Former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos made a provocative new claim on Wednesday: It’s too late to protect the fall elections.
Writing for Lawfare, Stamos, now an adjunct professor at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute of Public Policy, said in the strongly titled essay that “America’s adversaries believe that it is still both safe and effective to attack U.S. democracy using American technologies and the freedoms we cherish.”
These will include both direct attacks and misinformation campaigns, he wrote.
Stamos’ essay comes the day after Facebook and Twitter announced that the two social media companies had removed pages, accounts, and groups linked to Iran and Russia. Facebook announced the Iran-related accounts were removed for what the company termed “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”
His experience in security at Yahoo and later at Facebook leads him to believe, “The facts are indisputable: There was a multiyear effort by a coalition of Russian agents to harm the likely presidency of Hillary Rodham Clinton and sow deep division in America’s political discourse.”
What Stamos termed the weak response by the Obama administration to election meddling and Republican efforts to brush aside foreign attacks on domestic opposition will set up a situation where “U.S. adversaries and allies battle to impose their various interests on the American electorate.”
The Senate Intelligence Committee is holding a Sept. 5 hearing on social media manipulation that will hear from Facebook, Google, and Twitter about efforts to fight disinformation campaigns.
Stamos suggested four steps to protect elections going forward: legal standards that address online disinformation; creating an independent, defense-only cybersecurity agency; election protection capability in each state; and popular demand for rapid investigation, public disclosure ahead of an election, and punishment of those responsible.
