US intelligence agencies confirm Russia is pushing fake videos of Kamala Harris

The U.S. intelligence community on Monday said Russia is responsible for recent videos shared on social media that sought to denigrate Vice President Kamala Harris, including one that tried to implicate her in a hit-and-run accident.

Spy agencies also assess that Russian influence actors were responsible for altering videos of the vice president's speeches — behavior consistent with Moscow’s broader efforts to boost former President Donald Trump’s candidacy and disparage Harris and the Democratic Party, an official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said during a press briefing.

The session did not provide any more details on the incident revealed last week in which Iranian hackers offered materials pilfered from the Trump campaign to the Harris camp.

The details about Russia’s videos follows a Microsoft analysis that found Moscow had “pivoted” its focus to Harris, and identified the article and website that triggered the hit-and-run conspiracy as part of a Russia-based disinformation campaign ahead of the upcoming election.

However, the ODNI official disagreed with the tech giant that the Kremlin quickly changed its focus once President Joe Biden withdrew from the race. Instead, they said, Russia has taken time to adapt to the new political environment with the vice president atop the Democratic ticket.

The disclosure about the fake Harris videos is part of a broader warning by the spy community that foreign actors are increasing their election influence activities as November approaches and could use artificial intelligence to generate and manipulate media. A chorus of national security officials this year have warned foreign adversaries might engage in oftentimes hard-to-detect influence operations designed to shape public opinion.

Russia “has generated the most AI content related to the election, and has done so across all four mediums, text, images, audio and video,” the ODNI official said.

In addition, Iranian influence actors have used AI to help generate social media posts and write inauthentic news articles for websites that claim to be real news sites, in both English and Spanish. 

The intelligence community has not witnessed Beijing carry out any “specific operations” targeting the election, the official said, although China is tapping emerging technology to influence global views about itself and stoke division in the U.S.

Yet despite these efforts, AI is not a “revolutionary influence tool,” the official noted.

For it to become one, foreign actors would have to overcome restrictions built in AI tools while remaining undetected, and develop their own sophisticated models to “strategically target and disseminate” such content.

“Foreign actors are behind in each of these three areas,” the ODNI official said.

With roughly six weeks left until voters go to the polls, the intelligence community is also “closely” watching malign steps foreign actors take between election day and when the outcome is certified by Congress in January.

“The various influence actors have fairly steady state influence operations that seek to stoke divisions and undermine U.S. democracy, and we would not expect that to end on Election Day,” they said.