Banning Russia from the 2016 Olympics makes sense.
It is unfair to those athletes who remained clean and through hard work, are at the top of their field. Their government, Russia, however, damned them and gave others unfair and illegal support. The Russian government must be punished.
</end editorial>
By Brian Whitmore
July 22, 2016
Russia’s doping scandal puts the International Olympic Committee in something of a bind.
If the Russian team is banned from the Summer Games in Rio, it would be an unprecedented move and the 2016 Olympics will forever have an asterisk attached to them.
With a major sports powerhouse excluded, this year’s games would be seen as significantly diminished.
But if the Russian team is not banned after such a massive and brazen state-sponsored cheating program was exposed, this year’s games — and the Olympic movement in general — will forever be tainted.
With a proven cheater allowed to compete, the integrity of the games would be damaged.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
And in this sense, sports is just another aspect of foreign affairs for the Kremlin.
It’s just another international arena where Moscow is breaking all the rules, smirking, and daring the world to do something about it.
Russia’s addiction to doping, its intervention in Ukraine, its violations of Western air and sea space, its abduction of Estonian law-enforcement officer Eston Kohver, its kidnapping of Nadia Savchenko, and its culpability for the downing of Flight MH17 are all parts of a single whole.
They stem from a belief that the rule of law is a joke and is only for sissies.
In fact, it’s highly appropriate that the doping-infested Sochi Olympics wrapped up just weeks before the annexation of Crimea.
Because in reality, these things are really two sides of the very same coin.
FILE – Alexander Fishenko, left, owner of ARC Electronics Inc., hides behind another inmate as they are escorted from the federal courthouse in Houston, Oct. 10, 2012.
VOA News
July 21, 2016 8:00 PM
A federal court in New York on Thursday sentenced an admitted agent of the Russian government to 10 years in prison and ordered him to forfeit $500,000 in profit he’d gained from his criminal activity, which focused on acquiring and secretly shipping abroad high-tech microelectronics for Russian military equipment.
Alexander Fishenko pleaded guilty to all 19 charges brought by the Department of Justice. U.S. officials said a company that Fishenko had founded shipped $50 million worth of electronic products to Russia between 2002 and 2012, all in defiance of a government licensing system meant to control such exports.
“These commodities have applications and are frequently used in a wide range of military systems,” U.S. officials said, “including radar and surveillance systems, missile guidance systems and detonation triggers.”
Charges against Fishenko, who has both American and Russian citizenship, included conspiracy, illegally exporting controlled products, conspiring to launder money and obstruction of justice. He was indicted in October 2012, along with 10 other individuals and two corporations, both of which Fishenko controlled. Three of the people remain at large, but the others either have pleaded guilty or been convicted in court.
To evade export controls on high-tech products manufactured in the United States, officials said, Fishenko and his co-conspirators gave false information about who was buying the electronic components, concealed the fact they were exporters and falsely described the devices on records submitted to the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Ultimate recipients of the electronic components acquired by Fishenko’s companies, known as ARC and Apex, included a research unit for the Russian internal security agency FSB, a Russian entity that builds air and missile defense systems, and another that produces electronic warfare systems for the Russian Ministry of Defense.
Assistant Attorney General John Carlin said prosecuting those who violate U.S. export laws is “an important part of our national security framework … protecting national assets from ending up in the hands of our potential adversaries.”
Over the past two years, the media has tended to sensationalize jihadists’ rapid adoption and strategic use of social media. Despite perpetual news coverage on the issue, the general public remains relatively uninformed about the complex ways in which many jihadists maintain robust yet secretive online presences. To accomplish their goals ― ranging from propaganda dissemination and recruitment to launching attacks ― jihadists must skillfully leverage various digital technologies that are widely advertised and freely accessible online.
Just as smart phones and portable devices have transformed the way much of the world communicates and interacts, jihadists, too, have rapidly adopted and availed themselves of these technologies. Their savvy grasp of technology presents one of the most frequently asked questions about jihadists today: what is in their digital toolbox and how do they exploit these technologies to benefit their activities?
This report explores these questions by elucidating 36 of the most noteworthy tools and technologies behind the online presence of jihadist groups such as ISIS. Flashpoint analysts have examined primary sources from the Deep and Dark Web to identify and analyze the key digital technologies facilitating the proliferation of these actors’ radical agendas.
Why is digital technology critical for jihadists?
Today’s jihadists rely heavily on the Internet, and their defense systems are increasingly shifting toward digital mediums. Consequently, this expanding online presence ignites an entirely new host of security concerns. As a result, many jihadists now depend on specialized security technologies. These technologies are imperative to jihadist operations ― whether for escaping surveillance, maintaining presences in underground channels, or obscuring tracks to war zones. Jihadist groups undeniably owe countless aspects of their perpetuated existence to the Internet.
Indeed, social media is integral to this robust online presence; it has truly transformed the global jihadist movement. Platforms such as Twitter and Facebook inflate jihadist notoriety, driving unlimited traffic, new recruits, and a global audience. Inevitably, this social media presence has generated pushback from certain platforms. Twitter in particular has been highly aggressive against pro-ISIS accounts. In response, today’s tech-savvy jihadists have demonstrated their keen adaptability; they now frequently leverage digital technologies to circumvent these barriers.
It is no secret that confidentiality and privacy are paramount to jihadists’ survival. However, most communication platforms lack the sophistication necessary to ensure sufficient security. As a result, today’s jihadists constantly seek alternative ways to advance their agendas and communicate securely. The 36 digital tools discussed within this report represent only a small sampling of the technologies required to overcome security challenges that would otherwise render jihadists’ daily tasks and crucial operations impossible.
Full-Scale Democratic Response to Hostile Disinformation Operations: 50 Measures to Oust Kremlin Hostile Disinformation Influence out of Europe
This paper has been consulted with several dozens of state and non-state diplomatic, academic, security and intelligence professionals. The author would like to express his gratitude for their inputs and feedback. Special thanks goes to Ben Nimmo, Peter Pomerancev, Stefan Meister, Yevhen Fedchenko, Jakub Kalenský and Peter Kreko
Jakub Janda Head of the Kremlin Watch Programme Deputy Director at European Values Think-Tank
Kremlin Watch is a strategic program of the European Values Think-Tank, which aims to unravel and confront instruments of Russian hybrid war which is focused against liberal democratic system.
Evidence suggests that a Russian intelligence group was the source of the most recent Wikileaks intel dump, which was aimed to influence the U.S. election.
Close your eyes and imagine that a hacking group backed by Russian President Vladimir Putin broke into the email system of a major U.S. political party. The group stole thousands of sensitive messages and then published them through an obliging third party in a way that was strategically timed to influence the United States presidential election. Now open your eyes, because that’s what just happened.
On Friday, Wikileaks published 20,000 emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee. They reveal, among other things,thuggish infighting, a push by a top DNC official to use Bernie Sanders’ religious convictions against him in the South, and attempts to strong-arm media outlets. In other words, they reveal the Washington campaign monster for what it is.
But leave aside the purported content of the Wikileaks data dump (to which numerous other outlets have devoted considerable attention) and consider the source. Considerable evidence shows that the Wikileaks dump was an orchestrated act by the Russian government, working through proxies, to undermine Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign.
“This has all the hallmarks of tradecraft. The only rationale to release such data from the Russian bulletproof host was to empower one candidate against another. The Cold War is alive and well,” Tom Kellermann, the CEO of Strategic Cyber Ventures told Defense One.
