Hillicon Valley: Officials on alert for potential cyber threats after a quiet Election Day | Officials warn delayed vote count could lead to flood of disinformation | Facebook takes down massive ‘Stop the Steal’ group

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ELECTION SECURITY SUCCESS, SO FAR: Election officials are cautiously declaring victory after no reports of major cyber incidents on Election Day.

“After millions of Americans voted, we have no evidence any foreign adversary was capable of preventing Americans from voting or changing vote tallies,” Christopher Krebs, the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said in a statement Wednesday.

But the long shadow of 2016, when the U.S. fell victim to extensive Russian interference, has those same officials on guard for potential attacks as key battleground states tally up remaining ballots.

Agencies that have worked to bolster election security over the past years are still on high alert during the vote-counting process, noting that the election is not over even if ballots have already been cast.

“I think while it’s fantastic that yesterday was quiet, that tells you that the work is paying off. But we know the nature of the threats in the cybersecurity landscape don’t go away, and you don’t get to say, ‘Oh, we’re good.’ You see the commitment and the effort and that has to continue,” Election Assistance Commission Chairman Benjamin Hovland, who was nominated by President Trump, told The Hill on Wednesday.

Election officials at all levels of government have been hyper-focused on the security of the voting process since 2016, when the nation was caught off-guard by a sweeping and sophisticated Russian interference effort that included targeting election infrastructure in all 50 states, with Russian hackers gaining access to voter registration systems in Florida and Illinois.

While there was no evidence that any votes were changed or voters prevented from casting a ballot, the targeted efforts created renewed focus on the cybersecurity of voting infrastructure, along with the improving ties between the federal government and state and local election officials.

Read more here.  

LET THE DISINFO/MISINFO GAMES BEGIN: Uncertainty over the winner of the presidential election and President Trump’s early victory declaration could open the floodgates for election disinformation. 

Fears about disinformation were already high after Russia’s efforts to disrupt the 2016 presidential contest. 

Now that the United States seems poised to not know the result of the contest for several days, the openings for foreign and domestic agents to plant seeds is far higher, say a number of experts on the issue. 

“There’s a lot of uncertainty right now about different aspects of the election that make this moment a perfect breeding ground for a disinformation campaign or even casual rumors to float around,” Saif Shahin, an assistant professor at American University’s School of Communications, told The Hill.  

Sen. Mark Warner (Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said foreign adversaries could take advantage of Trump’s comments prematurely declaring victory on Wednesday morning, even as votes were being counted. 

“In the coming days, I am deeply concerned that foreign adversaries could seek to amplify messages, like those from the President, that are designed to undermine the legitimacy of the election,” Warner, who won reelection to the Senate on Tuesday, told The Hill in a statement. 

Warner and acting Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) had warned of the threat in the days and weeks leading up to the election. 

“WARNING. The bulk of disinformation attacks prepared by our adversaries were designed for the days before & just after Election Day,” Rubio tweeted last week. “They may come faster than they can be spotted & called out, so word to the wise, the more outlandish the claim, the likelier it’s foreign influence.” 

Read more here.  

POTENTIAL TWITTER TAKEDOWN: The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the watchdog group Common Cause issued a joint request Thursday for Twitter to temporarily suspend President Trump’s account over the spread of disinformation about the election.

The groups sent a joint letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey calling for Trump’s account to be suspended over “repeated violations” of the platform’s Civic Integrity Policy. 

“We fear that, in the absence of action by Twitter, the President may be successful in his goal of delegitimizing the integrity of our democratic processes for many, and not just Twitter users but other voters and members of the public, sowing uncertainty about the voting and elections process, and potentially inciting violence against civil servants or others,” Common Cause president Karen Hobert Flynn and Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law executive director Kirsten Clarke wrote. 

As of Thursday afternoon, Twitter has hidden eight Tweets posted by Trump since Election Day behind a label that warns “some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is doubted and might be misleading about an election or other civic process.” Twitter has also limited the spread of such tweets. 

