August, the month of vacations, is often referred to as the silly season in the media; but this year, something important is happening in the American media: its leading outlets are finally focusing on what most in Russia and its neighbors have long understood: Vladimir Putin has gone from strength to strength by odious means.…

via Americans finally starting to recognize how odious Putin really is, Nemets says — Euromaidan Press

Last Friday night in prime time, Moscow’s REN-TV presented what it says was a documentary about the sinking of the Titanic in 2012 that suggested that the sinking of the ship was the result of a Masonic conspiracy with, in the words of one viewer, “a clearly expressed anti-Semitic subtext.” Aleksey Zheleznev suggests that this…

via Moscow TV revives infamous anti-Semitic forgery ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ — Euromaidan Press

Tensions continue growing in Crimea. As Krym.Realii reported, the Ukrainian intelligence noted a large concentration of large groups of the Russian army in North Crimea over the latest days. In the words of Nariman Djelyal, first deputy Head of the Crimean Tatar Mejlis, Dzhankoi was fully encircled by Russian servicemen. Transport movement was partially blocked…

via Crimea drills can be the start of a real full-scale invasion of Ukraine – expert — Euromaidan Press

This is more from my noisy search for my next windmill to tilt at in what will be the great success of helping an organization become more resilient, capable, and respected for the information security posture they exhibit. I like some of the recruiters I deal with on LinkedIN. I have helped several very nice…

via You’re not in our industry WTF do you know about infosec? — Selil

Anonymous expert analysis.

Bottom line: Russia fail.

Two curveballs being thrown simultaneously. Putin shakeup. Donbass/Crimea buildup.  I don’t believe the experience is in this new batch of Putin appointees to oversee a “war”, buildup portends later attacks. Probable, possible, likely, delayed – anyone’s guess, that’s how Russia likes it.  Which contributes to Russia’s precipitous fall in reputation.

</end editorial>

The Crimea play did not sell in the West, other than with the dumbest of regurgitators in the mass media camp. Spending 2.5 years spinning unbelievable yarns and telling simple lies has produced great scepticism in the West. If Surkov et al expected otherwise, they were kidding themselves. Notable that this false flag operation is happening while Putin is quietly sacking his most loyal and oldest associates in the bureaucracy, suggesting this may be little more than a media stunt for domestic consumption. But the latter could also be a deception / distraction to cover for another offensive.

Disturbing reports of blinding injuries to Ukrainian border guards, caused by anti-personnel laser weapons.

Steinmeier may well be living in an alternate reality.

Russia vs. Ukraine: Putin’s bloodiest battlegroundOVERNIGHT in Donetsk, Ukraine, heavy artillery rains down from the sky.

Crimea tension: What is Russia’s end game? – BBC News Tensions between Russia and Ukraine are rising again over Crimea. But what is in it for Moscow?Russia May Be Preparing New Offensive in Ukraine After a summer of escalating violence, tensions in the region are now the highest they’ve been since Putin annexed Crimea in 2014.:

More Russian artillery and aviation reported near Crimean border Ukraine Today

News from Crimea: Russia is not ready for full-scale warfare in Ukraine – Ukrainian officialUkraine Today

Russian occupants use prohibited laser weapons in Donbas, – Head of State Border Guard Service Nazarenko 13.08.16 17:43 – Russian occupants use prohibited laser weapons in Donbas, – Head of State Border Guard Service Nazarenko Russian occupants used banned weapons against the Ukrainian military in the Donbas. View news.

Belarus Air and Air Defense Force enhances their combat skills | Defence blog
Parsing Russia’s Tough Talk on Ukraine | International Crisis GroupMoscow’s current outburst, a combination of verbal aggression and military caution, may indicate that it is unsure what to do. 

Vitaliy Portnikov | Why Russia will threaten Ukraine even after Putin -Euromaidan Press |Are the difficulties in Russia’s relations with Ukraine really due to the personalities of the presidents? Nadiya Savchenko, in an interview with the BBC, stated that “if Putin and Poroshenko were removed, then relations could be normalized but only under those two conditions.” It is true that she later specified that it would be better to remove Putin first, but that in any case, “the old politicians must be removed.” It is difficult to argue with the second thesis. The renewal of the political elite is necessary in Ukraine, in Russia, in all the countries of the former Soviet Union. At the same time, the renewal must be radical and can occur only with successful economic transformations and the emergence of committed owners. If we succeed, in 10-15 years we will have a new elite — not in terms of personalities and age but in terms of quality and value. And this is determined not by youth and biography but by the understanding of strategic objectives.