Here’s the timeline: On June 14, cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, under contract with the DNC, announced in a blog post that two separate Russian intelligence groups had gained access to the DNC network. One group, FANCYBEAR or APT 28, gained access in April. The other, COZYBEAR, (also called Cozy Duke and APT 29) first breached the network in the summer of 2015.
Cybersecurity company FireEye first discoveredAPT 29 in 2014 and was quick to point out a clear Kremlin connection. “We suspect the Russian government sponsors the group because of the organizations it targets and the data it steals. Additionally, APT29 appeared to cease operations on Russian holidays, and their work hours seem to align with the UTC +3 time zone, which contains cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg,” they wrote in their report on the group. Other U.S. officials have said that the group looks like it has sponsorship from the Russian government due in large part to the level of sophistication behind the group’s attacks.
It’s the same group that hit the State Department, the White House, and the civilian email of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The group’s modus operandi (a spearphishing attack that uploads a distinctive remote access tool on the target’s computer) is well known to cyber-security researchers.
In his blog post on the DNC breaches CrowdStrike’s CTO Dmitri Alperovitch wrote “We’ve had lots of experience with both of these actors attempting to target our customers in the past and know them well. In fact, our team considers them some of the best adversaries out of all the numerous nation-state, criminal and hacktivist/terrorist groups we encounter on a daily basis. Their tradecraft is superb, operational security second to none and the extensive usage of ‘living-off-the-land’ techniques enables them to easily bypass many security solutions they encounter.”
The next day, an individual calling himself Guccifer 2.0 claimed to be the culprit behind the breach and released key documents to back up the claim, writing: “Shame on CrowdStrike.”
Related: What the Joint Chiefs’ Email Hack Tells Us About the DNC Breach
Related: The Ukrainian Blackout and the Future of War
Crowdstrike stood by their original analysis, writing: “these claims do nothing to lessen our findings relating to the Russian government’s involvement, portions of which we have documented for the public and the greater security community.”
Other security firms offered independent analysis and reached the same conclusion. The group Fidelis undertook their own investigation and found Crowdstrike to be correct.
A Twitter user named @PwnAlltheThings looked at the metadata on the docs that Guccifer 2.0 provided in his blog post and found literal Russian signatures.
— Pwn All The Things (@pwnallthethings) June 15, 2016
His findings were backed up by Dan Goodin at Ars Technica. “Given the evidence combined with everything else, I think it’s a strong attribution to one of the Russian intelligence agencies,” @PwnAllTheThings remarked to Motherboard.
Motherboard reporter Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai actually conversed with Guccifer 2.0 over Twitter. The hacker, who claimed to be Romanian, answered questions in short sentences that “were filled with mistakes according to several Romanian native speakers,” Bicchieri found.
A large body of evidence suggests that Guccifer 2.0 is a smokescreen that the actual culprits employed to hide their involvement in the breach.
That would be consistent with Russian information and influence operations. “Russian propagandists have been caught hiring actors to portray victims of manufactured atrocities or crimes for news reports (as was the case when Viktoria Schmidt pretended to have been attacked by Syrian refugees in Germany for Russia’s Zvezda TV network), or faking on-scene news reporting (as shown in a leaked video in which “reporter” Maria Katasonova is revealed to be in a darkened room with explosion sounds playing in the background rather than on a battlefield in Donetsk when a light is switched on during the recording),” notes a RAND report from earlier in July.
The use of Wikileaks as the publishing platform served to legitimize the information dump, which also contains a large amount of personal information related to democratic donors such as social security and credit card numbers. This suggests that Wikileaks didn’t perform a thorough analysis of the documents before they released them, or simply didn’t care.
It’s the latest installment in a trend that information security researcher Bruce Schneier calls organizational doxing and that Lawfare’s Nicholas Weaver calls the weaponization of Wikileaks.
The most remarkable example of which, prior to the DNC incident, was the June 2015 the publication of several sets of NSA records related to government intelligence collection targets in France, Japan, Brazil and Germany. The data itself was not remarkable, but it did harm U.S. relations and may have compromised NSA tradecraft. “Wikileaks doesn’t seem to care that they are being used as a weapon by unknown parties, instead calling themselves a ‘library of mass education’. But the rest of us should,” Weaver writes.
The evidence so far suggests it’s a weapon that Putin used to great effect last week.
China’s top internet regulator ordered major online companies including Sina Corp. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. to stop original news reporting, the latest effort by the government to tighten its grip over the country’s web and information industries.
The Cyberspace Administration of China imposed the ban on several major news portals, including Sohu.com Inc. and NetEase Inc., Chinese media reported in identically worded articles citing an unidentified official from the agency’s Beijing office. The companies have “seriously violated” internet regulations by carrying plenty of news content obtained through original reporting, causing “huge negative effects,” according to a report that appeared in The Paper on Sunday.
The agency instructed the operators of mobile and online news services to dismantle “current-affairs news” operations on Friday, after earlier calling a halt to such activity at Tencent, according to people familiar with the situation. Like its peers, Asia’s largest internet company had developed a news operation and grown its team. Henceforth, they and other services can only carry reports provided by government-controlled print or online media, the people said, asking not to be identified because the issue is politically sensitive.
The sweeping ban gives authorities near-absolute control over online news and political discourse, in keeping with a broader crackdown on information increasingly distributed over the web and mobile devices. President Xi Jinping has stressed that Chinese media must serve the interests of the ruling Communist Party.
The party has long been sensitive to the potential for negative reporting to stir up unrest, the greatest threat to its decades-old hold on power. Regulations forbidding enterprise reporting have been in place for years without consistent enforcement, but the latest ordinance suggests “they really mean business,” said Willy Lam, an adjunct professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Center for China Studies.
Xi’s ‘Crusade’
Xi is cementing his power base and silencing dissenters ahead of a twice-a-decade reshuffle at next year’s party congress. Lam said that he “is really tightening up his crusade to silence opponents in the media.”
The regulator will slap financial penalties on sites found in violation of the regulations, the Paper cited the official as saying. A representative of Sohu declined to comment on the report. Tencent, Sina and NetEase didn’t respond to messages and phone calls seeking comment. The cyberspace administration has yet to respond to a faxed request for comment.
The government is now considering ways to exert a more direct form of influence over the country’s online media institutions. In recent months, Chinese authorities have held discussions with internet providers on a pilot project intended to pave the way for the government to start taking board seats and stakes of at least 1 percent in those companies. In return, they would get a license to provide news on a daily basis.
Gray Area
China’s online giants serve content, games and news to hundreds of millions of people across the country — Tencent’s QQ and WeChat alone host more than a billion users, combined. Online news services however have always operated in a regulatory gray area. They’re not authorized to provide original content and technically aren’t allowed to hire reporters or editors. Still, outlets have recently published investigative stories on official corruption cases, and covered sensitive social issues from demonstrations to human rights. For instance, NetEase ran a feature in April after the party announced an investigation into a senior Hebei provincial official, Zhang Yue. The story was later removed from the internet.
“Current-affairs news” is a broad term in China and encompasses all news and commentary related to politics, economics, military, foreign affairs and social issues, according to the draft version of China’s online information law. The amended draft of the regulation is currently seeking public feedback on the CAC’s official website.
The change in the guidelines on original reporting also comes weeks after China replaced its chief internet regulator. Xu Lin, a former Shanghai propaganda chief who worked briefly with Xi during his half-year stint as Shanghai party boss in 2007, succeeded Lu Wei in June as head of the cyberspace administration.