Trump’s post-Election Day tweets are not the first to be flagged by the social media giant, as Flynn and Clarke write in the letter. The platform has labeled misleading or false claims the president has tweeted about the coronavirus as well as mail-in ballots in recent months. 

“If Twitter’s rules are to have any meaning, they must be enforced, and we would expect any other Twitter users who repeatedly and deliberately violated Twitter’s terms of service in this manner would also have their account locked,” they wrote. 

Read more here. 

FACEBOOK STOPS THE STEAL: Facebook took down a group called Stop the Steal that spread pro-Trump election misinformation on Thursday after it had accumulated well over 300,000 members. 

“In line with the exceptional measures that we are taking during this period of heightened tension, we have removed the Group ‘Stop the Steal,’ which was creating real-world events,” a platform spokesperson told The Hill. “The group was organized around the delegitimization of the election process, and we saw worrying calls for violence from some members of the group.” 

The group was rife with misinformation, including debunked claims about Sharpie pens in Maricopa County, Ariz., invalidating ballots and election workers throwing out ballots. 

It was tied to Woman for America First, a nonprofit organized to protest against President Trump’s impeachment by former tea party activist Amy Kremer, Mother Jones reported. 

Read more here. 

BAD DAY FOR THE DARK WEB: The Justice Department reportedly seized about $1 billion worth of bitcoin this week that was allegedly linked to a dark web market.  

The Justice Department seized thousands of bitcoins that the agency said were linked to the criminal marketplace Silk Road that was shut down by federal authorities in 2013, CNBC reported Thursday. 

“Silk Road was the most notorious online criminal marketplace of its day,” U.S. Attorney David Anderson of the Northern District of California said in a civil complaint Thursday, according to the outlet. “The successful prosecution of Silk Road’s founder in 2015 left open a billion-dollar question. Where did the money go?”

Silk Road, an online marketplace dedicated to the trafficking of illegal goods, was shut down by the FBI in 2013. Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison two years later for creating and operating Silk Road. 

Read more here. 

HUAWEI TAKES THE FIGHT TO COURT: Chinese telecommunications group Huawei is fighting back in court against the decision by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last year to label the company a national security threat.

Legal representation for Huawei argued before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on Wednesday that the company could not be labeled a national security threat because the FCC had not developed a set standard for defining companies as threats, according to Courthouse News Service.

“What’s the standard for being a national security threat?” Michael Carvin, an attorney for law firm Jones Day arguing on behalf of Huawei’s U.S. subsidiary, said during arguments, according to Courthouse News Service. “It’s a phrase, not a standard.”

Carvin argued that there were no “neutral standards” for the FCC to make the designation, and accused FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, who was appointed by President Trump, of pressuring other members of the FCC into voting to label Huawei a threat. 

A lawyer for the FCC pushed back against these claims, arguing that the case should be thrown out due to Huawei not having been hurt by the designation and describing Huawei’s claims as “meritless,” according to Courthouse News Service.

Both the FCC and Huawei declined to comment on the case to The Hill. 

The case comes months after the five-member FCC panel voted unanimously last year to designate both Huawei and Chinese telecom group ZTE as national security threats and to ban U.S. companies from using the FCC’s $8.5 billion Universal Service Fund to purchase equipment from either group. The FCC formalized that decision in June. 

Read more here.  

Lighter click: Free my mans

An op-ed to chew on: Mapping vital U.S. interests beyond Earth orbit

NOTABLE LINKS FROM AROUND THE WEB:

‘Those in Power Won’t Give Up Willingly’: Veena Dubal and Meredith Whittaker on the Future of Organizing Under Prop 22 (OneZero / Meredith Whittaker and Veena Dubal)

LexisNexis to Pay $5 Million Class Action Settlement for Selling DMV Data (Motherboard / Joseph Cox)

Facebook and Twitter are finally calling out election misinformation. Is it working? (Protocol / Emily Birnbaum and Issie Lapowsky)