National: The Facebook ad dump shows the true sophistication of Russia’s influence operation | The Washington Post

The massive trove of Facebook ads House Intelligence Committee Democrats released Tuesday provides a stunning look into the true sophistication of the Russian government’s digital operations during the presidential election. We’ve already heard a lot from the U.S. intelligence community about the hacking operation Russian intelligence services carried out against Democratic party computer networks to influence the election in favor of then-candidate Donald Trump. But this is the first time we have a swath of empirical and visual evidence of Russia’s disinformation campaign, in the form of more than 3,000 incredibly specific and inflammatory ads purchased by an Internet troll farm sponsored by the Kremlin.

National: Senate report on Russian hacking highlights threats to election tech vendors | CyberScoop

Lawmakers are concerned about a major blind spot in the government’s ongoing effort to protect U.S. elections from hackers. Agencies like the Homeland Security Department have little insight into the cybersecurity practices of election technology vendors. This lack of visibility opens the door to supply chain attacks, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, which could be otherwise potentially detected or stopped by government cybersecurity experts. The Senate committee’s first installment of a larger report on Russian targeting of the 2016 presidential election was released late Tuesday night. It focuses on assessing the federal government’s response to security threats and provides recommendations for future elections.

National: U.S. Voting System Still Vulnerable To Cyberattacks 6 Months Before Election Day | NPR

As America heads toward the 2018 midterms, there is an 800-pound gorilla in the voting booth. Despite improvements since Russia’s attack on the 2016 presidential race, the U.S. elections infrastructure is vulnerable — and will remain so in November. Cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier laid out the problem to an overflowing room full of election directors and secretaries of state — people charged with running and securing elections — at a conference at Harvard University this spring. “Computers are basically insecure,” said Schneier. “Voting systems are not magical in any way. They are computers.” Even though most states have moved away from voting equipment that does not produce a paper trail, when experts talk about “voting systems,” that phrase encompasses the entire process of voting: how citizens register, how they find their polling places, how they check in, how they cast their ballots and, ultimately, how they find out who won. Much of that process is digital.

National: States Await Election Security Reviews as Primaries Heat Up | Associated Press

With the midterm congressional primaries about to go into full swing, the Department of Homeland Security has completed security reviews of election systems in only about half the states that have requested them so far. The government’s slow pace in conducting the reviews has raised concerns that the nation’s voting systems could be vulnerable to hacking, especially after U.S. intelligence agencies warned that Russia plans to continue meddling in the country’s elections. Among those still waiting for Homeland Security to conduct a risk assessment is Indiana, one of four states with primaries on Tuesday. Its ballot includes several hotly contested races, including a Republican primary for U.S. Senate. Indiana Secretary of State Connie Lawson said she is confident state officials have done what they can to safeguard Tuesday’s voting, but acknowledged: “I’ll probably be chewing my fingernails during the entire day on Election Day.”

National: Six States Hit Harder By Cyberattacks Than Previously Known, New Report Reveals | NPR

Two years after Russia’s wave of cyberattacks against American democracy, a Senate committee investigating election interference says those hackers hit more states harder than previously thought. The committee also added that it still doesn’t know with complete certainty exactly how much of U.S. voting infrastructure was compromised. The report summary released this week by the Senate intelligence committee gives an overview of initial findings focused specifically on how Russian government operatives affected U.S. elections systems. The full report is undergoing a review to check for classified information.

National: Bolton pushing to eliminate White House cybersecurity job | Politico

President Donald Trump’s national security team is weighing the elimination of the top White House cybersecurity job, multiple sources told POLITICO — a move that would come as the nation faces growing digital threats from adversaries such as Russia and Iran. John Bolton, Trump’s hawkish new national security adviser, is leading the push to abolish the role of special assistant to the president and cybersecurity coordinator, currently held by the departing Rob Joyce, according to one current and two former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the discussions. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of deliberations about internal White House operations.