The regulator has since tightened its grip on online news reports, such as by warningnews or social network websites against publishing news without proper verification. In another sign that the government is exerting influence over information, the publishers of a private purchasing managers index suspended that popular gauge without explanation.
This paper sheds light on organisations operating in Europe that are funded by the Russian government, whether officially or unofficially. These include government-organised non-governmental organisations (GONGOs), non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and think tanks.
Their goal is to shift European public opinion towards a positive view of Russian politics and policies, and towards respect for its great power ambitions. In light of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and Russian aggression in Eastern Ukraine, the overt or covert support for these organisations must become a matter of concern to the EU.
The EU’s politicians and citizens should look at the activities of the Russian GONGOs and think tanks as challenges that can help improve national and EU-level decision-making mechanisms, increase transparency in policymaking and deepen the involvement of citizens and civil society organisations in the democratic process.
The paper recommends, among other measures, fostering the EU’s own narrative, which is based on human rights, freedom and equality; supporting pro-democratic civil society so that Europeans become more resistant to Russian propaganda; and increasing transparency requirements for NGOs and lobbyists by setting up a mandatory lobbying register at the EU level.
As a result, I was flooded with input from readers from all over the world, who detested, and exposed Ms. Marsden as an unmitigated Russian troll and a disaster of a journalist here: Rachel Mardsen, Russian Troll.
Sputnik News, don’t forget, is the “news” outlet spun off of RT, Russia’s state-controlled media outlet for fabricated, sensationalistic, and outlandish news stories.
I had a pleasant chat with a reporter this evening, who was trying to grasp the basic concepts of Russian Information Warfare for his readers.
Assuming Russia is behind this mass email disclosure to Wikileaks, the idea is to undermine the United States, or, more importantly, to put a candidate of Russia’s choice into the White House. This assumes, of course, that no similar disclosure will occur to Trump, which I have insider knowledge is about to happen.
This is the first time a foreign country has so blatantly tried to influence a US election. We all know it is Russia, like the green men in Crimea, yet nobody can prove it – yet.
This was the first release of emails injurious to Clinton. A second will be sure to follow. At least some will be more damaging to her reputation and her perception by the voters. Will this result in changes to votes? The pollers like to think so.
I have to look at the supporting and corroborating stories, however. A bunch of Russian and pro-Russian fabrication story sites picked up this story:
Russia has energized the ‘great’ Russian fake propaganda machine to support this story. Interestingly, Ria Novosti, RT, Sputnik News, and other more conventional Russian propaganda sites are covering the original story of the DNC hack but NOT the story that Assange will release a second batch of emails.
Russian news actually split on this story, into fake and merely fraudulent. Hmmm. This is an interesting development, perhaps very revealing.
</end editorial>
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says his next leak will virtually destroy Hillary Clinton
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says his next leak will virtually guarantee an indictment of Hillary Clinton.
In a recent interview with ITV, Assange said the whistleblowing website will soon be leaking documents that will provide “enough evidence” for the Department of Justice to indict the presumptive Democratic nominee. WikiLeaks has already published 30,322 emails from Clinton’s private email server, spanning from June 30, 2010 to August 12, 2014. While Assange didn’t specify what exactly was in the emails, he did tell ITV that WikiLeaks had “accumulated a lot of material about Hillary Clinton, which could proceed to an indictment.”
Assange hinted that the emails slated for publication contain additional information about the Clinton Foundation. He also reminded ITV’s Robert Peston that previously released emails contained one damning piece of communication from Clinton, instructing a staffer to remove the classification settings from an official State Department communication and send it through a “nonsecure” channel. Assange then pointed out that the Obama administration has previously prosecuted numerous whistleblowers for violating the government’s procedures for handling classified documents.
In regard to the ongoing FBI investigation, however, Assange expressed a lack of confidence in the Obama administration’s Justice Department to indict the former Secretary of State.
“[Attorney General Loretta Lynch] is not going to indict Hillary Clinton. It’s not possible that could happen. But the FBI could push for new concessions from the Clinton government in exchange for its lack of indictment.”
WikiLeaks has long been a thorn in the side of the former Secretary of State, who called on President Obama to prosecute the whistleblowing site after its 2010 leak of State Department cables. Julian Assange remains confined to the Ecuadorian Embassy in downtown London, as Ecuador has promised to not hand over the WikiLeaks founder to US authorities.
This week, we attach the master-table containing all the disinformation stories reported to us over the last ten months – 174 pages worth!
The Disinformation Review project started last October. Since then, our contributors have reported 1,649 disinformation stories that they noticed in their local pro-Kremlin outlets. This sample represents 18 different languages – which means even more countries were targeted by the campaign.
Top of the list comes disinformation in Russian, with 936 examples. This targets also the audience in the Baltic states (during the ten months, we have not been told of any stories in Estonian, Latvian, or Lithuanian), in the Caucasus, in Belarus and in Ukraine (there are only five stories in the Ukrainian language in the master-table). And remembering the “Lisa case” in Germany (http://ceip.org/1UuM3oy), we cannot omit that the pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign in the Russian language targets also Russian-speaking minorities in many countries further from Russia’s borders.
The other “lingua franca” highly represented in the master-table is English, with 173 stories. Among the English-language outlets, you will find RT (aka Russia Today) and Sputnik, but also more than a dozen less-known sources: minor websites, blogs, etc. Despite their limited audience, their influence cannot be underestimated – we see these sites serving as sources for other disinformation-oriented outlets in other languages. As our partners from European Values think-tank in Prague regularly showed us, Czech pro-Kremlin outlets often use the English conspiracy sites like whatdoesitmean.com for their own reporting.
Russian, Czech and English are the three most represented languages in all the Disinformation Reviews. Among other languages, you will also find multiple stories in Bulgarian, Georgian, German, Hungarian, or Slovak. The pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign in other languages was covered in a less representative manner, but you will still find some stories in Dutch, French, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish or Ukrainian.
Territory-wise, the most exotic pro-Kremlin disinformation comes probably from Venezuela. As StopFake pointed out in February (http://bit.ly/1LtH8Ek), Venezuela’s TV station aired a story claiming that UNICEF accuses Ukraine of aggression against Donetsk and Luhansk. Of course, the story was a fake.
This database of disinformation has been possible only thanks to dozens of contributors monitoring the pro-Kremlin campaign in their countries and their languages and providing us with their reports. We thank you very much for all your efforts and we are looking forward to further collaboration.
With this edition, the East StratCom Task Force wishes you an enjoyable summer! We will start collecting your stories again in the week beginning 22 August. The Disinformation Digest will be back on Friday 26 August, the Disinformation Review on Tuesday 30 August.
The Disinformation Review collects examples of pro-Kremlin disinformation all around Europe and beyond. Every week, it exposes the breadth of this campaign, showing the countries and languages targeted. We’re always looking for new partners to cooperate with us for that.
The Disinformation Digest analyses how pro-Kremlin media see the world and what independent Russian voices say. It follows key trends on Russian social media, so you can put pro-Kremlin narratives into their wider context. And finally… some Friday Fun before the weekend!
DISCLAIMER: The Disinformation Review is a compilation of reports received from members of the mythbusting network. The mythbusting network comprises of over 450 experts, journalists, officials, NGOs and Think Tanks in over 30 countries. Please note that opinions and judgements expressed here do not represent official EU positions.
