Donald Trump is dismantling US guardrails, warn former security officials
Authoritarian Interference Tracker
Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD): “From foam-filled exhaust pipes to hacked water utilities: a new ISD tool maps how Russia, China and Iran are interfering in democracies and gives researchers, policymakers and journalists the evidence to track it. Foreign interference is not new, but it is constantly evolving.
Over the past decade, Russia, China and Iran have deployed an ever-expanding set of hybrid tactics to erode trust in democratic institutions and widen social divisions across Europe and North America. Elections remain frequent targets, but the threat reaches far beyond them, from cyberattacks on critical infrastructure to sabotage, arson and assassination plots carried out on Western soil.
To capture this reality, ISD is launching the Authoritarian Interference Tracker (AIT), a tool that catalogues interference operations by Russia, China and Iran across five incident types: cyber operations, kinetic operations, information operations, malign finance, and political and civic subversion. Building on a database created by the Alliance for Securing Democracy—which merged with ISD in January—this new version adds activity linked to Iran, a redesigned interface, and new features for identifying trends across countries and incident types. The tracker documents more than 290 incidents that took place in 2022 or after.“The rate of authoritarian hybrid attack and interference in liberal democracies has risen significantly these last years,” said ISD co-founder and CEO Sasha Havlicek.
“ISD is committed to detecting and exposing this activity as a basis for more effective deterrence and response. I am excited to be releasing this important resource serving the sector, to be further developed and grown with input from the expert and policy community over time.”
- You can explore the Authoritarian Interference Tracker here.
FBI gets voter’s IP address in new fraud probe tactic
Axios: “The Trump administration has a new tactic for trying to isolate cases of alleged voter fraud — digging into the IP addresses of those who went online to register to vote. The FBI recently obtained the IP address of someone who registered online in South Carolina, according to documents first shared with Axios.
The bureau’s request for the address, which state and local officials complied with, offers a glimpse of how federal authorities are stepping up their probe of voter rolls and registration practices under pressure from President Trump. The president’s persistent complaints about the 2020 election have expanded into federal investigations that also involve the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security.
- It’s unclear how often the FBI plans to take the extraordinary step of seeking IP addresses, but its push in South Carolina has broad implications nationwide: 43 states allow some form of online voter registration. An IP address would show a user’s geographic location and service provider, but not their specific identity. It could tell whether the user was outside a state or even the U.S., for example. Trump has claimed that operatives in China and elsewhere have tried to influence U.S. elections.
- The big picture: As the bureau investigates South Carolina, ICE has been requesting voter data in Texas and North Carolina. The Justice Department, meanwhile, is trying to get voter rolls from states that have resisted sharing registration information, and is suing 30 states and Washington, D.C., for that access…”