Document suggests “terror shootout” in Crimea internal Russian conflict -Euromaidan Press |Five people accused of a serious crime in the city of Armiansk are “dressed in camouflage uniforms bearing chevrons with the Russian Federation flag.”

A timeline of Russia’s Crimean “terror” games | Infographics -Euromaidan Press |The Russian Federation has accused Ukraine of staging “terror attacks” in occupied Crimea, is drawing military hardware to the border to mainland Ukraine, and has announced Russia is dropping out of the Minsk negotiations. Meanwhile, Ukrainian authorities accuse Russia of a staged plot. Events have been moving fast, and we have gathered the main events for your convenience in one timeline.

The Daily Vertical: Another Kremlin Tale Unravels (Transcript)The Daily Vertical is a video primer for Russia-watchers that appears Monday through Friday.

Crimea Terror Allegations: Yevhen Panov arrested by Russia’s FSB crossed into Crimea on his own &ndash; Ukrainian intelligence (video)Ukraine TodayUkraine Blames International Response to Georgia Crisis for Russian InterventionInternational community was “not tough enough” on Moscow.

News from Germany: Steinmeier urges Ukraine and Russia to refrain from escalating situation in CrimeaUkraine Today

Germany expects investigation into Crimean events – SteinmeierGerman Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has said Germany expects Russia and Ukraine to investigate the recent incident in Crimea, according to Russian news agency TASS. News 15 August from UNIAN.

Germany’s Steinmeier Says No ‘Standoff’ In Relations With RussiaGerman Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said there is no “standoff” in relations between Russia and the West, predicting improved relations between Moscow and Berlin in the coming years.“

We have proposals which can help improve the security situation in Ukraine,” – Steinmeier15.08.16 11:15 – We have proposals which can help improve the security situation in Ukraine, – Steinmeier German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier says there are new ideas as to how to improve the security situation in the Donbas. View news.

Poroshenko, Merkel, Hollande to discuss situation in Crimea and Putin’s statements, – Klympush-Tsyntsadze15.08.16 12:26 – Poroshenko, Merkel, Hollande to discuss situation in Crimea and Putin’s statements, – Klympush-Tsyntsadze Tomorrow, President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko is going to have a phone talk with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande. View news.

Publicity needed to prevent torture of Ukrainians detained in “Crimea saboteurs” case -Euromaidan Press |Kidnapping and false charges of “terrorist activities” is a basic FSB method, reminds Euromaidan SOS

In a 2012 speech, then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta warned Americans they could face a “cyber Pearl Harbor” someday at the hands of a terrorist group or enemy state. But for the most part, cyberwar hasn’t yet turned out that way—at least so far. The world has not yet seen nations use computers to launch surprise attacks on factories or refineries, set tanks on fire, bring down aircraft, or shut down an adversary’s military. Nor have we seen terrorists use computers to wreak much destruction at all.

Instead what is emerging is the sort of attack that happened at the Democratic National Committee, where embarrassing files and emails were posted on WikiLeaks at the height of the Democratic National Convention. The timing of these posts seemed motivated to disrupt the Democratic campaign and consequently the U.S. presidential electoral process. U.S. government officials have blamed hackers linked to the Russian government.

Indeed with rare exceptions like the Stuxnet virus that took out Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, what we have seen from nation-states is more the sort of behavior one would expect from spies than soldiers, establishing cyberspace as a clear realm for espionage and less so for war.

While absolute attribution is a difficult endeavor, this type of attack is a murky foray into the realm of information geopolitics that falls squarely within the established doctrine of many foreign governments, including Russia and Iran.

The November 2014 cyber attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment is another example of modern cyber conflict: more espionage and propaganda than martial metaphors. Similar to the DNC hack, cyber specialists and the U.S. government pointed to a nation-state, this time North Korea, which apparently attacked Sony in retaliation for its release of The Interview, a movie that based its plot on the fictive assassination of North Korea’s leader.

