Active Measures, Disinfo, Propaganda

[HenryJames 65795]

 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23355]

Facebook is working with the Atlantic Council on this stuff which is a great sign.  They have access to some of the best international scholars on Russia’s digital active measures.

 

On July 31, Facebook announced the removal of around 30 pages and accounts on its platform for “coordinated and inauthentic behavior.” In an announcement depicting actions taken on their platform, Facebook representatives explained:

We’re still in the very early stages of our investigation and don’t have all the facts — including who may be behind this. But we are sharing what we know today given the connection between these bad actors and protests that are planned in Washington next week. We will update this post with more details when we have them, or if the facts we have change.

It’s clear that whoever set up these accounts went to much greater lengths to obscure their true identities than the Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) has in the past.

Facebook concluded, based on internal data, that the accounts were “inauthentic,” and did not represent the individuals and groups they claimed to. @DFRLab has not had access to that data; however, our team has been poring over the specific pages Facebook took action against over the last 24 hours.

@DFRLab’s mission is to identify, expose, and explain disinformation. Our goal is to create more digital resilience against influence operations like those Russia mounted against the United States during 2016 elections. As such, we intend to make every aspect of our research broadly available, just as soon as we have had a chance to analyze the accounts. The effort is part of our #ElectionWatch work and a broader initiative to provide independent and credible research about the role of social media in elections, as well as democracy more generally.

This post provides an initial overview of the pages. Subsequent posts will focus on thematic trends and the behavior patterns exhibited in more detail.

Initial Findings

The pattern of behavior by the accounts and on the pages in question make one thing abundantly clear: they sought to promote divisions and set Americans against one another.

Their approach, tactics, language, and content were, in some instances, very similar to accounts run by the Russian “troll farm” or Internet Research Agency between 2014 and 2017.

Similarities included language patterns that indicate non-native English and consistent mistranslation, as well as an overwhelming focus on polarizing issues at the top of any given news cycle with content that remained emotive rather than fact-based.

The set of accounts appeared, however, to use much stronger operational security. They maintained a focus on building an online audience then translating it to produce events — such as protests — in the real world. Further, this specific set of accounts was focused exclusively at engaging and influencing the left end of the American political spectrum.

Of note, the events coordinated by — or with help from — inauthentic accounts did have a very real, organic, and engaged online community; however, the intent of the inauthentic activity appeared to be designed to catalyze the most incendiary impulses of political sentiment.

Again, these are initial findings. We will provide a more in-depth assessment as soon as possible.

Edited July 31, 2018 by Hugo Stiglitz

[Hugo Stiglitz 23355]

Clint Watts named Distinguished Research Fellow at FPRI

 

The Foreign Policy Research Institute is pleased to announce that Clint Watts has been named a Distinguished Research Fellow in recognition of his unique contributions to the nation and, for the past ten years, to the work of FPRI, where he has been a senior fellow and a Robert A. Fox Fellow. 

Watts has worked at the cutting edge of several key issues affecting US national security — first, for his work on the influx of foreign fighters into Iraq and Syria, then on the fracturing of Al Qaeda,  then on the rise of ISIS and its deft use of social media to recruit jihadis, and most recently on Russian Influence operations to sow distrust in America’s democratic institutions. 

All of this work is captured in his new book “Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News”, which recounts Watts’ years of work tracking terrorists online and how he stumbled onto Russian trolls in 2014, leading him to focus on Russian influence operations in social media. 

As cited by The Washington Post, Watts and his colleagues were among the first to identify and track Russian bots operating through social media campaigns and networks in 2014. He testified about his findings before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on March 30, 2017 and his testimony is now a cornerstone of ongoing reporting on Russian bots.  He subsequently became an NBC analyst and appears regularly on MSNBC.  In August 2017, Watts and his colleagues launched Hamilton 68, a dashboard that tracks real time activity of over 600 monitored Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations.

As a consultant and researcher, he models and forecasts the behavior of nefarious state and non-state actors and develops countermeasures to disrupt and defeat them. Before becoming a consultant, Clint served as a U.S. Army infantry officer, an FBI Special Agent on a Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), as the Executive Officer of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point (CTC) and as a consultant to the FBI’s Counter Terrorism Division (CTD) and National Security Branch (NSB).

https://www.fpri.org/news/2018/07/clint-watts-named-distinguished-research-fellow-at-fpri/

 

 

[Francisco 2.0 32289]

Whatever you are doing, if you loathe Facebook as I do, just read:

https://qz.com/1342757/everything-bad-about-facebook-is-bad-for-the-same-reason/

 

Quote

The decision is one of many recent Facebook actions that may have left a bad taste in your mouth. The company unknowingly allowed Donald Trump’s presidential campaign to collect personal data on millions of Americans. It failed to notice Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election; facilitated ethnic and religious violence in several countries; and allowed advertisers to target such noble categories of consumers as “Jew haters.” Not to mention that fake news, conspiracy theories, and blatant lies abound on the platform.

Facebook didn’t intend for any of this to happen. It just wanted to connect people. But there is a thread running from Perkins’ death to religious violence in Myanmar and the company’s half-assed attempts at combating fake news. Facebook really is evil. Not on purpose. In the banal kind of way.

Underlying all of Facebook’s screw-ups is a bumbling obliviousness to real humans. The company’s singular focus on “connecting people” has allowed it to conquer the world, making possible the creation of a vast network of human relationships, a source of insights and eyeballs that makes advertisers and investors drool.

But the imperative to “connect people” lacks the one ingredient essential for being a good citizen: Treating individual human beings as sacrosanct. To Facebook, the world is not made up of individuals, but of connections between them. The billions of Facebook accounts belong not to “people” but to “users,” collections of data points connected to other collections of data points on a vast Social Network, to be targeted and monetized by computer programs.

There are certain things you do not in good conscience do to humans. To data, you can do whatever you like.

 

[atomheartbevo 89291]

Murdoch is probably thinking with just a few changes, MySpace could have taken advantage of this.

[triplehorn 2664]

"The company unknowingly allowed Donald Trump’s presidential campaign to collect personal data on millions of Americans. It failed to notice Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election; facilitated ethnic and religious violence in several countries; and allowed advertisers to target such noble categories of consumers as “Jew haters.” Not to mention that fake news, conspiracy theories, and blatant lies abound on the platform.

