On the organization of the U.S. government for responding to adversarial information warfare and influence operations

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of the United States (US) government’s efforts to organize itself to deal with information warfare and influence operations. Russian interference in the US presidential election of 2016 impressed upon many Americans the significance and potential impact of information warfare and influence operations on the political fate of a nation. The Supreme Court will uphold content-based speech restrictions only if narrowly tailored to combat what the Court deems to be a compelling government interest. The US government consists of 15 departments and a large number of agencies not affiliated with any department, each of which has different authorities for action and different expertise to support the exercise of those authorities. The brief survey of Executive Branch departments and agencies suggests that a variety of US government entities have some expertise that could be relevant to some aspects of the cyber-enabled information warfare/influence operations problem.