The Daily Vertical: Ukraine’s Forgotten War (Transcript)
July 26, 2016
Don’t look now but it’s been one hell of a deadly month in the Donbas.
I know it’s easy to miss given all the excitement elsewhere, but according to statistics released by the United Nations last week, 27 Ukrainian soldiers were killed and 123 wounded in the first part of July alone.
Yesterday, three Ukrainian servicemen were killed and three more were wounded.
Six more were killed over one 24-hour period this past weekend.
The reports of this slow drip of death have been coming in every single day, each looking like the one before it.
Three killed and 16 wounded one day. One killed and five wounded another. Three killed and 13 wounded on another. And seven killed and 14 wounded on yet another.
It becomes a blur.
But when you add it all up, you need to go back nearly a year to find another month as deadly as July — and the month isn’t even over yet.
But despite all the death and destruction, almost nobody is noticing.
New evidence is emerging that content from the DNC emails accessed by Russian hackers may have been altered before being released to Wikileaks. This added layer of information joined with the timing of the release and Trump’s cozy relationship with Putin paint a picture of deep collusion and planning aimed at fracturing any potential Democratic unity at the most crucial point in the 2016 presidential election cycle.
The metadata in the leaked documents are perhaps most revealing: one dumped document was modified using Russian language settings, by a user named “Феликс Эдмундович,” a code name referring to the founder of the Soviet Secret Police, the Cheka, memorialised in a 15-ton iron statue in front of the old KGB headquarters during Soviet times. The original intruders made other errors: one leaked document included hyperlink error messages in Cyrillic, the result of editing the file on a computer with Russian language settings. After this mistake became public, the intruders removed the Cyrillic information from the metadata in the next dump and carefully used made-up user names from different world regions, thereby confirming they had made a mistake in the first round.
Then there is the language issue. “I hate being attributed to Russia,” the Guccifer 2.0 account told Motherboard, probably accurately. The person at the keyboard then claimed in a chat with Motherboard’s Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai that Guccifer 2.0 was from Romania, like the original Guccifer, a well-known hacker. But when asked to explain his hack in Romanian, he was unable to respond colloquially and without errors. Guccifer 2.0’s English initially was also weak, but in subsequent posts the quality improved sharply, albeit only on political subjects, not in technical matters—an indication of a team of operators at work behind the scenes.
Rid went on to add:
The metadata show that the Russian operators apparently edited some documents, and in some cases created new documents after the intruders were already expunged from the DNC network on June 11. A file called donors.xls, for instance, was created more than a day after the story came out, on June 15, most likely by copy-pasting an existing list into a clean document.
Although so far the actual content of the leaked documents appears not to have been tampered with, manipulation would fit an established pattern of operational behaviour in other contexts, such as troll farms or planting fake media stories. Subtle (or not so subtle) manipulation of content may be in the interest of the adversary in the future. Documents that were leaked by or through an intelligence operation should be handled with great care, and journalists should not simply treat them as reliable sources.
Adding context to why Putin and the Russian government would go to so much trouble to influence the U.S. presidential elections, NPR reported:
The security firm the party brought in last month to deal with the data breach immediately pointed fingers towardwhat it called “Russian espionage groups.”
“If [it’s a coincidence] it’s a really great coincidence,” said Russia expert Fiona Hill, who directs the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution. “The Russians have a word — ne sluchaino. It means, not accidental. Not by chance.”
Hill said the Russian hackers may not be taking orders directly from Putin, but that they are clearly working with Russian foreign policy interests in mind.
“They don’t have to be run directly by the Kremlin. They can just be encouraged,” Hill said. “They [Russian security services] are very good at knowing how to play our media. We are making this email leak into a huge story, as they knew we would.”
On a personal level, Trump said last fall that he and Putin “would probably get along … very well.” He has repeatedly praised Putin’s strength, particularly when it comes to military intervention in Syria.
Add to that Trump’s fondness for Putin (both as a man and as a hardline leader):
“He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader, you know unlike what we have in this country,” Trump told MSNBC in December.
During his annual end-of-year marathon news conference in December, Putin returned the compliment, calling Trump “a bright personality, a talented person, no doubt.”
“He says that he wants to move to a different level of relations, to a closer, deeper one, with Russia,” Putin said. “How can we not welcome that?”
In 2007, he praised Putin for “rebuilding Russia.” A year later he added, “He does his work well. Much better than our Bush.” When Putin ripped American exceptionalism in a New York Times op-ed in 2013, Trump called it “a masterpiece.” Despite ample evidence, Trump denies that Putin has assassinated his opponents: “In all fairness to Putin, you’re saying he killed people. I haven’t seen that.” In the event that such killings have transpired, they can beforgiven: “At least he’s a leader.” And not just any old head of state: “I will tell you that, in terms of leadership, he’s getting an A.”
And several advisers in Trump’s orbit have close ties to Russia and Russian interests. Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who advises Trump on foreign policy, raised eyebrows in Washington by sitting at a table with Putinduring a gala for the state-run English language news channel Russia Today last year. And Trump’s top adviser, Manafort, has done political consulting work for Ukrainian politicians viewed as allies to Russia.
Even Trump’s vaguely stated policy ideals align with the idea of his collusion with Russia right down to his abhorrence of NATO:
More consequential for Moscow: Trump’s repeated skepticism about the value and strength of the NATO alliance, which formed the pillar of Western Europe and North America’s opposition to the Soviet Union over the past half century.
A central tenet of the North Atlantic treaty is that member states view an attack against one of them as an attack against the entire alliance.
Asked about Russia’s threatening activities, which have unnerved the small Baltic States that are among the more recent entrants into NATO, Trump said that if Russia attacked them, he would decide whether to come to their aid only after reviewing if those nations have “fulfilled their obligations to us.”
“If they fulfill their obligations to us,” he added, “the answer is yes.”
In essence, Trump wouldn’t live up to the obligations contained in NATO’s charter. While he didn’t explicitly link this reluctance to his relationship with Putin, the writing is on the wall.
That wasn’t the only occasion in which Trump attacked NATO either. “We pay so much disproportionately more for NATO,” Trump said in March. “We are getting ripped off by every country in NATO, where they pay virtually nothing, most of them. And we’re paying the majority of the costs.”
The NATO skepticism plays into a much broader isolationist view that Trump has taken during his campaign, a view that would undoubtedly benefit internationally proactive countries like Russia, if it were carried out by a President Trump.
“The most important difference between our plan and that of our opponents is that our plan will put America first,”Trump said Thursday night during his convention speech. “Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo.”
Which is to say, Americans should regard any “leaks” published by Wikileaks in the coming weeks leading up to the 2016 presidential elections with a grain of salt. After all, Putin has a puppet in his pocket named Trump and a globe full of hackers, spies and allies all aimed at installing that puppet into the White House.
Tim Peacock is the Managing Editor and founder of Peacock Panache and has worked as a civil rights advocate for over twenty years. During that time he’s worn several hats including leading on campus LGBT advocacy in the University of Missouri campus system, interning with the Colorado Civil Rights Division, and volunteering at advocacy organizations. You can learn more about him at his personal website.
Mass media have often reported on the attack of Russian trolls on Ukrainian and western information resources. An army of paid bots leaves comments on the sites of the largest European and American online sites, engages in polemics in forums, and also massively penetrate professional networks, such as LinkedIn, that are used by many for the exchange of professional resumes and job vacancies, including some government organizations.
