Alliance for Securing Democracy
The Alliance for Securing Democracy was a political advocacy group formed in July 2017. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue–US and ASD announced in December 2025 that they would be merging under the ISD-US banner effective January 1, 2026.
The organization was chaired and run primarily by former senior United States intelligence and State Department officials. Laura Thornton, formerly of International IDEA, joined ASD as its director in May 2021. Laura Rosenberger, chair of the American Institute in Taiwan and former senior director for China on the Biden administration's National Security Council, previously served as a director of ASD. ASD was housed at the German Marshall Fund of [the United States] and its work spanned across both the United States and Europe.
History
In 2016, the CIA, FBI, NSA, and the Director of National Intelligence concluded that Russia had interfered in US elections of that year. Former acting CIA Director Michael Morell, who served on ASD's advisory council, stated that the group would fulfill some of the role that ideally would have been handled by a national investigative commission.The Institute for Strategic Dialogue–US and ASD announced in December 2025 that they would be merging under the ISD-US banner effective January 1, 2026.
Hamilton 68 Dashboard
The Hamilton 68 Dashboard was a tool designed by ASD to track Russian influence operations on social media, named after no. 68 of the Federalist Papers, in which Alexander Hamilton had warned about foreign interference in the American electoral process. The original iteration of the Hamilton 68 Dashboard, released in August 2017, tracked 600 Twitter accounts that ASD asserted might be "linked to Russian influence", whether knowingly or unknowingly. ASD did not disclose which accounts the original version of Hamilton 68 tracked, citing its desire to "focus on the behavior of the overall network rather than get dragged into hundreds of individual debates over which troll fits which role". In 2018, ASD's communications director, Bret Schafer, stated that the dashboard didn’t specifically track automated bot accounts. Schafer noted "that results on the dashboard are meant to be viewed in a nuanced way" and that not all instances of information appearing on the dashboard were evidence of pro-Kremlin accounts or biases.In January 2018, Hamilton 68 tracking of the amplification of the hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo was widely cited across major news outlets. Schafer told the Associated Press this amplification represented "the most coordinated such effort" since the dashboard launched. The dashboard's findings prompted congressional action; Senator Dianne Feinstein and Representative Adam Schiff wrote to Twitter and Facebook citing the Alliance for Securing Democracy.
The original version of Hamilton 68 was shut down towards the end of 2018.
Version 2.0 of the Hamilton 68 Dashboard, released in 2019, tracked approximately 600 Twitter social media accounts that the ASD asserts can be "directly attribute to the Russian, Chinese, or Iranian governments or their various news and information channels". The list of these accounts was made public.
In September 2017, and again in May of 2021, the group launched similar German-language dashboards focused on possible Russian influence in German politics ahead of the federal elections in those respective years.
In January 2023, journalist Matt Taibbi tweeted about internal Twitter documents related to Hamilton 68 as the 15th installment of the Twitter Files. The documents show that Twitter's former Head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, attempted to identify the accounts tracked in the dashboard. Roth found that only 36 of the 644 accounts he identified were registered in Russia and argued that the dashboard used "shoddy methodology" to incorrectly label authentic accounts as "Russian stooges without evidence". ASD responded to Taibbi's release a few days later, noting that ASD had always maintained that not all of the accounts on the dashboard were controlled by Russia, despite what it described as persistent misunderstandings in the media. The National Desk's Sinnenberg counters Taibbi's criticisms as being hyperbolic.