Air Force Gen. Timothy D. Haugh took the helm of the National Security Agency and Cyber ​​Command on Friday, as the intelligence community and the military braced for renewed efforts by foreign adversaries to influence this year's U.S. elections.

General Haugh replaces Army Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, who took over in 2018 and helped focus the NSA and Cyber ​​Command on countering foreign attempts to interfere in the U.S. elections. The NSA collects communications information, such as telephone calls and computer traffic, and Cyber ​​Command conducts operations on computer networks.

Securing the 2024 presidential election from outside interference and seeking out operations that take advantage of new artificial intelligence strategies will be General Haugh's first order of business.

Intelligence agencies say they don't know whether China will stay on the sidelines or increase its activities this year. But officials have said Russia is likely to expand its efforts during the 2022 midterm elections. For President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, the stakes are enormous in this year's election, with Democrats supporting continued financing of Ukraine in its war against Russia and Republicans growing increasingly skeptical of such aid.

Shortly after taking over in 2018, General Nakasone created what he called the Russia Small Group, a team of experts from the NSA and Cyber ​​Command, to uncover and deter Moscow's attempts to interfere in the elections. to be scared.

At the time, General Haugh led Cyber ​​Command's National Mission Force, which conducts offensive and defensive operations on computer networks. General Nakasone has selected General Haugh to help lead the group, along with NSA official Anne Neuberger, who is now deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology.

That group identified the Russians who conducted influence operations in the 2018 midterm elections. Cyber ​​Command warned some of them to deter further action and later disabled servers operated by a Russian troll farm that supported Russian intelligence.

After his time in the Cyber ​​National Mission Force, General Haugh held posts at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland in Texas before returning to Fort Meade, Maryland, in 2022 to become deputy chief of Cyber ​​Command.

Speaking to reporters this week, General Nakasone said that when he arrived, the NSA and Cyber ​​Command began stepping up their efforts to understand who was trying to influence the election — and then stop them.

“We would act and impose costs on any opponent who would attempt to influence or interfere with our elections,” General Nakasone said.

Because the NSA now works more closely with technology and cybersecurity companies, it is often possible to attribute intrusions to a hostile country within seven days, General Nakasone said.

“There's not much discussion in cyberspace anymore about how difficult it is to do attribution,” he said. “We've become much more sophisticated, in terms of our ability to work with a range of partners to determine that.”

But more countries are trying to influence the US elections, including China and Iran.

During the 2022 midterm elections, General Nakasone said, Chinese operators have stepped up their efforts to influence specific races. While their interest in this year's vote is not clear, China and the technologies associated with artificial intelligence pose a long-term challenge for the NSA and Cyber ​​Command.

General Nakasone said China “poses the generational challenge of our time, and I think we are just at the beginning of really understanding how much we will have to change.”

The way Cyber ​​Command conducts operations and the NSA collects intelligence varies from month to month as new technologies become widely used and new vulnerabilities are discovered.

China has already experimented with artificial intelligence in influence operations, and intelligence agencies expect countries will try to use new technology to make their campaigns more credible.

General Nakasone said the smartphone has been the “most disruptive technology” of his lifetime, but generative AI could have an equally big impact.

“Maintaining our country's lead in this technology is critical to us,” he said.

The National Security Agency purchases certain logs relating to Americans' domestic Internet activities from commercial data brokers an unclassified letter from the agency.

The letter, addressed to a Democratic senator and obtained by The New York Times, offered few details about the nature of the data, other than to say it did not include the content of Internet communications.

Still, the revelation is the latest to highlight a legal gray area: Intelligence and law enforcement agencies sometimes purchase potentially sensitive and revealing domestic data from brokers that require a court order to acquire it directly.

It comes as the Federal Trade Commission has launched a crackdown on companies trading in personal location data collected through smartphone apps and sold without people's knowledge and consent about where it would end up and for what purpose it would be used .

In a letter to the director of national intelligence On Thursday, Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, argued that “Internet metadata” — logs that show when two computers communicated, but not the content of any message — “can be as sensitive” as the location data the FTC relies on focuses. .

