Can Facebook, or Anybody, Solve the Internet’s Misinformation Problem?; The New York Times, August 22, 2018

Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times;Can Facebook, or Anybody, Solve the Internet’s Misinformation Problem?

"Alex Stamos, who until recently was Facebook’s chief security officer, has a dimmer view. 

In an article published on Wednesday on Lawfare, a news site that covers national security, Mr. Stamos wrote that the string of attacks revealed by Facebook, Microsoft and others were evidence 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.”

The government’s failure to address these threats have left the United States “unprepared to protect the 2018 elections,” Mr. Stamos said. He outlined a set of legislative, regulatory and law enforcement steps Americans might take to secure their digital house.

If we move fast, he said, we might be able to salvage 2020."

Trump Wants Putin to Keep Meddling to Get Himself Reelected; The Daily Beast, July 19, 2018

Margaret Carlson, The Daily Beast; Trump Wants Putin to Keep Meddling to Get Himself Reelected

"From the gist of special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments, Trump knows how sophisticated, how costly the Russian actions were, and how likely they are to take place again. Yet he’s made no moves to deny Putin a glide path to a sequel, no elevating election security to a priority as he did for the calamitous separating children at the border, which has all the money and attention in the world.

To the contrary, the White House hasn’t spearheaded anything close to the kind of Manhattan Project that protecting our democracy deserves, not even the cost-free appointment of an election czar, or a request to Silicon Valley to help. Small efforts to counter voting machine fraud, bots, fake news (the real kind) go along at a snail’s pace at the FBI and Homeland Security. Congress has allotted a mere $380 million, a pittance to the cause. It’s likely that Russia is putting more money into interfering in 2020 than the U.S. is putting in to stopping it."

By November, Russian hackers could target voting machines; Washington Post, 7/27/16

Bruce Shneier, Washington Post; By November, Russian hackers could target voting machines:

"Russia was behind the hacks into the Democratic National Committee’s computer network that led to the release of thousands of internal emails just before the party’s convention began, U.S. intelligence agencies have reportedly concluded.

The FBI is investigating. WikiLeaks promises there is more data to come. The political nature of this cyberattack means that Democrats and Republicans are trying to spin this as much as possible. Even so, we have to accept that someone is attacking our nation’s computer systems in an apparent attempt to influence a presidential election. This kind of cyberattack targets the very core of our democratic process. And it points to the possibility of an even worse problem in November — that our election systems and our voting machines could be vulnerable to a similar attack."