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I’m a bit confused! News broke yesterday that the director of national intelligence (DNI) announced he intends to eliminate in-person election security briefings to Congress. Today’s New York Times notes such a move “could leave the public with a diminished understanding of the threats facing the election as it enters a critical phase.” The reason, says the director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, is to “stop a pandemic of information being leaked out of the intelligence community.”

How can such a move best serve the country’s interests?

Beyond the  obvious questions of who leaked what to whom and why we don’t know about it, this raises questions with profound implications for election security, one of which is how will our election be made more secure by limiting the ability of congress to perform it’s constitutionally-mandated function of overseeing the government’s performance in protecting our elections from foreign interference?

“Who needs to know this information,” ask David E. Sanger and Julian E. Barnes, the reporters who wrote the above-referenced Times article, “just the president, or the voters whose election infrastructure, and minds, are the target of the hacking.”

The DNI’s new directive will deny Congress the ability to ask questions about the information offered them. And it will add to the clouds of doubt swirling about concerning whom to believe and which candidate is the wiser choice to lead the country out of the deplorable state in which our country and we, it’s citizens currently find ourselves.   

So, again, I must ask, how does the withholding of information from the public about foreign election interference serve the country’s best interest? Unanswered questions are the devil’s playground; the imagination fills in the gaps. For instance, could it be, as many suspect, that the interference in the upcoming election thus far reported is primarily Russian, and could it be that their focus this time or not limited to misinformation and cyber mischief but rather has branched out into somehow enabling the mysterious “anarchists” who those allied with trump keep citing in their fearmongering about violence in primarily Democratic-run cities?  

A little bit of sunshine to dispel the shadows in the mind created by the overzealous classifying of information, a bit of transparency, would go a long way toward clearing up such matters while also alerting the public to be wary of Russian trolling of their social media.

The president, referring to his mythical notion that mail-in ballots will lead to fraud, an allegation lacking evidence to support it, said a month ago the election will be “the most rigged election in history.” On that point, he may be right, but not for the reasons he intended.

Tim Konrad

2020.08.31