Last week marked the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a conflict that has been marked by multiple reports that Russia may have committed war crimes by indiscriminately targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure. During the first winter of the conflict, Russia pursued a strategy that US secretary of state Antony Blinken described as trying to “freeze [Ukraine] into submission” by attacking its power infrastructure, shutting citizens off from heat and electricity.
Now, using satellite imagery and open source information, a new report from the Conflict Observatory, a US-government-backed initiative between Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab, the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative, PlanetScape AI, and the mapping software Esri, offers a clearer picture of the scale of this strategy. Between October 1, 2022, and April 30, 2023, researchers found more than 200 instances of damage to the country’s power infrastructure, amounting to more than $8 billion in estimated destruction. Of the 223 instances identified in the report, researchers were able to confirm 66 of them with high confidence, meaning they were able to cross-reference the damage across multiple trustworthy sources and data points.
Courtesy of Yale Humanitarian Research Lab
“What we see here is that there was a pattern of bombardment that hit front lines and non-frontline areas, at a scale that must have had civilian effect,” says Nathaniel Raymond, a coleader of the Humanitarian Research Lab and lecturer at Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated at the time that attacks on Ukraine’s power grid had left “millions” of people without electricity throughout the country.
Researchers found and were able to identify and verify damage to power infrastructure in 17 of the country’s 24 oblasts, or administrative units.
Documenting specific instances of damage to power infrastructure has been particularly difficult for researchers and investigators, because the Ukrainian government has sought to limit public information about which sites have been damaged and which continue to be operational in an effort to prevent further attacks. (For this reason, the report itself avoids getting too specific about which locations it analyzed and the extent of the destruction.) But this can also make it difficult to collect, verify, and build upon the data necessary to prove violations of international law.
By making its methodology public, Raymond hopes that it will make further investigation possible. “Having common standards to a common dataset is a prerequisite for accountability,” he says.
It remains unclear how many of Warner’s colleagues agree with him. But when WIRED surveyed the other 23 Republican secretaries who oversee elections in their states, several of them said they would continue working with CISA.
“The agency has been beneficial to our office by providing information and resources as it pertains to cybersecurity,” says JoDonn Chaney, a spokesperson for Missouri’s Jay Ashcroft.
South Dakota’s Monae Johnson says her office “has a good relationship with its CISA partners and plans to maintain the partnership.”
But others who praised CISA’s support also sounded notes of caution.
Idaho’s Phil McGrane says CISA is doing “critical work … to protect us from foreign cyber threats.” But he also tells WIRED that the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC), a public-private collaboration group that he helps oversee, “is actively reviewing past efforts regarding mis/disinformation” to determine “what aligns best” with CISA’s mission.
Mississippi’s Michael Watson says that “statements following the 2020 election and some internal confidence issues we’ve since had to navigate have caused concern.” As federal and state officials gear up for this year’s elections, he adds, “my hope is CISA will act as a nonpartisan organization and stick to the facts.”
CISA’s relationships with Republican secretaries are “not as strong as they’ve been before,” says John Merrill, who served as Alabama’s secretary of state from 2015 to 2023. In part, Merrill says, that’s because of pressure from the GOP base. “Too many conservative Republican secretaries are not just concerned about how the interaction with those federal agencies is going, but also about how it’s perceived … by their constituents.”
Free Help at Risk
CISA’s defenders say the agency does critical work to help underfunded state and local officials confront cyber and physical threats to election systems.
The agency’s career civil servants and political leaders “have been outstanding” during both the Trump and Biden administrations, says Minnesota secretary of state Steve Simon, a Democrat.
Others specifically praised CISA’s coordination with tech companies to fight misinformation, arguing that officials only highlighted false claims and never ordered companies to delete posts.
“They’re just making folks aware of threats,” says Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, Adrian Fontes. The real “bad actors,” he says, are the people who “want the election denialists and the rumor-mongers to run amok and just spread out whatever lies they want.”
If Republican officials begin disengaging from CISA, their states will lose critical security protections and resources. CISA sponsors the EI-ISAC, which shares information about threats and best practices for thwarting them; provides free services like scanning election offices’ networks for vulnerabilities, monitoring those networks for intrusions and reviewing local governments’ contingency plans; and convenes exercises to test election officials’ responses to crises.
“For GOP election officials to back away from [CISA] would be like a medical patient refusing to accept free wellness assessments, check-ups, and optional prescriptions from one of the world’s greatest medical centers,” says Eddie Perez, a former director for civic integrity at Twitter and a board member at the OSET Institute, a nonprofit group advocating for improved election technology.
