Air Force Gen. Timothy D. Haugh took command of the National Security Agency and Cyber Command on Friday as the intelligence community and military braced for renewed attempts by foreign adversaries to influence American elections this year.
General Haugh replaces Army Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, who took over in 2018 and helped focus the NSA and Cyber Command on countering foreign efforts to interfere in American elections. The NSA collects communications information such as telephone calls and computer traffic, and Cyber Command conducts operations on computer networks.
General Haugh’s first task will be to protect the 2024 presidential election from outside interference and look for operations that use new artificial intelligence strategies.
Intelligence agencies say they don’t know whether China will stay on the sidelines or step up its activities this year. But officials have said Russia is likely to expand its efforts over the course of the 2022 midterm elections. Russian President Vladimir V. Putin has a lot at stake in this year’s election, as Democrats support continued funding for Ukraine’s war against Russia and Republicans become increasingly skeptical of such help.
Shortly after taking office in 2018, General Nakasone founded the so-called Russia Small Group, a team of experts from the NSA and Cyber Command to detect and prevent attempts by Moscow to interfere in elections.
At the time, General Haugh led Cyber Command’s National Mission Force, which conducts offensive and defensive operations on computer networks. General Nakasone selected General Haugh to lead the group, along with NSA official Anne Neuberger, now deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technologies.
This group identified the Russians who conducted influence operations in the 2018 midterm elections. Cyber Command warned some of them to discourage further action and later shut down servers run by a Russian troll farm that supported Russian intelligence.
Following his time with 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.
In a discussion with reporters this week, General Nakasone said that after his arrival, the NSA and Cyber Command began ramping up efforts to find out who was trying to influence elections – and then stop them.
“We would act and impose costs on any adversary who would attempt to influence or interfere in our elections,” Gen. Nakasone said.
With the NSA now working more closely with technology and cybersecurity firms, it is often possible to pinpoint intrusions to an enemy country within seven days, Gen. Nakasone said.
“There isn’t much discussion in cyberspace anymore about how difficult it is to make attribution,” he said. “We have become much more sophisticated in our ability to work with a range of partners to figure this out.”
But other countries are trying to influence the US elections, including China and Iran.
During the 2022 midterm elections, Gen. Nakasone said, Chinese operators increased their efforts to influence certain races. Although their interest in this year’s vote is unclear, China and technologies related to artificial intelligence pose a long-term challenge for the NSA and Cyber Command.
Gen. Nakasone said China represents “the generational challenge of our time, and I think we are only at the beginning of truly understanding how much we need to change.”
The way Cyber Command conducts operations and the way the NSA collects intelligence varies from month to month as new technologies become widespread and new vulnerabilities are discovered.
China has already experimented with artificial intelligence in influence operations, and intelligence agencies expect countries to try to use new technologies to make their campaigns more credible.
Gen. Nakasone said the smartphone was the “most disruptive technology” of his lifetime, but generative AI could have just as profound an impact.
“It is critical for us to maintain our country’s lead in this technology,” he said.
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2024-02-02 20:03:56
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