In this special election security-focused episode of Inside the Media Minds, our hosts Madison Farabaugh, Luca Pagni and Christine Blake sat down with John Sakellariadis of POLITICO, Joao-Pierre S. Ruth of InformationWeek and Derek Johnson of CyberScoop to hear their key focus areas surrounding the 2024 Presidential election cycle.
From the potential legal battles, deep fakes, cyberattacks and the continued spreading of disinformation, this trio discusses the topics they are most focused on leading up to the 2024 election. Our guests highlight the significance of the election security beat and the importance of ensuring their coverage puts the impact of the news into the proper context. Additionally, they discuss how it’s important to ensure information is truthful and not “putting napalm on a match” in an already divisive cycle.
How Deep are Deep Fakes?
Is AI playing the role we thought it would in the election? Maybe and maybe not. The reporters have different thoughts on the impact of deep fakes and AI-generated images on voters. However, with the recent use of AI-generated images of Taylor Swift, nation-states’ attempts to use AI to influence elections around the world, and ongoing efforts to educate voters on understanding and identifying when AI is being used, the reporters agree that the consideration of and legislation around these technologies will continue to be important.
To hear more from John, Joao-Pierre and Derek on the security concerns and potential legislation surrounding and following the upcoming November election, what they’re looking to cover in the next few months and more, tune in below or read the full transcript.
Timestamps:
0:38 – Reporter Introductions
5:28 – Most Interesting Storylines Surrounding 2024 Election
14:27 – Security Concerns That Need Attention
25:06 – Election Guiding Legislation
37:59 – Final Thoughts
Want more from Inside the Media Minds? Find all of our past episodes here!
Transcript
Christine Blake (CB): Welcome to Inside the Media Minds. This is your host, Christine Blake. This show features in-depth interviews with tech reporters who share everything from their biggest pet peeves to their favorite stories, from our studio at W2 Communications. Let’s go inside the media minds.
Madison Farabaugh (MF): Hi everyone, and welcome to our special election security focused episode of Inside the Media Minds, where we interviewed several reporters for their perspectives on the most pressing stories and trends that they’re observing on the front lines. I’m your host, Madison Farabaugh here with my cohost, Luca Pagni.
Luca Pagni (LP): For this episode, we had the pleasure of interviewing John Sakellariadis, cybersecurity reporter at POLITICO, Joao-Pierre Ruth, senior editor at Information Week, and Derek Johnson, reporter at CyberScoop, before we dove into questions. We asked each guest to give us a rundown of their background and current role, to kick things off we turn it over to John first.
John Sakellariadis (JS): Right? So have to go back in history a little bit. Basically, I’ve been interested in cybersecurity policy dating back, I guess, almost a decade at this point, which is kind of crazy, if you kind of include it within the ambit of national general, national security tech themes that have always really kind of captured my enthusiasm. So in my first job out of college, I actually worked at a think tank doing national security research, kind of hybrid warfare type stuff, and that’s where I started really looking into cyber security as a super interesting topic. I ended up doing a master’s program kind of focused on cyber policy, and for a period of time, thought I would work for the government or the hill, doing something the tech, Nat-sec intersection, you know, ideally cybersecurity. Hopefully I’m not blabbering too much, but the pandemic sort of scuttled my plans. And as I was I had a job I was waiting to start, and in the interim, because the pandemic had delayed things. I started freelance writing. I was actually, actually working, interning, interning as an NGO, or interning at an NGO, who did some cybersecurity work as well. But I started reporting. And I didn’t really have a background in journalism, though I knew I loved writing and talking to folks and just kind of learning. And I focused on cybersecurity because the thing I knew, the way I could like pitch stories was, hey, here’s an interesting thing in cybersecurity that you that your outlet should be aware of. And to make a long story short, I fell in love with journalism because I really like meeting all these interesting people, learning new topics, and it’s just constantly a little bit of an adventure. And I love that about it. So decided I wanted to go into journalism. And the first official job I had was writing the cybersecurity newsletter at POLITICO, which was which was great. I think generally, the candidates for that job at POLITICO know a ton about Congress and not that much about tech or cybersecurity. I was the exact opposite. You know, couldn’t remember how a bill got made. Had to go back to the drawing board and a lot of basic things, but it’s been really great. So I guess the last biographical details that I moved off the newsletter about a year ago, though I still contribute. So that’s me.
