National: ‘We’re doubling down.’ DHS insists it’s not reducing election security efforts | The Washington Post

The Homeland Security Department is actually surging its efforts to protect elections against foreign hackers during the two years leading up to the 2020 elections — not winding them down, the agency’s top cybersecurity official insists. Chris Krebs, who leads DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, was punching back Thursday against a Daily Beast report citing anonymous staffers who said the department was reducing its election security efforts following the midterms to invest more in border security and other Trump administration priorities. “The department’s election security and countering foreign influence security-related efforts are not going anywhere,” Krebs said. “In fact, we’re doubling down.” The article made waves in the security community because even a perception that the government isn’t serious about securing elections against Russian hackers could damage trust in the result in the 2020 election.  Federal officials — including Krebs himself — have warned Russia may have viewed the midterms as merely a “warm-up” for 2020 when more Americans will be looking for signs of foreign influence. That stakes for officials such as Krebs are especially high because President Trump has wavered on whether he believes Russia was responsible for its hacking and disinformation campaign to influence the 2016 presidential contest.

National: CISA says it’s ramping up election security efforts for 2020 | FCW

The head of the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity wing is pushing back on a media report that the agency has scaled back personnel and resources from its combatting foreign election interference. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Chris Krebs hosted a conference call with reporters less than 24 hours after The Daily Beast published a story that quoted multiple anonymous DHS officials who said two CISA task forces focused on coordinating the department’s response to foreign influence in U.S. elections were significantly downsized shortly after the mid-terms. Krebs didn’t deny that personnel levels for the task forces were reduced. He characterized the task forces as temporary vehicles to address an emerging threat while CISA worked to hire staff and build more permanent institutional capacity to tackle the issue.

National: DHS Guts Task Forces Protecting Elections From Foreign Meddling | The Daily Beast

Two teams of federal officials assembled to fight foreign election interference are being dramatically downsized, according to three current and former Department of Homeland Security officials. And now, those sources say they fear the department won’t prepare adequately for election threats in 2020. “The clear assessment from the intelligence community is that 2020 is going to be the perfect storm,” said a DHS official familiar with the teams. “We know Russia is going to be engaged. Other state actors have seen the success of Russia and realize the value of disinformation operations. So it’s very curious why the task forces were demoted in the bureaucracy and the leadership has not committed resources to prepare for the 2020 election.”

National: Lawmakers quiz officials on 2020 election security measures | The Hill

Lawmakers questioned federal officials Wednesday about the importance of passing election security measures ahead of the 2020 contests, pressing witnesses on the threat posed by foreign actors to influence U.S. elections. Christopher Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), testified during the House Homeland Security Committee hearing Wednesday that the federal government is “lightyears ahead” of where it was in 2016 when it came to communicating with state and local officials. But he said improving outreach and communication with those officials is a top priority for his department ahead of 2020. Krebs also said that being able to audit elections is a pressing issue for his agency, and that records of votes, like paper trails, will help officials confirm election results. The DHS official added that basic cybersecurity remains a crucial issue, saying he fears any gaps could expose vulnerabilities in systems that could be abused by hackers.

National: This key House Republican is open to mandates on states for election security | The Washington Post

As the House Homeland Security Committee meets for the first election security hearing of 2019 today, Congress is still far away from a grand bargain to help protect state election systems from foreign hackers. But the goalposts may be changing with Democrats in charge of the House. The new top Republican on the committee, Rep. Mike Rogers (Ala.), tells me he’s ready to impose requirements on states to secure their election systems against hackers. He called for a baseline of security states must meet before receiving money from the government to upgrade outdated and vulnerable voting machines and secure other election infrastructure. “We want to get some minimum standards that have to be adhered to,” Rogers tells me. And he says he’s willing to work with Democrats to get it done.

National: House Democrats, Republicans cross swords over election security bill | Politico

Democrats and Republicans have clashed before over H.R. 1, the House Dems’ sweeping package of democracy and governance proposals, but today the fight goes directly to the election security provisions of the bill. The House Homeland Security panel holds a hearing today on the measure with testimony from DHS’s top cyber official, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Chris Krebs, Election Assistance Commission Chairman Thomas Hicks and others. A CISA official told MC: “Director Krebs will confirm election security remains a priority for CISA in the run up to 2020, laying out the Agency’s plan to work with State and local election officials on broader engagement, better defining risk to election systems, and understanding the resources to manage that risk.” At least one witness — Jake Braun, a former Obama administration official who now works as executive director of the University of Chicago’s Cyber Policy Initiative and an organizer of DEF CON’s Voting Village — endorses the bill’s election security ideas in his prepared testimony. He praises the provisions mandating auditable paper trails and authorizing voting infrastructure research and development funds.

