What's At Stake.

The security, resilience and integrity of the American election system.

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Welcome to the first US election featuring audio and visual “deep fakes” and the cyber-hacking of U.S. infrastructure for the purpose of destabilizing American democracy.

We’ve not been here before. Bad actors, foreign and domestic, are perfecting the art of AI-enabled deception. There might be audio of former President Obama, for instance, speaking to friends in a crowded restaurant, saying “You don’t really realize how old Biden is until you meet with him privately. It’s like he’s not there.”

That audio will sound exactly like Mr. Obama. The busy restaurant background noise will be actual audio from a busy restaurant. The elements for this hypothetical “deep fake” audio will be stitched together and co-produced by advanced artificial intelligence. You won’t be able to tell the difference between “real” Obama and “deep fake” Obama, because you can’t. The quality of the “forgery” is that good.

If you think these deep fakes can be ring-fenced, and kept separate from the “news” about the 2024 presidential election, think again. Deep fake Obama is perfect for social media. It’s short, it’s intriguing and it’s one-click “share-able.” Indeed, something like it (and others like it) will be shared millions of times on social media throughout the election season. Every day.

It will reach a point, probably in early October, when the first question asked about a social media political “post” will be: “Is that AI or is it real?” If it’s just audio, you and I will not be able to answer the question. The only honest answer will be, “I don’t know.”

Deep fake video is easier to spot. It’s not “perfect” the way deep fake audio is. That does not mean we won’t be flooded with short, deep fake video clips on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, Threads, Telegram, Discord, and the others. Thousands and thousands of them will make the rounds, some humorous, some crazy, some “serious,” some supposedly “official.” None of them will be "true.”

The net effect of this avalanche of deep fake audio/video will be distrust. Tens of millions of deep fake audio/video posts and “re-shares” will overwhelm any ability we have to sort out what is true and what is not. We don’t have the time. We don’t have the expertise. If we can’t sort it out quickly, we won’t sort it out. We’ll only trust people and sources we already trust.

That will be the mental landscape as we enter the final two weeks of the 2024 campaign; an unhappy electorate entering the final two weeks of an unhappy election. It’s during these two weeks that our adversaries can and (likely) will wreak havoc.

With deep fake audio and video, “news reports” and “video news clips’ may be untrustworthy. With sophisticated cyber-hacking, we’re talking about the integrity of the election itself.

The Chinese and the Russians and the Iranians and the North Koreans have been working on this for a long time. The Chinese have been testing US cyber-defenses in every part of our lives. They have hacked into power plants, gas pipelines, communications networks, television stations, water systems, healthcare systems, universities, banks, law firms, Silicon Valley start-ups, major US tech companies, the US government, municipal and state governments, countless US corporations, the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, on and on and on.

If they choose to, they can hack the 2024 presidential election. They can shut off the power in Philadelphia. They can turn off the gas in Milwaukee. They can shut down the cell towers in Charlotte and Atlanta. The Wall Street Journal yesterday had a report on China’s capabilities. Here’s a lengthy excerpt:

The U.S. government said it had disrupted a uniquely dangerous and potentially life-threatening Chinese hacking operation that hijacked hundreds of infected routers and used them to covertly target American and allied critical infrastructure networks.

Senior officials described the operation in unusually blunt terms as part of an evolving and increasingly worrisome campaign by Beijing to get a foothold in U.S. computer networks responsible for everything from safe drinking water to aviation traffic so it could detonate, at a moment’s notice, damaging cyberattacks during a future conflict, including over Taiwan.

Wednesday’s announcement was part of an effort by senior Biden administration officials to underscore what Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray called the “apocalyptic scenarios” animating their fears about China’s advanced and well-resourced hacking prowess. Western intelligence officials say its skill and sophistication has accelerated over the past decade. Officials have grown particularly alarmed at Beijing’s interest in infiltrating U.S. critical infrastructure networks, which they say poses an unrivaled cybersecurity challenge.

“This is a world where a major crisis halfway across the planet could well endanger the lives of Americans here at home through the disruption of our pipelines, the severing of our telecommunications, the pollution of our water facilities, the crippling of our transportation modes—all to ensure they can incite societal panic and chaos and to deter our ability to marshal military might and civilian will,” said Jen Easterly, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, during congressional testimony Wednesday on Chinese cyber threats. 

The activity discovered so far attributed to China, she said, is “likely just the tip of the iceberg.”

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The easiest way to destroy the integrity of the US electoral process is to go where the most people live (cities). From there, you prepare an attack on the voting “infrastructure,” from the voter registration rolls to the operations of the Election Divisions of local and state governments. You also prepare to cut off power and heat to key voting locations on Election Day. You create further chaos by setting off local emergency warnings, shutting down hospitals and public transit, cutting off the water supply.

You bring all of your cyber-hacking skills, battle-tested over the last ten years, and unleash them on the American political system. Do we think that the city of Philadelphia, to pick a city, is up to that challenge? Or the city of Pittsburg? Or the cities of Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta or Phoenix. One hopes.

In 2020, we had an election after which the loser refused to accept the fact of his defeat. Democracy depends upon the consent of the loser. If the loser doesn’t concede, then the integrity of the process (and the government) is damaged. This is why Nixon conceded in 1960, why Ford conceded in 1976, why Gore conceded in 2000. Democracy depended on it.

Six or seven states (PA, MI, WI, GA, NC, AZ, NV) will determine who wins the 2024 election in the Electoral College. The margins of victory in those states will be narrow, maybe 100,000 votes or less. So those six or seven states are “the target” for a major cyber attack.

What happens if one state or two or all seven are won because thousands of urban and/or suburban voters weren’t able to vote, because critical public infrastructure had been hacked? Is there any way to know who really won? Would either of the two major party candidates “concede” under those circumstances?

What stands between us and “foreign interference” into our elections is the federal government. At a hearing before the House Select Committee on China, top officials from the National Security Agency, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI expressed confidence that the Feds were up to the task. This from Politico:

The nation’s top officials charged with protecting U.S. elections against cyber threats say they’re convinced this year’s ballot will be safer than ever — even if foreign nations try to interfere.

“Americans should have confidence in the integrity of our election infrastructure because of the enormous amount of work that’s been done by state and local election officials, by the federal government, by vendors, by the private sector since 2016,” Jen Easterly, head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told the House Select Committee on China on Wednesday.

“It’s that work that should make the American people confident in the security, resilience and integrity of the American election system.”

Gen. Paul Nakasone, head of both U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, separately told reporters Tuesday that this year “will be the most secure elections that we’ve had to date.”

Fears about digital threats to voting have been pronounced since evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election as well as recent advancements in new technologies like artificial intelligence.

President Joe Biden and his administration have also been working to shore up confidence in voting security in the wake of Donald Trump’s widely debunked election fraud claims and ahead of what could be another potential showdown between the two.

“We have an experienced team and I think that we understand the technologies, and I think that our partnerships are much more broad than they’ve ever been before,” Nakasone said, adding that he had not seen any indicators of a major cyberattack against voting being planned this year.

Let’s hope Mr. Nakasone’s assessment is correct. If he’s wrong — and it’s entirely possible that he is — God help us.