The fact that in 2023 we’re rolling out mandated minimum cybersecurity practices for the first time in critical infrastructure—we’re one of the last countries to do that.
Building in the red-teaming, the testing, the human-in-the-loop before those models are deployed is a core lesson learned from cybersecurity that we want to make in the AI space.
In the AI executive order, regulators were tasked to determine where their existing regulations—let’s say for safety—already account for the risks around AI, and where are there deltas? Those first risk assessments have come in, and we’re going to use those both to inform the Hill’s work and also to think about how we roll those into the same cybersecurity minimum practices that we just talked about that regulators are doing.
Where are you starting to see threat actors actually use AI in attacks on the US? Are there places where you’re seeing this technology already being deployed by threat actors?
We mentioned voice cloning and deepfakes. We can say we’re seeing some criminal actors—or some countries—experimenting. You saw FraudGPT that ostensibly advances criminal use cases. That’s about all we can say we’re releasing right now.
You have been more engaged recently on autonomous vehicles. What’s drawn your interest there?
There’s a whole host of risks that we have to look at, the data that’s collected, patching—bulk patches, should we have checks to ensure they’re safe before millions of cars get a software patch? The administration is working on an effort that probably will include both some requests for input as well as assessing the need for new standards. Then we’re looking very likely in the near term to come up with a plan to test those standards, ideally in partnership with our European allies. This is something we both care about, and it’s another example of “Let’s get ahead of it.”
You already see with AVs large amounts of data being collected. We’ve seen a few states, for example, that have given approval for Chinese car models to drive around and collect. We’re taking a look at that and thinking, “Hold on a second, maybe before we allow this kind of data collection that can potentially be around military bases, around sensitive sites, we want to really take a look at that more carefully.” We’re interested both from the perspective of what data is being collected, what are we comfortable being collected, as well as what new standards are needed to ensure American cars and foreign-made cars are built safely. Cars used to be hardware, and they’ve shifted to including a great deal of software, and we need to reboot how we think about security and long-term safety.
You’ve also been working a lot on spectrum—you had a big gathering about 6G standards last year. Where do you see that work going, and what are the next steps?
First, I would say there’s a domestic and an international part. It comes from a foundational belief that wireless telecommunications is core to our economic growth—it’s both manufacturing robotics in a smart manufacturing factory, and then I just went to CES and John Deere was showing their smart tractors, where they use connectivity to adjust irrigation based on the weather. On the CES floor, they noted that integrating AI in agriculture requires changes to US policies on spectrum. I said, “I don’t understand, America’s broadband plan deploys to rural sites.” He said, “Yeah, you’re deploying to the farm, but there’s acres and acres of fields that have no connectivity. How are we going to do this stuff?” I hadn’t expected to get pinged on spectrum there, on the floor talking about tractors. But it shows how it’s core to what we want to do—this huge promise of drones monitoring electricity infrastructure after storms and determining lines are down to make maintenance far more efficient, all of that needs connectivity.
Two prototype satellites for the Missile Defense Agency and four missile-tracking satellites for the US Space Force rode a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket into orbit Wednesday from Florida’s Space Coast.
These satellites are part of a new generation of spacecraft designed to track hypersonic missiles launched by China or Russia and perhaps emerging missile threats from Iran or North Korea, which are developing their own hypersonic weapons.
Hypersonic missiles are smaller and more maneuverable than conventional ballistic missiles, which the US military’s legacy missile defense satellites can detect when they launch. Infrared sensors on the military’s older-generation missile tracking satellites are tuned to pick out bright thermal signatures from missile exhaust.
The New Threat Paradigm
Hypersonic missiles represent a new challenge for the Space Force and the Missile Defense Agency (MDA). For one thing, ballistic missiles follow a predictable parabolic trajectory that takes them into space. Hypersonic missiles are smaller and comparatively dim, and they spend more time flying in Earth’s atmosphere. Their maneuverability makes them difficult to track.
A nearly five-year-old military organization called the Space Development Agency (SDA) has launched 27 prototype satellites over the last year to prove the Pentagon’s concept for a constellation of hundreds of small, relatively low-cost spacecraft in low-Earth orbit. This new fleet of satellites, which the SDA calls the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, will eventually number hundreds of spacecraft to track missiles and relay data about their flight paths down to the ground. The tracking data will provide an early warning to those targeted by hypersonic missiles and help generate a firing solution for interceptors to shoot them down.