As a projection of national power goes, these attacks don’t do much to capture our collective cyberwarfare imagination. No one died or lost a power grid, but the DNC and the Sony hacks are nevertheless consequential events. If the Russian government is truly behind the DNC hack, and posted the data in an effort to influence the U.S. presidential election, this is an extraordinary use of cyberspace against the United States.

Still, these attacks do not live up to the visions of doom and mass hysteria described in many cyberwar scenarios, where a massive attack on society or the infrastructure is a strategic cyber element in a broader conflict among powers. Even the straightforward cyber attacks that accompanied real military action or pursue traditional political goals have been tactical and limited. Examples there include Russian attacks against Estonia (April 2007), Georgia (August 2008), and Ukraine (2013-2015), where Russia used cyber to achieve tactical advantage or otherwise to influence, coerce, or just intimidate the population. The December 2015 Ukraine attack, described by U.S. officials as the first confirmed cyberattack to take down a power grid and affect civilians, comes closest to the “cyberwar” scenario: It attacked six power companies and caused a blackout across 103 cities and towns, but for only a few hours.

Even terrorists have been slow to adopt cyber conflict, largely choosing truck bombs and suicide bombs over logic bombs. With a few exceptions, terrorists have largely used computers and the Internet for many of the same purposes as legitimate users: to securely communicate, move money and travel; for planning and mapping, training, and recruitment. A few recent examples do represent a true difference in terrorists’ use of cyberspace. Al Qaeda in Iraq became notorious for posting videos of beheadings. This injected terrorist propaganda and rhetoric into mainstream media in a way unseen since Palestinian terrorists first used aircraft hijackings to grab media exposure in the 1960s, giving birth to modern terrorism as a global phenomenon fed and legitimized by global media. With its combination of brutality and aiming into the heart of Western immigrant populations, the Islamic State has refined terrorist use of cyberspace. But it hasn’t derailed any trains or brought down aircraft by hacking a computer.

This seems to be the current nature of cyber conflict: countries like North Korea trying to intimidate the private sector out of political, not commercial, objectives; Russia using cyber means to accomplish an age-old objective of covert action: to influence political conditions in a foreign country while hiding their hand as a sponsor; terrorist groups like AQAP (Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) and ISIL using mass media, sophisticated production values and intensive knowledge of foreign cultures to proselytize, recruit and intimidate.

Again, however, this is more the province of covert action and espionage than war. If trends continue, Russia and other states will continue to practice espionage and covert action to pursue true strategic outcomes—political influence, social coercion, even intimidation—but not typically within an overt military campaign. These trends set by Iran and North Korea will likely grow in the near term—states attacking specific companies such as oil producers, media companies, manufacturers and banks to pursue tactical foreign policy goals for political as well as economic advantage but with zero military context.

Some of the cyber attacks have been more aggressive—verging somewhat closer to war than espionage. In March of this year, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted seven hackers associated with the Iranian government for so-called distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks on Wall Street banks, as well as breaking into a computer system at a small dam in Rye, New York, in an apparent attempt to disrupt its operation. It’s reasonable to assume that other states have plans in place, in case there’s ever a shooting war—in that situation, cyber will be one of many domains of conflict, in addition to sea, air, land and maybe space.

This is the reason the U.S. established the U.S. Cyber Command. Such a conflict in cyberspace won’t happen in isolation—a scenario like this will undoubtedly take place in a broader, very obvious strategic context. But infrastructure weaponized against us might bring an otherwise overseas conflict into the homes of the United States—something that terrorist attacks have done in the U.S., and are doing in Europe right now. After all, the very nature of a connected and largely civilian critical infrastructure lends itself easily to the ancient Chinese stratagem to “Kill with a Borrowed Sword.”

In his 2012 speech, Secretary Panetta referenced the DDOS attacks against Wall Street banks’ customer websites, as well as the release of the Shamoon virus against Saudi Aramco and Qatari RasGas, both in late 2012. The technology used in the DDOS was quite sophisticated, and had it been used against global banking infrastructure as opposed to online retail banking, the effects could have been quite severe. Instead, it simply inconvenienced some customers, and temporarily at that. Secretary Panetta noted that the Shamoon virus rendered 30,000 Aramco computers useless, all of which had to be replaced; he called this attack “probably the most destructive attack that the private sector has seen to date.” But Aramco oil production or distribution was reportedly unaffected, and the damage was fixed within 10 days (during the last week of Ramadan, at that).

