NSA installs new director as US prepares for election influence operations

USA

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.