He urged the intelligence community to stop buying Internet data on Americans if it is not collected according to the standard the FTC has set for location data.

“The U.S. government should not fund and legitimize a dark industry whose blatant violations of American privacy are not only unethical, but illegal,” Mr. Wyden wrote.

A representative for Director of National Intelligence Avril D. Haines did not respond to a request for comment.

The NSA made his specific disclosure under pressure in a letter sent to Mr. Wyden last month by outgoing director Gen. Paul M. Nakasone. The senator arrived in November placed a hold on President Biden's nominee to be the agency's next director, Lt. Gen. Timothy D. Haugh, to prevent the Senate from voting on his confirmation until the agency publicly announced whether it was purchasing Americans' location data and web browsing data.

In the letter, General Nakasone wrote that his agency had decided to disclose that it purchases and uses several types of commercially available metadata for its foreign intelligence and cybersecurity missions, including netflow data “pertaining to entirely domestic Internet communications.”

Netflow data generally means Internet metadata that shows when computers or servers have connected but does not include the content of their interactions. Such data can be generated when people visit different websites or use smartphone apps, but the letter does not specify the level of detail of the data the agency is purchasing.

Asked for clarification, an NSA official issued a statement saying the agency purchases commercially available netflow data for its cybersecurity mission to track, identify and thwart foreign hackers. It emphasized that “the NSA takes steps at all stages to minimize the collection of U.S. personal information,” including by using technical means to filter it.

The statement added that it limited its network data to Internet communications where one side is a computer address in the United States “and the other side is foreign, or where one or both communicants are foreign intelligence targets, such as a malicious cyber actor.” ”

While General Nakasone also acknowledged that some of the data the NSA is purchasing “is associated with electronic devices used outside – and in some cases within – the United States,” he said the agency has not purchased any domestic location data, nor from phones or internet-connected cars known to be in the country.

Mr. Wyden, a longtime privacy advocate and surveillance skeptic who has access to classified information as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has proposed legislation that would ban the government from purchasing data on Americans that would otherwise require a court order.

In early 2021, he received a memo revealing that the Defense Intelligence Agency is purchasing commercially available databases containing location data from smartphone apps and has searched them several times without a warrant for Americans' previous movements. The senator has tried to convince the government to publicly reveal more about its practices.

The correspondence with Mr. Wyden, some of which was redacted as confidential, strongly suggested that other branches of the Defense Department were also purchasing such data.

Law enforcement and intelligence agencies outside the Defense Department are also purchasing data on Americans in ways that are gaining increasing attention. In September, the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general said has criticized some of its units for purchasing and using smartphone location data in violation of the privacy policy. Customs and Border Protection has also indicated this that it would stop buying such data.

Another letter to Mr. Wyden, by Ronald S. Moultrie, the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, said that obtaining and using such data from commercial brokers was subject to several safeguards.

He said the Pentagon used the data lawfully and responsibly to carry out its various missions, including tracking hackers and protecting U.S. military personnel. There is no legal barrier to purchasing data that is “equally available for purchase to foreign adversaries, U.S. companies and private individuals as it is to the U.S. government,” he added.

But in his own letter to Ms. Haines, Mr. Wyden urged the intelligence agencies to change their practices, pointing to the Federal Trade Commission's recent crackdown on companies that sell personal information.

This month, the FTC has banned a data broker formerly known as X-Mode Social of the sale of location data as part of a unique settlement. The agreement stated that the agency considers trade location data – collected without consumers' consent that it would be sold to government contractors for national security purposes – as a violation of a provision of the Federal Trade Commission Act that prohibits unfair and deceptive practices. practices.

And last week the FTC unveiled a proposed settlement with another data aggregator, InMarket Media, banning the company from selling precise location data if it has not fully informed customers and obtained their consent – ​​even if the government is not involved.

While the NSA does not appear to be purchasing data that contains location information, Mr. Wyden argued that Internet metadata can also reveal sensitive things — such as whether someone visits websites about counseling related to topics like suicide, substance abuse or sexual abuse, or other private matters, for example if someone is looking for abortion pills by mail order.

In his letter, he wrote that the action against .”