National: State and Local Elections Experts Weigh-In on Security Concerns | MeriTalk

With the 2020 national election cycle on the horizon, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., convened a hearing Wednesday to examine the how the United States was working to secure its elections. The hearing, broken into two panels, heard from senior Federal election officials, as well as state and local election officials. During the first half of the hearing Christopher Krebs, director of the newly minted Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), stressed that election cybersecurity is on the upswing. However, the second half of the hearing held a slightly different tone, with California Secretary of State Alex Padilla declaring that “our democracy is under attack.”

National: Cyber chief pushes audits as key to election security | FCW

The nation’s top cybersecurity official told Congress that the ability to audit voting machines after elections is critical for ballot security. “The area that I think we need to invest the most in the nation is ensuring auditability across infrastructure,” Christopher Krebs, head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said at a Feb. 13 hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee. “If you don’t know what’s happening and you can’t check back at what’s happening in the system — you don’t have security.” While 34 states and the District of Columbia have some laws mandating post-election audits, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Congress has been unable to agree on how hard or soft to make such language in legislation. Krebs and Election Assistance Commission (EAC) Chair Thomas Hicks endorsed the need for greater auditability, though both deferred to states on the question of whether it should be done digitally or by hand.

National: Manafort Found to Have Lied to Prosecutors While Under a Cooperation Agreement | The New York Times

A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, had breached his plea agreement by lying multiple times to prosecutors after pledging to cooperate with the special counsel’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The decision by Judge Amy Berman Jackson of United States District Court in Washington may affect the severity of punishment that awaits Mr. Manafort. Judge Jackson is scheduled to sentence him next month on two conspiracy counts, and he is also awaiting sentencing for eight other counts in a related fraud case. After Mr. Manafort agreed in September to cooperate with the office of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, the judge found, he lied about his contacts with a Russian associate during the campaign and after the election. Prosecutors claim that the associate, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, has ties to Russian intelligence, and have been investigating whether he was involved in Russia’s covert campaign to influence the election results.

National: Senate committee leaders worry no one’s in charge on cybersecurity | The Washington Post

Responsibility for the nation’s cybersecurity is spread piecemeal throughout the government without a single person or agency in charge. That creates dangerous gaps that U.S. adversaries could exploit to hack the government or critical infrastructure, two prominent Senate Republicans told me. Homeland Security Chairman Ron Johnson (Wis.) and Mike Rounds (S.D.), chair of the Armed Services Committee’s cyber panel, are mulling how they might create a centralized government authority for cybersecurity issues. The goal would be an office that could make sure the Homeland Security, Defense and Justice departments are effectively sharing information and working toward common goals, the senators said. For example, the Defense Department, which is authorized to conduct clandestine military activities in cyberspace, might not be as clued in as DHS is to how some of those activities could prompt retaliation against U.S. businesses. Rounds also noted that some parts of the government were concerned for several years that Chinese telecom giant Huawei could use its position inside global telecommunications infrastructure to spy on behalf of the Chinese government — but the U.S. did not act until recently.

National: Where cybersecurity legislation ‘goes to die’ in Congress | Politico

Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson leads the committee with broad oversight over the nation’s most important cybersecurity issues, including protecting consumers and U.S. elections from hackers. But he’s also a major reason little legislation on these topics ever passes, according to lobbyists, cybersecurity policy experts, lawmakers and congressional aides from both parties who spoke with POLITICO. Johnson or members of his staff have derailed many of the most significant cybersecurity-related bills in the past four years, including legislation to secure elections, study whether the growing use of encrypted apps hampers law enforcement, and hold companies accountable for the proliferation of insecure connected devices, people who track the legislation told POLITICO.

National: Supreme Court likely to act this week on census dispute | Constitution Daily

Moving with unusual speed, the Supreme Court on Monday set the stage for acting soon – probably on Friday – on the constitutional controversy over asking everyone living in America about their citizenship, as part of the 2020 census. At issue at this point is whether the Justices will take up directly, without waiting for further action in lower courts, the dispute over the contents of the questionnaire that will go to every household across the nation next year. The outcome of the controversy may have a major influence on dividing up seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, on drawing up new election district maps at all levels of government, and about the distribution of billions of dollars in federal money. Although there is a clear dispute among the two sides in the controversy about the legality of adding the citizenship question, everyone involved has now agreed that an answer needs to be forthcoming before the Supreme Court finishes its current term, probably in late June.

