After the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency announced last week last week to its endowment and programs, several secretaries of state declared to Statescoop that they concern what it could mean for the future Country voting systems.
Their concerns follow the interim director of Cisa Bridget Bean last week circulating a note announcing a “review and evaluation” of each program, service, action and position linked to the agency’s efforts to counter “put, dis- and malinformation”, with results due on March 6.
CBS News last weekend reported that heads of the Department of Homeland Security drawn around 400 employeesciting inadequate performance. This included more than 130 CISA employees, an agency that President Donald Trump created in 2018 to consolidate federal efforts to protect himself from an increasing tide of cyber attacks and foreign interference in the US elections.
Bean’s memo noted that funding has also been interrupted for the Center for the Sharing and Analysis of Information on Elections Infrastructure, or IS-ISAC, a program hosted at the non-profit center for Internet security that provides Training monitoring services, threat monitoring and resource sharing with officials of elections in the state and state and offices of the local government across the country.
A White House spokesperson told Statescoop that the EI-ISAC funds had been eliminated because his work no longer performs the DHS priorities. The funding discounts arise while the DHS “partially ends” from its cooperation agreement with CIS, according to a separate memo of February 14 obtained by Statescoop.
The order technically leaves the non -profit organization in New York free to provide services to the governments of states and local, but without its previous designation, A majority of states are now legally prohibited from accepting its services. A familiar source with the situation, which requested anonymity for fear of reprisals, said that these changes would probably close Ei-ISAC.
The White House spokesman said that funding was not eliminated for the CIS multiple information sharing and analysis center, which provides surveillance, training and other cybersecurity services Apart from the election space. The spokesperson refused to provide additional clarifications on the CISA programs affected by the cuts.
‘A difficult place’
The secretary of state of the New Mexico, Maggie Toulouse Oliver, a democrat who, during Trump’s first mandate, praised the work of his administration in the creation of the CISA and to convene experts to improve the security of the Nation’s electoral infrastructure, said to Statescoop that it was now “very concerned” by the cuts, in particular how they will affect the electoral offices of rural counties that leaned On financing and free technical services provided by the CSA.
“It’s a difficult place to be,” said Toulouse Oliver. “Most of us start our legislative sessions. Ours is very short in new-mexic and we did not even have knowledge of knowledge to be able to relay our legislature that we were going to lose on many of these tools and resources. »»
It is common for small local governments to use team technology only a handful of people – or for the smallest county offices, for a single employee divides time between IT and other responsibilities. Toulouse Oliver said that the two most useful services that Cisa and Ei-Isac offered included “robust” penetration tests, which alerted vulnerability officials in their voting systems, and Albert sensors. In recent years, CIS has distributed more than 1,000 of the aircraft to the governments of states and local governments, which act as an early alert system for the activity of the abnormal network.
“I can have all the Albert sensors on my systems, but I am connected to 33 counties,” said Toulouse Oliver. “And if one of these counties does not have an Albert sensor, it is a county that we are potentially lacking which can have an increase in strange traffic. It is just worrying that it seems that these two things will disappear and we will have to find a way to pay them. »»
Toulouse Oliver said that in addition to free services, his condition also received $ 1 million a year via the America vote law, a 2002 law created by former president George W. Bush who instantiated new standards For voting systems and has established a new accessibility and authentication rules for voters. Hava has also created the election assistance committee, an independent exchange center for information on electoral administration. Toulouse Oliver said that some were concerned that the Trump administration could start reducing funding and programs at the EAC.
“I can guarantee you that it will be a great success for our office and it is relative compared to the little counties, who already have enough resources,” she said about the recent Cisa cuts. “To be honest, we get rid of, try to understand what we can keep.”
‘For Americans’
Cybersecurity efforts in the government have traditionally benefited from non -partisan status and Bipartisan support. David J. Becker, executive director and founder of the non -profit center for innovation and electoral research, said that he thought that the expertise developed at CISA in the past seven years has become a victim of the policy.
“What Cisa was able to do is provide a kind of vision of cyber-men’s birds that could affect our national electoral infrastructure,” said Becker. “Since the elections are directed in the United States, each state does not have a large entity as the Federal Department of Internal Security. They therefore helped them bring the pieces together.
Beyond cybersecurity, the CISA has also helped the electoral offices to physical security, to prepare and to answer threats of violence Against electoral workers and white powder envelopes, as well as disinformation campaigns targeting the elections. The disinformation of the voting process – as an assertion without repeated foundation by Trump that the 2020 presidential election has been faked against him – is another threat than the CISA and the community of elections as a whole have known a certain success in buffer in recent years.
“It seems that even if our foreign opponents are only accelerating their efforts, with massive disinformation campaigns, with specific targeted campaigns, we are now actually unilaterally disarming,” said Becker. “I imagine that our opponents celebrate this because they plan their next attacks.”
Becker awarded the Trump administration for the success of the CISA in the fight against the disinformation campaigns of the elections, which, according to him, do not necessarily promote a particular party in the United States. He underlined the trend of Russia to promote Republicans, Iran’s preference for Democrats and the penchant of China to sow chaos.
“The US elections should be for the Americans,” said Becker. “They should not be for foreign opponents to mislead the American people. And that was something that we all agreed on a bipartite basis, apparently until recently. »»
‘A major error’
The Federal Trade Commission Thursday announced an investigation In “potentially illegal” and “unfair” censorship practices of technological platforms. A press release encourages “users of the platform that have been prohibited, prohibited, demonetized or otherwise censored shadow” to share their stories with the agency.
And the New York Times reported Thursday That the Trump administration continued to retreat from government work to lower foreign disinformation campaigns, reaffecting several dozen officials at the FBI and the CISA which had been assigned to the task.
The movements reversed the posture of the government in recent years, when the authorities have sought to identify and counter the disinformation put in order against the 16 sectors Cisa designated As a critical infrastructure, a group that also includes the electrical network, transport and water systems.
“I do not think that the elections sector differs from any other sector that enjoys the critical designation of infrastructure,” said Steve Simon, Secretary of State of Minnesota. “This means that if a foreign opponent runs false stories and ment on any sector, I think we should have people from the federal government who are there to identify and repel it. I think it would be a major mistake and a danger to national security to abandon the disinformation mission. »»
Simon, a democrat who was elected secretary of state for the first time in 2014, said that when he learned foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election, he was “shocked and indignant”. Minnesota was one of the 21 states where pirates of nation state Targeted websites and electoral systemsIn some cases, theft of information on voters, although they did not succeed in Minnesota.
This election has “changed everything,” he said, noting that a lesson gleaned during the intermediate years has been that election security can only be managed effectively by the government.
The secretary of the DHS, Kristi Noem, said In recent weeks, as its agency reorganizes, it plans to make more use of the private sector to defend the country’s digital infrastructure.
“They are aware of information information and other information that no private seller could never know,” said Simon. “So, in the end, it is not only a question of probing our systems and finding potential clean points. It is a question of giving us usable suggestions which are linked to intelligence assessments on what exists and what is likely to come. »»
He argued that the Trump administration, like any new administration, should be given room to assess the work of Cisa and its organizational table, but that certain basic services should remain, including its penetration tests, its services physical security, threat assessments and “intelligence briefings with closed doors. “”
“These are services on which, at my observation, the secretaries of state across the country have really come to count,” he said.