 

About that 'unknowing' part, recall this:

Facebook and Cambridge Analytica worked side by side at a Trump campaign office in San Antonio

 

"In a 2017 BBC report, Therese Wong, a “digital guru” for the Trump campaign walks journalist Jamie Bartlett through the San Antonio office, showing him the room out of which Cambridge Analytica operated—”the brain” of the operation, she says. Nearby were desks where Facebook employees sat embedded with the Trump campaign.

Wong said in the video that people from Google, YouTube, and Facebook were the campaign’s “hands-on partners” in helping utilize their platforms. “When you’re pumping in millions and millions of dollars to these platforms, you’re going to get white club [sic] treatment,” she said. “Without Facebook, we wouldn’t have won. I mean Facebook really and truly put us over the edge.”

 

Spoiler

 

The 'unknowing' on Facebook's part remains to be seen.

[27-25 2039]

12 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Murdoch is probably thinking with just a few changes, MySpace could have taken advantage of this.

I could get behind the idea of isolating all Trumpkins to MySpace 100%.  

[Hugo Stiglitz 23355]

 

Dead lives matter.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23355]

 

(CNN) — Russia's meddling online went beyond the 2016 US presidential election and into public health, amplifying online debates about vaccines, according to a new study.

The recent research project was intended to study how social media and survey data can be used to better understand people's decision-making process around vaccines. It ended up unmasking some unexpected key players in the vaccination debate: Russian trolls.

 

The study, published in the American Journal of Public Health on Thursday, suggests that what appeared to be Twitter accounts run by automated bots and Russian trolls masqueraded as legitimate users engaging in online vaccine debates. The bots and trolls disseminated both pro- and anti-vaccine messages between 2014 and 2017.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23355]

A network of Russian-linked Twitter accounts have been disseminating divisive content about Mollie Tibbetts' death in an apparent attempt to divert attention from explosive news surrounding Donald Trumpand his former associates. 

Almost immediately after a guilty verdict was announced in the trial of Paul Manafort, the president’s former campaign chairman convicted on eight counts of bank and tax fraud charges, there was a flurry of activity among hundreds of pro-Kremlin Twitter accounts believed to be controlled by Russian government influence operations. Those accounts began posting thousands of tweets about Ms Tibbetts, the 20-year-old University of Iowa student who had been missing for nearly five weeks. 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23355]

 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23355]

 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23355]

Trump tweet is from 3/28/2014

[atomheartbevo 89291]

Lots of shit going down, Russian bot farms better ramp up. The Iowa student’s death is getting lost in the shuffle. 

Fox News is doing their best, but they are having a hard time preventing their viewers from seeing this stuff.  

Edited August 24, 2018 by atomheartbevo

[Brisketexan 104196]

Well, I just got a FB friend request from Ирина Дмитриева

I don't know her.  

But I bet she has some nifty ideas that I''d learn a lot from.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23355]

Okay, I’ll give Ben Sasse some credit here.  Way to be part of the solution on something Senator.

 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23355]

 

[blackmarketbaby 118]

The Russians LOVE messing with Texas

[Hugo Stiglitz 23355]

 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23355]

 

TALLINN, Estonia — The Russian government discreetly funded a group of seemingly independent news websites in Eastern Europe to pump out stories dictated to them by the Kremlin, BuzzFeed News and its reporting partners can reveal.

Russian state media created secret companies in order to bankroll websites in the Baltic states — a key battleground between Russia and the West — and elsewhere in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

The scheme has only come to light through Skype chats and documents obtained by BuzzFeed News, Estonian newspaper Postimees, and investigative journalism outlet Re:Baltica via freedom of information laws, as part of a criminal probe into the individual who was Moscow’s man on the ground in Estonia.

The Skype logs and other files, obtained from computers seized by investigators, reveal the secrets and obfuscating tactics used by Russia as it tries to influence public opinion and push Kremlin talking points.

The websites presented themselves as independent news outlets, but in fact, editorial lines were dictated directly by Moscow.

Raul Rebane, a leading strategic communications expert in Estonia, said that this scheme and others like it are “systemic information-related activities on foreign territory. In other words — information warfare.”

He said that Russian propaganda networks in the Baltics had been operating for years but had become more intense recently.

“The pressure to turn [Estonia] from facing the West to facing the East has grown.”

Long before Russian interference in the 2016 US election became one of the biggest stories in the world, and Kremlin disinformation campaigns became a household issue, Moscow faced accusations of trying to influence public opinion in the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, which are all members of NATO.

The revelations about the websites in the Baltic states provide a rare and detailed inside look into how such disinformation campaigns work, and the lengths to which Moscow is willing to go to obscure its involvement in such schemes.

In the Baltics, Russia directly borders the European Union, and NATO has a big military presence, but perhaps most importantly the region is home to hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians, mostly in Estonia and Latvia.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014, he did so under the pretext of protecting the interests of “Russian speakers.” So in the Baltic states, Russian propaganda is a real and present fear, and explains why attempts by Moscow to influence public opinion are treated so seriously.

The records and Skype logs obtained offer an opportunity to see what it looks like when the curtain is pulled back on the inner workings of the Kremlin’s propaganda machine, on this occasion targeted at Russian speakers in the Baltics.

-Snip-

The scheme worked like this: Money was channeled through shell companies outside of Russia, direct editorial orders were delivered via Skype, and the sites reported back the headlines they published, while they also bought clicks and tested buying comments from Russian troll factories to boost numbers.

The story and the true nature of the websites only came to light via a tax evasion and forgery criminal investigation into Kornilov — a 55-year-old Russian citizen described in public reports by Estonia’s counterintelligence agency KAPO as a Russian propagandist — and a freedom of information request in that country. Kornilov wasn’t convicted personally, but the NGO he set up and used in the schemes was, under Estonian law that allows for companies and other bodies to be prosecuted and convicted.

The documents reveal that Rossiya Segodnya set up the Russian-language news sites in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in October 2014 — six months after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and as the war between Russian-backed separatists and Ukraine waged in Eastern Ukraine.

The sites all had the same name — Baltnews — with only different country codes to distinguish their domain names. They were presented as independent media websites for the local Russian-speaking populations of each country. The partner for the project in Estonia was officially an NGO run by Kornilov called Altmedia, which he set up in 2010 to represent Russian speakers in the country.

When approached by BuzzFeed News for comment, Kornilov said that as he doesn’t work for Baltnews anymore, he is not prepared to answer journalists’ questions about the websites. “It’s not interesting for me anymore,” he said. Subsequent attempts to contact him were unsuccessful.

