DIRECTOR WRAY: Good afternoon, everybody. Last fall, after I — shortly after I became Director, I stood up a new foreign influence taskforce at the FBI, which was designed to identify and counteract the full range of malign foreign influence operations targeting our democratic institutions and our values.
The taskforce now brings together, across the waterfront, of FBI expertise who are talking counterintelligence, cyber, criminal, and even counterterrorism designed to root out and respond to foreign influence operations.
For their part, our adversaries’ influence operations have encompassed a wide range of activities. So just like we have a multidisciplinary response, that’s because the threat is multidisciplinary.
So just a few examples of some of the things we’ve seen over the past: targeting U.S. officials and other U.S. persons through traditional intelligence tradecraft; criminal efforts to suppress voting and provide illegal campaign financing; cyberattacks against voting infrastructure, along with computer intrusions targeting elected officials and others; and a whole slew of other kinds of influence, like both overtly and covertly manipulating news stories, spreading disinformation, leveraging economic resources, and escalating divisive issues.
But it’s important to understand this is not just an election cycle threat. Our adversaries are trying to undermine our country on a persistent and regular basis, whether it’s election season or not.
There’s a clear distinction between, on the one hand, activities that threaten the security and integrity of our election systems, and, on the other hand, the broader threat of influence operations designed to manipulate and influence our voters and their opinions.
With our partners, we’re trying to counteract both threats. We have three pillars to our operational strategy. The first pillar is our investigations and our operations. And for a variety of reasons, which I hope are obvious, including operational sensitivities — I’m not going to be able to describe the full extent of those efforts, but I will tell you that our foreign influence taskforce works with FBI personnel in all 56 FBI field offices. And even as we speak, we’ve got open investigations with a foreign influence nexus spanning field offices — FBI field offices across the country. So make no mistake, the scope of this foreign influence threat is both broad and deep.
The second pillar — I said there were three pillars — the second is focused on information sharing and intelligence sharing. We’re working closely with our partners in the intelligence community and in the federal government, as well as with our state and local partners, to establish a common operating picture.
Just last week, as an example, we disseminated a list to our state and local law enforcement partners of various foreign influence indicators for them to be on the lookout for — things like malicious cyber activity, social abnormalities, and foreign propaganda activities. The idea is to marshal additional eyes and ears in the fight.
We’re also working with our international partners to exchange intelligence and strategies for combatting the threat. Because this is, after all, a shared threat with our allies.
The third pillar of our approach is based on our strong relationships with the private sector. Technology companies have a frontline responsibility to secure their own networks, products, and platforms. But we’re doing our part by providing actionable intelligence to better enable them to address abuse of their platforms by foreign actors.
So this year, we’ve met with top social media companies and technology companies several times. We’ve given them classify briefings. We’ve shared specific threat indicators and account information, and a variety of other pieces of information so that they can better monitor their own platforms.
The reality is, it’s going to take all of us working together to hold the field, because this threat is not going away. As I have said consistently: Russia attempted to interfere with the last election, and continues to engage in malign influence operations to this day.
This is a threat we need to take extremely seriously, and to tackle and respond to with fierce determination and focus. And together, with our partners, both those here and some of the other partners we’ve talked about, I’m confident that we can protect the integrity of our democratic institutions and maintain public confidence in our electoral process.
Thank you.