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Feds Kick Off 2020 Cybersecurity Race with Silicon Valley Talks

The fight to preserve the information security of the 2020 U.S. election is underway. First, government officials met with Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft in Silicon Valley earlier this month to talk about how they’re getting ready for the polls in 2020, as CNBC reports.

More recently, as CBS reports, the National Security Agency has started unveiling its own steps to ward off cyber threats in 2020. The meeting with the big tech companies happened at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. The FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence were on hand.

According to Facebook, tech company representatives and government officials “specifically … talked about how industry and government could improve how we share information and coordinate our response to better detect and deter threats.” Almost 14 months ahead of Election Day, the meetings underscored how tech companies are attempting to avoid a disinformation scheme like the one by Russia that clouded the 2016 presidential elections. Facebook is building on the “war room” it created before the 2018 mid-terms. Google said it is spending on ways to uncover cyber attacks and foreign meddling as well as safeguard presidential campaigns from hackers.

Separately, the NSA this month set out a three-part plan that they said was critical in 2018:

  • First, understand malicious actors’ behavior
  • Second, share those details with possible targets, mainly via the FBI and DHS
  • Third, force unspecified “costs” on digital adversaries in conjunction with U.S. Cyber Command, the military’s cyber defense unit.

General Paul Nakasone, head of both U.S. Cyber Command and the NSA, told the annual Intelligence and National Security Alliance Summit this month, “[W]e said… if there is an adversary or adversaries that are attempting to either influence or interfere in our elections, we're going to take them on.”

State governments have ramped up their election security efforts, too. Ohio’s top election official recently asked a state budget committee for approval to use more than $1.7 million in federal funds to watch county boards of elections for possible cyber threats ahead of Election Day, reports the Toledo Blade. The state would become the third to have monitoring devices in every country, after Florida and Nevada.

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