The first contract Altmedia signed relating to the websites was with a group called Media Capital Holding B.V. — based in the Netherlands and owned through several front companies by Rossiya Segodnya — on Aug. 18, 2014, at which point Altmedia became responsible for “the creation and promotion of media projects in Estonia and the Baltic States.”

According to a tax audit, part of the documents obtained via a freedom of information request, Atlmedia received 91,400 euros (about $107,000) in total in five separate monthly payments, four from Media Capital Holding and one from Barsolina Ventures, a company registered in Cyprus.

At the start of 2015, Altmedia began sending monthly traffic reports, including headlines of the most-read stories, to Barsolina Ventures. The reports, which were not signed, refer to a new contract dated Jan. 1, 2015. As part of the deal, Barsolina Ventures would pay 11,400 euros a month to Altmedia. This arrangement continued into 2016, the most recent year covered by the documents. Based on publicly available data, it appears that Altmedia continued receiving such funding up until spring this year, when Rossiya Segodnya pulled the plug on the operation. BuzzFeed News approached Rossiya Segodnya, RIA Novosti, and their press team for comment in three separate emails, but none were answered.

The next company to enter into an arrangement with Altmedia was SPN Media Solutions DOO Beograd, a company registered in Serbia. Documents from the Serbian business registry reveal that it was created on March 31, 2015, by OOO Media Kapital, another company owned through different intermediaries by Rossiya Segodnya in Russia.

SPN Media Solutions’ address is registered at law firm Stanisic’s office in an upmarket neighborhood in central Belgrade.

According to the company’s own financial reviews, it has no employees. But in the years 2015, 2016, and 2017, its annual turnover was around 3.5 million euros, with all revenue coming from “foreign markets.” According to the Serbian business registry, its managers since the company’s founding have each possessed passports, filed at the registry, that indicate they are Russian citizens.

Tanya Stanisic, a partner of the law firm that helped establish SPN Media and where the company’s address is registered, declined to comment. “Unfortunately, I cannot help you. I am not authorized to talk to you about the business of a client. Also, it is not allowed by the Code of Professional Ethics of Lawyers, starting from the privilege of confidentiality in the relations between the lawyer and the client,” she said in an email sent after BuzzFeed News went to the firm’s office for the third time.

SPN Media Solutions does not just have interest in Estonia. A Ukrainian court order from July obtained by BuzzFeed News quotes the Ukrainian security service (SBU) as saying the same company was secretly financing the Ukrainian branch of RIA Novosti.

The deputy head of the SBU, Viktor Kononenko, said in May that each month the Serbian company was transferring 53,000 euros “of Russian origin” to Ukrainian companies that funneled the money to the Russian state news agency’s branch in the country. Kononenko did not respond when contacted by BuzzFeed News for comment.

Kirill Vyshinsky, the head of RIA Novosti Ukraine, was arrested by the SBU in May, accused of treason and of running an information war against Ukraine for Russia. In the court order obtained by BuzzFeed News, RIA Novosti Ukraine is accused of hosting and distributing 16 anti-Ukraine articles that aimed to divide Ukrainian society, create separatist sentiments, and stir hatred between different ethnicities. Vyshinsky’s lawyer, Andriy Domanskyy, did not reply to an email seeking comment, but Vyshinsky has previously denied the charges.

The documents and Skype chats relating to how the scheme was operated and funded in Estonia relate to only that country, but the versions of Baltnews hosted in Latvia and Lithuania appear to be operated in a similar way — all three websites look identical, they were set up at the same time, and they published similar stories on the same day. Local security services in all three countries consider the websites to be part of the same operation.

In addition, the Latvian branch of Baltnews did file at least one monthly report to Barsolina Ventures, according to the documents obtained by BuzzFeed News.

The financial reports of Baltnews.lv show it had an annual turnover of 100,000 euros, but it displays little to no advertising and had no paid-for subscriptions.

The website’s editor-in-chief, Andrejs Jakovlevs, declined to comment, saying finances were not a matter for editorial staff. He said there was an information-sharing arrangement in place with RIA Novosti, but no money was exchanged, and no one ever told him what to write.

But Latvia’s internal counterintelligence and security service, known by the acronym DP, said that according to its information, Baltnews.lv was financed from Russia using companies in third-party countries.

“The information obtained by [DP] indicates that money received from Russia was the main source of income for Baltnews.lv,” Ēriks Cinkus, deputy head of the DP, told BuzzFeed News.

Meanwhile in Lithuania, the country’s intelligence service, the VSD, identified Baltnews.lt and Sputnik as the channels through which Russia spreads pro-Kremlin messaging in the country.

“Their goal is to extend Russia’s influence within Lithuania’s information space, promote anti-western sentiments, and shape public opinion favourable to Kremlin,” wrote the VSD in its latest annual report.

The report said that in 2017, on the orders of Russia, Baltnews and Sputnik began publishing more articles about the status of the Polish community in Lithuania.

“They sought to incite ethnic confrontation and exacerbate relations between Lithuania and Poland. The publications tried to persuade the audience that Lithuania discriminates [against] the local Polish community or to make an impression that Poland ‘does not waive’ its territorial claims to its neighbours,” the report said.

Up until June 1 this year, the editor-in-chief of Baltnews.lt was Anatoly Ivanov, and financial data from a nonprofit run by him — named Eurasian Media Laboratory — shows he was receiving significant funding from Barsolina Ventures.

According to reports in the Lithuanian business registry, Eurasian Media Laboratory received roughly 500,000 euros in three years. In 2015 and 2016 Barsolina paid 163,200 euros to Eurasian Media Laboratory each year. And in 2017, the Eurasian Media Laboratory reported 185,472 euros’ worth of earnings, with the vast majority of it coming from Barsolina for “internet gateway services.” When contacted by phone by BuzzFeed News, Ivanov did not answer any questions regarding the payments.

“Young man, you probably didn’t hear me. I’m busy — there’s people at my office. You can ask whatever you want to. If you don’t understand me in Russian, I’ll say it in Lithuanian,” Ivanov said, switching from one language to another. “There are people sitting at my office. And I don’t want to waste my time.”

Asked again about the payments in the amount of 500,000 euros, he sighed and gave no further response before hanging up the phone.

As well as providing the funding, Rossiya Segodnya also appears to have directly coordinated what topics all three Baltnews websites should cover. Not only does Baltnews seem far from the independent entertainment website Kornilov suggested to the Lithuanian news website Delfi, it also appears to have been just one cog in a much larger machine.