National: Security Experts Uneasy as US Barrels Into 2020 Election | Courthouse News

Cautious about the government’s efforts to safeguard the 2020 presidential race, election-security experts worry that the job is too formidable to finish in the time that remains. One issue at stake is outdated voting machines and technology, but Maurice Turner, a senior technologist with the Center for Democracy and Technology, warned that equipment updates require legislatures to make funding appropriations. With the first 2020 primaries scheduled for February, the process of issuing, receiving and evaluating proposals along can take months. After that comes testing and configuration, another months-long process, before the machines can be delivered on a large scale. “No election official wants to be rolling out new equipment 30 or 60 days before the general election,” Turner said in a phone interview, “so they’re going to need to identify other races, other contests they can test this equipment on.”

National: Asked to Stop Investigations, House Digs In | The New York Times

The House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday began a broad inquiry into whether Russia and other foreign powers may be exercising influence over President Trump, acting only hours after a defiant Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared that the House would not be cowed by the president’s “all-out threat” to drop its investigations of his administration. Other committees were zeroing in on similarly sensitive oversight targets. On Thursday, Democrats will begin their quest to secure the president’s long-suppressed tax returns. The chairman of the Judiciary Committee readied a subpoena for the acting attorney general, Matthew G. Whitaker, in case he tried to avoid Democratic questioning. And a House Appropriations subcommittee chairwoman began an inquiry into administration rule-bending during the 35-day partial government shutdown.

National: Voting Rights, Voter Registration Key For Democrats For 2020 Election | NPR

In her response to President Trump’s State of the Union, Stacey Abrams went through some of the top issues for the Democratic Party. Health care. Climate change. Gun safety. Then she brought up a topic Democrats are planning to spend a lot of time on over next two years: voting. “Let’s be clear. Voter suppression is real,” Abrams said. “From making it harder to register and staying on the rolls, to moving and closing polling places, to rejecting lawful ballots, we can no longer ignore these threats to democracy.” The past two federal elections seem to have been a tipping point.

National: The U.S. military is quietly launching efforts to deter Russian meddling | The Washington Post

With little public fanfare, U.S. Cyber Command, the military’s new center for combating electronic attacks against the United States, has launched operations to deter and disrupt Russians who have been interfering with the U.S. political system. Like other U.S. cyberwar activities, the disruption effort against Russia is cloaked in secrecy. But it appears to involve, in part, a warning to suspected Russian hackers that echoes a menacing phrase that’s a staple of many fictional crime and spy thrillers: “We know where you live.” Beginning last fall, before the midterm elections, Cyber Command began directly contacting Russians who were linked to operations, such the Internet Research Agency, that allegedly helped coordinate Moscow’s campaign to subvert the 2016 presidential election. The apparent aim was to put people on notice that their covers had been blown, and that their ability to work and travel freely might be affected.

National: Lawmakers Push for the State Department to Help Secure Foreign Elections | Nextgov

As misinformation campaigns and cyberattacks threaten to undermine democracy around the world, lawmakers want the State Department to play a bigger role in helping other countries secure their elections. Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, on Tuesday reintroduced legislation that would create a program at State to share information about election threats with other countries. Through the Global Electoral Exchange Program, the department would assist allies in adopting best practices around election cybersecurity, transparency and auditing. It would support work to combat misinformation campaigns and end discriminatory voter registration practices. An earlier version of the bill passed the House in September but was never put to a vote in the Senate. “Our election systems—and those of our allies—have become a target for foreign adversaries,” Klobuchar said in a statement. “Safeguarding our democracies must be a priority for us all.”

National: Debate Over Election Reform Bill Gets Heated in House | Courthouse News

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle raised their voices Wednesday over whether a sweeping election reform bill proposed by Democrats would drain or fill the Washington swamp. The wide-ranging anti-corruption bill, House Resolution 1, includes a provision that would increase transparency in campaign finance by requiring candidates to report where their campaign money comes from. That measure was the focus of committee members from both parties during the nearly four-hour hearing in the House Oversight Committee. Bradley Smith, an expert witness and chairman of the Institute for Free Speech, repeatedly told committee members that the bill would have a “chilling effect” on citizens’ desire to engage in elections through avenues like campaign donations. “You run the risk of regulations swallowing up the entire discourse in which the public engages,” Smith said.

