Big Tech Companies Meeting With U.S. Officials on 2020 Election Security | NYT

Excerpt below; also see An Op-Ed From the Future on Election Security | Lawfare

"Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft met with government officials in Silicon Valley on Wednesday to discuss and coordinate on how best to help secure the 2020 American election, kicking off what is likely to be a marathon effort to prevent the kind of foreign interference that roiled the 2016 election.

The daylong meeting, held at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., included security teams from the tech companies, as well as members of the F.B.I., the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security."

On a related note, from an interview about The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats, by Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake:

            "Dave Bittner: [00:14:24] I must admit, I'm puzzled that given what we saw in the 2016 election, what I would have thought would have been a non-controversial notion that defending our electoral system would have bipartisan support. That's not what we're seeing. We're seeing, you know, Mitch McConnell blocking efforts to strengthen our security when it comes to elections.
            Richard A. Clarke: [00:14:49] Well, Mitch McConnell is - there are Republican senators that are interested in making progress on election security - Senator Lankford, Senator Rubio - but Mitch McConnell is blocking it. And his argument is pretty transparently false. His argument is, well, we don't want to federalize the Federal elections. That's nonsense. I think Mitch McConnell is once again pimping for Donald Trump and the White House. They don't want to improve our election security because they want the Russians to interfere again in the next presidential election. You saw Trump joking about it with Putin. The two of them sitting next to each other laughing and Trump wagging his finger at him and say, oh, you don't interfere in our election, and then laugh. You know, that's almost a treasonous act, I think. They want the same outcome as they had in 2016, which is the Russians being able to manipulate social media and perhaps even the election machinery to get this guy re-elected. They got him elected the last time, they want to get him elected the next time. McConnell knows that, and McConnell wants that outcome."

Big Tech Companies Meeting With U.S. Officials on 2020 Election Security | NYT