Joao-Pierre Ruth (JPR): Joao-Pierre Ruth. I am the senior editor for Information Week. I’ve been with the team at Information Week for a bit more than five years now, I’ve been a journalist for 27 years, I guess. Get my start in newspapers as we move from the print world into the digital world and all the trials and tribulations that the media has kind of seen trying to get their arms around that, of course, still continuing to grasp this ever evolving world of technology and digital media and digital everything these days, freelance, For a bit, I’ve covered a broad spectrum of different types of Business and Technology different outlets. So these days, I’m covering with Information Week. We focus on enterprise technology and trends, you know, doing more on the editing side, but I do get in the trenches, you know, talking about policy when I can, you know, definitely looking at cybersecurity, lot of other things. So yeah,
Derek Johnson (DJ): I started at CyberScoop in January. And my primary beat is election security, which is something that I covered in 2017 through the 2020 election. Did not cover the 2022 midterms, but back on the election security beat for the presidential cycle. So that’s, you know, that’s where a lot of my, my copy has, has been directed. But I also cover a lot of different topics. That’s kind of how things work at CyberScoop. You sort of, you have a everyone here has a really well-rounded knowledge base. And. So it would not, it’s not out of turn. If you, you know, wouldn’t be out of turn if you saw me covering a story about critical infrastructure or a policy story or surveillance or privacy story. And you know, same for the other reporters too. You know you’ll have other reporters cover election security, and so, you know, so elections, but, but, but many other things as well.
MF: Great. Now that we’ve learned a bit more about our guests, let’s dive into our first question, what aspect of election security will you all be most interested in covering and hearing new scoops on ahead of this year’s election?
JS: I am incredibly fascinated interested in and think it’s an important, thing to cover in potential legal fights that are going to arise around the 2024 election. We know in 2020 there were sort of these challenges built on the fly to the vote count, to the certification process that also obviously culminated in the attack on the Capitol on January 6. And if you’ve been following this this space closely, I guess it’s surprising or not that the Republican Party in particular has been sort of transparent about the fact that they were not ready for these types of legal challenges that they wanted to mount four years ago, and have been building out teams of folks to help scrutinize the the electoral or the vote count and certification process, including sort of equipping legal experts to be ready if they encounter anything that they think is a violation of of the integrity of the process. Obviously, we’re also headed towards an election that will probably be very close and will definitely be highly polarizing and divisive, given just where the country is. So you know, it is not kind of a strict election security or cybersecurity story, in the sense that we’ve come to think about it based on 2016 to a lesser extent, 2020 where we did see some stuff, like the Iranian campaign, the voter impersonation campaign, where they pretended to be the proud boys. But I think it’s a really important story. And just the last month, literally, I’ve been thinking about trying to, I guess I’m now, I’m pleading with your audience, if there’s folks who’ve been thinking about this problem too, it’s just such an interesting space, obviously, because it cuts to the core of, you know, America’s democratic institutions, but also because, sort of, like, analogous to many issues of cybersecurity. It is not something that falls neatly into the federal government’s authorities and then because of the toxic political climate that we live in and some very legitimate concerns around constitutional constraints of what the federal government can be doing when it comes to elections, who is there to provide help to the states. So that’s got to be, you know, big focus on my coverage in the in the coming months.