The SDA constellation combines conventional tactical radio links, laser inter-satellite communications, and wide-view infrared sensors. The agency, now part of the Space Force, plans to launch successive generations, or tranches, of small satellites, each introducing new technology. The SDA’s approach relies on commercially available spacecraft and sensor technology and will be more resilient to attack from an adversary than the military’s conventional space assets. Those legacy military satellites often cost hundreds of millions or billions of dollars apiece, with architectures that rely on small numbers of large satellites that might appear like a sitting duck to an adversary determined to inflict damage.
Four of the small SDA satellites and two larger spacecraft for the Missile Defense Agency were aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket when it lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 5:30 pm EST (2230 UTC) Wednesday.
The rocket headed northeast from Cape Canaveral to place the six payloads into low-Earth orbit. Officials from the Space Force declared the launch a success later Wednesday evening.
The SDA’s four tracking satellites, built by L3Harris, are the last spacecraft the agency will launch in its prototype constellation, called Tranche 0. Beginning later this year, the SDA plans to kick off a rapid-fire launch campaign with SpaceX and United Launch Alliance to quickly build out its operational Tranche 1 constellation, with launches set to occur at one-month intervals to deploy approximately 150 satellites. Then, there will be a Tranche 2 constellation with more advanced sensor technologies.
The primary payloads aboard Wednesday’s launch were for the Missile Defense Agency. These two Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor (HBTSS) satellites, one supplied by L3Harris and the other by Northrop Grumman, will demonstrate medium field-of-view sensors. Those sensors can’t cover as much territory as the SDA satellites but will provide more sensitive and detailed missile tracking data.
A watchdog group’s investigation found that terrorist group Hezbollah and other US-sanctioned entities have accounts with paid check marks on X, the Elon Musk–owned social network that still resides at the Twitter.com domain.
The Tech Transparency Project (TTP), a nonprofit that is critical of Big Tech companies, said in a report on Wednesday that “X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, is providing premium, paid services to accounts for two leaders of a US-designated terrorist group and several other organizations sanctioned by the US government.”
After buying Twitter for $44 billion, Musk started charging users for check marks that were previously intended to verify that an account was notable and authentic. “Along with the check marks, which are intended to confer legitimacy, X promises various perks for premium accounts, including the ability to post longer text and videos and greater visibility for some posts,” the Tech Transparency Project report noted.
The Tech Transparency Project suggests that X may be violating US sanctions. “The accounts identified by TTP include two that apparently belong to the top leaders of Lebanon-based Hezbollah and others belonging to Iranian and Russian state-run media,” the report said. “The fact that X requires users to pay a monthly or annual fee for premium service suggests that X is engaging in financial transactions with these accounts, a potential violation of US sanctions.”
Some of the accounts were verified before Musk bought Twitter, but verification was a free service at the time. Musk’s decision to charge for check marks means that X is “providing a premium, paid service to sanctioned entities,” which may raise “new legal issues,” the Tech Transparency Project said.
Report Details 28 Check-Marked Accounts
Musk’s X charges $1,000 a month for a Verified Organizations subscription and last month added a basic tier for $200 a month. For individuals, the X Premium tiers that come with check marks cost $8 or $16 a month.
It’s possible for US companies to receive a license from the government to engage in certain transactions with sanctioned entities, but it doesn’t seem likely that X has such a license. X’s rules explicitly prohibit users from purchasing X Premium “if you are a person with whom X is not permitted to have dealings under US and any other applicable economic sanctions and trade compliance law.”
In all, the Tech Transparency Project said it found 28 “verified” accounts tied to sanctioned individuals or entities. These include individuals and groups listed by the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) as Specially Designated Nationals.
“Of the 28 X accounts identified by TTP, 18 show they got verified after April 1, 2023, when X began requiring accounts to subscribe to paid plans to get a check mark. The other 10 were legacy verified accounts, which are required to pay for a subscription to retain their check marks,” the group wrote, adding that it “found advertising in the replies to posts in 19 of the 28 accounts.”
X issued the following statement on Wednesday: “X has a robust and secure approach in place for our monetization features, adhering to legal obligations, along with independent screening by our payments providers. Several of the accounts listed in the Tech Transparency Report are not directly named on sanction lists, while some others may have visible account check marks without receiving any services that would be subject to sanctions. Our teams have reviewed the report and will take action if necessary. We’re always committed to ensuring that we maintain a safe, secure and compliant platform.”
X Removes Some Check Marks
An account with the handle @SH_NasrallahEng appears to be tied to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, the TTP report said. The account had a check mark when we first checked it earlier Wednesday, but it has since been removed.
“The account, which has 93,600 followers, posts English-language Hezbollah messages and memes disparaging Israel and the US. It was created in October 2021 and verified in November 2023, the same month that Nasrallah threatened further escalation of Israel’s war with Hamas,” the report said.
