In continued support of our mission to cultivate a cybersecurity renaissance that will improve the resiliency of our nation’s 16 critical infrastructure sectors, defend our democratic institutions, and empower generations of cybersecurity leaders, ICIT asked some of the brightest minds in national security, cybersecurity, and technology to author essays communicating their perspective. Our goal is to share their knowledge and insights with our community to shed light on solutions to the technology, policy, and human challenges facing the cybersecurity community. Our hope is that their words will motivate, educate, and inspire you to take on the challenges facing your organizations.
ICIT Fellow Perspective Essay Authored by Parham Eftekhari, Founder and Board Chair of the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology and the Senior VP of the Cyber Risk Alliance, where he serves as the Executive Director the Cybersecurity Collaborative: There is near-unanimous agreement among national security experts that our adversaries are attempting to influence the outcomes of the 2020 elections through the pervasive use of digital and information warfare. Our intelligence communities are overwhelmingly made up of non-partisan, career civil servants. They use some of the most sophisticated signals and analytical capabilities in the world to monitor and assess these threats and their impact on campaigns, the election infrastructure, and voter perceptions. This intelligence is then passed onto our elected and appointed officials who develop overt and covert policies and operations to defend our homeland and the integrity of our democratic institutions against our adversaries.
The bedrock of our democracy depends on trusting the analyses of our intelligence community as they act against election interference. Politicizing these facts plays into the very hands of the nation-state actors who are weaponizing information through social and traditional media to manipulate our perceptions on the strength of our democracy. In this ICIT Fellow Perspective Essay, Parham Eftekhari explains:
Why Election Security is Not a Partisan Issue
The Threat Adversarial Nation-States Pose to the Integrity of US Elections
The Roles and Responsibilities of the Media, Voters, and Politicians in the "Whole-of-Nation" Defense of US Election Infrastructure
Read the Full Essay