JPR: So thanks for your question, with election security. There’s, you know, the I’m going to be even handed, but also be frank on certain things. There are the active things that have happened already, in terms of, you know, certain candidates having some of their computers accessed, potentially by, allegedly by various nation states, going after, you know, you know, trying to breach their information. But to what extent that actually manifests into, like, okay, they did that. Then what, was done with that? That’s, I mean, the breach happening, which is, you know, never, breaches are not good in general, but the but the but what then, is something that I’m interested in hearing about. I’m like, okay, they breached it. What was taken? What was access? What? What did they expose? Was it, did they get access to an itinerary that was, like, several weeks old, you know, like, so the hearing about incidents that happen are, of course, important, but also it’s irrelevant of what has been accessed, particularly in this election cycle over the past several years, there’s a lot of hyperbole. We need to put things in context of what’s happening and and really kind of try away, like, okay, breaches happen. But also like, what are we talking about? You know, was, was misinformation fed, or something taken from the, you know, with the breach that was used to then dispense misinformation, or then to to, you know, I don’t know, generate deep fakes.
So, seeing, you know if and when something happens. You know, particularly with the candidates, if nation states are involved. You know that in the here and now, that is something that that is, that is essential when we get to the actual election process. be careful phrasing this. There has been in the prior elections, there has been a furor. There has been firestorms about the electoral process and how that may or may not be infiltrated. But then there’s a question of, what is being said about like, oh, this was compromised. I’m like, but could that actually be compromised? And from the prior election, from the last presidential election, a lot of the accusations that were made about the election process, saying, you know, now this was this machine was compromised, and what have you, those were unfounded. And it is important, I think, to you know, when talking about electric security, to also speak about, okay, there, there might be things in terms of like somebody’s personal sentiment and feeling and presumption, but there needs to be a discussion of, you might assume that, but this is reality of what exists in terms of the equipment, the technology that is in play, and whether or not is actually connected in a way for it to be compromised. So, so yes, being aware of things, and you know, when necessary, debunking things that might come up, but also just again, getting back to putting things in context of this is what’s happened here, here the parties involved, you know, what’s it was just personal mischief. Was there a nation state involved? And also, you know, what is the outcome that they were trying for, to try to make happen? And have we seen any evidence of that leading to anything other than, you know, yes, being upset about a breach. But what was done with that? So, because it is very easy to say, you know, the sky’s falling, this just happened. This happened. This potentially could to lead to something. It’s like, yes, explore the possibilities. But at the same time, let’s not, you know, start pouring, you know, napalm on an on a on a little match. You know, I it there’s, you know, people are wound up already, as it is,
MF: of course
JPR: you know, the the necessity to say, okay, okay, this is what’s happened. And then get as real as you can about, about the switch, the merits, but of the tangibility of what’s going on
DJ: Yeah, um, you know, I think that where I’m at right now is, I am trying to cover the things the techno the ways that technology intersects with elections and what is having the most impact? I think I’m looking for stories about impact, because there is so much noise around election security, particularly this year, when it comes to things like AI and disinformation, there’s like, a tremendous amount of of of energy and conversation and activity. But the problem is, is that for both of those topics, is that it’s really hard to sort of identify measurable impacts on elections, on voting behavior, and so I know that for me, that’s sort of a constant source of frustration, because on the one hand, there’s so much going on in both of these areas, and I think that when you know malicious parties are trying to use, you know, whether it’s AI or deep fakes or social media, to try to mess with elections, I think that’s always worth paying attention and tracking. But in terms of how I prioritize this stuff, in my mind, I really want to know about the stuff that can break through the noise and potentially impact elections and outcomes. So a lot of times that tends to involve a lot of offline stuff. So I think the work that’s being done, like, with conservatives around tools like Eagle AI, which could result in a lot of people getting, like, erroneously kicked off of voter rolls. Like, that’s what’s interesting me right now, hack and leap type stuff, like the operations that we saw reported on Iran earlier this month, that certainly interests me. But yeah, impact is how I’m trying to approach things here over the stretch run.
LP: So now that we’re only a couple months out from the election itself, what security concerns or trends have caught your eye that you feel need greater attention? Is there anything that’s been particularly surprising?
