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Sen. Mark R. Warner, chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, said U.S. adversaries are expected to intensify digital disinformation operations to sow chaos, discord and confusion among Americans if the presidential election is as close as anticipated.
He told The Washington Times in an interview this week that “China and Iran in particular” can use artificial intelligence to enhance the mass dissemination of “deepfake” videos.
“The two, three, four days after the election is where we could really see bad things happen,” he said. “Think about the potential of a deepfake of someone who appears to be an election official [on] Election Day or the day after election appearing to destroy ballots, and artificial intelligence can just simply allow these activities to be done at speed and scale that’s unprecedented.”
Senior U.S. intelligence officials warned in a briefing with reporters this week that hostile disinformation campaigns will remain a threat even after all the ballots are cast on Nov. 5. The postelection period, particularly if the outcome of the presidential race is undecided, could be even more perilous.
The Virginia Democrat, who has chaired the intelligence committee since 2021, shared his insights in a wide-ranging discussion with The Washington Times’ “Threat Status Influencers” video series, which was released on Thursday.
Topics included Iran’s time needed to make a nuclear bomb, Israeli intelligence failures before Hamas’ Oct. 7 rampage last year, CIA spy recruitment tactics and the geopolitical relevance of Sudan’s civil war. He also spoke openly of the Biden administration’s failure in Venezuela and the extent to which the authoritarian regimes in Cuba and Venezuela should be viewed as dangerous members of the rising anti-U.S., anti-Western great power alignment of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.
“All four of those nations, and I’d throw in Cuba and Venezuela as well, want to undermine American leadership in the world. They want to undermine our market-based economy,” Mr. Warner said.
Mr. Warner said the Biden administration “should have pushed harder” to support pro-democracy opposition forces in Venezuela after socialist President Nicolas Maduro rejected their claims of electoral victory this year. The South American country is one of the world’s largest oil producers.
“We tried to get Mexico, Brazil and Colombia — more left-leaning countries in the region — to [act] in the immediate aftermath,” he said. “I frankly think they whiffed.
“We need to put more emphasis on this one … to stand up for democracy in our own hemisphere,” he said.
He said the result could have grave implications for illegal immigration along the southern U.S. border. “When Maduro gets reinaugurated at the beginning of the year, we can have another 4 to 6 million Venezuelans leave the country, and that means more problems at the border,” Mr. Warner said.
The intelligence committee chairman downplayed CIA Director William J. Burns’ pronouncement at a recent security conference that Tehran needs only “a week or a little more” to produce a nuclear bomb’s worth of weapons-grade nuclear material. Iran’s capacity to produce a single nuclear weapon is “different than the delivery of a weapon,” which would involve longer timelines, Mr. Warner said.
SEE ALSO: Iran pushing for greater ties with Russia at BRICS Summit
He suggested that Iran’s nuclear breakout potential underscores the Biden administration’s urgency for “some level of cease-fire in the region.”
Israel’s decapitation of Hezbollah and Hamas, Mr. Warner said, presents an opportunity for a “realignment in the Middle East of the Gulf states to have a united front against Iran.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken was making much the same argument on a diplomatic swing through the region Thursday, although neither Hamas nor Israel has signaled a readiness to cut a deal despite months of prodding from Washington and regional powers.
“[This] is a great opportunity, and I just don’t want it to pass by,” Mr. Warner said. “We have Iranian proxies on their back foot in the region.”
Mr. Warner said the brutal civil war in Sudan is intertwined with a struggle for influence among China, Iran, Russia, the U.S. and several Arab nations. Meanwhile, famine and humanitarian crises are spiraling. Some 12 million Sudanese have been driven from their homes by the fighting between rival generals seeking power in Khartoum.
“There are more people dying every day in Sudan than in Gaza and Ukraine combined,” he said. There are “no moral good guys in this case other than the Sudanese people who want to have a chance at democracy.
“If we can actually show influence here to bring about both humanitarian aid and a level of a cease-fire, showing that America cares about what’s happening in Africa, I think it would help our standing across the Global South,” he said. “It would help our standing, where we’ve lost, in countries like Niger and Burkina Faso and Mali.”
The danger of ‘deepfakes’
U.S. intelligence officials have warned for months of Russian, Chinese and Iranian attempts to sow chaos with disinformation campaigns targeting the American presidential election. A declassified memo circulated this week by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said all three nations “have the technical capability to access some U.S. election-related networks and systems.”
The memo said hostile powers will “probably refrain from disruptive attacks that seek to alter vote counts because they almost certainly would not be able to tangibly impact the outcome … without detection; such activity would carry a risk of retaliation; and there is no indication they attempted such attacks during the past two election cycles.”
“As we go into these last couple of weeks before the election, I think the security of our voting systems is in pretty darn good shape,” Mr. Warner told The Times. In the propaganda wars, though, the stakes are dangerously high.
In a statement released Thursday, Mr. Warner highlighted a Justice Department claim that leading American domain registry companies, including NameCheap, GoDaddy, Cloudflare, NewFold Digital, NameSilo and Verisign, have provided services to a Russian covert influence network known as Doppelganger. The network specializes in impersonating Western media outlets online, including The Washington Post, Fox News and The Forward.
The department has pressured the companies to strengthen cybersecurity before and after Election Day.
“So far, we’ve not seen the kind of use of deepfakes that we expected. That’s good news,” Mr. Warner said, “but we are starting to see some evidence,”
He noted that Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin, Maryland Democrat and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was lured into a videoconference call with a “deepfake” impersonator of former Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba.
AI and U.S. spy agencies
Mr. Warner also discussed the evolving U.S. intelligence debate over how spy agencies can harness the power of artificial intelligence while managing the technology’s risks.
“We are using AI kind of behind the scenes in terms of increasing productivity. But there are real questions,” he said, including debate on whether a single large-language model — an AI program that can understand and generate human language — should be used across multiple spy agencies.
“Do we need a single large-language model for all of the information we collect? Because we collect so much communications from NSA, you know, spies from CIA may collect thumb drives, our satellites collect so many images,” Mr. Warner said.
“How do you just process all that in an appropriate way? Initially, we thought there might be just one [model]. Then each agency thought they would develop their own, and now we’re maybe back to having a discussion about one,” he said. “This is a tool that we need … because right now we have so much information coming in, we’re not even able to fully process it all in a timely fashion.”
The U.S. intelligence community faces a transitional challenge with the dramatically advancing technology, he said.
“Our spying ability, in terms of traditional spying on another nation-state or another nation’s military, we’re pretty good,” he said.
“[But] national security is much more than who has the most tanks and guns and ships and planes. It’s who’s going to win AI? Who’s going to win quantum computing?” Mr. Warner said. “You combine artificial intelligence and synthetic biology, and you’ve got some great opportunities but some real potential negative opportunities.
“How do we align our intelligence community to go after that kind of spying as well? There, I think, we’ve clearly got gaps.”
He praised the intelligence community’s forward thinking on more traditional human intelligence gathering. The CIA is attempting to recruit foreign spies among opposition communities within adversarial nations by posting on social media sites in Farsi, Mandarin, Russian, Korean, and other languages, complete with instructions on how to safely contact the agency.
“We’ve got to use all the tools we can,” Mr. Warner said. “So, having this ability to reach out and say, ‘You want to go against your regime, here’s a way to contact.’ … I’m not going to get into the results of that, but … if it ends up screwing with the minds of the bad guys a little bit in terms of the regimes, that’s not a bad outcome.”
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