Alex Stamos, former chief security officer for Facebook, said that despite Robert Mueller's investigation, American elections are still vulnerable to attacks by Russia and other foreign adversaries -- so much so that we could easily see a repeat of 2016 or worse.
"I think what we should be looking for first is for Americans to be manipulated and turned into patsies," Stamos said, saying that new guidelines by social media platforms to ensure the authenticity of users wouldn't be enough.
"What I would expect what the response would be for the Russians and for others," he said, "is to try to support groups who are legitimately made of Americans who perhaps don't know they're being used to push Russian propaganda."
"Our election infrastructure is run by 10,000 different local election authorities," Stamos continued. "The idea that an IT guy in Miami-Dade or some county in Ohio can stand up against a colonel of the GRU, of Russian military intelligence by themselves, is just unacceptable." He said without uniform standards for "all 10,000 of those authorities", the system was exposed.
"If there's an attack against our election, while it would be hard to change the final outcome, it would not be hard at all to throw the results into chaos and to convince many, many Americans the election had been stolen," he said. "Perhaps permanently."
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