JS: Yeah, so I’ll pivot now to some other slightly more traditional security issues and give you a couple. One thing that I’ve been thinking about are ransomware attacks on county governments. There’s been a good amount of coverage on this. I mean, it dates back to 2020, I remember reading, I think it was in Nicole Perlroth’s book. Book, which I’m not blanking on the title of, but she had a great cybersecurity book. She talked about how Chris Krebs is then the director of the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency, had had some sort of all hands on deck briefing at the time about sort of a spate of ransomware attacks that had hit local governments across the states and kind of, you know, raising the alarm on on those, primarily, you know, opportunistic, profit motivated criminals who are responsible for the damage, but potentially, sort of tinctured by this, you know, Kremlin, potentially tasking tacit or overt or explicit, we don’t quite know, but a way to really rankle the United States. So anyways, there’s one sort of window to this problem. A couple of months ago, I had reported that in Georgia, I think there’s been at least three, but I I’m digging into the recesses. In my mind, it might have been four county governments in a short period of time who had been hit with ransomware attacks. And you know, these are not hitting voting machines are not connected to the internet, except in very, you know, small exceptions. But the danger is that you could, you know, take down call centers that help voters, you know, figure out what their polling station is on on election day, answer other questions, various other sort of, you know, auxiliary services that are really important to making sure things run smoothly on election day. And then, you know, given the environment we live in, again, just could sort of provide this, you know, very fertile soil for conspiracy theorizing to emerge and or challenges to, hey, you know, we think that 400 Democrats didn’t show up because they weren’t able to, you know, contact the local election office. Therefore, we want to, you know, rerun the election, something like that. So that’s one big one that I’ve been thinking about. Another theme is just a, I’ll give you sort of a narrative around disinformation that I’ve been thinking about recently. This has been pushed by folks in the GOP, which is this idea that the Democrats are encouraging illegal immigrants to come into to come into the country and then vote illegally in the election for the Democratic Party. It’s sort of an, you know, non-falsifiable claim to a certain extent, you know. So I could just, this is something that I’m trying to pay attention to and think, you know, again, if they end up being the unhappy ones on on election day, this is sort of something that is very hard to litigate, could buy them time, could become a big source of controversy. Not sure if I’m articulating this super well, but it just it really, you know, keeping up to date with a couple of the firms who track this type of activity, it’s one of the narratives that has really taken hold, you know. So anyways, that’s, that’s one other thing I’ve been thinking about on election security.
JPR: There’s, I mean, it’s been, it’s not specifically just for the elect election process, but the the spreading use of deep fakes and other technologies to misrepresent or miss cast how, you know, if it’s the candidates themselves, or it might be, you know, public figures you know, trying to, you know, essentially, put words in their mouths or put sentiments, you know, attach sentiments to them. Just recently, I think there’s, you know, some sort of deepfake of relating to Taylor Swift, trying to say, you know, she was, you know, allegedly supporting a particular candidate. And everyone’s like, no, no, no. That is not what’s what’s going on and but that has been a persistent thing for quite some time, in terms of, like, you know, deep fakes being a troublesome thing. Actually did a podcast couple weeks ago this kind of talking to organizations about like, you know, what are their concerns about how their systems might be you know, used infiltrated to, you know, you know, what if they become like an access point to then, you know, spread misinformation. What if misinformation is spread within their organization, amongst our staff, you know, what, if they’re, what, if they happen to be a vendor associated, you know, several rungs down the line, connected with something that is sensitive. And, you know, we’ve had various incidences where, you know, bad actors have used, you know, a third or fourth What are, you know, a tertiary party to then, you know, work their way into the the really sensitive areas that they want to get to. So, so those are some of those things that that we’ve been picking up on.
DJ: Yeah, so one of the things that I’ve really come to realize over this last year is that while things like deep fakes and disinformation campaigns are, are everywhere, and they’re they’re prevalent within within the election space. These are not really going to be the things that, in my view, are going to be the biggest threats to elections, but the biggest threats to elections, in my view, are going to be largely offline, things, things like what we’re seeing happening with state and local election boards that impact things like whether elections results are going to be certified within a particular county or a particular state. I think some of the things that we are seeing around tools like Eagle AI and others that are really designed to flag a massive amount of, you know, presumably ineligible voters using really shoddy data that can then be used in certain states to throw voters off voter rolls. Those are the things that I think are going to be, are going to be most important. The thing that has been surprising to me is that deep fakes haven’t been as impactful as I think we initially felt. And I think that’s for for two reasons.
