Intelligence agencies in the United States, in order to discuss and device strategies ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November 2020, held a meeting on Wednesday with country’s technologies companies including Microsoft Corp, Facebook Inc, Twitter Inc and Alphabet’s Google.
Representatives of government agencies that include the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation met with the security teams of these companies at the headquarter of Facebook in Menlo park.
The meeting was held to serve the purpose of not only to carry forward and implement the matter already discussed and agreed upon in previous discussions but also to develop and further strengthen the collaboration between the agencies and tech companies for the security of state, federal and presidential elections next year, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy Nathaniel Gleicher, said in a statement.
Attendees of the meeting specifically talked about ways to improve the information sharing and coordination between government and industry to quickly respond for embitterment of detecting and preventing threats, he said.
U.S. intelligence agencies have repeatedly said that in last U.S. presidential elections, Russia had use extensive cyber-influence operation aiming helping President Donald Trump to get elected, though Russia time and again denied those allegations, but after that pressure was built up on social media companies to enhance their security.
A Twitter spokeswoman, in her statement, told Reuters that the meeting was a joint effort to properly respond a common threat, and company is committed to play its role in it.
Google and Microsoft also confirmed that their officials attended the meeting.
Google came on investing in forceful systems of detecting hacking and phishing attempts, identifying any interference on our platform by foreign factors and protecting campaigns from become the victim of digital attacks. But technological advancement plays only a part in solving those issues, said Richard Salgado, Google’s director of law enforcement and information security.
