EXPERT ANALYSIS

Every presidential election season comes with a host of national security concerns, and the 2024 campaign is no different.

Among other things, it’s contending with fallout from the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a campaign event, threats of wider war in the Middle East and continued cyberattacks.

Javed Ali, associate professor of practice at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy and former senior U.S. government counterterrorism official, discusses the risks as well as implications for the campaigns and the country.

On security considerations and priorities related to the Democratic National Convention:

There’s been a major security presence there already, and the planning for that has been going on for several months, if not longer. These big events, whether they’re national conventions, state of the unions or other high-profile things, are usually designated as national security special events.

That means between the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security, they plan all the security arrangements for these things. So just based on the convention and how significant that is, there is going to be layers and layers of security, both around the convention center itself and then the surrounding parts of downtown Chicago. They also try to control the airspace above as well.

Now I would have to think there are going to be potential lessons learned from the assassination attempt (on Trump) at the rally last month. And even though this is an inside event, there’s still probably small things they have looked at and perhaps tweaked to make sure the possibility of that lone shooter threat to people even trying to come inside the building is minimized to the greatest extent possible.

You’re never going to kind of have 100% security at these events. But the secure security planning and preparations have been underway for a long time, and they will be very robust.

On tensions in the Middle East between Iran and Israel:

The dual Israeli targeted strikes last month against a senior Hezbollah commander in Beirut, and then just hours later, the death of the Hamas political chief in Tehran last have raised the prospect of a broader conflict outside of just the Israel-Hamas war that has been grinding on for 10 months.

In the immediate aftermath of those strikes, both the leadership of Hezbollah and the supreme leader of Iran both vowed significant retaliation. Over that period of time, there have been warnings from the U.S. side that perhaps both Hezbollah and Iran were preparing something significant.

And what that meant or what that preparation was, it’s not clear to us on the outside. But it may have been the potential to launch an attack like Iran launched against Israel in April with what then included a combination of 300 ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, drones.

So maybe Iran and or Hezbollah was planning to do something like that. But here we are now, two-plus weeks later, and that response has not yet happened.

Maybe it’s because cooler heads have prevailed. Maybe neither side wants to get dragged into a war with Israel. And maybe it’s because all these parties are now waiting to see what happens with a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that finally ends this terrible, terrible conflict there—and brings the hostages back and allows for, you know, Palestinians to resume some kind of level of normalcy and begin the rebuilding and reconstruction process.

There are so many variables in play, but right now it doesn’t seem like that immediate escalation to full-out regional war is as likely now as it perhaps was a couple of weeks ago, and that’s a good thing.

But again, things are very volatile—it could change at the drop of a hat. And a lot of this is based on perceptions as well about where things are headed. At least my sense is we’re not yet looking at a wider regional conflict.

On cyberattacks against the presidential campaigns, including the most recent that appear to involve Iran:

I think that’s sort of separate from Iran’s agenda. With this regional conflict, Iran has been trying to influence U.S. elections going back a decade. So this isn’t necessarily new. From that perspective, I think that tradecraft is different.

I do think we are going to continue to see countries like Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela and others try to at least influence our elections through misinformation, disinformation and propaganda—most of which is going to be channeled through social media. Those countries have been doing that since 2016.

The more sinister aspect of the threat is on the election interference side. That’s actually when these potential countries could try to get into some part of the electronic infrastructure of how voting occurs here in the United States, which is very disaggregated and happens at the state and local level. The Russians tried that in 2016, or at least they tried to build in a capability.

I also think that all the countries I just mentioned are probably scanning and probing for those electronic vulnerabilities in that election voting infrastructure. And if they choose to decide to interfere, they could. But if they did that, that would be seen as very provocative. And the U.S. response would probably have to be very significant.

I think it’s going to be another difficult moment from a security perspective. But planning for these things now is the right thing to do. And that’s what I think at the federal level, DHS and FBI are doing, and then working with all of their counterparts at the state and local level throughout the entire United States to make sure we have the best security we can, both on the electronic side and the physical side.