>>18473093
>to affect this in real time
>>18473144
>an entry-level officer at CIA. particularly as we walked through the Iraq war together. ourcolleagues, like Phil Mudd
>>18473173 Q3536 drop was 10 days after Coats adds Pierson as the Election Threats Chief. Coats Fired
Adding the rest of the interview:
MICHAEL MORELL:
When did you start in 2016?
SHELBY PIERSON:
So I think some of my colleagues would laugh at this because I think it was about two weeks into that assignment in November that President Obama asked the intelligence community to write the assessment based upon the work of CIA and FBI that people now know as the 2017 intelligence community assessment. So.
MICHAEL MORELL:
Did you have a role in that?
SHELBY PIERSON:
No. As the NIM, we're certainly there from a mission management perspective. But my colleagues from the National Intelligence Council and analytic leadership of FBI and CIA handled the lion's share of the content. But from the management side, I worked closely with the team on how we disseminate that information and how do you replicate that year after year after year to create the assessments going forward. So, again, many of the planks from earlier in my career I think culminated in the creation of the ET.
MICHAEL MORELL:
And this denial and deception thing that you talk about, which is so important, denial is actions on the part of our adversaries so that we don't know what they're doing.
SHELBY PIERSON:
Right. Concealing it..
MICHAEL MORELL:
And deception is deceiving us.
SHELBY PIERSON:
And sort of manipulating of the situation. And it really has .. and I think it's important for people to understand .. that although 2016 was a watershed moment for the intelligence community, the work in counterintelligence and information operations manipulation has gone on for many, many decades. And the intelligence community has focused on that in a variety of different mechanisms.
MICHAEL MORELL:
So, Shelby, before we get to your role today, I think it would be good for our listeners if we could review what happened both in 2016 and in 2018, essentially the story of what brought us to the creation of your current job, right? So if we start with 2016, can you review for us in a broad sense what the Russians did during the 2016 campaign and why?
SHELBY PIERSON:
Sure. And as I said, I'm pleased that there is a volume of information that has been declassified out of the intelligence community. And I would refer your listeners to the 2017 report that the intelligence community put out there because I think it does an excellent job of capturing our analytic line, so to speak, as to our findings.
But to summarize, the Russians not only sought to scan and look at our voting-related infrastructure but then also utilized social media and other influence vectors to try to sway voters towards one favored candidate and also, I think as folks know, captured information from the DNC and other venues and released that information, again, to particularly sway the voting populace towards one candidate or another.
So when we look at election security as a discipline, there are sort of three different vectors that were concerned about. One is potentially an adversary compromising the actual infrastructure by which Americans vote. And we assess that that threshold was not crossed in 2016.
Secondly, we look at adversaries pursuing information relative to voter databases or voter rolls, which either they could use that to affect election day activities, deleting certain content, or also using that information to better manipulate how they focus influence operations. And in fact, our campaigns do that today.
And then thirdly is using social media and other platforms with which to manipulate or exacerbate existing social divides in the country. And so, again, all three of those vectors were looked at from a Russian perspective. And then going into 2018, I think, again, we did not assess that there were any material compromises to the voting apparatus, but there certainly was considerable influence operation-type activity.
And, as you've seen illuminated in the press and we've discussed this in very broad circumstances, we also undertook some defensive measures, particularly on the part of U.S. Cyber Command, to stop malicious content from making its way to the U.S.
MICHAEL MORELL:
Let me just ask a couple of follow-up questions on that. I don't want to make this political at all. But in terms of hurting one candidate and helping another, it was the assessment of the intelligence community that what the Russians were doing in part was designed to hurt Secretary Clinton and help..