Editor’s note: This story will be updated throughout the day as additional briefings occur.
Election Day marks the middle of the expected duration of the operations center to optimize coordination between critical entities during elections, according to senior officials of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
“Today, in some sense, is halftime,” CISA Director Christopher Krebs said in a press briefing Tuesday. “There may be other events or activities or efforts to interfere and undermine confidence in the election.”
Krebs and Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf described actions CISA has taken since the 2016 contest and—despite some interference attempts by foreign actors—expressed confidence in the security of the vote in 2020.
Among key measures CISA has implemented is an in-person operations center established at the agency’s headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.
“We've got our operation center here up and running,” senior CISA officials said in a call with reporters following the briefing. “We've been in enhanced coordination posture now for 45 days and will continue that enhanced coordination posture for another 45 days, or as long as needed to make sure we're sharing information with our partners.”
The operations center will occupy both classified and unclassified spaces and include the FBI and the broader intelligence community, the Department of Defense, the United States Postal Service, the National Association of Secretaries of State, the National Association of State Election Directors, the Election Assistance Commission, both major political parties, social media and election technology companies, and others, according to CISA.
“We're sharing information at an unprecedented rate, allowing us to spot even the smallest events and share them across the entire country in order to stop threats in their tracks,” Wolf said, noting sensors in place to detect hacking attemp ..
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