Most blamed Iran for the Wall Street and Aramco attacks; certainly the attackers’ statements were sympathetic with Iran. Iran’s motivations could have ranged from response to recent economic sanctions and oil embargoes, to retaliation for their own victimization by the Stuxnet virus, which many have blamed on the U.S. and Israel, and of course seems to be another example of modern cyber conflict. Stuxnet was a worm that disabled centrifuges in Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities thought to be part of a nuclear weapons program.

But both Shamoon and Stuxnet also belong in the world of spies, not soldiers.

***

So did Panetta get the future mostly wrong when he likened “cyberwar” to Pearl Harbor? Panetta was hardly the first to issue such a warning; in 1991, cyber expert Winn Schwartau coined the term “Electronic Pearl Harbor” in testimony before Congress. And in 1996, with our colleague Brian Houghton, we wrote an article titled “Information Terrorism: Can You Trust Your Toaster?” in which we posed a scenario in which terrorists used Internet-connected air traffic control systems to crash aircraft, to illustrate vulnerabilities inherent in the “Internet of Things” (before it was called that). Such scenarios might not be wrong—just early. The potential weapons are here, the bad guys are here, and the vulnerabilities are certainly here.

Furthermore, the weapons of war might change. This happens fairly regularly. New tools and concepts are invented and then come online, from gunpowder and cavalry to blitzkrieg, aircraft carriers and drones. As George Orwell noted, “the history of civilization is largely the history of weapons.” Cyber may follow the path of so many other weapons platforms, such as the scout, the airplane and the drone—what started out as a reconnaissance platform eventually was weaponized. The question is, when and why will cyber truly be weaponized?

The combatants would certainly do that. This might be no more complicated than flipping a switch, or toggling a function between “monitor” and “destroy.” In his speech, Panetta said “we know that foreign cyber actors are probing America’s critical infrastructure networks. They are targeting the computer control systems that operate chemical, electricity and water plants and those that guide transportation throughout this country. … We also know that they are seeking to create advanced tools to attack these systems and cause panic and destruction and even the loss of life.”

Yet even now, we’re prone to hyperbole—every ATM hack is cyberterrorism, if you believe some media outlets and politicians. The infrastructure is rife with technical vulnerabilities—headlines remind us of this daily. But perhaps the greatest vulnerability we face, in preventing dark futures of cyberwars, is the fragility and scarcity of precious resources. Wars often originate from avarice over something precious—land, mineral resources, beliefs in God, Helen of Troy, etc.

But another resource precious to cyberspace, and one that could launch a conflict, is trust—a resource that underpins democratic societies, critical infrastructure and peace among nations every bit as much as mineral resources or land.

In June, The Economist pointed out the role of trust and its vulnerability to cyber attacks on the infrastructure, sketching a fairly dire but realistic scenario of hackers bringing down the financial market infrastructure. The scenario didn’t have them attacking banks to steal money, but attacking payment systems and clearinghouses and corrupting or destroying their data and systems. As the magazine noted, the global financial system’s primary resource for functioning is trust; if the “set of promises between people and institutions” is “no longer believed, the whole house of cards will collapse and people will take their money and run.” In this scenario, banks would no longer trust the numbers of their balance sheets, the payment systems would become unreliable, shops and businesses would not be able to operate normally, supply chains and trades would be disrupted, there would be massive runs on banks, and things begin to look like recent episodes of “Mr. Robot.”

Right now, nations would have little interest in attacking the very infrastructure that helps keep them solvent, at least for as long as they trust those infrastructures. Terrorists and hacktivists might have more interest, though. Either way, scenarios like this, which are technologically possible today, would be a strategic failure that would jeopardize the political and economic integrity of the countries under attack.

Attacking banks, not power grids, may become the bridge between what we see today, and the “electronic Pearl Harbor” scenarios we’ve been hearing.

Source: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/is-cyberwar-turning-out-to-be-very-different-from-what-we-thought-214136

It is good to read a real hands-on report of how the bandits and the Russian soldiers fight against the Ukraine army. It’s also good to read more of the truth of Ukraine’s lack of equipment, SOPs and experience.