On May 25, 2016, Svyazin — probably in error — sent Kornilov a list of topics that appear to show the expected coverage of Kremlin-owned media across the former USSR: the Baltic states, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and the Russian-supported breakaway region of Ossetia in Georgia. Estonia has two separate entries in the list — one for Baltnews and the other for the local edition of Sputnik.

BuzzFeed News compared the list of topics with stories published in these countries that day and found that all but two of the local editions of Sputnik indeed published what was ordered. The Kyrgyzstan Sputnikwrote, as instructed, about local business tycoon Sharshenbek Abdykerimov secretly owning an apartment in the Tower, at the time London’s tallest residential skyscraper.

The Georgian Sputnik wrote, as it was asked, about the dress sense of the country’s female politicians, including plenty of examples and photos. In Moldova, the local Sputnik website was ordered to cover the dependence of the national currency on the Russian ruble, and the price of oil. It carried out the task by publishing a news piece headlined “The Diagnosis of Our Leu: Breaking Free of One Dependency Brings on Another.”

Sometimes, other people based in Russia directed the coverage. On July 20, 2015, a multimedia editor for Rossiya Segodnya demanded news stories on the troop and arms movements of the Eastern Ukrainian separatists. Similar coverage of mandatory topics was ordered regularly in the following months. The orders also came from a woman who introduced herself to Kornilov on Skype as Liana Minasyan and said she was the editor of a multimedia program “planning to deal with the Baltic countries.” Another person involved in directing the coverage in Estonia also appears to have traveled to Estonia to recruit journalists for the local Sputnik.

The Estonian counterintelligence agency KAPO identified Minasyan as the supervisor of the Estonian Sputnik office in 2015. “Rossiya Segodnya has been working to establish an office in Estonia and an Estonian and Russian-language portal for Sputnik since spring 2015,” KAPO revealed in its 2015 review, adding that “Liana Minasyan from Moscow” was among those overseeing the office. Last year Minasyan confirmed to Re:Baltica that she was responsible for all Sputnik websites in the Baltics, but denied being involved with Baltnews.

When approached again by BuzzFeed News for this story, Minasyan said she didn’t work with Baltnews or with the Baltic states at all anymore. “If you want, I will forward your question to my former colleague,” she said, and didn’t reply to follow-up questions.

The records show that Kornilov and Svyazin’s daily Skype sessions continued for months, with the two men sometimes arguing about the weekly and monthly traffic reports Kornilov was asked to file.

In one case, Kornilov says that a draft contract has an error in it — instead of saying “Estonian language” it says “Latvian language,” another indication that similar contracts were signed in each Baltic country.

Their conversations at times went beyond work — sometimes they complained about their bosses and the bureaucracy they were involved in. The records also show that they met several times in Russia.

From the beginning, Kornilov tried to weave an illusion of an independent news site. When the Lithuanian outlet Delfi.lt covered the launch of Baltnews, Kornilov presented himself as the publisher of all three sites. The domains in all three Baltic states were registered to his name at that time, but were soon re-registered to Media Capital Holding B.V. — the company registered in the Netherlands by Rossiya Segodnya proxies.

Immediately after the news story was published by Delfi, Kornilov held a conversation with Jevgeni Levik, a pro-Russian journalist in Estonia who was working at Baltnews as its first editor-in-chief but was fired by Kornilov shortly before the launch.

“Our official position is such: We are developing an interactive information project together with foreign investors,” Levik said prior to his dismissal, in a Skype chat obtained under freedom of information laws. They also discussed how to react if journalists asked about the sites’ investors.

“Maybe we should give them the name of the company. I am sure many would not decline to know about it. And all contacts? And prepare a business plan,” Kornilov replied, seemingly sarcastically.

Levik said, “If they ask who are the Dutchmen, I will reply that they are private people and it is a private commercial project. The terms are confidential. I am the editor-in-chief and communicate directly with their representative in Estonia. Right?”

“Yes. You should deal only with things in your competence. To be precise, people there are not private, but it is an investment fund,” Kornilov said.

Levik declined to comment when contacted by phone by BuzzFeed News. “It’s a four-year-old history. I was just a journalist,” he said.

He then demanded to be sent the excerpt of the article where he is mentioned ahead of publication. “I am warning you — it’s your duty,” Levik said. “And then I will say if I approve it to be published or not.”

What the Skype chat logs also reveal is that over several years the Estonian Baltnews inflated its website traffic by buying fake unique visitors from various Russian companies that offer such a service. A friend and assistant of Kornilov, Aleksandr Dorofeyev, approached one such company as early as October 2014, the same month Baltnews.ee launched. Dorofeyev didn’t say why he needed to pump up the traffic numbers.

“I’m thinking to first have a test with 2,000 [pageviews] and if everything is OK then [we’ll make a larger order] for 14,000 rubles [about $200 by today’s exchange rate]. Will these visitors be distributed evenly throughout the day? If I order 100,000 you will share them evenly throughout the month?” he asked under the Skype handle Раскрутка сайтов — Website Promotion.

It seems that the initial test went well, as Baltnews and the Russian web company continued doing business. Dorofeyev was told that 1 million pageviews would cost 10,990 rubles (roughly $160 by today’s exchange rate). The Skype logs indicate that he placed several orders over the next few months. In March 2015, Dorofeyev said that he was looking for a long-term arrangement, with one or two orders every week.

Most of the orders needed to be submitted via email or a designated website, but occasionally Dorofeyev also posted the orders directly on Skype. On Feb. 18, 2016, he asked for 20,000 pageviews spread across five days on four different stories, with a viewing time of between 90 and 120 seconds. One of the stories he wanted to artificially boost the audience for was headlined “NATO’s Help for Estonia Might Not Arrive in Time”; another was about a local far-right politician promising to fight against refugees.

The Skype chats show Dorofeyev did not stop at fake visitors: He also paid for fake comments from a troll factory for specific stories. The price per comment was nine rubles (just $0.13). At first, Dorofeyev ordered a practice run on another propaganda site that Kornilov and he ran privately, Baltija.eu.

“Let’s start with 50 comments from two different people. If everything works out, we can continue working together also on other sites and with a larger number of posts,” Dorofeyev instructed an individual named Artem who offered the troll factory service.

