Roving Periscope: MS chief warns of ‘foreign interference’ on eve of US polls
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Amid this year’s Lok Sabha elections, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had, in a TV interview, disclosed that some ‘foreigners’ were not only ‘interested’ in the Indian parliamentary elections but also ‘interfering’ in it.
Now, Microsoft Corporation’s President Brad Smith has warned of possible meddling by foreign state actors in the final 48 hours of the ongoing campaign for the presidential election in the US, scheduled for November 5, 2024.
Foreign actors have already been spreading manipulated videos and false posts to sow discord around the US presidential elections, the media reported him, and other executives with the largest American technology companies, as saying on Thursday.
Warning about the danger of ‘foreign interference’ in the upcoming US polls, he said such attempts will surge in the last two days of the presidential campaign.
“The most perilous moment will come, I think, 48 hours before the election,” Smith told the Senate Intelligence Committee of the US Congress on Wednesday.
That was the “lesson to be learned” from the Slovakian election last fall, in which fake audio of one of the top candidates circulated online days before the election.
Smith said Microsoft earlier identified an “AI-enhanced” video from a Russian group showing Vice President Kamala Harris saying words she didn’t say at a recent rally.
Groups from adversarial nations including Russia, China, and Iran have spread false information and news reports about both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump’s campaigns, the tech executives said.
The US Committee heard testimonies from Smith, Google parent Alphabet Inc.’s President and Chief Legal Officer Kent Walker, and Nick Clegg, Meta Platforms Inc.’s President of Global Affairs.
Those attacks are being shaped in part by new developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Walker said.
“We are seeing some foreign state actors experimenting with generative AI to improve existing cyberattacks, like probing for vulnerabilities or creating spear phishing emails,” he said.
“We see generative AI being used to more efficiently create fake websites, misleading news articles, and robot social media posts.”
The Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, focused on foreign interference in US elections, comes on the heels of a Microsoft report that found Russian efforts to influence the US election have shifted to smearing Harris with doctored and misleading videos.
Meta on Tuesday also announced it was banning Russian state media outlet Russia Today (RT) due to “foreign interference.”
The Biden administration and the top tech companies stopped communicating about online threats to US elections over the past year as they waited for a ruling in Murthy v. Missouri, a case centered on whether it is constitutional for government officials to ask social media companies to take down certain posts.
The US Supreme Court in June cleared the Biden administration to communicate freely with social media companies, an election-year ruling that bolstered the government’s ability to seek removal of what officials see as misinformation. The judges, voting 6-3, tossed out court-imposed restrictions on contacts by the White House and several federal agencies.
Virginia Democratic Senator Mark Warner, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, several times expressed frustration that Elon Musk’s X Corporation (formerly Twitter) declined to send a representative to testify at the hearing.
Recently. the US also urged India to ban the Russian state media network RT. The US call followed a series of America’s sanctions against Russian media entities and journalists.
The US ramped up its efforts to ban and block RT globally, and urged India also to join actions against what it called “Russian disinformation”, by revoking accreditations and designating their journalists under the “Foreign Missions Act.”
However, while the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) did not react, government officials said the debate on sanctions is not relevant to India. A former diplomat said that banning media organizations showed “double standards” by Western countries.
On September 13, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced further sanctions against RT, claiming the media organization, which has offices around the world including in India, was the “de facto arm of Russia’s intelligence apparatus”.
