The Trump administration continues its wide-ranging and drastic cuts on services provided by the federal government. In one of their latest moves, the Department of Homeland Security recently announced the termination of a program that helped state officials monitor potential election interference.
The program, which was called the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, or EI-ISAC, had been established in 2018 in the wake of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
But, per a March 3 email obtained by Jen Fifield at Votebeat, that program “no longer supports Department priorities.”
Fifield joined The Show to explain the implications of all this.
Full conversation
SAM DINGMAN: Can you give us sort of a concrete sense of the kind of information that this EI-ISAC program would have provided to a state election official?
JEN FIFIELD: Sure, absolutely. If you remember, there were a bunch of hoax bomb threats that happened during this November election. That’s a great example. The reason why states were able to continue running the election, without fear, is because they had been alerted through the system that these were hoaxes.
Of course, you know, there’s everyone is looking for alerts across many different systems. But this was the main way that states saw what was happening in other states, cybersecurity wise and physical security wise during elections.
DINGMAN: Got it. So obviously states themselves are able to monitor some of this, but this service was designed to identify the threats that might have crossed state lines and help separate fact from fiction it seems. The Trump administration, as I understand it, is making a sort of freedom of speech agreement to justify cutting this program though. Can you explain that?
FIFIELD: Well, part of the program that was criticized was run by the center for internet security, where they monitored misinformation or misinformation about elections. But they had phased out of that a while ago.
There had been a lot of criticism that it was censoring free speech by monitoring social media. The government requesting for the social media companies to look at certain posts, they had phased out of that.
Now the services that were being directly cut and targeted by the Trump administration were more the ones that we talked about monitoring of cybersecurity and physical threats. And like you said, it wasn’t very explained on why other than saying it wasn’t a priority.
DINGMAN: Well, let’s talk about the local impact of this. In your piece you write that Secretary of State Adrian Fontes offered to the center, or I’m sorry, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a tour of state election offices, presumably to demonstrate the value of the EI-ISAC program. What happened?
FIFIELD: So this was actually through the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is known as CISA. They do assessments of physical spaces and cyber spaces for local governments. They’ve done this for years.
Now, Fontes was just doing these tours, in the off election year and had scheduled for CISA officials to come with, because of their expertise. Now about a month ago, they said they were not able to make it up to two northern Arizona counties on these tours. Since then, we’ve had eight of these tours, and they haven’t been present.
DINGMAN: I see. So where do these cuts leave election security infrastructure in Arizona and states like Arizona that have large rural populations?
FIFIELD: I think it’s still too soon to tell. I know the Pennsylvania secretary of state was concerned specifically for the smaller and rural counties there. They just rely a bit more on the federal government to help them with things like, you know, their physical, even, you know, cybersecurity assessments of their systems.
So, there are a lot of state election directors concerned right now. They’ve already written to DHS. They’re just waiting to see what services this nonprofit center for internet security can still provide, even with the funding cuts.
DINGMAN: Yes, that does seem like a critical point here that though the EI-ISAC program was cut, there may still be other federal resources available?
FIFIELD: Not really federal government resources, but this nonprofit that was kind of running the show for CISA, for the federal government for a while might be able to still pick up on this. But we don’t, you know, we don’t know. Their funding was just cut, and so we’re waiting to hear a little more.
I think it’s causing uncertainty. Like, luckily most states don’t have a statewide election this year. So, we’re just kind of in this holding period right now.