I would love to talk with the author. It seems he has experience at and below the platoon level.  If he served at least one tour in his own Army, he should have been at least a Sergeant. What surprised me, however, is that he was performing at the squad level.  He showed observational capabilities by observing Russian and bandit tactics, equipment, and procedures.

It’s a shame, however, he cannot be subjected to a real AAR by real soldiers, in order to clarify all my questions.  After 2 1/2 years of watching this conflict, I am convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the volunteers, called bandits here, were an absolute joke.  I am also convinced the common Russian soldiers are only a shade better.

</end editorial>

Watch the video.

</end editorial>

During the 25 th anniversary of Independence of Ukraine appeared this video, which shows the history of Ukraine since ancient times. The video is produced by the Ukrainian Crisis Media Center together with the Institute of National Remembrance in the framework of the project “Ukraine. Gіdnostі Way. ”

The authors of the video show in vivid that Ukrainians in all ages differed sincere desire for freedom.

“Starting from Kievan Rus through the Cossacks, the UPR, Independence Ukrainians have always been at the forefront of the struggle for freedom and the will, and now protect the values of the free world at the forefront”, – stated in the description of the project site.

Source: https://inforesist.org/ukrayina-narodzheni-vilnimi-effektnyiy-videorolik-ko-dnyu-nezavisimosti/

Very illustrative article.  The demographics of each individual news source is also eye-opening.  These facts are mostly commonly known but it is useful for this to be documented.

This clearly shows a clearly liberal bias for the vast majority of news sources in the US.

I wonder if this can be done for global news sources?  Social media?

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/what-your-preferred-news-outlet-says-about-your-political-ideology-2014-10

</end editorial>

America’s partisan divide is well-illustrated by which news outlets people stick to.

Some news outlets have a fairly even distribution of viewers, while others (some of which are the most popular in the country) skew strongly to the right or left.

A new report from the Pew Research Center breaks down the news consumption habits of Americans. Most say they get their news from local TV and Facebook, but Americans still rely heavily on network and cable news shows as well as newspapers and digital outlets.

A whopping 44% of those who responded to Pew’s survey said they got news from CNN in the past week. Other network and cable news outlets — Fox, ABC, NBC, CBS, and MSNBC — took the remaining top five spots.

Fox’s audience leans conservative, while CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC have audiences that lean left.

Among newspapers, The New York Times and USA Today ranked highest, but their numbers still didn’t compare to those of the TV networks. Only 13% of respondents reported getting news from the Times in the past week, while 12% said they got news from USA Today.

The average Times reader identifies as mostly liberal, while USA Today is more mixed but still leaning left.

Find your preferred news outlets below and see what they say about your political ideology:

Pew Research Center

Pew Research Center

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Pew Research Center

Pew Research Center

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/what-your-preferred-news-outlet-says-about-your-political-ideology-2014-10

A story in today’s Politico got me to thinking about US politics, the leaks of emails, fact checking, and how much we just distrust all politicians, especially the two main candidates running for President of the United States.  Nobody trusts Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, but they are the anointed candidates of the Democratic and Republican parties.  What a sad choice. What a sad state of American politics.  What a sad state of the world.

Democrats’ new warning: Leaks could include Russian lies: The move could help inoculate Hillary Clinton against an October cyber surprise.

I’m not sure I agree with the subtitle: “The move could help inoculate Hillary Clinton against an October cyber surprise.”   They have an ‘out’ with the word “could”, but I still had to contemplate what the author is asserting. I’m certain the implication is they today’s leaks (if they can certify alterations) can help disprove future leaks, but I believe it is more about believability.

Besides statements of 95% of the ‘leaked’ emails are unmodified vs. 5% are modified (meant to assert unbelievability), I haven’t seen anyone say “this” particular email has been altered, etc.  Little hand, big map sweeping dismissals may not be at all effective, especially if the officials are consistently caught lying, manipulating elections, etc. Maybe I’m not paying attention to domestic politics enough… maybe I’m paying too much attention. Am I reading into things too much?  Am I overanalyzing based on how Russia is distorting the news?  Am I comparing apples to oranges, is this a fair comparison?

Let me pose this situation: a wholly fabricated email from HRC could be leaked and who is to say it is fake except the recipient?  By October will we still have any “give a craps” left? Can we still be outraged?