National: Midterm election infrastructure deemed meddle-free, but states seek equipment funding | GCN

The federal government has determined there is no evidence that foreign interference in the 2018 midterm election “had a material impact on the integrity or security of election infrastructure or political [and] campaign infrastructure,” the Justice Department announced. DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security said Feb. 5 that they have submitted a classified report to President Donald Trump in accordance with an executive order issued last year to root out and investigate foreign interference targeting American elections or campaigns. The conclusions represent the second half of an interagency process created late last year to assess whether foreign governments made any efforts to hack into voting machines and election systems or alter voter behavior through covert influence campaigns on social platforms and other media.

National: DHS prioritizes restart of election security programs post-shutdown | CNN

Since the shutdown ended, the Department of Homeland Security has prioritized the resumption of its election security programs, some of which were forced to go on hiatus during the lapse in government funding, according to Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Chris Krebs. “Coming out of the shutdown, anything that had paused on election security-related activities was put on the top of the priority list for restart,” he said. Krebs told CNN that if there was an active threat during the shutdown, the department was able to respond by conducting assessments and hunting down the threat. “What paused was the more routine vulnerability assessments,” he said. Those included a “couple of the election security-related” assessments run by the department, specifically focused on state networks.

National: Inaccurate claims of noncitizen voting in Texas reflect a growing trend in Republican states | The Washington Post

When Texas officials announced in late January that as many as 58,000 noncitizens may have voted illegally in state elections over nearly two decades, top Republicans — including President Trump — quickly warned about the prevalence of voter fraud and the need to crack down on it. But just as quickly, the numbers stopped adding up. First, on Jan. 25, the secretary of state instructed counties to give voters 30 days to prove their citizenship before canceling their registration. Then, four days later, the office began calling local election officials to say that thousands of people on the list were in fact U.S. citizens, eligible to vote.

National: House will advance HR 1 government overhaul package this month, Pelosi says | Roll Call

The House will advance a package of voting rights, campaign finance and ethics overhauls this month, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a “Dear Colleague” letter Monday night. House Democrats have introduced the government overhaul package as HR 1 to reflect its priority status. They believe fundamentally changing the way government operates will increase public buy-in as Democrats pursue an economic policy agenda focused on issues such as heath care, infrastructure and climate change. “During this Black History Month, I am pleased we will be advancing H.R. 1, which contains Congressman John Lewis’s Voter Empowerment Act ensuring equal access to the ballot for every eligible voter, and lays the groundwork of the subsequent passage of Congresswoman Terri Sewell’s Voting Rights Advancement Act,” Pelosi wrote, citing two black lawmakers who have sponsored legislation that is part of the Democrats’ effort to overhaul voting rights laws.

National: Mitch McConnell balked at Election Day holiday. What if it were one? | USA Today

House Democrats introduced their first piece of legislation in the new Congress this week, an anti-corruption bill that proposes making Election Day a federal holiday  and encourages private employers to give their workers the day off, too. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell dismissed the legislation on the Senate floor, calling it a “power grab” by Democrats. He was subsequently dragged by progressive lawmakers on Twitter, including Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who tweeted that “voting isn’t a ‘power grab.’ It’s democracy, and it’s literally the entire point of our representative government.” But according to the Pew Research Center, Americans on both sides of the aisle support making Election Day a national holiday: 71% of Democrats and 59% of Republicans favor the idea. 

National: DOJ, DHS say foreign influence campaigns didn’t alter 2018 elections | FCW

The federal government has determined that foreign interference campaigns had no material impact on the outcomes of the 2018 midterm elections. The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security announced Feb. 5 that they have submitted a classified report to President Donald Trump in accordance with an executive order issued last year to root out and investigate foreign interference targeting American elections or campaigns. “Although the specific conclusions within the joint report must remain classified, the Departments have concluded there is no evidence to date that any identified activities of a foreign government or foreign agent had a material impact on the integrity or security of election infrastructure or political [and] campaign infrastructure used in the 2018 midterm elections for the United States Congress,” said DOJ in a statement.

