PORTLAND, Ore. — As Oregon heads deeper into a major presidential election year, federal authorities are on the lookout for anything that will cause things to go less than smoothly. A big player in that is the Federal Bureau of Investigation's new special agent in charge for the state, Doug Olson.
Olson isn't a newcomer to Oregon. He ran the FBI's Salem office eight years ago before rotating back to Washington, D.C. Now, he's stationed in Portland, heading the agency's efforts for the entire state after taking over from the last special agent in charge, Kieran Ramsey.
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The Story's Pat Dooris recently had a chance to sit down with Olson to learn more about what he's doing, particularly as it concerns election security.
"I think we're always preparing for the worst," Olson said. "I think we've done a lot of preparations this go-around ... some that we did do last time and some that we didn't do."
Keeping elections secure
The FBI has the advantage of being a national-level organization, Olson said. They're able to look at threats across the country and share information with local partners, letting them know what to be prepared for.
"So, that's a tremendously powerful thing to do," he continued. "When I was back at FBI headquarters, before I came here, I sat for a while in the public corruption/civil rights section where we kind of had a national look at elections, and there was a lot of that same discussion in the inter-agency where we could kind of talk about different threats facing the country."
It's not so different at the Portland office, Olson said. The FBI is in dialogue with the Oregon secretary of state's office and anyone else involved in the election process, letting them know about the threats they're monitoring. They also try to game out different scenarios, learning how best to respond.
"We've had two tabletop exercises already here in Oregon, where we exercise that muscle memory," Olson explained. "So, we introduce some of those predictive threats that we might have ... and then we practice the communication that has to occur between all the different stakeholders — both on the (law enforcement) side and then also on the election side. Then, we go through exercises on how we would address those situations."
Those situations could be a phoned-in threats, cyberthreats or suspicious letters, to name just a few of the most acute examples.
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Olson knows a thing or two about threats. In the armed forces, he was a Marine scout sniper, a platoon commander and intelligence officer. He's held a variety of posts in the FBI and was recognized for his work in New York investigating members of the Genovese organized crime family.
In Oregon, the FBI has worked on growing its elections crime team, breaking that one focus into several.
"Normally every office has what we call an election crimes coordinator that kind of runs through the whole election process, and they're like the single point of contact in the field office for all things elections," Olson said. "Now, we have a cyber election crimes coordinator, counterintelligence election crimes coordinator and then just the regular election crimes coordinator — so, we've kind of created an additional focus on all those different areas to kind of increase our bandwidth as an agency and kind of help assist our partners that way."
These FBI coordinators are there to be available to people like the Oregon secretary of state or county clerks when they have a problem.
"But the idea is to be engaged way before November, right? So that we've done these tabletop (exercises) and everybody knows everybody on a first-name basis, they know who to call. They know where people are going to be sitting during the counting and during all the different phases of the election," Olson said. "So that's the idea. It doesn't alleviate all problems, but it sure makes it better when you have to address one if it's not the first time you're meeting and talking about those types of issues."
Extremism and cybersecurity
Olson said that it's difficult to gauge whether the threat level this year is any higher now than it's been in the past. Oregon has long had a somewhat unique ecosystem for extremism.
"I think there's ebbs and flows in what's going on," he said. "I think ... it's a very interesting environment we're in. I think we have extremes on either end of the political spectrum. I think Oregon definitely exudes those two different ends of the spectrum-type things.
"In terms of specific threats, we're going to follow and investigate whatever comes down the line. I think we've had some unprecedented stuff in the past ... We kind of expect we're going to have stuff in the future, but I don't have any specific stuff or threats, particularly right now, so we're just trying to prepare for anything that might come."
Cyber threats have obviously become a bigger issue over the last several decades — not just in terms of literal threats, but the way that bad actors can hack the computer systems of even major public entities and corporations. That said, Olson said that elections in Oregon are well-insulated against that kind of threat.
"First of all, the voting system is completely isolated from the outer internet," he said. "So more what we worry about in terms of cyber and voting is disinformation misinformation, that type of stuff — and also disinformation and misinformation about cyberattacks on the voting system, right? Because this is a system that's air gapped from the regular internet and other systems."
By "air gapped," Olson means that voting computers and the worldwide web don't directly interact. The worst thing bad actors can do is spread lies online about voting systems being hacked or otherwise electronically manipulated — it's much more difficult for them to actually do the hacking or manipulation.
This year, we've already seen examples in the U.S. of disinformation campaigns meant to discourage people from voting.
But even outside of elections, any entity that is connected to the wider internet can be vulnerable, which is something the FBI is always trying to stay ahead of.
"I think in the second week I got here, we actually had a cyber summit down in Wilsonville, where we had all these small to medium-sized companies that are located here in Oregon," Olson said. "And just the engagement and the amount of information sharing back and forth, that was really (impressive) ... like, I think that's something they're doing really well here in this office and in the state. We learn as much from those companies as they learn from us.
"It kind of helps us stay ahead of the threat on different vulnerabilities and stuff which could be leveraged for a threat actor in an election or a threat actor who wants to hit a municipality or a company, a private company. And I think in order to be best positioned to address those threats, we have to be engaging with the companies that are in that sector ... and engage what's really, really strong."