Dorofeyev, the Skype chats show, was interested if the troll factory could use different IPs for the fake comments. The service provider asked why. “We need unique IPs so that the owner would have no reason to think that something murky is going on, but that they are real unique visitors. In general, we need a crowd of people,” Dorofeyev replied.

Artem, whose surname is not known, said that the company’s policy did not allow it to be involved in publishing comments on other sites. “We have copyright,” he said and directed Dorofeyev to the terms and conditions. But they still agreed to proceed with the test on Baltija.eu.

When approached by BuzzFeed News, Dorofeyev denied buying pageviews and comments. He said he only worked for Baltnews in Estonia as a daily editor: “I wrote and published the news I thought to be important and interesting.” He also rejected the notion that anyone had told him what to write about.

When told about Skype chat logs that show his involvement in artificially boosting traffic numbers, Dorofeyev said that he could also have a ticket to the moon, but “it wouldn’t prove that I actually went on the moon.” He declined to share his email address so the Skype logs he is featured in could be sent to him.

Harrys Puusepp, a superintendent and spokesperson at Estonia’s KAPO agency, told BuzzFeed News that the Baltnews scheme matches the modus operandi of other Kremlin propaganda operations and shows how their covert financial schemes are used to legitimize hostile propaganda.

“It’s a telling vicious circle of producing and financing propaganda, then referring to it as a genuine voice of local Russians, in order to use the distorted public image to support their foreign policy goals at international platforms,” Puusepp said.

The documents and Skype logs obtained by BuzzFeed News continue until summer 2016 — the time when the Estonian police seized Kornilov and his associates’ computers as part of the criminal investigation into document forgery. Public data suggests that the financing scheme of Baltnews continued well beyond that date. In 2016, after getting into trouble with Estonian tax authorities and the police, Kornilov changed the NGO he was using to run Baltnews. Instead of Altmedia, he started using a new NGO named Baltnewsmedia.

According to the financial review of Baltnewsmedia, it received 136,800 euros’ worth of donations in 2016. The review doesn’t specify the source of the donations, but they amount to exactly 11,400 euros a month — the sum Barsolina Ventures used to send to Altmedia. In 2017, the donation went up to 155,508 euros.

On June 1 this year, a brief message was posted on all three Baltnews sites, saying that due to a change of publisher, a new editorial team was to be formed. The same day, Kornilov posted a message on Facebook saying his team had ended its association with Baltnews. “Thank you to everyone who was with us for those four years,” he wrote.

Four days later, he reached a plea deal with the Estonian prosecutor’s office. While Kornilov managed to avoid a conviction for tax fraud and forgery of documents, Altmedia, the NGO he founded and used when publishing Baltnews, was convicted — allowing Kornilov to keep a clean record personally, although the court verdictclearly states his role in arranging and running a tax evasion scheme and document forgery.

The Latvian Baltnews website, when contacted via its general email address for comment, directed all questions to the press office of Rossiya Segodnya. Emails sent there remain unanswered.

Baltnews continues to be published in all three Baltic countries.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23355]

 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23355]

Part of the appeal of this strategy is its sheer outlandishness. It may seem implausible that Russia’s secret services could recruit or radicalize skinheads or social outcasts in the West. The Kremlin can easily argue that whatever ties exist between far-right groups in Russia and the West occur spontaneously, and have no connection to the Russian state. But whether it be Serb ultranationalists in Montenegro or neo-Nazis in Hungary, the hand of Russia’s intelligence services has in many cases already been exposed. Russia’s ongoing war in eastern Ukraine, waged using separatist proxies under the firm command and control of the Russian military, has provided a convenient recruiting ground for right-wing fanatics from Brazil to Belarus.

After the Kremlin accelerated its covert war against Western democracies in the aftermath of its invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s intelligence services dramatically ramped up their “active measures” (in Russian intelligence jargon, aktivnyye meropriyatiya or “active measures” refers to a broad range of covert influence and/or subversive operations) using radical-right and fringe groups. These groups serve as the perfect unwitting agents to accomplish Moscow’s twin goals of destabilizing Western societies and co-opting Western business and political elites.

By forging ties to radical groups on the far right, and sometimes on the far left, the Kremlin has developed convenient local surrogates that can amplify its talking points, even as Russian trolls reinforce the divisive narratives such groups spread online.

It would be a mistake, however, to think that the partnerships between the Kremlin and these groups are always marriages of convenience. Many are genuine partnerships based on a shared aversion to liberal democracy and a desire to undermine it.

 

 

Much more ore info in the link:

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/08/russia-is-co-opting-angry-young-men/568741/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_term=2018-08-29T10%3A00%3A27&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_campaign=the-atlantic

Edited August 29, 2018 by Hugo Stiglitz

[Hugo Stiglitz 23355]

 

[yaqdum 182]

14 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

 

Quote

We acknowledge our responsibility, and commit to greater accountability. I plan to share our leanings and the proactive measures we’re taking. We’re going to listen, learn and engage in any practical ideas we hear on how to improve together. Looking forward to the conversation.

this is what he edited.  under truth serum he would probably have said:

*conversions, not conversation #edit

and would have left leanings alone.

where did you go, joe freud?  it's not your wife's slip that is showing.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23355]

http://faculty.washington.edu/kstarbi/BLM-IRA Camera Ready.pdf

 

Following up on network analysis showing RU-IRA agents were active on both “sides” (pro- and anti-) of the politicized BLM conversation, we conducted a deep qualitative analysis, showing how RU accounts impersonated “authentic” voices.

The content on one “side” was typically very different from the other—(on the left) exhibiting pride in African American identity, (on the right) using racist memes targeting African American people. But it did converge around some themes, e.g. attacking the "mainstream media”.

This is one of two studies we did showing how RU disinfo operations infiltrate, integrate into, leverage, and shape “organic” online political activism. In this case, they targeted an authentic, organic political movement (and its countermovement) to further RU's political aims.