So number one, I do think that we have paid so much attention to this issue over the last year or two that it really has, I think, broken through to the to the public, to the broader public, to policymakers, to institutions that hey, if I see this particular image of Trump or Kamala Harris online, and it looks crazy. I’m not just going to necessarily believe that this is genuine, because I know that there’s all this synthetic media out there that can trick you. I think we have done a good job of saturating, you know, for better or worse, saturating the public with the with the awareness about things like AI, things like deep fakes. And the second reason is, I think that we were initially concerned that there would be all these deep fakes floating around, and it would be really impossible for us to effectively detect what we what was real and what was fake. And that hasn’t really come to pass, if you sort of look at the way deep fakes have been leveraged in U.S. elections, as well as abroad in places like Taiwan and places like India, where we have seen like a bunch of deep fakes be used, the detectors, the the algorithms that are designed to detect these things have actually done a pretty good job this year of debunking the most high profile deep fakes that we’ve seen. So the AI Biden robo call that was pretty quickly debunked and detected by companies like Pindrop. There was another one with Kamala Harris that came out more recently that was quickly picked up. You had China throwing a lot of deep fakes during the Taiwan election that were pretty quickly picked up and detected. So, you know, I think it hasn’t been the information collapse that we initially feared, and I think that’s largely due to things like awareness and detection holding the line, one of the great legacies of the 2016 to 2020. Is the amount of time and attention that was paid to this particular theoretical threat, which is what happens if somebody tries to hack a voting machine or multiple voting machines? How easy is that to do. What can we do to make it harder? And how can we audit things after the fact to make sure that the vote counts that we’re seeing spit out of these machines match the actual number of ballots and the vote choices that were put into them. And so you saw this huge shift from 2016 to 2022 by CISA and by other organizations to push states to move who had not, who had not already moved to voting machines with paper ballots to do so. And so you saw a lot of federal money. You saw a lot of state and local money that got put towards that effort. States like Virginia moved entirely away from paperless voting machines. And really the end result of that is that today, I mean, it was already, I think, relatively difficult, to pull off a successful voting machine hack that could impact the outcome of an election. I think it is immeasurably harder to do that today. It’s certainly not impossible, and it’s certainly not to say that these voting machines don’t have security vulnerabilities. It’s more just so that the logistics of trying to manually hack into voting machines and doing so when they have paper ballots that you can audit, it’s just much harder today to do that than it was 5, 10, years ago. And so that’s a really. Big success, I think, for the election security community and for American elections.
MF: Based on what we’ve discussed so far. How do you foresee this year’s election, guiding future legislation, both from an election security angle, but also considering things like White House cybersecurity initiatives, such as the National Cybersecurity Strategy implementation plan and more. What are your thoughts?
JS: Yeah, two part answer. First and foremost, I would expect. Well, three-part answer. Take it back. First foremost, totally depends on what happens in November and then with the certification process. I mean, every year there is a huge reaction to the scandal of that year’s election that informs whatever legislation ultimately gets passed. We saw that around certification this year. And then there was a lot of stuff. I mean, the birth of CISA in 2018 you could tie back to the Russian influence effort in the 2016 election. So that’s first and foremost.
