US sanctions Russian, Iranian groups for election interference – djohnson

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The U.S. State Department has sanctioned two foreign organizations and one individual who it alleges worked on behalf of Russian and Iranian intelligence agencies to interfere in the 2024 U.S. general election.

“These actors sought to stoke sociopolitical tensions and undermine our election institutions during the 2024 U.S. general election,” said State Department Press Secretary Matthew Miller in a statement. “Today’s sanctions build on numerous previous U.S. government actions that have disrupted Iran’s attempts to undermine confidence in our democratic institutions and Russia’s global malign influence campaigns and illicit cyber activities.”

The sanctioned entities include the Cognitive Design Production Center, which U.S. officials call a “subordinate organization” of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). According to a Department of Treasury press release detailing the sanctions, the center has “planned influence operations designed to incite socio-political tensions among the U.S. electorate in the lead up to the 2024 U.S. elections, on behalf of the IRGC.” 

Also sanctioned was the Center for Geopolitical Expertise, accused of working on behalf of Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), along with Valery Mikhaylovich Korovin, its director. 

The Center for Geopolitical Expertise was founded in 1999 by Aleksandr Dugin, a Russian official close to President Vladimir Putin who was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2015. Treasury officials alleged that Korovin is a GRU officer and the center works “directly with a GRU unit that oversees sabotage, political interference operations, and cyberwarfare targeting the West,” including through the use of generative AI.

“At the direction of, and with financial support from, the GRU, CGE and its personnel used generative AI tools to quickly create disinformation that would be distributed across a massive network of websites designed to imitate legitimate news outlets to create false corroboration between the stories, as well as to obfuscate their Russian origin,” the Treasury statement said. “CGE built a server that hosts the generative AI tools and associated AI-created content, in order to avoid foreign web-hosting services that would block their activity.”
 

In addition to the activity listed in the sanctions, U.S. intelligence agencies, private threat intelligence organizations and public reporting have tracked numerous disinformation campaigns online and offline that were traced to Russian and Iranian intelligence operations, though not all were specifically attributed to the GRU and IRGC.

Russia-linked efforts include a clandestine campaign to launder millions in foreign money to American online influencers to spread Russia-friendly narratives, a botfarm powered by artificial intelligence that created nearly 1,000 unique fake accounts and personas imitating U.S. voters on X, the folding of state-run media operatives into ongoing intelligence operations carried out by the Federal Security Service (FSB) and through Doppelganger, a prolific online disinformation group tied to the Russian government that has persistently targeted U.S. audiences with political content over the past year.

Iranian efforts included disinformation campaigns, a hack and leak operation that used an online persona to spread stolen documents from Republican candidate Donald Trump’s campaign and, reportedly, a plot to assassinate then-candidate Trump in retaliation for his assassination of Iranian IRCG General Qasem Soleimani in 2020. After Trump’s election win this year, Iranian officials moved to assure the Biden administration that they were not actively trying to kill the president-elect.

U.S. intelligence officials have assessed that the Russian government’s efforts were largely in support of Trump while Iranian influence efforts were primarily targeted towards helping the electoral chances of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.

While the U.S. government has attempted to respond forcefully to foreign interference campaigns, the ultimate impact of these combined efforts on U.S. politics is less clear. Many of the online disinformation campaigns appeared to gain little to no traction with U.S. audiences, while other efforts, like the funding of conservative influencers, garnered tens of millions of views online. Iran’s hack and leak received only tepid coverage in U.S. media, mostly focused on the operation’s Iranian origins.

Jen Easterly, Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, remarked this year that while she believes U.S. election infrastructure has never been more secure, the threat environment facing elections “has never been so complex” and Americans faced a “firehose” of false information from foreign countries. 

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