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The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is also known as America's Cyber Defense Agency.
Jen Easterly has served as the director of that agency since 2021.
Explain the role that CISA plays when it comes to election security and what you're doing right now.
Yeah, well, great to be on C-SPAN.
Love it.
So CISA, and folks may not have heard of it, we're the newest agency in the federal government.
We were stood up six years ago to play two key roles.
We serve as America's cyber defense agency and as the national coordinator for critical infrastructure security and resilience.
So what does that mean?
We protect and defend the cyber and physical infrastructure that Americans rely on every day for water, for power, for transportation, for communication, for health care, for finance, and the infrastructure that Americans use to cast their ballots and to ensure that those ballots are counted as cast.
And that came out of 2016, Russian attempts to interfere in the election.
After that, election infrastructure was designated as critical infrastructure, and CISA was designated as the federal government lead for election infrastructure security.
We all know states run elections.
What we do is we bring together support from the federal government to ensure that state and local election officials have the resources that they need to defend their election infrastructure.
So when it comes to election security, what takes more of your time or where are you mostly focused?
Are the bigger threats coming from the cyber side attacking U.S. elections or is it the infrastructure, the physical devices and places where we vote?
So I should say that based on the work that we have done over the past eight years, really what state and local election officials have done, American people should understand our election infrastructure has never been more secure.
But to your point, the threat environment has never been more complex.
There are serious cyber threats, ransomware, denial of service, so you can't get to websites.
There's very serious physical threats to election officials.
And there is a range of very serious threats from our foreign adversaries from Russia, from Iran, from China.
They're using different tactics, but they are focused on two main goals, to undermine American trust in our democracy and our confidence in elections, and to sow partisan discord, basically pitting Americans against each other.
And so we are focused on the full range.
We've been working with election officials since the beginning of this cycle to provide physical assessments.
We've done nearly 1,200 for physical security, 700 for cybersecurity.
We've done nearly 200 exercises to work with election officials on the full range of scenarios where you could have incidents or disruptions.
And we've done hundreds of trainings to help election officials reduce risk to election systems and processes.
Drill down on the foreign threats for a second.
There's an article in the business section of today's New York Times, the headline, how Russia, China, and Iran are interfering in the U.S. elections.
Are they taking different paths to do it?
Is one of those more concerning to you than the other?
Well, they're more active and they're using more sophisticated techniques.
In some cases, they're powered by generative AI, so they're using some of these capabilities to be able to more rapidly generate fake media personas, fake websites, so they can spew this propaganda out into the U.S. and they're using unwitting influencers to get their message out widely.
I do want Americans to understand that despite this threat environment, as I said, no matter who you vote for, you can have confidence that your vote will be counted as cast.
And why am I saying that?
Well, a few things.
So to prevent digital interference, voting machines are not connected to the internet.
Really important to understand that.
To prevent digital manipulation, over 97% paper ballots.
And to guarantee near zero human manipulation, there are multiple, multiple layers of safeguards, physical security, cybersecurity, pre-election testing of equipment, post-election auditing to ensure that election infrastructure is safe from compromise.
And the last thing that Americans should understand is every state runs elections differently.
Different equipment, different processes.
The saying goes, if you've seen one state's election, you've seen one state's election.
And that diverse and decentralized nature of our election infrastructure is actually a great strength because it means it's not possible for a bad actor to tamper with or try and manipulate our voting systems in a way where you can have an impact on the outcome of the presidential election, certainly not without being detected.
You talk about what Americans should understand.
Do you meet with both campaigns?
Do you think they understand the level of security that you're talking about here and the safeguards that are in place?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, most of my work over the past three years has been on the ground with election officials of both parties.
And, you know, election officials will tell you this is not a political issue.
Elections are political.
Election security is not.
It's not Republican.
It's not Democrat.
It's a national security American issue.
And so we work with all aspects of the campaigns so that they can take advantage of our voluntary services.
We have cyber expertise, physical security expertise.
And that strong partnership with all of the states and the territories, I believe, has made a real difference in improving the security of our election infrastructure.
Have you ever had a meeting with Donald Trump or members of the Trump campaign to have this conversation?
Yeah, so I have folks on my team who meet with all folks from the campaigns and from the partisan organizations.
Most of our time is spent with the election officials who are running elections and ensuring the security of election infrastructure.
But we meet with anyone who wants to take advantage of our expertise and our advice.
Jen Easterly with us for about another 10 minutes here.
So get your calls in.
Phone lines, as usual, 202-748-8000.
For Democrats, 202-748-8001 for Republicans.
Independents, it's 202-748-8002.
As folks are calling in, what do you make of ballot drop boxes being burned or set on fire in Oregon and Washington?
Yeah, so I talked to Secretary of State Steve Hobbs in Washington yesterday.
They are working very closely with local law enforcement and the FBI to identify the criminals involved and to hold them accountable for these crimes.
I think it's important to understand elections and certainly the presidential election is a very complex event.
You're talking hundreds of thousands of election workers, tens of thousands of polling places, some 150 million plus Americans voting.
There are going to be disruptions.
There are going to be incidents.
The good news is that election officials have prepared for this.
They've trained for this.
They've exercised for it.
And so they are ready to be able to deal with the full range of disruptions.
And when it comes to criminal activities, whether it's setting a ballot box on fire with an incendiary device or whether it's fraudulently signing up voters as we saw happened in Pennsylvania, those things will be They will be caught, they will be investigated, and those who did it will be held liable.
You mentioned Pennsylvania.
I did want to give you a chance to talk about this October 25th threat update that CISA put out about a video circulating, purporting to show ballots being destroyed in Pennsylvania.
Yeah.
Well, it goes back to your point.
As we noted in a statement on Friday, that was Russian.
Look, we've been warning about this for months now.
One of the things we've tried to do, learning lessons from the past, is to get with the intelligence community and the FBI and be much more proactive.
We actually put up a webpage earlier this week that shows all of the updates from the intelligence community that have been declassified about foreign adversary activity.
We've seen Russia, we've seen Iran, we've seen China.
And by the way, we've also seen disruptions.
We've seen indictments against Russia.
We've seen indictments against Iran for the hack and leak operation against the Trump campaign.
And so there are massive efforts going on to ensure the safety of our elections.
I've got to think there's more fake videos out there.
What does it take to get a specific threat advisory from CISA on a video?
Is it the fact that this one was kind of going viral?
Yeah, well, we were very focused on the fact that this was, it went viral, but also it was clearly, as we looked at it, it was very specific.