The Government Accountability Office tells Congress that the Department of Homeland Security and its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) have no adequate plan to combat identified threats relating to the 2020 elections. It says, in part,
“In the absence of completed plans, CISA is not well-positioned to execute a nationwide strategy for securing election infrastructure prior to the start of the 2020 election cycle.”
“Further, CISA’s operations plan may not fully address all aspects outlined in its strategic plan, when finalized. Specifically, according to CISA officials, the operations plan is expected to identify organizational functions, processes, and resources for certain elements of two of the four strategic plan’s lines of effort—protecting election infrastructure, and sharing intelligence and identifying threats.
CISA officials stated that CISA was unlikely to develop additional operations plans for the other two lines of effort—providing security assistance to political campaigns, and raising public awareness on foreign influence threats and building resilience.”
“Moreover, CISA has not developed plans for how it will address challenges, such as concerns about incident response, identified in two reviews—one conducted by CISA and the other done by an external entity under contract—of the agency’s 2018 election security assistance.”
Source:
1. https://www.gao.gov/assets.pdf
1. Why are DHS and CISA, despite years of public exposure of the threats, still found to be unprepared for 2020 election security?
2. Who in DHS and CISA are responsible for this failure?
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