There are so many spin doctors involved that soon nobody will believe anything the candidates are saying is at all true or even predicated on a kernel of truth.

Does that mean that a release of emails by Wikileaks, Guccifer 2.0, Russia, or whoever, in October 2016, will be disbelieved?  We are expecting an October surprise, and if a Russian fabrication is as bad as their other work, it will be a complete flop. But what if it’s not bad?  What if it’s real? What if it’s not faked or it can’t be disproved?  Will anybody really care, react, change their vote?

Are we that jaded?  Are we that inured?  Is that the way the politicians view us?  Is that how Russia views the US or the world?  Are we really that bad?

“The Internet is the realm of the coward. These are people who are all sound and no fury.”

These are trolls.

I’ve been engaging trolls on all the sites mentioned in this article, mostly Russian trolls. Sometimes they might be paid professional trolls, but often they are just patriotic or ultra-nationalistic trolls.

I know I am a pain in the butt to these trolls, they’ve labeled me.  One pro-Russian writer even referred to me as the “Ukraine King of Trolls”, quite incorrectly.  I and a group of friends find them, we observe, note, and then expose them with varying amounts of success. Now they have even found a way to file a suit against me in court, which I am countering with what I am calling the “nuclear option”.  I win without even trying, quite to the consternation of my attorney.

These kind of trolls, however, are simply cowards. I have my real name on my Twitter feed, my Facebook profile, on all my accounts, so I am accountable for what I do and say. Trolls bask in the anonymity of fake profiles, false names, and counterfeit accounts. Seldom do they, as a few do in this article, use an actual account.  Those that do are begging to be uncovered after they have achieved a modicum of notoriety.  Law Enforcement and Intelligence will never become involved, there is no serious meat in the game. It is up to the social media owners to police their own activities within their realm, and if and when they do, they will always be wrong, no matter what they do.

It comes down to a decision.  Does Facebook, Twitter and all the other social media giants aggressively police the trolls in their ranks or will so many people become disgusted and just leave, dooming social media?

</end editorial>

They’re turning the web into a cesspool of aggression and violence. What watching them is doing to the rest of us may be even worse

This story is not a good idea. Not for society and certainly not for me. Because what trolls feed on is attention. And this little bit–these several thousand words–is like leaving bears a pan of baklava.

It would be smarter to be cautious, because the Internet’s personality has changed. Once it was a geek with lofty ideals about the free flow of information. Now the web is a sociopath with Asperger’s. If you need help improving your upload speeds it’s eager to help with technical details, but if you tell it you’re struggling with depression it will try to goad you into killing yourself. Psychologists call this the online disinhibition effect, in which factors like anonymity, invisibility, a lack of authority and not communicating in real time strip away the mores society spent millennia building. And it’s seeping from our smartphones into every aspect of our lives.

The people who relish this online freedom are called trolls, a term that originally came from a fishing method online thieves use to find victims. It quickly morphed to refer to the monsters who hide in darkness and threaten people. Internet trolls have a manifesto of sorts, which states they are doing it for the “lulz,” or laughs. What trolls do for the lulz ranges from clever pranks to harassment to violent threats. There’s also doxxing–publishing personal data, such as Social Security numbers and bank accounts–and swatting, calling in an emergency to a victim’s house so the SWAT team busts in. When victims do not experience lulz, trolls tell them they have no sense of humor. Trolls are turning social media and comment boards into a giant locker room in a teen movie, with towel-snapping racial epithets and misogyny.

They’ve been steadily upping their game. In 2011, trolls descended on Facebook memorial pages of recently deceased users to mock their deaths. In 2012, after feminist Anita Sarkeesian started a Kickstarter campaign to fund a series of YouTube videos chronicling misogyny in video games, she received bomb threats at speaking engagements, doxxing threats, rape threats and an unwanted starring role in a video game called Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian. In June of this year, Jonathan Weisman, the deputy Washington editor of the New York Times, quit Twitter, on which he had nearly 35,000 followers, after a barrage of anti-Semitic messages. At the end of July, feminist writer Jessica Valenti said she was leaving social media after receiving a rape threat against her daughter, who is 5 years old.
A Pew Research Center survey published two years ago found that 70% of 18-to-24-year-olds who use the Internet had experienced harassment, and 26% of women that age said they’d been stalked online. This is exactly what trolls want. A 2014 study published in the psychology journal Personality and Individual Differences found that the approximately 5% of Internet users who self-identified as trolls scored extremely high in the dark tetrad of personality traits: narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism and, especially, sadism.

