Russia is engaged in “information warfare” heading into the this year’s US presidential election, US FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Wednesday, although law enforcement has not seen ongoing efforts by Russia to target the US’ election infrastructure.
Wray told the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee that Russia, just as it did in 2016, is relying on a covert social media campaign aimed at dividing US public opinion and sowing discord.
That effort, which involves fictional personas, bots, social media postings and disinformation, might have an election-year uptick, but is also a round-the-clock threat that is in some ways harder to combat than an election system hack, Wray said.
“Unlike a cyberattack on an election infrastructure, that kind of effort — disinformation — in a world where we have a First Amendment and believe strongly in freedom of expression, the FBI is not going to be in the business of being the truth police and monitoring disinformation online,” Wray said.
The FBI and the US Department of Homeland Security are on alert for election-related cyberactivity such as what occurred in 2016, when Russians probed local election systems for vulnerabilities and hacked e-mails belonging to US Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton.
However, Wray said: “I don’t think we’ve seen any ongoing efforts to target election infrastructure like we did in 2016.”
His appearance came two days after Democratic presidential caucuses in Iowa were marred by a malfunctioning app that caused a delay in the reporting of results.
Although local and federal officials have stressed that the problems were not caused by a foreign intrusion, the error played into existing unease surrounding election security and risked amplifying concerns among Americans about the integrity of the voting process.
Even without signs of election system targeting, Wray said that Russian efforts to interfere in the election through disinformation had not tapered off since 2016.
Social media had injected “steroids” into those efforts, he said.
“They identify an issue that they know that the American people feel passionately about on both sides and then they take both sides and spin them up so they pit us against each other,” Wray said.
“Then they combine that with an effort to weaken our confidence in our elections and our democratic institutions, which has been a pernicious and asymmetric way of engaging in ... information warfare,” he added.
Asked by US Representative Jerrold Nadler if US President Donald Trump had asked him to investigate former US vice president Joe Biden or Biden’s son, Hunter, Wray said: “No one has asked me to open an investigation based on anything other than facts, the law and proper predication.”
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