National: State officials want election security cash. But some don’t like the strings attached. | The Washington Post

State election officials want the latest round of election security money included in a major bill proposed by House Democrats – but they’re divided on whether they want to accept a slew of voting mandates that come along with it. The divide is largely along partisan lines. On one side, there’s Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate (R), the incoming president of the National Association of Secretaries of State, who balked at provisions in H.R. 1 that make it more difficult for states to impose voter ID requirements. Pate said in an email the For the People Act amounts to the federal government seizing authority over elections from states. On the other side are Democrats who largely support those efforts to expand voter access and consider them a fair trade for more election security money. “There’s a tension over H.R. 1 and whether or not it’s a federalization of elections,” one Democratic secretary of state told me at the NASS conference in Washington this weekend. “It is not. And anyone who claims that it is, that’s an overreach.”

National: House Intelligence poised to send Mueller lingering Russia investigation transcripts | Washington Examiner

The House Intelligence Committee has scheduled a vote this week on sending more transcripts to the Justice Department. The panel’s website says members will vote on Wednesday regarding the “transmission of Certain Committee Transcripts to the Department of Justice.” Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said last week the first thing his panel would do in the new term would be to release all remaining transcripts from their Russia investigation to special counsel Robert Mueller. “Neither we nor the Special Counsel will tolerate efforts by any person to impede any investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, nor to pressure a witness to withhold testimony from or mislead Congress,” Schiff said in a statement released after longtime associate Roger Stone was indicted as part of Mueller’s investigation.

National: Black caucus members explore voting rights issues | Brownsville Herald: Local News

The first Voting Rights and Elections listening session of the U.S. Committee on House Administration took place Monday in Brownsville at the invitation of U.S. Rep. Filemon Vela as part of a day of events he hosted in recognition of Black History Month. Several members of the Congressional Black and Hispanic caucuses took part in the session, which was led by U.S. Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, CHA Elections Subcommittee chair-designee, and which and took place at the Cameron County Courthouse Oscar C. Dancy Building. … The members of Congress heard testimony from a panel made up of veteran voting and civil rights attorneys Chad Dunn, George Korbel and Rolando Rios; Mimi Marziani, attorney and president of the Texas Civil Rights Project, and Matthew McCarthy, representing the American Civil Liberties Union.

National: House Panel Launches Inquiry Over Voter Rights Roll-Backs | Reuters

The Democratically controlled U.S. House Judiciary Committee launched an inquiry on Friday into the Trump administration’s decision to reverse course on several key voting rights lawsuits and its efforts to add a citizenship question to the upcoming 2020 U.S. census. In a letter to acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew Whitaker seen by Reuters, the chairman of the committee, Representative Jerrold Nadler, demanded that the Justice Department turn over any internal records on a number of voting rights issues and said he was concerned by a lack of enforcement of voter rights laws in general. The letter seeks records related to the Justice Department’s decision to drop its opposition to a contentious Ohio policy allowing the state to purge infrequent voters from registration rolls and a Texas voter identification law.

National: Russians reportedly “altered” Mueller documents and leaked them online to discredit probe | Salon

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team has accused Russian operatives of stealing materials obtained from his prosecutors, altering the documents, and posting them online in a disinformation effort to discredit the Russia investigation, according to court documents filed on Wednesday. Mueller’s team made the filing in its case against Concord Management and Consulting LLC, a sanctioned Russian company indicted in the probe for allegedly funding a Russian troll farm that waged a disinformation campaign during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. According to prosecutors, a Twitter account with the handle @HackingRedstone was created last October. The user bragged that he had hacked evidence in the Mueller probe. “We’ve got access to the Special Counsel Mueller’s probe database as we hacked Russian server with info from the Russian troll case Concord LLC v. Mueller,” the account tweeted, according to the court filing. “Enjoy the reading!”

National: Russia Is Attacking the U.S. System From Within | The Atlantic

A new court filing submitted on Wednesday by Special Counsel Robert Mueller revealed that a Russian troll farm currently locked in a legal battle over its alleged interference in the 2016 election appeared to wage yet another disinformation campaign late last year—this time targeting Mueller himself. According to the filing, the special counsel’s office turned over 1 million pages of evidence to lawyers for Concord Management and Consulting as part of the discovery process. The firm is accused of funding the troll farm, known as the Internet Research Agency. But someone connected to Concord allegedly manipulated the documents and leaked them to reporters, hoping the documents would make people think that Mueller’s evidence against the troll farm and its owners was flimsy. The tactic didn’t seem to convince anyone, but it appeared to mark yet another example of Russia exploiting the U.S. justice system to undercut its rivals abroad.