Thread got shredded a bit… Content from RU-IRA agents also converged in supporting Trump in the 2016 election, directly on the right through pro-Trump content, and indirectly on the left by urging supporters of BlackLivesMatter to not vote for Hillary Clinton.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23355]

Some good reads:

The Resistance Information Warfare Handbook, Part I

https://medium.com/@joohnchoe/the-resistance-information-warfare-handbook-part-i-317e24e7b667

Part II

https://medium.com/@joohnchoe/the-resistance-information-warfare-handbook-part-ii-bbd3149bb19e

The Resistance Information Warfare Handbook, Part III

https://medium.com/@joohnchoe/the-resistance-information-warfare-handbook-part-iii-9a7d2af1f73e

Part IV A Case Study In Information War Countermeasures Strategy : The Alabama Senate Special Election of 2017

https://medium.com/@joohnchoe/the-resistance-information-warfare-handbook-part-iv-a375993f3dc0

Part V: Structural characteristics of disinformation and fake news

https://medium.com/@joohnchoe/the-resistance-information-warfare-handbook-part-v-3f1f3b4a51b8

Part VI:

https://medium.com/@joohnchoe/the-resistance-information-warfare-handbook-part-vi-86a9476b0672

[Hugo Stiglitz 23355]

 

[pyrohornIII 4782]

On 9/5/2018 at 2:26 PM, Hugo Stiglitz said:

 

It's so refreshing to hear someone not using a lot of CYA speech and hem-hawing around a subject.  Dorsey owned up to things, discussed how they had already began to address improvements and are looking forward to prevent this from happening again.  

[Hugo Stiglitz 23355]

 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23355]

 

[pyrohornIII 4782]

https://sputniknews.com/us/201807221066591235-butina-father-defense/

Quote

The father of Maria Butina, a Russian national, detained in the US on charges of acting as a foreign agent in addition to conspiring to be one, insists that his daughter has done nothing wrong and had spent most of her time in the US studying.

"All she did was study, working very hard on a daily basis. Naturally, the pressure was high because English is not her native language, full of unfamiliar terms. What I’m saying is that she was studying almost round-the-clock,” Valery Butin told Rossiya-1 television.

He added that the last time he spoke with Maria was on July 14,  a day before she was arrested.

“She had to meet and contact many people just as her future profession calls for. Well, it looks like some people in some places circles got interested. She never did anything illegal, I can vouch for that,” Valery Butin emphasized.

What else is a father to do?    Doesn't really matter what he says.  The idea they are floating this must only be an attempt to make her come across as more human, innocent and slighted.  Whether he believes what he said or was coerced to do so somehow makes no difference. 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23355]

2 hours ago, pyrohornIII said:

https://sputniknews.com/us/201807221066591235-butina-father-defense/

What else is a father to do?    Doesn't really matter what he says.  The idea they are floating this must only be an attempt to make her come across as more human, innocent and slighted.  Whether he believes what he said or was coerced to do so somehow makes no difference. 

This is an official Russian Federation Twitter account 

check the profile picture 

 

They are using her for propaganda purposes really well.

The Kremlin is pushing the classic “United States is the evil empire” narrative and has this innocent little Russian school girl locked up for crimes she didn’t commit.

I imagine it plays really well with domestic Russian audiences and make Putin look more benevolent by comparison. 

[triplehorn 2664]

 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23355]

3 minutes ago, triplehorn said:

 

Jester pointed this out yesterday.  

Of course Parscale is going to do the same shit with SCL based micro-targeting psychographic data manipulation.

It’s the most powerful weapon they have. 

[ChickenSandwich 9778]

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2018/09/21/google-staffers-wanted-to-manipulate-search-results-to-combat-trumps-travel-ban-emails-show.html

wonder if it was Muller who found this?

[Hugo Stiglitz 23355]

2 minutes ago, ChickenSandwich said:

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2018/09/21/google-staffers-wanted-to-manipulate-search-results-to-combat-trumps-travel-ban-emails-show.html

wonder if it was Muller who found this?

Looks like corporate activism to me.  

[ChickenSandwich 9778]

Looks like Google is a bigger threat to US democracy than Russia at this point. And they actually have the emails (ie proof) to back it up. 

 

Who’da thunk it?

[Hugo Stiglitz 23355]

41 minutes ago, ChickenSandwich said:

Looks like Google is a bigger threat to US democracy than Russia at this point. And they actually have the emails (ie proof) to back it up. 

 

Who’da thunk it?

Remarkable analysis considering Fox News suppresses liberal points of view 24/7. 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23355]

The book, which is coming out less than two months before the midterm elections, at a moment when polls suggest that some sixty per cent of voters disapprove of Trump, may well reignite the question of Trump’s electoral legitimacy. The President’s supporters will likely characterize the study as an act of partisan warfare. But in person Jamieson, who wears her gray hair in a pixie cut and favors silk scarves and matronly tweeds, looks more likely to suspend a troublemaker than to be one. She is seventy-one, and has spent forty years studying political speeches, ads, and debates. Since 1993, she has directed the Annenberg Public Policy Center, at Penn, and in 2003 she co-founded FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan watchdog group. She is widely respected by political experts in both parties, though her predominantly male peers have occasionally mocked her scholarly intensity, calling her the Drill Sergeant. As Steven Livingston, a professor of political communication at George Washington University, puts it, “She is the epitome of a humorless, no-nonsense social scientist driven by the numbers. She doesn’t bullshit. She calls it straight.”

Indeed, when I met recently with Jamieson, in a book-lined conference room at the Annenberg Center, in Philadelphia, and asked her point-blank if she thought that Trump would be President without the aid of Russians, she didn’t equivocate. “No,” she said, her face unsmiling. Clearly cognizant of the gravity of her statement, she clarified, “If everything else is a constant? No, I do not.”

Jamieson said that, as an academic, she hoped that the public would challenge her arguments. Yet she expressed confidence that unbiased readers would accept her conclusion that it is not just plausible that Russia changed the outcome of the 2016 election—it is “likelythat it did.”

An airtight case, she acknowledges, may never be possible. In the introduction to her newbook, she writes that any case for influence will likely be similar to that in a civil legal trial, “in which the verdict is rendered not with the certainty that e=mc2 but rather based on the preponderance of evidence.” But, she points out, “we do make most of life’s decisions based on less-than-rock-solid, incontrovertible evidence.” In Philadelphia, she noted to me that “we convict people on probabilities rather than absolute certainty, and we’ve executed people based on inferences from available evidence.” She argued that “the standard of proof being demanded” by people claiming it’s impossible to know whether Russia delivered the White House to Trump is “substantially higher than the standard of proof we ordinarily use in our lives.”