National: Documents Reveal How Russian Official Courted Conservatives In U.S. Since 2009 | NPR

Kremlin-linked Russian politician Alexander Torshin traveled frequently between Moscow and various destinations in the United States to build relationships with figures on the American right starting as early as 2009, beyond his previously known contacts with the National Rifle Association. Documents newly obtained by NPR show how he traveled throughout the United States to cultivate ties in ways well beyond his formal role as a member of the Russian legislature and later as a top official at the Russian central bank. These are steps a former top CIA official believes Torshin took in order to advance Moscow’s long-term objectives in the United States, in part by establishing common political interests with American conservatives. “Putin and probably the Russian intelligence services saw [Torshin’s connections] as something that they could leverage in the United States,” said Steve Hall, a retired CIA chief of Russian operations. “They reach to reach out to guy like Torshin and say, ‘Hey, can you make contact with the NRA and some other conservatives… so that we can have connectivity from Moscow into those conservative parts of American politics should we need them?’ And that’s basically just wiring the United States for sound, if you will, in preparation for whatever they might need down the road.”

National: What data on more than 3,500 Russian Facebook ads reveals about the interference effort | The Washington Post

On Thursday morning, Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee released 8 gigabytes of archives containing more than 3,500 documents detailing advertisements run on Facebook from 2015 to 2017 and paid for by Russians attempting to interfere in American politics. We analyzed those files to get a better sense of how the Russian interference effort operated — and how well it worked. Overall, the files provide information on thousands of ads, including data on when ad campaigns began, when they ended, how effective they were and how much they cost. The two months in which the most campaigns began were May 2016 and April 2017 — shortly before the Russian effort was curtailed. (No data for June 2017 were released.)

National: A Voting Rights Push: Allowing Felons to Cast Ballots | Wall Street Journal

As the midterm elections draw closer, Dameon Stackhouse is eager to cast a ballot, but he can’t under New Jersey law because he remains on parole after more than a decade behind bars for second-degree robbery. “We have no say,” said Mr. Stackhouse, a 41-year-old construction worker and student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. “This is one of the worst things you can do to a citizen.” New Jersey is weighing a measure that would immediately restore voting rights to Mr. Stackhouse and more than 94,000 other state residents with convictions. If passed by the state’s Democratic-controlled Senate and General Assembly, it would be the third U.S. state, along with Maine and Vermont, to allow people to vote even while incarcerated.

National: Fiercest Fight of the Midterms May Be the One for Maps | Roll Call

The congressional maps are all but set for the 2018 elections. But for those on the front lines of a simmering battle over the next decade of elections, the results are about more than who will control the next Congress. This year’s election season could reveal just how much the current districts have entrenched an advantage for one political party over the other, whether courts will step in to stop state lawmakers from creating such partisan districts, and which party will control crucial local offices ahead of a nationwide redistricting based on the 2020 census. The National Democratic Redistricting Committee — a new group led by former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. that aims to spend $30 million this cycle — has targeted 20 legislative chambers, nine gubernatorial races and other races it considers the “most important for shifting the balance of power in the redistricting process.”

National: Senate Intelligence Committee offers election security guidelines | FCW

A May 8 report on election security by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence calls for paper backups for state voter registration databases, risk assessments for voting machine manufacturers and better sensor technology for state and local election systems. The committee recommended two-factor authentication for state voter registration databases, better sensors around election systems to detect malicious activity, paper backups for state voter registration data and assessments for third-party vendors like voting machine manufacturers to ensure they’re meeting baseline security standards. Cybersecurity experts have long called for states to institute paper records for their voting machines, and the Senate Intel report reiterated that advice, but the recommendation to do the same for state voter registration databases takes on new importance after the committee found activity around as many as six states’ election infrastructure that went beyond mere scanning and targeting of public websites.

National: Lawmakers call for action following revelations that APT28 posed as ISIS online | CyberScoop

The world got a fresh reminder Tuesday of the difficulties associated with assigning blame for hacking – and of the consequences when a case of mistaken identity takes hold. New evidence reinforces the notion that a group dubbed the CyberCaliphate, which sent death threats to the wives of U.S. military personnel in 2015 under the banner of the Islamic State, is actually an infamous Russian-government-linked hacking group accused of meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Associated Press reported. Activity from the CyberCaliphate coincided with attempts by the Russian group, known as APT28 or Fancy Bear, to breach the womens’ email accounts, according to the Associated Press. The episode brings to life established links between the CyberCaliphate and APT28 in a way that no cybersecurity research did. The hacking victims were led to believe that jihadists, and not state-backed Russians, were breaching their accounts and leaving threatening messages.