The second other point here is, I expect, consistent with whatever happens on Election Day this year will inform legislative kind of momentum initiatives thereafter, there will be stuff that will happen at the state level, and there could be sort of a lot of, you know, air quotes, boring, blocking and tackling around election administration. So not exactly cyber security, but things that come to mind are risk limiting audits, which you know, one example of certain practices, not you know, uniformly implemented across the states, not always stipulated in the way you know, consistent with sort of best practices on how you conduct an audit. But again, the type of thing that if we see a lot of anxiety around whether we can trust the results or not, this is one thing that states could promote to try to build trust in an environment of like intense voter skepticism. That being said at the federal level. Listen when you talk to state election state elections official across the country, the biggest thing they will always say, say or general, but very important, it’s just, we need consistent funding. We run federal elections, you know, at the state level, with no federal resources. And you know, in particular as a lot of election sort of systems, or election adjacent system. You know, the things that provide services to voters around election day go digital, just like the rest of life in the 21st century. States need money to maintain this stuff, to defend it, etc. And if we do see certain, you know, technological glitches even doesn’t have to be a hack becoming problems, at least in terms of, again, voter trust around, hey, this system went down. Can we trust it? Then you see a conspiracy, blah, blah, blah. You could see a big push for funding in the aftermath of this, some consistent funding mechanism for the state so that they can make plans around, you know, technology, acquisition, procurement, etc.
So those are my predictions. I guess a little boring, but those are my predictions. Just as one final thought, I guess I didn’t even mention, AI don’t have anything super sophisticated to say on that. But one other thing I’m interested, I mean, we saw a lot of blow back to mostly baseless. But to voting machines in 2020 and I think about, you know, the major voting machine vendors in the United States, Dominion, ESMs, Hart InterCivic like fairly small companies. And I do think what the future of them are, especially if we have some version, you know, some redux of 2020, in 2024, be very interesting to see. I mean, is it a Rage Against the Machine Things again? And at some point, even if you know the folks in position of authority, you on the front lines of running elections, say, No, we trust, you know, XYZ technology. Here are the redundancies and built into the system. The reason you should trust trusted, if there was such a backlash from voters. I mean, you see these sort of half baked legislative, you know, efforts in various states to go to all paper ballot systems. There’s always some nuances there. Sometimes you have machine printed paper and whatnot. Anyways, that is something I’m interested in, is, like, literally the future of these companies. And that’s sort of a human story to talk about these folks who also talk about election officials who have been the subject of a lot of, like, vitriol, abuse, harassment, sometimes physical threats. It’s also the folks at these voting machine companies who were just trying to, you know, help the country vote. So anyways, the last thing
JPR: I think, and it’s very it’s gonna, it may be very telling, based on which party to be perfectly frank about. Which party gets in office and how the election is perceived by everyone. You have one party that very much will has already started to cast doubt on the process to begin with, so the outcome, whether or not it goes their particular favor. Could particularly, you know, cast a certain shadow or light on in terms of how they then might proceed going forward, you know, they might have a sense of, you know, vindictiveness or what have, you know, you know, based based on their rhetoric. I’m speaking based on their rhetoric. I’m not trying to put words in their mouth. Put words in their mouth, but that sentiment might then just, you know, it may or may not, meet with the realities of of findings, of how the technology has been applied and and how the process has played out. You know it, you could have an election, electoral process that that runs smoothly. There is, you know, through whatever vetting needs to be done, show that that everything worked fine, and that, you know the you know, any attempts to compromise, to do anything, were caught and dealt with. But the sentiment, unfortunately, or the sentiment that is associated right now might overwhelm certain actions and ideologies and and steps forward so that might, despite everything working perfectly, we could, we could come through this election as smoothly as we did through the whole Y2K process, which was something that, you know, was gearing up for at that time, you know, preparing for, like, this might happen if we don’t get everything, all our ducks in a row. And we did, and everything was smooth. And afterwards, some people were like, Oh, was that even a problem? Like, Well, no, because they did all the work to make sure that everything was fine and we could go through this, you know, just nice and smooth and depending on the outcome of the of the election, that might lead to, you know, attempts at legislation that might, you know, that could potentially chase for ghosts that aren’t there, that isn’t an unfortunate reality that that is, that is where policy meets emotion. And so we’ll have to see how that plays out, you know, in an ideal world, you know, however the election plays out, we would see, you know, the you know, the whatever forthcoming administration, you know, see that process allow those who involve the you know, the independent, you know, monitors, to continue to do their work and to then further, you know, like give them more access to whatever resources that they need. To further safeguard the electoral the election process, there is a tendency. There has been a tendency that getting better. There has been tendency for government entities, agencies, what have you to be, maybe a couple steps behind in terms of the real world practices, of technology, maybe where the commercial markets are. And, you know, there has been an effort, at least in recent years, to try and, you know, be, you know, to kind of like narrow that gap. So in an ideal world, I would love to see you know that, that you know the next administration, whoever it is, will continue to get resources and make sure that those independent, you know, monitors are there and they can do their jobs and be as effective and as nimble as a need to be going forward, particularly looking at, you know, things like, things like quantum computing and, you know, on top of AI, you know, just how you know that can potentially change the game of of cybersecurity.
