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- Key takeaways from the first night of Republicans’ dark convention
- Wisconsin police fire teargas during second night of protest over Jacob Blake shooting
- 503 US deaths and 40,309 new coronavirus cases were reported yesterday
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It is Tuesday, so there is new polling data from the weekly Axios-Ipsos coronavirus index. If you’d wanted to invent something new that would show up how starkly polarised American politics is, I’m not sure you could have done a better job than with Covid-19.
Here are some of the headline figures:
Director of the National Security Agency Paul Nakasone and his senior adviser Michael Sulmeyer have penned a piece together looking at US efforts to prevent digital interference in elections. Nakasone is also the commander of US Cyber Command.
“How to Compete in Cyberspace” appears in Foreign Affairs magazine, and has just gone online this morning. In it, the two explain the actions the US took to protect elections in Montenegro last year, and specifically talk about how they attempted to proactively protect the 2018 mid-terms from interference, and will be doing so again in 2020.
The power of this partnership can be seen in how Cyber Command and the NSA worked together to protect against meddling in the 2018 midterm elections. Experts from both organizations formed the Russia Small Group (RSG), a task force created to ensure that democratic processes were executed unfettered by Russian activity. It shared indicators of potential compromise, enabling DHS to harden the security of election infrastructure. It also shared threat indicators with the FBI to bolster that organization’s efforts to counter foreign trolls on social media platforms.
And Cyber Command sent personnel on several hunt forward missions, where governments had invited them to search for malware on their networks. Thanks to these and other efforts, the United States disrupted a concerted effort to undermine the midterm elections. Together with its partners, Cyber Command is doing all of this and more for the 2020 elections.
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