National: Russia tried to undermine voting process in US, Senate panel reports | CNET

Russia was preparing to wage a campaign to undermine confidence in the US voting process when hackers associated with Russia’s government targeted about 18 state election systems in the months leading up to the 2016 election, the Senate Intelligence Committee has concluded. The hackers attempted to access several state election systems, but the committee said it found no evidence of vote tallies being changed. Some voter registration databases were accessed, though, and the hackers were “in a position to, at a minimum, alter or delete voter registration data,” the committee said in a report released on Tuesday.

National: Russia Tried to Undermine Confidence in Voting Systems, Senators Say | The New York Times

Russia was preparing to undermine confidence in the United States’ voting process when its hackers surveilled around 20 state election systems in the run-up to the 2016 elections, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in a brief report released on Tuesday. But the committee said it saw no evidence that the Russians had ultimately changed vote tallies or voter registration information. In a few states, however, Russian hackers were “in a position to, at a minimum, alter or delete voter registration data,” the committee said. “These activities began at least as early as 2014, continued through Election Day 2016, and included traditional information-gathering efforts as well as operations likely aimed at preparing to discredit the integrity of the U.S. voting process and election results,” the senators wrote.

National: GOP Voter Suppression: A Bigger Problem Than Russian Meddling? | WhoWhatWhy

While Democrats, Republicans, and the intelligence community are all warning about potential Russian meddling in the November midterm elections, ordinary citizens face even greater obstacles to exercising their vote. WhoWhatWhy spoke to voting rights and election integrity experts about the broad range of threats to voting access. They noted that there are other serious election concerns that voters should worry about this fall — challenges to the integrity of the voting process that are not getting enough attention in the mainstream media. In 2016, Donald Trump campaigned with a warning that the vote might be rigged against him. After winning the election but not the popular vote, President Trump — to prove his (completely unsubstantiated) claim that “millions voted illegally” — established a commission to address alleged voter fraud. The commission was later disbanded after many states refused to turn over sensitive voter data and allegations surfaced that its true purpose may have been voter suppression.

National: Hack-Resistant Vote Machines Missing as States Gird for ’18 Vote | Bloomberg

Past piles of hay outside the Pennsylvania Farm Show Complex in Harrisburg, vendors in a meeting hall hawked their latest secure voting technology. Local officials and activists tapped sleek Android screens in a mock election and saw the results documented on printouts. Yet none of the state-of-the-art equipment displayed will be used for the battleground state’s May 15 primary. That’s despite fears of hacking spawned by Russian meddling in the national election two years ago and the narrow margin of victory in key recent contests from Alabama to Pennsylvania. There’s too little time and money, officials say. U.S. election season is well underway, with Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio and West Virginia all holding primaries on Tuesday. Control of Congress in November’s midterm election may hinge on voters in Pennsylvania, a closely divided state that helped President Donald Trump clinch his 2016 victory. But like several other states, there’s a gaping hole in Pennsylvania’s machinery of democracy: It has some of the oldest, least secure voting technology in the country.

National: Cambridge Analytica: how did it turn clicks into votes? | The Guardian

How do 87m records scraped from Facebook become an advertising campaign that could help swing an election? What does gathering that much data actually involve? And what does that data tell us about ourselves? The Cambridge Analytica scandal has raised question after question, but for many, the technological USP of the company, which announced last week that it was closing its operations, remains a mystery. For those 87 million people probably wondering what was actually done with their data, I went back to Christopher Wylie, the ex-Cambridge Analytica employee who blew the whistle on the company’s problematic operations in the Observer. According to Wylie, all you need to know is a little bit about data science, a little bit about bored rich women, and a little bit about human psychology…

National: Republicans Make Moves To Crush Gerrymandering Reform | TPM

With anti-gerrymandering efforts gaining steam, Republicans in some states are mobilizing to protect their ability to continue rigging election maps. In late April, a Republican group backed by the Michigan Chamber of Commerce sued to keep a popular redistricting reform measure off the state’s November ballot. Arizona’s GOP-controlled legislature last week narrowly failed to pass a bill that would have given the party much more control over the map-drawing process. And Pennsylvania Republicans, who recently mulled impeaching a group of state judges who struck down their gerrymander, this week gutted reform legislation.

