Before the 2024 US election the U.S. intelligence community and law enforcement were on high alert and willing to share information—both interagency and publicly—when foreign influence operations emerged. Tech giants like Microsoft have similarly jumped into action, collaborating with government partners and publishing their own information on election-related disinformation campaigns. The speed and certainty with which authorities were able to tie these efforts to threats in Russia, China and Iran was unprecedented. But the researchers also caution that not all attributes are created equal.
At the Cyberwarcon security conference in Arlington, Virginia, researchers from the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab today presented initial findings on the role of attribution in the 2024 US election. Their research compares the impact of the rapid naming and branding of foreign actors of influence with other recent US elections in which attribution to the government has been much less common.
“We’re building on a project we did in 2020 where there was a much larger context of concern that the Trump administration was not forthcoming about foreign attacks,” said Emerson Brooking, director of strategy and resident senior fellow for DFRLab. “Unlike 2020, there have now been abundant allegations by the US government of influence operations conducted by various adversaries. So in thinking about attribution policy, we wanted to look at the question of overcorrection.”
On the eve of the 2016 US presidential election. Russia’s extensive influence operations – which include hacking and leak campaigns, as well as strategic disinformation – have taken the US government by surprise. Law enforcement and the intelligence community were largely aware of Russia’s digital probe, but lacked an extreme sense of urgency, and the big picture of how such activity might affect public discourse had yet to emerge. After Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee in June of that year, it took the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the US Department of Homeland Security four months to publicly attribute the attack to the Kremlin. Some officials have said in the weeks since the incident that official confirmation from the US government may never come.
Even in the highly politicized landscape that followed, federal, state, and local cooperation around election security expanded dramatically. By 2020, the researchers said, 33 of the 84 attributions of influence operations they studied related to the 2020 U.S. election, or about 39 percent, came from U.S. intelligence or federal sources. And this year, 40 of the 80 the group tracked were from the U.S. government. Dina Sadek, a DFRLabs resident, notes, however, that one important factor in evaluating the usefulness of US government attributions is the quality of the information provided. The content and specificity of the information, she says, are important to how the public views the objectivity and credibility of the statement.
Specific information confirming that Russia created a video purporting to show the destruction of ballots in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, is a high-quality and useful attribution, researchers say, because it is direct, narrow in scope and comes very quickly to minimize speculation and doubt . Repeated statements from the office of the director of the National Intelligence Center’s Foreign Malicious Influence Center warning very broadly and generally about Russian influence operations are an example of the type of attribution that can be less helpful and even serve to expand campaigns , which may otherwise not register with the public at all.
Similarly, in the run-up to the 2020 election, the researchers point out, the US government’s statements about Russia, China and Iran playing a role in the Black Lives Matter protests may have been out of step because they did not include details of the scope of the activity or the specific objectives of the participants.
Even with all that in mind, researchers note that there is valuable progress in the 2024 election cycle. But with a new Trump administration in the White House, such transparency may begin to take a different direction.
“We don’t want to come across a rearrangement of sunbeds on Titanicbecause the state of things that was is not what it will be,” says Brooking. “And from a public interest perspective, I think we’ve gotten very close in terms of disclosure in 2024.”