Her case is based on a growing body of knowledge about the electronic warfare waged by Russian trolls and hackers—whom she terms “discourse saboteurs”—and on five decades’ worth of academic studies about what kinds of persuasion can influence voters, and under what circumstances. Democracies around the world, she told me, have begun to realize that subverting an election doesn’t require tampering with voting machines. Extensive studies of past campaigns, Jamieson said, have demonstrated that “you can affect people, who then change their decision, and that alters the outcome.” She continued, “I’m not arguing that Russians pulled the voting levers. I’m arguing that they persuaded enough people to either vote a certain way or not vote at all.”

The effect of such manipulations could be momentous in an election as close as the 2016 race, in which Clinton got nearly 2.9 million more votes than Trump, and Trump won the Electoral College only because some eighty thousand votes went his way in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. In two hundred and twenty-four pages of extremely dry prose, with four appendixes of charts and graphs and fifty-four pages of footnotes, Jamieson makes a strong case that, in 2016, “Russian masterminds” pulled off a technological and political coup. Moreover, she concludes, the American media “inadvertently helped them achieve their goals.”

When Jamieson set out to research the 2016 campaign—she has researched every Presidential election since 1976—she had no intention of lobbing a grenade. She was spending a peaceful sabbatical as a fellow at the Shorenstein Center, at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, exploring a rather narrow topic: the 2016 Presidential debates. She’d chosen this subject because, having devoted decades to examining the impact of advertising and other forms of persuasion on voters, she believed that most of the big questions in the field of political-campaign communications had been answered. Also, she admitted, “I have what you could call a debate fixation. Every year since 1996 I’ve done some kind of social-science look at the effects of debates.”

This expertise helped Jamieson notice something odd about the three debates between Trump and Clinton. As she told me, “The conventional wisdom was that Hillary Clinton had done pretty well.” According to CNN polls conducted immediately after the debates, she won all three, by a margin of thirteen per cent or greater. But, during the period of the debates, Jamieson and others at the Annenberg Center had overseen three telephone surveys, each sampling about a thousand adults. In an election that turned more than most on judgments of character, Americans who saw or heard the second and third debates, in particular, were more likely than those who hadn’t to agree that Clinton “says one thing in public and something else in private.” Jamieson found this statistic curious, because, by the time of the first debate, on September 26th, Clinton’s reputation for candor had already been tarnished by her failed attempt to hide the fact that she’d developed pneumonia, and by the revelation that, at a recent fund-raising event, she’d described some Trump supporters as “deplorables”—a slur that contradicted her slogan “Stronger Together.” Other Annenberg Center polling data indicated to Jamieson that concerns about Clinton being two-faced had been “baked in” voters’ minds since before the first debate. Clinton “had already been attacked for a very long time over that,” Jamieson recalls thinking. “Why would the debates have had an additional effect?”

After insuring that the surveys had been properly conducted, Jamieson analyzed whether this change in a voter’s perception of Clinton’s forthrightness predicted a change in his or her candidate preference. To her surprise, she found that it did: as she put it to me, there was a “small but significant drop in reported intention to vote for her.” This statistic, too, struck Jamieson as curious; she knew from years of scholarship that Presidential debates, barring major gaffes, typically “increase the likelihood that you’re casting a vote for, rather than against,” a candidate.

Last year, while Jamieson was trying to determine what could have caused viewers’ perception of Clinton’s character to fall so consequentially, the Washington Post asked her to write an op-ed addressing whether Russian operatives had helped to elect Trump. Jamieson agreed to do so, but, she admitted to me, “I frankly hadn’t thought about it one way or the other.”

[David Dennison 18347]

4 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

 

  Hide contents

The book, which is coming out less than two months before the midterm elections, at a moment when polls suggest that some sixty per cent of voters disapprove of Trump, may well reignite the question of Trump’s electoral legitimacy. The President’s supporters will likely characterize the study as an act of partisan warfare. But in person Jamieson, who wears her gray hair in a pixie cut and favors silk scarves and matronly tweeds, looks more likely to suspend a troublemaker than to be one. She is seventy-one, and has spent forty years studying political speeches, ads, and debates. Since 1993, she has directed the Annenberg Public Policy Center, at Penn, and in 2003 she co-founded FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan watchdog group. She is widely respected by political experts in both parties, though her predominantly male peers have occasionally mocked her scholarly intensity, calling her the Drill Sergeant. As Steven Livingston, a professor of political communication at George Washington University, puts it, “She is the epitome of a humorless, no-nonsense social scientist driven by the numbers. She doesn’t bullshit. She calls it straight.”

Indeed, when I met recently with Jamieson, in a book-lined conference room at the Annenberg Center, in Philadelphia, and asked her point-blank if she thought that Trump would be President without the aid of Russians, she didn’t equivocate. “No,” she said, her face unsmiling. Clearly cognizant of the gravity of her statement, she clarified, “If everything else is a constant? No, I do not.”

Jamieson said that, as an academic, she hoped that the public would challenge her arguments. Yet she expressed confidence that unbiased readers would accept her conclusion that it is not just plausible that Russia changed the outcome of the 2016 election—it is “likelythat it did.”

An airtight case, she acknowledges, may never be possible. In the introduction to her newbook, she writes that any case for influence will likely be similar to that in a civil legal trial, “in which the verdict is rendered not with the certainty that e=mc2 but rather based on the preponderance of evidence.” But, she points out, “we do make most of life’s decisions based on less-than-rock-solid, incontrovertible evidence.” In Philadelphia, she noted to me that “we convict people on probabilities rather than absolute certainty, and we’ve executed people based on inferences from available evidence.” She argued that “the standard of proof being demanded” by people claiming it’s impossible to know whether Russia delivered the White House to Trump is “substantially higher than the standard of proof we ordinarily use in our lives.”

Her case is based on a growing body of knowledge about the electronic warfare waged by Russian trolls and hackers—whom she terms “discourse saboteurs”—and on five decades’ worth of academic studies about what kinds of persuasion can influence voters, and under what circumstances. Democracies around the world, she told me, have begun to realize that subverting an election doesn’t require tampering with voting machines. Extensive studies of past campaigns, Jamieson said, have demonstrated that “you can affect people, who then change their decision, and that alters the outcome.” She continued, “I’m not arguing that Russians pulled the voting levers. I’m arguing that they persuaded enough people to either vote a certain way or not vote at all.”

The effect of such manipulations could be momentous in an election as close as the 2016 race, in which Clinton got nearly 2.9 million more votes than Trump, and Trump won the Electoral College only because some eighty thousand votes went his way in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. In two hundred and twenty-four pages of extremely dry prose, with four appendixes of charts and graphs and fifty-four pages of footnotes, Jamieson makes a strong case that, in 2016, “Russian masterminds” pulled off a technological and political coup. Moreover, she concludes, the American media “inadvertently helped them achieve their goals.”

