The Active Measures Newsletter Podcast

The gap between imagined and actual threats to elections is vast. Where the public is focused on hacking electronic voting machines, the actual threat, says Votebeat Editorial Director Jessica Huseman, is unlikely to change actual votes. Still, there are real threats, from the 100 suspicious letters sent to election offices this week to the everyday cybersecurity challenges facing local officials. To complicate things further, the second Trump administration has unwound the tremendous work done in the first Trump administration to create a federal capacity to protect elections. What remains are patriotic, local election workers committed to serving their communities and ensuring democracy works. Hosts Jim Ludes and Mark Jacobson also discuss the viral claims about Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centers and the British Prime Minister’s recent remarks about Brexit.
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Election interference doesn’t have to change votes to be effective. The long history of Russian efforts to target specific communities in the United States mirrors domestic efforts to suppress votes. These measures don’t require AI, social media, or bot-farms—they simply require a decent understanding of one candidate’s voters. With that, anyone can generate an effective campaign to confuse voters or suppress turn-out with the ultimate goal of undermining confidence in democratic processes and institutions. Russia has a long history of this tactic, and Mark Jacobson reviews the last decade of Russian campaigns targeting voters in successive American elections.
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Hostile information activity is no longer just about false claims, but about intimidation, disruption, and shaping the conditions in which politics and policy unfold. In this week’s episode, Jim Ludes and Mark Jacobson provide a wide-ranging update on current foreign malign influence efforts, from suspected break-ins at Finnish lawmakers’ homes to Russia’s growing use of cloned media outlets and AI-assisted deception. They also examine how Australia, Britain, and the United States are wrestling with the harder question of how democracies should respond without sliding into censorship.
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Foreign election interference aims to weaken trust in democracy more than to change vote counts. New York Times reporter Dustin Volz takes us inside his recent reporting on U.S. intelligence tracking current foreign efforts to influence America’s election. The Russians are still sewing chaos; the Chinese are attacking down-ballot races, and the Iranians—locked in an intense fight with the United States—emerge as the wild card as we head into the mid-term elections. Hosts Jim Ludes and Mark Jacobson also look at the remarkable speech by UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham announcing the formation of a new, information defense agency.
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AI deepfakes don’t have to be flawless. They have to look believable enough to make you react. We spoke with CNET reporter Katelyn Chedraoui about where deepfakes are now—and what gives them so much potential as vehicles for disinformation. Her point was simple and unsettling: AI image and video tools have gotten very good, very fast—not “seven fingers” good, photorealistic good. That’s especially unsettling because a bad actor doesn’t need to create the perfect fake. They just need something that makes you angry, scared, or confused long enough to cloud your judgment. That can be a video; a robocall; a text about a polling place changing. Sometimes the most effective deception is also the most mundane. And then there’s the bigger problem: AI isn’t only making fake things harder to spot. It’s also making real things easier to doubt. Co-hosts Jim Ludes and Mark Jacobson also discuss the recent U.S. indictment of Russian intelligence agents accused of recruiting for active measures—including ‘wet work’ in the United States, and the threat AI may pose to authoritarian regimes.
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