But maybe that’s just people who call themselves trolls. And maybe they do only a small percentage of the actual trolling. “Trolls are portrayed as aberrational and antithetical to how normal people converse with each other. And that could not be further from the truth,” says Whitney Phillips, a literature professor at Mercer University and the author of Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture. “These are mostly normal people who do things that seem fun at the time that have huge implications. You want to say this is the bad guys, but it’s a problem of us.”

A lot of people enjoy the kind of trolling that illuminates the gullibility of the powerful and their willingness to respond. One of the best is Congressman Steve Smith, a Tea Party Republican representing Georgia’s 15th District, which doesn’t exist. For nearly three years Smith has spewed over-the-top conservative blather on Twitter, luring Senator Claire McCaskill, Christiane Amanpour and Rosie O’Donnell into arguments. Surprisingly, the guy behind the GOP-mocking prank, Jeffrey Marty, isn’t a liberal but a Donald Trump supporter angry at the Republican elite, furious at Hillary Clinton and unhappy with Black Lives Matter. A 40-year-old dad and lawyer who lives outside Tampa, he says he has become addicted to the attention. “I was totally ruined when I started this. My ex-wife and I had just separated. She decided to start a new, more exciting life without me,” he says. Then his best friend, who he used to do pranks with as a kid, killed himself. Now he’s got an illness that’s keeping him home.

Marty says his trolling has been empowering. “Let’s say I wrote a letter to the New York Times saying I didn’t like your article about Trump. They throw it in the shredder. On Twitter I communicate directly with the writers. It’s a breakdown of all the institutions,” he says. “I really do think this stuff matters in the election. I have 1.5 million views of my tweets every 28 days. It’s a much bigger audience than I would have gotten if I called people up and said, ‘Did you ever consider Trump for President?’”

Trolling is, overtly, a political fight. Liberals do indeed troll–sex-advice columnist Dan Savage used his followers to make Googling former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum’s last name a blunt lesson in the hygienic challenges of anal sex; the hunter who killed Cecil the lion got it really bad.

But trolling has become the main tool of the alt-right, an Internet-grown reactionary movement that works for men’s rights and against immigration and may have used the computer from Weird Science to fabricate Donald Trump. Not only does Trump share their attitudes, but he’s got mad trolling skills: he doxxed Republican primary opponent Senator Lindsey Graham by giving out his cell-phone number on TV and indirectly got his Twitter followers to attack GOP political strategist Cheri Jacobus so severely that her lawyers sent him a cease-and-desist order.

The alt-right’s favorite insult is to call men who don’t hate feminism “cucks,” as in “cuckold.” Republicans who don’t like Trump are “cuckservatives.” Men who don’t see how feminists are secretly controlling them haven’t “taken the red pill,” a reference to the truth-revealing drug in The Matrix. They derisively call their adversaries “social-justice warriors” and believe that liberal interest groups purposely exploit their weakness to gain pity, which allows them to control the levers of power. Trolling is the alt-right’s version of political activism, and its ranks view any attempt to take it away as a denial of democracy.

In this new culture war, the battle isn’t just over homosexuality, abortion, rap lyrics, drugs or how to greet people at Christmastime. It’s expanded to anything and everything: video games, clothing ads, even remaking a mediocre comedy from the 1980s. In July, trolls who had long been furious that the 2016 reboot of Ghostbusters starred four women instead of men harassed the film’s black co-star Leslie Jones so badly on Twitter with racist and sexist threats–including a widely copied photo of her at the film’s premiere that someone splattered semen on–that she considered quitting the service. “I was in my apartment by myself, and I felt trapped,” Jones says. “When you’re reading all these gay and racial slurs, it was like, I can’t fight y’all. I didn’t know what to do. Do you call the police? Then they got my email, and they started sending me threats that they were going to cut off my head and stuff they do to ‘N words.’ It’s not done to express an opinion, it’s done to scare you.”