National: How U.S. Election Officials Are Trying To Head Off The Hackers | Fast Company

U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials now say it’s likely that in 2016, Russian hackers at least attempted to break into election systems in all 50 states. So far this year, there’s been no evidence of attempts of hacking election systems before the midterm congressional races, but federal, state, and local officials are still taking steps to keep any intruders at bay. Congress in March appropriated $380 million to help states beef up election security, and the DHS has been working with states to help them test and improve the security of their election systems. “The president has been clear, and the DHS and our interagency partners have been clear: We will not allow any foreign adversary to change the outcome of our elections,” Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen said at April’s RSA security conference in San Francisco. Hackers digitally flipping votes is the worst-case scenario, and it’s one that experts take seriously. Thirteen states use at least some voting machines that only record votes electronically with no paper backups, meaning a hack or even a malfunction could mean votes permanently altered or lost.

National: Trump meets with Cabinet officials on election security | The Hill

President Trump met with members of his administration, including leaders of the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, on Thursday to discuss election security, the White House said Friday. The meeting comes amid widespread concerns over the possibility of foreign interference in future elections, including this year’s midterms, following Russia’s hacking and disinformation effort against the 2016 vote. The Russian effort included the targeting of digital state election systems. Trump met Thursday with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and FBI Director Christopher Wray to discuss election security, “including enhanced protections against malign foreign influence,” the White House said in a statement early Friday.

National: From Russia with fear: New Tech is going to make fake news look quaint | Ad Age

If you’re a politically inclined technologist, this is your moment. There have never been more rewarding career opportunities for your wonky, nerdy kind. Unless someone wants to hire you to figure out what to do about Russia. That job would suck, because it seems like nobody has any idea how to do it. The consensus last week at CampaignTech East, a two-day conference in Washington, D.C., put on by the trade publication Campaigns & Elections, was that tech-enabled shenanigans—whether masterminded by Vladimir Putin and friends or other bad hombres—are only going to further infect the U.S. political system. Everybody at CampaignTech seemed wracked by the worst-case scenarios that have happened already and are yet to happen. Half a dozen panels and presentations dealt with the specter explicitly—e.g., “Social Disinformation and Cyber Interference in the 2018 Midterms.” And sessions not directly focused on the threat still had a tendency, at one point or another, to circle back to the topic.

National: Giuliani said the Stormy Daniels payment was legal. Here’s what campaign finance experts said. | The Washington Post

In interviews Wednesday and Thursday, President Trump’s attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani repeatedly asserted that a $130,000 payment to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels during the presidential campaign was legal. “It’s not campaign money,” he told Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “No campaign finance violation.” The settlement with Daniels, made by Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen in the fall of 2016, was a “personal thing,” Giuliani later told The Washington Post. “Was the president really wise to take it out of personal funds rather than from campaign funds?” he added. “Thank God he did, [or else] he’d get a campaign finance violation they’d try to drum up into a felony or something. The president is personally protected.” But under federal campaign finance rules, a contribution is “anything of value given, loaned or advanced to influence a federal election.” A “knowing and willful” violation of those rules can lead to criminal charges.

National: Trump Adds Clinton Impeachment Lawyer, Bracing for a Fight on Multiple Fronts | The New York Times

President Trump hired on Wednesday a Washington lawyer who represented Bill Clinton during his impeachment, a sign that the White House sees no immediate end to its legal problems and is girding for a combative relationship with a new Congress after the midterm elections. The new lawyer, Emmet T. Flood, will replace Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer who persuaded Mr. Trump to cooperate with the special counsel for the first year of its investigation. Mr. Cobb assured the president that doing so would bring the investigation to a swift end.