In addition to unloading copious amounts of disinformation, slandering, and insulting opponents, trolls employ a technique well-known to Russian and Ukrainian Internet users. They succeed in blocking their opponents by lodging a large number of complaints about them. More often than not, the mechanism for blocking user accounts is automatic and determined by the number of complaints received, and this is a favorite tool of the trolls. Now, maybe for the first time, such an attack has targeted respected American experts, government employees, and even intelligence service veterans.
This was the case a few days ago when LinkedIn, a site for professionals, banned the accounts of several people who had dared oppose those who posted pro-Putin comments. Among the “casualties” of this network attack were Army veteran Eric Tallant, retired senior CIA officer Charles Leven, and New York attorney James Berger. All three were notified that their accounts had been blocked “for repeatedly posting unwanted/inappropriate content, and using the platform to harass other members.“
“No group owner ever complained to me about too many, unwanted, or inappropriate posts. Harassment, if any, was harassment back to trolls and extremists who were harassing me and others… it could have been an orchestrated attack, including by bots, and I was given no opportunity to respond,” explained Charles Leven in an interview with our site.
“I suspect I’ve become the target of a neo-Nazi, pro-Kremlin, former Finnish pastor.He launched an attack using real and fake proxies. Some have ties to the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) as alleged metropolitans. Funny thing! I never even interacted with the guy. I simply posted a link that briefly mentions him,” Eric Tallant told us.
Warning notices of possible bans were received by other members of the virtual network, for example, U.S. Department of Commerce official Jason C. Groves.
“I have never sent spam or unwanted communications to another member. I have commented on threads of trolls. I have never acted dishonestly or posted inaccurate or objectionable content, only the truth which repulses trolls and the occasional swear word… But I swore an oath to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same,’ and I will continue to do so,” averred Jason.
Still another troll victim is French foreign policy expert Giles DeMourot. One of the most active pro-Russian LinkedIn users, Yana Dianova (ЯнаДианова) complained to the LinkedIn management that he (DeMourot) was using a false profile. After three days, Giles was able to establish his rights to an account and as a precaution sent a copy of his passport to the LinkedIn support staff. The French expert notes in this connection that the company management apparently operates according to a double standard, reacting vigorously to complaints from Russian trolls without giving them a critical examination, while they treat other members of the network more sternly.
“They refused to apologize for having given credence to Ms Dianova’s allegations without any form of verification. Then arose the case of another Russian troll, Fred Eidlin, who was fraudulently using the title of “visiting professor at Karlova University.” I produced an email from the vice-rector whom I had contacted saying he had no right to use this title. LinkedIn is still allowing him to fraudulently use the title!
“Ms Dianova continued to defame me and others and I filed a notice of defamatory content and partly won: LinkedIn said they had taken appropriate action. The action taken was, I believe, to ask Ms Dianova to stop defaming me explicitly, i.e. to quote my name. This was observed, though some statements clearly referred to me,” Giles DeMourot informed us.
According to James Berger, any time the discussion turned to Russian policies, particularly, but not exclusively, the illegal Russian occupation of part of Ukraine, he and those who agreed with him were “repeatedly threatened, abused, and subjected to character assassination.”
“More shockingly, during the past week, I and my like-minded colleagues have now had our LinkedIn accounts deleted based solely on having used LinkedIn – as professionals … Meanwhile, countless actual violators of the User Agreement – many of whom we had sought to expose by presenting evidence – remain unquestioned, ignored and even supported. How could this be?” asks the attorney.
James Berger is convinced that such a company policy can be explained only by an apparent bias.
“Still more fascinating is that a number of those convicted of the unpardonable sin of “unprofessionalism” are military veterans and/or current or former public servants who have sworn oaths to uphold the truth and have literally placed their lives on the line to advance that mission. Yet in the sick and upside down world of LinkedIn, allegiance to the bottom line always trumps commitment to sacred ideals,” says the outraged advocate.
The attorney affirms that he will demand an apology from LinkedIn for its biased policy and questions whether Microsoft shareholders are prepared to invest 26 billion dollars in a company which could cost them their reputation.
Unfortunately, we might add that a similar situation exists on Facebook and several other social networks. American companies have shown themselves unprepared for the information war. Their systems for handling complaints apparently were not set up to handle the possibility of well-financed and organized attacks. For the time being, the Kremlin’s trolls are swimming in success.
MOSCOW — Britain’s decision to leave the European Union is just the beginning, if some in the Kremlin have their way.
Northern Irish, Scottish, Basque, Catalan and Italian secessionists have been invited to Moscow for a conference, partly funded by Russia, planned for August. They will mingle with Texan, Californian, Puerto-Rican and Hawaiian wannabe-separatists from all over the world, the conference organizer says.
“Our goal is to consolidate efforts based on international legal standards [and] to achieve the very democracy the European Union and the United States talk about, but [the democracy] in its true meaning,” Alexander Ionov, head of the Anti-Globalist Movement of Russia, which is organizing the event, told NBC News.
One of the international standards he referred to is to a nation’s right for self-determination that is part of the United Nations’ chapter.
Ionov said that the Russian government’s modest grant of $53,000 to accommodate dozens of guests will be supplemented by private donations from “Texas and other countries” that openly or clandestinely support the secessionist cause.
Western leaders and Russia experts say the Kremlin backs fringe, ultra-nationalist and separatist parties to destabilize groupings such as NATO and the EU and to thwart U.S. missile defense installations that Moscow sees as a threat to its security.
They also say Moscow uses these movements to promote its political agenda, gain more political leverage within the EU and push for the lifting of Western sanctions imposed on Moscow after its 2014 annexation of Crimea.
President Barack Obama said in April that Russia’s Vladimir Putin “exploits” the EU migrant crisis because he is “not entirely persuaded” by European unity. In January, Congress instructed James Clapper, the U.S.’s director of national intelligence, to investigate how the Kremlin finances these parties.
“As it tries to rattle the cage, the Kremlin is working hard to buy off and co-opt European political forces, funding both right-wing and left-wing anti-systemic parties throughout Europe,” Vice President Joe Biden said in his May 2015 speech at Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank. “President Putin sees such political forces as useful tools to be manipulated, to create cracks in the European body politic which he can then exploit.”
The director of the Institute of Political Studies, political scientist Sergei Markov at a meeting of the Open Tribune council of experts to discuss the issue of civil society in modern Russia. Anna Isakova / TASS via Getty Images
A Russian opposition leader claims the Kremlin’s new friendships reflect its political desperation to find political allies of any stripe.
“This is a diagnosis of international isolation,” said Gennady Gudkov, a former lawmaker who was evicted from the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, after longtime criticism of Putin’s policies. “Now we embrace the very people we had never wanted to share bread with.”
Putin has a different take.
“Nobody wants to feed and subsidize weaker economies, maintain other states, entire nations,” he said after the U.K.’s shock vote to leave the EU, known as Brexit. One of the arguments deployed by those who campaigned for Britain to leave was that wealthier countries contribute disproportionately more than their poorer counterparts.
A pro-Kremlin political analyst and former lawmaker called Russia’s new alliances with separatists “very useful” — but blamed the West for forcing Moscow to embrace their cause.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. MAXIM SHEMETOV / Reuters
“The EU [and] the U.S. push Russia to support all sorts of anti-establishment movements,” Sergei Markov told NBC News, referring to Euroskeptic and separatist groups.”
He echoed the Kremlin’s assertion that the West plots to weaken resurgent Russia by installing pro-Western governments in neighboring ex-Soviet republics such as Georgia and Ukraine, and by giving financial support to opposition movements, human rights groups and NGOs.