You know, that I was actually doing a podcast earlier today, just talking about the NIST standards for the post quantum cryptography space. And you know, the the the momentum of getting prepared for the further future of what securing anything is going to look like is going to change, and there needs to be a lot of nibbleness. And it would hope that the next administration would recognize that need and be not to just say, our car plunge get whatever you need. You know, we’ll bankrupt all the other agencies to give you what you what you need, but the very least, have that understanding of saying, Hey, we’ve had decades of ways that security of it has happened. It’s potentially going to change. And, you know, maybe, maybe not tomorrow, but it’s going to be coming. And this is, you know, our election process, electoral process has been shown to be something that everyone has got a great concern on. So let’s make sure that we can guarantee that the populace can feel secure in how it plays out. I would hope that’s what would happen. But some people are sore losers, and there may be legislation and policy that calls for things that are that are, you know, chasing Flying Dutchmen. We will have to say, you know, is unfortunate, but there has been a certain trend with certain actions, with certain politicians, to do that, you know, stepping in where they might not have any expertise or awareness or understanding. They might get checked on it later, but that may be something that could unfold.
DJ: Yeah, so it’s going to depend on, obviously, how the presidential and congressional races play out, because each party is going to have its own priorities and viewpoints on specific issues, and we really are kind of at the point where a party kind of needs full control of the executive and legislative branch just to pass any of its priorities, because that’s sort of the state of congressional gridlock. Having said that, I think no matter who wins, we are going to see some meaningful attempts to legislate around things like AI, around deepfakes and impersonation. That’s an issue where there’s pretty broad cross partisan support for doing something, and things like deep fakes tend to fall more neatly into existing laws and regulations around elections, things like election fraud, things like impersonating candidates, which, you know, we had laws on the books in place before. You know, deep fakes were a thing that said, you know, you can’t pretend to be this other candidate and say a bunch of terrible things and make them look bad. So I think that you’re going to see a lot of action no matter who wins. You’re going to see a focus on that.
I also think you’re going to see a big focus no matter who wins, on boosting resources and more tightly regulating critical infrastructure cybersecurity. You know, while you know, while some members of Congress and some parties may be more enthusiastic about things like regulation on industry than others for members of Congress, disruption to critical services that are caused by things like ransomware that really cuts through to their constituents in a way that really no other cybersecurity issue does. And so you have seen a lot of energy and enthusiasm, even from ostensibly conservative folks, about doing more in the critical infrastructure space, and that has sometimes lent itself to support for certain targeted regulations, but certainly other things like more resources and, you know, boosting CISA’s mission and outreach to those to those entities. I think you’re going to see that. You know, no matter who wins next year.
LP: Awesome, well, is there anything else that we haven’t discussed that you’d like to add?
JS: Only other thing, I guess, is will be interesting to see the messaging around the results this year from the Biden administration in 2020 You famously had the Chris Krebs statement on that year’s election being the most secure in U.S. history, and that promptly leading to as firing from President Trump. You know, seeing how the Biden administration, in a in a likely close election, handles messaging, at what point did they come out and say, you know, it is done in final I mean, they might. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are more careful in terms of waiting for, you know, ballots to be counted in each state and the swing states anyways, that’s sort of a minor thing, but interesting to just watch how they handle, kind of the communication side of this again, given How those how statements like that have have featured in some of the skepticism, or the, you know, denialism about results from prior elections.
