S.Amdt. 6493

This amendment, submitted by Mrs. Shaheen, aims to add a subtitle titled Countering Adversarial Propaganda to bill S. 4784. Its purpose is to increase the ability of the United States to track and respond to foreign malign influence activities.

Annual Report on Foreign Malign Influence Activities

The amendment requires the President to submit a report to Congress every year for five years. This report must include:

• An assessment of threats from the Russian Federation, the People's Republic of China, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, and the Republic of Cuba.
• Descriptions of activities like adversarial propaganda, cyber-enabled information operations, deepfakes, and artificial intelligence-enabled capabilities.
• Assessments of incidents targeting elections, democratic institutions, and public opinion.
• An analysis of trends and techniques used by adversaries.
• An evaluation of how effective the U.S. Government has been at countering these activities.
• Recommendations for actions to counter these threats.

The unclassified part of this report must be made available to the public on a government website.

Adversarial Propaganda Watcher Program

The amendment also directs the Secretary of State to create the Adversarial Propaganda Watchers Program. This program is designed to:

• Monitor and analyze malign operations from the same list of five foreign countries.
• Coordinate responses with partner governments and international organizations.
• Help partner countries build their own capacity to detect and respond to these operations.

To do this, the Secretary of State will place trained officers with specific language skills and expertise in select diplomatic and consular posts in high-risk partner countries.