Ionov, of the Anti-Globalist Movement, and Markov said the Kremlin does not finance foreign secessionist parties. Top Kremlin officials also denied the accusation, according to Russian media reports.
However, France’s far-right Euroskeptic National Front Party has admitted receiving $12.2 million loan from a Kremlin-affiliated bank in 2014, according to Bloomberg. And it asked for another loan of $27.7 million in February, the report added.
“I will look for funds where I know I might get them,” the party’s treasurer Wallerand Saint-Just told Bloomberg. “I found some financing there in 2014, so yes I am going to try again.”
The National Front did not respond to NBC News’ requests for comment.
Moscow’s conservative pivot
Vladimir Putin’s return to the Kremlin for a third presidency in 2012 was marked by a conservative pivot for Moscow. The Kremlin now extols Christian values, denounces Western influences and bans sex education in schools. This “traditional” worldview overlaps with efforts to restore Russia’s clout in former Soviet regions — such as Ukraine and Georgia —and forge ties with nationalist and fringe groups in Europe.
Delegates listen to speeches during the ‘International Russian Conservative Forum’ in St. Petersburg, Russia, 22 march 2015. ANATOLY MALTSEV / EPA
Boris Reitschuster, a veteran German journalist who authored several books on Russia, claims that the ties date back to the first years of Putin’s presidency — and his past as a KGB spy in East Germany in 1985-1990, where he developed ties to the Stasi, the secret police.
“I think it started shortly after Putin came to power,” Reitschuster told the Voice of America in April. “He was a KGB man, and everything he is using now is the old methods of the KGB and the Stasi.”
One of these parties is the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany, whose former leader Udo Voigt, a current member of the European Parliament, attended the International Russian Conservative Forum conference in St. Petersburg in 2015.
It welcomed fringe parties, Euroskeptic groups and separatists from Greece, Italy, Great Britain and the U.S. and was organized by Rodina — “Motherland” — a conservative nationalist party in Russia that has been accused of xenophobia and racism.
Rodina’s founder and de-facto leader, Dmitri Rogozin, served as Russian envoy to NATO and is now a deputy prime minister in Putin’s government in charge of defense, space and nuclear industries. He was barred from entering the EU and the U.S. for his role in the annexation of Crimea.
While supporting the far-right and secessionist groups abroad, Russia violently cracks down on domestic separatists.
After the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Moscow fought hard to contain Russia’s further dissolution by waging two wars against separatists in Chechnya and negotiating deals with the government in Tatarstan, an oil-rich, largely Muslim region on the Volga River that declared independence in the early 1990s but remains a Russian territory.
Neo-Nazi and ultra-nationalist groups mushroomed throughout Russia in the late 1990s, and some of these parties,such as the banned Northern Brotherhood, want regions with the dominant ethnic Russian population to form a separate state.
Meanwhile, a handful of activists in some of 85 Russian provinces with sizable Muslim, Buddhist or shamanist populations also advocate independence.
Dozens of ultra-nationalists and separatists have been convicted and jailed for “propagating” their views in recent years, Sova, a Moscow-based human rights group, said in a recent report.
“They support people like me abroad, and jail us here,” Dmitry Demishkin, a veteran skinhead and head of the nationalist Russkiye (Russians) party that has repeatedly been denied registration, said in July just days before he was sentenced to 15 days in jail for posting a swastika on his social networking page.
Russian President Vladimir Putin chooses a questioner during his annual press conference in Moscow in December, 2014. SERGEI CHIRIKOV / EPA
In today’s article, Russian trolls attack Americans by Russian journalist Kseniya Kirillova, she lays out the obvious bias of LinkedIn against my friends and me in our effort to expose Russian trolls, uncover and publish their activities to act on Russia’s behalf, and their constant assault on anyone not supporting Russia’s position.
What has happened to Charles, James, and Jason transcends simple trolling to outright “internet assault”, harassment, and/or ‘playing hardball’ – each has been saddled with a “permanent suspension”. The only thing levied on us, including my nine-day suspension, is a denial of the use of LinkedIn, certainly not the denial of any “rights” since it’s a private site. Let’s not confuse the terminology.
The only harmful private information LinkedIn released was proprietary information submitted by me to LinkedIn as requested, which was then released by LinkedIn to Yana Dianova, discovered when she shared information contained only in those documents. This was not only unprofessional on LinkedIn’s behalf, but would be grounds for disbarment if Dianova was located in the West. Yana is the queen of defamation, but the only libel is calling Yana Dianova an attorney. She’s a Russian attorney too chicken-sh*t to openly discuss anything, first threatening litigation, then she blocks anyone remotely disagreeing with her.
Trolling, in my personal opinion, can be considered both harmful and harmless. Harmful because it denies a common user a means of ascertaining what is really going on (as opposed to the truth), a means to share one’s opinion and possibly receive honest feedback, and last of all transforms the internet into an ideologically dangerous place instead of a utopia for the exchange of ideas, open and honest discussions of current events, and the opportunity for learning from others. In other words, trolling has become a standard tool for Russian Information Warfare.
Trolling is harmless because at no place do we sign a form stating we should have any sort of an expectation of treatment allowing free expression, nor is it covered by a universal ‘internet Bill of Rights’. Therefore I have the right to squat over your dinner plate and make your meal inedible solely with the use of typed words. Yes, that behavior is odious but it’s a tough world out there and the only thing protecting us are social norms and publicly acceptable standards. Yes, the internet sucks, there’s still no Sheriff in town, but LinkedIn believes they can still apply the rules inequitably.
As has been pointed out, we do not enjoy Freedom of Speech on LinkedIn, we have the Users Agreement which we must agree to when creating an account.
As to that, an article in the Guardian today contained a pertinent quote:
Somehow, we’ve convinced ourselves that the internet – a thing that we built, and populate with our own brains and labour – is immutable, inert and utterly beyond our influence. Fight back and we’re “feeding the trolls”. Ban harassers and we’re “afraid of debate”. Report death threats and we’re “censoring free speech”. Speak out about our experiences and we’re “professional victims”.
As for trolling, LinkedIn has a significant problem there. Russian trolls are free to use false names, false locations, and create a completely fake persona. This is acceptable and even mandated behavior for Russian trolls, according to Adrian Chen’s article “The Agency“. We in the West are held to higher standards, as is normal in influence and information conflicts on the internet. Russian Information Warfare is unethical and often illegal. Western Information Operations, Public Diplomacy, and Strategic Communication and normal Western user behavior must be open and honest and based on fair, objective, and factual reporting by professional reporters. Trolls fit perfectly into the Russian Information Warfare model, they are abhorrently unethical. Trolls on LinkedIn, especially Russian troll pigsty-pin-up queen Yana Dianova, blather out filth, impugning solely to distract, and threaten legal action, much like how Putin falls back when confronted, saying “we have nukes”. When Andrey, the Russian troll supposedly living in Texas, copies and pastes entire pages into the comment sections for months and months, despite me lodging daily complaints about his performance, I know there are no set standards on LinkedIn. When Yana threatens me with implications, yet continued unabated for years, there is a LinkedIn problem. A list compiled by a professional in Eastern Europe of Russian trolls continues for pages, but what is the use? LinkedIn does not and will not care to keep the playing field level and will never use the list to remove Russian trolls.
