, a step that came only after Mr. Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton. Jen Easterly, the head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which has primary federal authority for helping the states defend election systems, said the U.S. government this year was undertaking a far more sophisticated effort to make sure the public is aware “of what these actors are doing and how they are doing it.”

No matter whom the foreign powers favor, Ms. Easterly said, they have common goals.

“The two main goals are to undermine American confidence in the security of our election and our democratic institutions and to sow partisan discord,” she said in an interview. “Those are the two goals of all our foreign adversaries.”

This year, officials are worried that a big portion of the ever more polarized electorate is divided even on the issue of election interference. When Mr. Trump warns that someone, somewhere is working to manipulate the vote — an accusation he makes with increasing stridency and regularity — he is usually talking about his domestic political opponents and election workers. When Democrats talk about interference, they are often pointing at Russia — and its fondness for Mr. Trump.

“To the extent our intelligence services can determine that misinformation and mistrust in our election is of foreign origin, it is fair game to defend against and announce,” said Mr. King, the Senate Intelligence Committee member.

Mr. King invoked Federalist No. 68, in which Alexander Hamilton called out foreign intervention in our politics as a grave threat. “It is pretty prescient,” Mr. King said. “Here it is, 200 plus years later, and we are seeing it playing out in real time.”

During last week’s hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee, lawmakers quizzed representatives of Microsoft, Meta and Alphabet, Google and YouTube’s parent company, about their efforts to defend against foreign influence efforts.

Senator Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat who leads the panel, said foreign adversaries “are more incentivized than ever to intervene in our elections.”

America’s support for Ukraine under the Democratic administration means the November vote has big stakes for Russia.

“Putin understands that influencing public opinion and shaping the elections in the United States is a cheap way to erode Western support for Ukraine and undermine America’s standing in the world,” he said.

In their most recent report to the public this week, U.S. intelligence officials announced that Russia and Iran had been using generative artificial intelligence technology to give a boost to their election influence efforts. The intelligence officials said that the use of A.I. had not been revolutionary, but instead had allowed foreign powers to produce better material more quickly.

Russia, the intelligence officials said, may have used A.I. along with standard editing tools to produce falsified versions of speeches by Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, adding words she did not say in what sounds like her voice.

Still, the use of artificial intelligence in videos remains difficult to pull off, and less artful uses of it are relatively easy to identify. And so Russia has continued to use old-school fake videos, using actors and fake story lines, to push some of their messages.

The intelligence agencies’ findings echoed work done this month by Microsoft, which reported a shift by Russian operatives to attack Ms. Harris. Russia appears to have been initially caught flat-footed when President Biden exited the race. And for days after Ms. Harris took his place, Russian operatives continued to push out videos accusing the Biden family of corruption, said Clint Watts, the head of the Threat Analysis Center at Microsoft.

“It took the Kremlin a couple weeks to figure out what they wanted to say about Vice President Harris, what attack lines they wanted to pursue,” Mr. Watts said, adding: “You see all the Russian actors focusing on the U.S. election now.”