Facebook's former security chief, Alex Stamos, is delivering a sobering warning — the U.S. is no better prepared to fight election hacking ahead of the 2018 midterm elections than it was two years ago when Russian agents hacked the 2016 presidential election, he said in an interview with CNN published Tuesday.
"We have the risk of turning our elections into the World Cup of information warfare, where everybody wants to have a piece in it, because we have not demonstrated that we will punish countries that do this to us and we have not addressed the fundamental issues that caused us to get here in the first place," he said.
Stamos' comments echo an essay he wrote last month and add to the growing uncertainty around election security and meddling on social platforms. He left Facebook last month, amid a series of high-profile departures.
Facebook has already removed hundreds of foreign pages that were found to be part of a coordinated misinformation campaign, and COO Sheryl Sandberg is set to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee this week.
But partisanship politics are stalling improvements, Stamos told CNN.
"The political polarization on election hacking is a horrible, horrible problem for the country," he said. "If you don't have everybody accepting that this happened, how can you move on and fix the fundamental problems?"
"Two years on from the election and people are still arguing whether we were even attacked, and I find that amazing," he said.
Read the full interview with Stamos at CNN.com.