When Jamieson set out to research the 2016 campaign—she has researched every Presidential election since 1976—she had no intention of lobbing a grenade. She was spending a peaceful sabbatical as a fellow at the Shorenstein Center, at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, exploring a rather narrow topic: the 2016 Presidential debates. She’d chosen this subject because, having devoted decades to examining the impact of advertising and other forms of persuasion on voters, she believed that most of the big questions in the field of political-campaign communications had been answered. Also, she admitted, “I have what you could call a debate fixation. Every year since 1996 I’ve done some kind of social-science look at the effects of debates.”

This expertise helped Jamieson notice something odd about the three debates between Trump and Clinton. As she told me, “The conventional wisdom was that Hillary Clinton had done pretty well.” According to CNN polls conducted immediately after the debates, she won all three, by a margin of thirteen per cent or greater. But, during the period of the debates, Jamieson and others at the Annenberg Center had overseen three telephone surveys, each sampling about a thousand adults. In an election that turned more than most on judgments of character, Americans who saw or heard the second and third debates, in particular, were more likely than those who hadn’t to agree that Clinton “says one thing in public and something else in private.” Jamieson found this statistic curious, because, by the time of the first debate, on September 26th, Clinton’s reputation for candor had already been tarnished by her failed attempt to hide the fact that she’d developed pneumonia, and by the revelation that, at a recent fund-raising event, she’d described some Trump supporters as “deplorables”—a slur that contradicted her slogan “Stronger Together.” Other Annenberg Center polling data indicated to Jamieson that concerns about Clinton being two-faced had been “baked in” voters’ minds since before the first debate. Clinton “had already been attacked for a very long time over that,” Jamieson recalls thinking. “Why would the debates have had an additional effect?”

After insuring that the surveys had been properly conducted, Jamieson analyzed whether this change in a voter’s perception of Clinton’s forthrightness predicted a change in his or her candidate preference. To her surprise, she found that it did: as she put it to me, there was a “small but significant drop in reported intention to vote for her.” This statistic, too, struck Jamieson as curious; she knew from years of scholarship that Presidential debates, barring major gaffes, typically “increase the likelihood that you’re casting a vote for, rather than against,” a candidate.

Last year, while Jamieson was trying to determine what could have caused viewers’ perception of Clinton’s character to fall so consequentially, the Washington Post asked her to write an op-ed addressing whether Russian operatives had helped to elect Trump. Jamieson agreed to do so, but, she admitted to me, “I frankly hadn’t thought about it one way or the other.”

 

Discourse sabotage would be much less effective against a population with even remedial critical thinking skills.

But this is Murica, so . . . 

 

 

[bernorange 8342]

So i saw this posted on another forum:

I haven't been paying a lot of attention to the Trump theater so I've never heard of this guy.  But I did a search on Surly for the last name and found this:

Active measures abound, apparently.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23355]

1 hour ago, bernorange said:

So i saw this posted on another forum:

I haven't been paying a lot of attention to the Trump theater so I've never heard of this guy.  But I did a search on Surly for the last name and found this:

Active measures abound, apparently.

I think any non-partisan observer would tell you the Krassenstein brothers are the left's version of Diamond and Silk. 

[F250 28597]

There are a lot of people from both sides cashing in on the Trump train.

[Incredulity 11373]

26 minutes ago, F250 said:

There are a lot of people from both sides cashing in on the Trump train.

wait, I thought "both sides" is horseshit????

[Hugo Stiglitz 23355]

6 hours ago, bernorange said:

So i saw this posted on another forum:

I haven't been paying a lot of attention to the Trump theater so I've never heard of this guy.  But I did a search on Surly for the last name and found this:

Active measures abound, apparently.

Back to this, while the tactics are similar, it really depends on who is paying him to classify as Active Measures. If it’s some US based interest group backed by a liberal billionaire like Bloomberg, he’s really no different than the talking heads that shill for Trump on Fox News. 

When I talk about Active Measures I’m talking about State sponsored foreign influence operations run like military operations.  

The Russia Federation (or other governments) weaponizing the power of Facebook and Twitter on American audiences would be 1980s analogous to the Kremlin working with Delta and United Airlines to drop propaganda pamphlets on targeted areas of the US population.  Except with the social media platforms, the targeting is much more precise and covert.  

Edited September 25, 2018 by Hugo Stiglitz

[F250 28597]

6 hours ago, Incredulity said:

wait, I thought "both sides" is horseshit????

 

In situations like this, political theater, it's just a case of hustlers gonna hustle. If there is a void to be filled on a particular side and money to be made doing it, someones going to step up.

 

 

[triplehorn 2664]

Crossposting this from the BK thread.   It's a foregone conclusion Putin levied a multifaceted cyber war on our populace in the 2016 election.

With so much at stake for Putin and all those aligned with him in the 2018 midterms, what tactic does he employ ?

1) Do Nothing

2) Repeat 2016

3) Go All In

 

 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23355]

9 minutes ago, triplehorn said:

Crossposting this from the BK thread.   It's a foregone conclusion Putin levied a multifaceted cyber war on our populace in the 2016 election.

With so much at stake for Putin and all those aligned with him in the 2018 midterms, what tactic does he employ ?

1) Do Nothing

2) Repeat 2016

3) Go All In

 

 

His best move is to do nothing.

I don’t think Putin has much of a grand strategy for 2018 except aid his assets in power with plausible deniability.  There’s no real trophy or victory he can claim like the presidency. 

Now would be the time Putin is laying the ground work for 2020. 

The 2016 interference really got started in 2014 or even 2013 if you want to go back to the Miss Universe Pageant.

Edited September 26, 2018 by Hugo Stiglitz

[retread 2951]

Putin's interference in Ukraine was supposedly the testing ground for Russia's interference in our '16 elections. Similarly, I guess he might use '18 to play around with social media and voting systems to get ready for '20.

Edited September 26, 2018 by retread

[atomheartbevo 89291]

19 minutes ago, retread said:

Putin's interference in Ukraine was supposedly the testing ground for Russia's interference in our '16 elections. Similarly, I guess he might use '18 to play around with social media and voting systems to get ready for '20.

Would be foolish to tip his hand this early and give the social media and search engine companies something to look for in a year or two.