I have stated in professional writings that fighting trolls one-on-one is a tremendous waste of time and not worth the effort. This should be a policy issue at LinkedIn but their User Agreement falls pitifully short. BUT, and this is a big but, LinkedIn is not unbiased. More succinctly, LinkedIn is biased in the application of their terms of the Users Agreement. Microsoft, are you listening?
LinkedIn is deplorably pro-Russian. LinkedIn, I challenge you to prove otherwise.
Russia’s troll factories were, at one point, likely being paid by the Kremlin to spread pro-Trump propaganda on social media.
That is what freelance journalist Adrian Chen, now a staff writer at The New Yorker, discovered as he was researching Russia’s “army of well-paid trolls” for an explosive New York Times Magazine exposé published in June 2015.
“A very interesting thing happened,” Chen told Longform‘s Max Linsky in a podcast in December.
“I created this list of Russian trolls when I was researching. And I check on it once in a while, still. And a lot of them have turned into conservative accounts, like fake conservatives. I don’t know what’s going on, but they’re all tweeting about Donald Trump and stuff,” he said.
Linsky then asked Chen who he thought “was paying for that.”
“I don’t know,” Chen replied. “I feel like it’s some kind of really opaque strategy of electing Donald Trump to undermine the US or something. Like false-flag kind of thing. You know, that’s how I started thinking about all this stuff after being in Russia.”
In his research from St. Petersburg, Chen discovered that Russian internet trolls — paid by the Kremlin to spread false information on the internet — have been behind a number of “highly coordinated campaigns” to deceive the American public.
It’s a brand of information warfare, known as “dezinformatsiya,” that has been used by the Russians since at least the Cold War. The disinformation campaigns are only one “active measure” tool used by Russian intelligence to “sow discord among,” and within, allies perceived hostile to Russia.
“An active measure is a time-honored KGB tactic for waging informational and psychological warfare,” Michael Weiss, a senior editor at The Daily Beast and editor-in-chief of The Interpreter — an online magazine that translates and analyzes political, social, and economic events inside the Russian Federation — wrote on Tuesday.
He continued (emphasis added):
“It is designed, as retired KGB General Oleg Kalugin once defined it, ‘to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO, to sow discord among allies, to weaken the United States in the eyes of the people in Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and thus to prepare ground in case the war really occurs.’ The most common subcategory of active measures is dezinformatsiya, or disinformation: feverish, if believable lies cooked up by Moscow Centre and planted in friendly media outlets to make democratic nations look sinister.”
It is not surprising, then, that the Kremlin would pay internet trolls to pose as Trump supporters and build him up online. In fact, that would be the easy part.
From his interviews with former trolls employed by Russia, Chen gathered that the point of their jobs “was to weave propaganda seamlessly into what appeared to be the nonpolitical musings of an everyday person.”
“Russia’s information war might be thought of as the biggest trolling operation in history,” Chen wrote. “And its target is nothing less than the utility of the Internet as a democratic space.”
‘The gift that keeps on giving’
From threats about pulling out of NATO to altering the GOP’s policy on Ukraine — which has long called for arming Ukrainian soldiers against pro-Russia rebels — Trump is “the gift that keeps on giving” for Putin, Russian journalist Julia Ioffe noted in a piece for Politico.
“Life is still not great here,” Ioffe reported from the small Russian city of Nizhny Tagil in June. “But it’s a loyal place and support for Putin is high. In large part, it is because people—especially older people like [Russian citizen Felix] Kolsky—get their news from Kremlin-controlled TV. And Kremlin-controlled TV has been unequivocal about whom they want to win the U.S. presidential election: Donald Trump.”
As such, the year-long hack of the DNC — discovered in mid-June and traced back to Russian military intelligence by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike — would seem to be the archetypal “active measure” described by Weiss, adapted to modern technology to have maximum impact.
“The DNC hack and dump is what cyberwar looks like,” Dave Aitel, a cybersecurity specialist, a former NSA employee, and founder of cybersecurity firm Immunity Inc., wrote for Ars Technica last week.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
That makes sense given Russia’s partiality to weaponizing information — and the digital era’s abundance of hackers for hire.
The leak of internal DNC email correspondences revealing a bias against Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders — by WikiLeaks, an organization founded by Russia Today contributor Julian Assange — has divided the American left and made the Republican Party look unified in comparison.
Trump’s seemingly shady financial overtures to Russian oligarchs have since resurfaced, perhaps as evidence that the real-estate mogul or his top advisers may have had a hand in the hack that made his opponents look so bad.
As Ioffe noted in a later piece for Foreign Policy, however, Trump’s own influence among high-level Russian figures may be overstated given the difficulty that he has had throughout his career in securing lucrative real-estate projects there.
Sara D. Davis/Getty Images
It seems, rather, that Trump is more useful to the Russians than they have ever been to him.
Even if — and it’s becoming increasingly unlikely — Vladimir Putin and his intelligence apparatus had nothing to do with the DNC hack, that the mere suspicion has come to dominate American media is a huge propaganda boon for the former KGB operative.
“The very fact that we are discussing this and believing that Putin has the skill, inside knowledge, and wherewithal to field a candidate in an American presidential election and get him through the primaries to the nomination means we are imbuing him with the very power and importance he so craves,” Ioffe wrote.
“All he wants is for America to see him as a worthy adversary. This week, we’re giving that to him, and then some,” she wrote.
By HYUNG-JIN KIM – Associated Press – Wednesday, July 27, 2016
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) – South Korea on Wednesday accused rival North Korea of floating propaganda leaflets down a river in the first such incident.
South Korea’s military discovered dozens of plastic bags, each carrying about 20 leaflets, near the estuary of Seoul’s Han River close to the tense Korean border last Friday, according to the South’s Defense Ministry. Seoul is only an hour’s drive from the border.
The leaflets contained threats to launch missile attacks and a repeat of the North’s long-running propaganda such as that the North won the 1950-53 Korean War, a ministry official said, requesting anonymity because of department rules.
The war ended with no one’s victory. An armistice that stopped the fighting has yet to be replaced with a peace treaty, leaving the Korean Peninsula split along the world’s most heavily fortified border and at a technical state of war. Wednesday marks the 63rd anniversary of the armistice’s signing.
North Korean recently warned of unspecified “physical” measures in response to a U.S. plan to deploy an advanced missile defense system in South Korea by the end of next year. North Korea last week fired three ballistic missiles into the sea, according to Seoul defense officials.
The rival Koreas resumed old-fashioned, Cold War-era psychological warfare in the wake of North Korea’s fourth nuclear test in January.
Seoul began blasting anti-Pyongyang propaganda broadcasts and K-pop songs from border loudspeakers in retaliation for the North’s atomic detonation. Pyongyang quickly matched Seoul’s campaign with its own border broadcasts and launches of balloons carrying anti-South leaflets across the border.
The latest discovery of propaganda leaflets marks the first time for North Korea to use a river to send leaflets, according to the South Korean defense official. He said North Korea is believed to have used a river because the direction of wind isn’t favorable in the summer to fly propaganda balloons from north to south.
Many in South Korea believe their broadcasts could sting in Pyongyang because the rigidly controlled, authoritarian country worries that the broadcasts will demoralize front-line troops and residents and eventually weaken the grip of absolute leader Kim Jong Un.
Nearly 30,000 North Koreans have fled to South Korea since the end of the Korean War, mostly for political and economic reasons. South Koreans defecting to the impoverished, authoritarian North is highly unusual.
Many Islamists online made fun of the State Department’s efforts to counter online radical recruiting.
