With the White House and Congress paralyzed over how — or even whether — to act on intelligence agency warnings about foreign interference in U.S. elections, Maryland opted to take matters into its own hands.

The state adopted transparency rules for political advertising on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere online. The pioneering move drew praise from election reformers as a blow against foreign meddling.

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“We haven’t come to grips with the sophistication and scale of the attack in 2016 and the coordinated action that is needed to confront it going forward,” said Nathaniel Persily, co-director of the Cyber Policy Center at Stanford University. “There is plenty of blame to go around.”