National: Giuliani: Trump fired Comey because he wouldn’t tell Trump he wasn’t target in Russia probe | The Hill

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) said Wednesday that President Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey because Comey wouldn’t tell Trump that he wasn’t a target of the FBI investigation into Russia’s election interference. “He fired Comey because Comey would not, among other things, say that he wasn’t a target of the investigation,” Giuliani, who recently joined Trump’s legal team, told Fox News’s Sean Hannity. “He’s entitled to that. Hillary Clinton got that and he couldn’t get that,” Giuliani said. “So he fired him and he said, ‘I’m free of this guy.’ ” Giuliani’s statement contradicts Trump’s recent claim that he didn’t fire Comey over the Russia probe.

National: Cambridge Analytica and British parent shut down after Facebook scandal | Reuters

Cambridge Analytica, the firm embroiled in a controversy over its handling of Facebook Inc user data, and its British parent SCL Elections Ltd, are shutting down immediately after suffering a sharp drop in business, the company said on Wednesday. The company will begin bankruptcy proceedings, it said, after losing clients and facing mounting legal fees resulting from the scandal over reports the company harvested personal data about millions of Facebook users beginning in 2014. “The siege of media coverage has driven away virtually all of the Company’s customers and suppliers,” the statement said. “As a result, it has been determined that it is no longer viable to continue operating the business, which left Cambridge Analytica with no realistic alternative to placing the company into administration.”

National: Mueller Has Dozens of Inquiries for Trump in Broad Quest on Russia Ties and Obstruction | The New York Times

Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russia’s election interference, has at least four dozen questions on an exhaustive array of subjects he wants to ask President Trump to learn more about his ties to Russia and determine whether he obstructed the inquiry itself, according to a list of the questions obtained by The New York Times. The open-ended queries appear to be an attempt to penetrate the president’s thinking, to get at the motivation behind some of his most combative Twitter posts and to examine his relationships with his family and his closest advisers. They deal chiefly with the president’s high-profile firings of the F.B.I. director and his first national security adviser, his treatment of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and a 2016 Trump Tower meeting between campaign officials and Russians offering dirt on Hillary Clinton.

National: Leaked questions reveal what Mueller wants to ask Trump about Russia | The Guardian

Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the US election, wants to ask Donald Trump about contact between his former election campaign manager Paul Manafort and Russia, the New York Times reported on Monday. The paper said it had obtained a list of nearly 50 questions that Mueller, investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, wants to put to the US president. More than half relate to potential obstruction of justice. “What knowledge did you have of any outreach by your campaign, including by Paul Manafort, to Russia about potential assistance to the campaign?” is one of the more dramatic questions published by the Times.

National: Trump-allied House conservatives draft articles of impeachment against Rosenstein as ‘last resort’ | The Washington Post

Conservative House allies of President Trump have drafted articles of impeachment against Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who oversees the ongoing special counsel probe, setting up a possible GOP showdown over the federal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The document, which was obtained by The Washington Post, underscores the growing chasm between congressional Republican leaders, who have maintained for months that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III should be allowed to proceed, and rank-and-file GOP lawmakers who have repeatedly battled the Justice Department during the past year. The draft articles, which one of its authors called a “last resort,” would be unlikely to garner significant support in Congress. But the document could serve as a provocative political weapon for conservatives in their standoff with Mueller and the Justice Department.

National: James Comey dismisses House Russia report as ‘political document’ | The Guardian

Former FBI director James Comey on Sunday dismissed a House intelligence committee report that found no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign as a “political document”. Interviewed on NBC’s Meet the Press, Comey said the most important investigation into Russian election interference and alleged links between Trump aides and Moscow was being conducted by special counsel Robert Mueller. The Senate judiciary and intelligence committees are also investigating. Democrats on the House committee protested the conclusions of the report, claiming the Republican majority had acted primarily to defend Trump. 

National: The Justice Department Deleted Language About Press Freedom And Racial Gerrymandering From Its Internal Manual | Buzzfeed

Since the fall, the US Department of Justice has been overhauling its manual for federal prosecutors. In: Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ tough-on-crime policies. Out: A section titled “Need for Free Press and Public Trial.” References to the department’s work on racial gerrymandering are gone. Language about limits on prosecutorial power has been edited down. The changes include new sections that underscore Sessions’ focus on religious liberty and the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on government leaks — there is new language admonishing prosecutors not to share classified information and directing them to report contacts with the media. Not all changes are substantive: Long paragraphs have been split up, outdated contacts lists have been updated, and citations to repealed laws have been removed.