Facebook And Clinton, Romney Campaign Chiefs Unite To Fight Election Propaganda

Facebook is providing the initial funding for a Harvard-based initiative, Defending Digital Democracy, which aims to protect U.S. political parties, voting networks and election overseers from hackers and propaganda.

Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos announced the company will provide the initial funding of $500,000 for the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government-based program to launch, Reuters reports. The bipartisan, nonprofit organization will be led by the former chairs of both the Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney presidential campaigns. It will also feature several tech security experts from Google, former government officials and Silicon Valley cybersecurity experts.

Read: US Election Hacked? Stolen Voter Rolls Linked To Russia

Stamos, speaking Wednesday at the Black Hat annual security event in Las Vegas, said Facebook is looking to create a $1 million Internet Defense Prize for security researchers and a partnership with CodePath, a free training company that educates engineers.

"Right now we are the founding sponsor, but we are in discussions with other tech organizations," Stamos said in an interview before the speech. "The goal for our money specifically is to help build a standalone ISAO (Information Sharing and Analysis Organization) that pulls in all the different groups that have some kind of vulnerability."

In an email to Reuters, Clinton campaign chair Robby Mook explained, "Most campaigns don't have the tools right now to defend themselves from cyber-attacks. Our initiative aims to fill that void and to help both Democratic and Republican campaigns defend themselves with greater information-sharing and security tools."

And 2012 Mitt Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades added, “This is a forward-looking and bipartisan effort to tackle a real problem.”

Although the group hasn’t yet detailed how it plans to fight hackers and fabricated political propaganda, their announcement shows at least a two-pronged program for defending the physical voting process as well as the protecting media narratives from foreign countries’ propaganda.

Defending Digital Democracy also intends to use blockchain technology to secure the integrity of votes and the group wants to create “playbooks” for campaigns and election overseers to hone their security methods, Engadget first reported.

Harvard’s Belfer Center co-director Eric Rosenbach announced in a press release last week: “Americans across the political spectrum agree that political contests should be decided by the power of ideas, not the skill of foreign hackers. Cyber deterrence starts with strong cyber defense — and this project brings together key partners in politics, national security, and technology to generate innovative ideas to safeguard our key democratic institutions.”

The Silicon Valley-backed project takes aim at hacks disrupting U.S. elections – a controversial and ongoing source of political ire that last throughout the presidential election between Donald Trump and Clinton. The group hopes to use its vast technological resources to keep hackers from tampering with voting machines and disrupting political parties’ narratives.

The anti-hacking, anti-propaganda program will also be led by several high-profile Silicon Valley cybersecurity names. That list includes Google’s information security director Heather Adkins (who is a founding member of the Google Security team), security firm CrowdStrike’s co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch and Eric Rosenbach, who was Chief of Staff to former Defense Secretary Ash Carter.