JPR: We are facing, you know, this, you know, very contentious election process, right, you know, season right now, there is a certain tunnel vision that that can happen as we’re looking at this, you know, there are many other, you know, there are many other nation state aggressors who want to do different things that are not just tied to this one particular moment. There’s what comes after that. Comes to the weeks and the months after. You know, the the you know, how the next administration, you know, will be able to function and go about, you know, whatever it is that they want to do with the multiple, numerous, you know, geopolitical military activities that are happening around the world right now. And interfering with, you know, potentially interfering with this election, is one aspect, but it’s also.
So what happens when you have aggressor states that are interfering with intelligence gathering? What happens with, you know, other nation states that are trying to influence the way, just, just the process and standards that the overall world works by? I mean, it’s a bit of a it’s a bit of a tangent, but, you know, the U.S. is trying to be a leader in this space of like setting technology standards, and, you know, at least having a kind of a consortium of folks who that are there essentially, you know, on the U.S.’s side. But there are other particular nation states that want to pull that away from the U.S., sometimes by flooding, you know, the market, by saying, like, hey, you know, we’re going to be the one to try and and be the one leading the standards. And if nation states are able to kind of sway what the technology standard might be, that could potentially then lead to them being more in control of how things are secured if, let’s say, there’s an aggressors state to the U.S. or U.S. allies, who then somehow, by whatever means, by maybe volume or their presence, essentially becomes the one to say, this is how cybersecurity is going to be handled. Because we have the overwhelming majority if you want to do commerce and business and what have you. And then, then that could be a way that they have already tried to find ways to work their way in and infiltrate, you know, U.S. systems. You know they’re the one that, if they became the policy standards, standard bearers, then how, you know, that might be their way to save to make it even easier for them to then compromise the systems that they’ve wanted to, you know, really try to get an expo so, so those are things that, that are, that, are, you know, little a bigger picture, you know, little further down the road than just the the election, you know. I mean, there’s, there’s some things that we lose sight over over time. You know, I think Ukraine, Middle East. It’s like, you know, kind of the attention shifts to the more immediate things that are like, like, are right in front of us, right here in the U.S. But I think just kind of being cognizant of how those areas are still important, still relevant, and could, it could lead to impacts and effect during the U.S. election process, and even further down the road, you know, with whatever new administration comes in, because you could have entities that are like so like, hey, you’ve done with your election. Okay? We’re not happy with whatever, and we don’t like you. So now we’re going to interfere with your new administration by, you know, by hook or by crook, putting bounties on information or disrupting your infrastructure or what have you. So those are the things that we’ve you know, election is going to happen, and then we have to look at the long road ahead.
DJ: I think I would just reiterate the point that I made. I cover elections from a technology and security perspective, and it’s certainly, I’m not going to argue that those that aspect doesn’t matter, or that it that it’s not important, but as I have covered the election landscape, you know, the thing that is going to the things that are going to to pose the greatest threats to the integrity and safety of our elections this cycle. It’s really, it’s really bread and butter offline type stuff. It’s what political parties are doing, what they’re doing in courts, what they’re doing in on state election boards, you know, battles over things like voter registration. That’s ultimately, I think, where the pivot point, and sort of the the fulcrum of this election is going to be, despite all of the hoopla that we’ve kind of heard around things like AI and disinformation. So it’s not a, it’s not, it’s not convenient for a technology based reporter like me to say that, but, but as I just kind of look at the landscape that that is sort of my conclusion.
MF: Great. Thank you to all of our guests for participating in this special episode of Inside the Media Minds and thank you to all of our listeners. We’ll catch you all next time.
CB: Thank you for joining us in today’s episode of Inside the Media Minds to learn more about our podcast and hear all of our episodes. Please visit us at w2comm.com/podcast, and follow us on Twitter @MediaMindsShow, and you can subscribe anywhere podcasts are found.