Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to Monitor US Midterm Elections Amid Security Concerns

 

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) plans to set up an "Elections Day Operations Center" to monitor the midterm election.

In response to concerns about potential attempts to sabotage the congressional election, CISA, the main US cybersecurity agency, announced that it would monitor and issue security alerts on Tuesday's vote. After it was discovered that Russia meddled in the 2016 US election with a hacking and propaganda effort meant to harm Hilary Clinton's chances of defeating Donald Trump, election security has become a major concern in the US.

According to a statement released on Monday, the top US cybersecurity agency intends to establish "Elections Day Operations Centers" with partners in the public and private sectors around the nation to track the midterm elections.

Kim Wyman, senior election security advisor at CISA, said in a statement last week that election officials "have had to deal with increased disinformation from foreign enemies, which can raise confusion about electoral infrastructure and undermine voters' faith in the process."

"Now, the innocent can be made to look malicious when something goes wrong—and with 8,800 electoral jurisdictions nationwide, something will go wrong somewhere."

In the meantime, according to employees who survived the layoffs and an outside voting rights group, Twitter is finding it difficult to address political misinformation and other harmful posts on the social media platform after Elon Musk fired roughly half of its staff just days before the US midterm elections.

Many of the workers whose job it is to remove hate and false information off social media platforms were not affected by the recent mass layoffs. According to an executive, Musk only fired 15% of those front-line content-moderation employees while cutting jobs by nearly 50% overall. Employees claim that in addition to drastically reducing the number of employees who can examine a specific account's digital behaviour and history in order to determine whether it has been used maliciously and take appropriate action to suspend it, the company did this in order to prepare for the layoffs.

As the US midterm elections come to a close on Tuesday, the recent developments are concerning. Although many Americans have already voted early and absentee, millions more are anticipated to cast their in-person ballots.

Election observers worry that the platform might not be able to handle hate speech, false information that could endanger voter safety, and actors looking to contest the results of valid elections around the nation.