By Jacob Silverman
July 27, 2016
In a breezy speech celebrating his wife’s nomination, former President Bill Clinton touted Hillary Clinton’s success fighting extremist propaganda when she presided over the State Department. “She launched a team — this is really important today — she launched a team to fight back against terrorists online and built a new global counterterrorism effort,” Clinton said. “We’ve got to win this battle in the mind field.”
It was essentially a throwaway line about a vital topic. It was also not entirely true—or at least failed to depict the bumbling effort behind the State Department’s campaign to counter online radicalization and the sharing of extremist material. For at least five years, under a program begun during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary, the State Department has been working to disrupt extremist messaging from the Islamic State and other terrorist groups. The government has spent millions of dollars but has little to show for its efforts.
Indeed, a government report last year by a panel of tech industry and advertising figures questioned whether the U.S. government should be engaging in any kind of “overt messaging” at all against the Islamic State. Although the panel’s report wasn’t publicly released — and its members’ credentials criticized, since none of them spoke Arabic, Urdu, Somali, or the other languages in which the State Department’s Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC) publishes — that criticism seems to have accelerated a shift to outsourcing the anti-Islamic State propaganda effort away from State and to allied organizations, especially those who may be seen as having credibility in Muslim communities.
Further evidence of the Clinton program’s inadequacies came last March, when a new executive order rebooted the CSCC as the Global Engagement Center. Headed by former Navy SEAL Cmdr. Michael Lumpkin, the new GEC is armed with a $15 million budget (three times the CSCC’s original budget). Lumpkin told The Hillthat he plans to scale the GEC up to 150 people — writers, graphics designers, data analysts, programmers, diplomats, intelligence consultants, and so on. Sounding a bit like a Silicon Valley executive, Lumpkin has promised to “build an innovative, agile organization” while also making the GEC the heir to previous wartime propaganda organizations, from the WWI-era Committee on Public Information to the Cold War-driven United States Information Agency.
Established by a presidential executive order in 2011, the CSCC was supposed to be the hub of the government’s counter-Islamic State information operations. The CSCC created social media accounts in several languages on a number of popular platforms, though its most visible was an English-language Twitter account called “Think Again Turn Away.” It was through this Twitter handle that the CSCC eventually became known as much for its crude graphic design and awkward debates with jihadist sympathizers as for any successes in the realm of countering violent extremism (CVE). (I was one of a number of journalists who took a skeptical look at the State Department’s efforts.)
There were few available metrics or public data for tracking State’s CVE campaign, and the target audience — extremist sympathizers around the world — seemed unimpressed. If anything the State effort only appeared to raise the profile of the Islamists it was targeting. “One mention and you get more followers,” a Middle Eastern Twitter user who brawled with the CSCC told a journalist. “Who doesn’t like free marketing?”
When it was founded, the Islamic State — or Daesh, as State Department officials sometimes refer to it, using a derogatory Arabic acronym — wasn’t a glimmer in the CSCC’s eye. In an early speech, State’s Alberto Fernandez said that the CSCC’s plan was based on “poking holes in the daily narrative of al Qaeda and its friends and its allies.” Quoting Joan Didion, Fernandez extolled the power of stories to change how we see ourselves and the world; it was literary theory adapted to the realm of soft power.
With bipartisan support, the CSCC limped forward, growing its staff and its $5 million budget, cycling through various directors. Gradually, the organization refined its messaging, hired more contractors to publish in more languages, and developed partnerships with foreign governments and NGOs
Last summer, after Hillary Clinton had left office, the Obama administration and the United Arab Emirates also created the Sawab Center, a counter-Islamic State propaganda shop based in the UAE. The Sawab Center, in turn, is affiliated with the Global Coalition, a coterie of 67 countries “united in degrading and defeating Daesh.” The Global Coalition also lays claim to a Counter-Messaging Working Group — a joint UAE/UK/US operation — and receives help from the Coalition Communications Cell, which works out of the UK’s Foreign Office.
And what of the successor organization, the Global Engagement Center? According to Executive Order 13721, which President Obama signed on March 14, 2016, the GEC will “lead the coordination, integration, and synchronization of government-wide communications activities” against the Islamic State, meaning that the GEC’s portfolio could easily expand as it exerts its authority to manage the government’s counter-IS propaganda operations. And that’s assuming that other extremist groups don’t assume center stage as the main enemy, just as ISIS supplanted al Qaeda. The information war against the Islamic State, in other words, may end up being as long, murky, and unresolvable as the kinetic battles of the global war on terror. The appointment of Lumpkin, who previously served as assistant secretary of Defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, indicates that the GEC plans to an engage in a protracted, shadowy conflict in cyberspace.
But it’s still unclear whether all of this frenzied meme-sharing and coalition-building can make a meaningful difference in the fight against the Islamic State. One question consistently rears its head: what does victory look like? The Obama administration has recently touted a 45 percent decline in the Islamic State’s usage of Twitter, but much of that can be attributed to more determined moderation efforts by Twitter itself (albeit at the urging of the State Department and many others). While Twitter is no longer the font of gruesome jihadist videos it once was — at least 125,000 Islamic State supporters have been suspended from the service in the last year — terrorist groups still enjoy access to Telegram, Kik, WhatsApp, Vkontakte, and various other private, encrypted forums and chat apps, some of their own making.
Should the U.S. government ultimately feel entitled to declare victory in this particular low-intensity conflict, some of the credit earned may fall on the shoulders of Hillary Clinton, as her husband declared last night. But judging from recent history, that day may be many years away.
Security experts have cloned all seven TSA master keys
Key escrow — the process of keeping a set of keys for yourself “just in case” — has always been the U.S. government’s modus operandi when it comes to security. From the disastrous Clipper chip to today, the government has always wanted a back door into encryption and security. That plan backfired for the TSA.
The TSA, as you’ll remember, offers a set of screener-friendly locks. These locks use one of seven master keys that only the TSA can use — until 2014. In an article in The Washington Post, a reporter included a shot of all seven keys on a desk. It wasn’t long before nearly all the keys were made available for 3D printing and, last week, security researchers released the final key.
At last week’s HOPE Conference in New York, hackers calling themselves DarkSim905, Johnny Xmas, and Nite 0wl explained how — and why — they cracked the TSA keys.
“This was done by legally procuring actual locks, comparing the inner workings, and finding the common denominator. It’s a great metaphor for how weak encryption mechanisms are broken — gather enough data, find the pattern, then just ‘math’ out a universal key (or set of keys),” said Johnny Xmas. “What we’re doing here is literally cracking physical encryption, and I fear that metaphor isn’t going to be properly delivered to the public.”
The keys, should you be interested, are here and can be printed on a 3D printer.
The TSA, for their part, doesn’t care, telling The Intercept that “The reported ability to create keys for TSA-approved suitcase locks from a digital image does not create a threat to aviation security. These consumer products are ‘peace of mind’ devices, not part of TSA’s aviation security regime.”
In other words, you might as well not use locks at all.
Banning Russia from the 2016 Olympics makes sense.
Evidence suggests that a Russian intelligence group was the source of the most recent Wikileaks intel dump, which was aimed to influence the U.S. election.
Bloomberg News
Research Paper
I had a pleasant chat with a reporter this evening, who was trying to grasp the basic concepts of Russian Information Warfare for his readers.
Article by: Kseniya Kirillova
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LinkedIn Trolling.
By HYUNG-JIN KIM 
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