- In the electoral year, National Intelligence reveals continuous foreign attacks against U.S. politics.
An increasing number of foreign countries are trying to influence U.S. elections. Among those, the most important ones are Russia, China, and Iran, as a U.S. official told a Senate committee on Wednesday.
To be more specific, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines says that “Russia is still the most active foreign threat we might have to deal with.” According to his latest statement, the Russian government has only one goal: to erode the trust in U.S. democratic institutions, which would further exacerbate sociopolitical divisions in the United States, and also degrade Western support to Ukraine.
Moreover, Democratic Senator Mark Warner, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s chairman, declared that the latest declassified intelligence assessments discovered not just Russia, China, and Iran’s involvement, but also Cuba, Venezuela, and some Islamic militants are trying to seek the influence of U.S. politics.
The senator also listed all the current foreign efforts to influence U.S. elections and public opinion, including multiple harassment operations against candidates and multiple impersonations of U.S. organizations, like Russian imposter social media accounts disguised as the Tennessee Republican Party and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Moreover, Warner added that there are increasingly more Americans, of any political stripes, who simply don’t trust U.S. institutions, from federal agencies and local law enforcement all the way to mainstream media institutions, coupled with an ascending reliance on manipulated Internet media platforms.
Congressional committees started to look into reported foreign, especially Russian, efforts to influence American public opinion, right after U.S. intelligence agencies came to the conclusion that entities supported by the Kremlin sought to boost Republican Donald Trump’s chances of winning the White House in 2016.
Naturally, Moscow denied any kind of involvement.
Trump is currently running for reelection this year, against his biggest opponent, the Democratic President Joe Biden, who already defeated him in 2020. As the elections are getting closer, officials are also increasingly more worried regarding the risks that artificial intelligence might pose to this year’s elections, including the use of convincing “deep fakes” that might trigger the voters.
At the same time, a bipartisan group of senators, which also includes Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, called on Congress on Wednesday to give his approval on $32 billion in funding for AI research and keep the U.S. ahead of China in the powerful technology.
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