Washington (AP) – The nation’s cyber security agency has played a crucial role in supporting states that enable the defense of their voting systems, but his election mission seems to be uncertain when the Republicans and critical figures in Trump administration be criticized sustainably.
President Donald Trump has not yet named anyone who leads the US cyber security and security of the infrastructure, and for the first time since it was founded, there is no one in his leaders Starts, it begins, it starts on Thursday in Washington.
Trump’s modern Minister of Homeland, Kristi Noem, said during her hearing to confirm that the agency had expired “far from the mission”. She promised to work with the senators to “contain” with legislation.
The agency, generally known as CISA, was founded in 2018 during the first Trump administration and is said to have protected the country’s critical infrastructure from insulation and nuclear power plants to banks and voting systems. While it is under the Department of Homeland Security, CISA is a separate agency with its own director of the Senate.
The agency has had a non -partisan praise from many state and local election officers, but Trump and its allies are furious with their efforts to counteract misinformation about the 2020 presidential elections and the Coronavirus pandemic. The first director of the agency, Chris Krebs, was released by Trump after cancer highlighted a group of election officers who described the election in 2020 as “the safest in American history”.
This attracted Trump’s anger when he competed against the Democrat Joe Biden. Since then, the Republicans have repeatedly claimed that CISA has worked with social media companies to censor conservative points of view about questions related to elections and health.
Agency officers contested: “Cisa censored, never censored,” said the then director of the agency, Easter, in an interview with the Associated Press last autumn. Nevertheless, the Republicans continue to accuse the agency and insist that changes are required.
“Joe Bidens Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) concentrated the government’s efficiency, said last week in a social media post.” The rackets responsible for this type of waste and abuse are held accountable! “
During the 2020 elections, the agency officials worked with states to facilitate them inform social media companies about misinformation that spreads on their platforms, but they have never dependent or tried to force these companies . For the 2024 elections, CISA and other federal authorities made the public aware of various foreign misinformation campaigns, including a bogus video associated with Russia to show the abuse of ballot pens in Pennsylvania.
In the past few months, Meta-CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeated the GOP claims and announced plans to reduce the company’s factual test program.
One of the first measures that Trump had taken after returning to the White House on January 20 was to examine “termination of the federal census” and the instruction of his general prosecutor to examine federal actions as part of the previous administration and to propose “remedial measures”. There is little information about what comes next and whether Cisa’s mission could change under a modern leadership.
Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for a Republican administration, recommended that the CISA move to the traffic department and to focus exclusively on the protection of state networks and the coordination of the security of critical infrastructure.
It is said that the agency should only facilitate the states to assess whether they have “good cyberhygiene in their hardware and software to prepare for a choice – nothing more”. The agency has done this in recent years by providing training and security checks.
According to the effort of Russia in 2016, the voting systems were described as a critical infrastructure to interfere with this year’s presidential election, including the scanning of the state voter registration databases for vulnerabilities.
Some state election officers were initially resistant to the idea of ​​the Federal Aid. But many are now reporting the agency and the federal money with improving security before the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections.
“There were some of US secretaries who were skeptical that the federal government tried to take over the election behavior and I was one of them,” said Kim Wyman, former Foreign Minister of the role at CISA. “It became a partnership and our systems were therefore stronger.”