Because of Jones’ harassment, alt-right leader Milo Yiannopoulos was permanently banned from Twitter. (He is also an editor at Breitbart News, the conservative website whose executive chairman, Stephen Bannon, was hired Aug. 17 to run the Trump campaign.) The service said Yiannopoulos, a critic of the new Ghostbusters who called Jones a “black dude” in a tweet, marshaled many of his more than 300,000 followers to harass her. He not only denies this but says being responsible for your fans is a ridiculous standard. He also thinks Jones is faking hurt for political purposes. “She is one of the stars of a Hollywood blockbuster,” he says. “It takes a certain personality to get there. It’s a politically aware, highly intelligent star using this to get ahead. I think it’s very sad that feminism has turned very successful women into professional victims.”
A gay, 31-year-old Brit with frosted hair, Yiannopoulos has been speaking at college campuses on his Dangerous Faggot tour. He says trolling is a direct response to being told by the left what not to say and what kinds of video games not to play. “Human nature has a need for mischief. We want to thumb our nose at authority and be individuals,” he says. “Trump might not win this election. I might not turn into the media figure I want to. But the space we’re making for others to be bolder in their speech is some of the most important work being done today. The trolls are the only people telling the truth.”

The alt-right was galvanized by Gamergate, a 2014 controversy in which trolls tried to drive critics of misogyny in video games away from their virtual man cave. “In the mid-2000s, Internet culture felt very separate from pop culture,” says Katie Notopoulos, who reports on the web as an editor at BuzzFeed and co-host of the Internet Explorer podcast. “This small group of people are trying to stand their ground that the Internet is dark and scary, and they’re trying to scare people off. There’s such a culture of viciously making fun of each other on their message boards that they have this very thick skin. They’re all trained up.”

Andrew Auernheimer, who calls himself Weev online, is probably the biggest troll in history. He served just over a year in prison for identity fraud and conspiracy. When he was released in 2014, he left the U.S., mostly bouncing around Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Since then he has worked to post anti–Planned Parenthood videos and flooded thousands of university printers in America with instructions to print swastikas–a symbol tattooed on his chest. When I asked if I could fly out and interview him, he agreed, though he warned that he “might not be coming ashore for a while, but we can probably pass close enough to land to have you meet us somewhere in the Adriatic or Ionian.” His email signature: “Eternally your servant in the escalation of entropy and eschaton.”

While we planned my trip to “a pretty remote location,” he told me that he no longer does interviews for free and that his rate was two bitcoins (about $1,100) per hour. That’s when one of us started trolling the other, though I’m not sure which:

From: Joel Stein

To: Andrew Auernheimer

I totally understand your position. But TIME, and all the major media outlets, won’t pay people who we interview. There’s a bunch of reasons for that, but I’m sure you know them.

Thanks anyway,

Joel

From: Andrew Auernheimer

To: Joel Stein

I find it hilarious that after your people have stolen years of my life at gunpoint and bulldozed my home, you still expect me to work for free in your interests.

You people belong in a f-cking oven.

From: Joel Stein

To: Andrew Auernheimer

For a guy who doesn’t want to be interviewed for free, you’re giving me a lot of good quotes!

In a later blog post about our emails, Weev clarified that TIME is “trying to destroy white civilization” and that we should “open up your Jew wallets and dump out some of the f-cking geld you’ve stolen from us goys, because what other incentive could I possibly have to work with your poisonous publication?” I found it comforting that the rate for a neo-Nazi to compromise his ideology is just two bitcoins.

Expressing socially unacceptable views like Weev’s is becoming more socially acceptable. Sure, just like there are tiny, weird bookstores where you can buy neo-Nazi pamphlets, there are also tiny, weird white-supremacist sites on the web. But some of the contributors on those sites now go to places like 8chan or 4chan, which have a more diverse crowd of meme creators, gamers, anime lovers and porn enthusiasts. Once accepted there, they move on to Reddit, the ninth most visited site in the U.S., on which users can post links to online articles and comment on them anonymously. Reddit believes in unalloyed free speech; the site only eliminated the comment boards “jailbait,” “creepshots” and “beatingwomen” for legal reasons.

But last summer, Reddit banned five more discussion groups for being distasteful. The one with the largest user base, more than 150,000 subscribers, was “fatpeoplehate.” It was a particularly active community that reveled in finding photos of overweight people looking happy, almost all women, and adding mean captions. Reddit users would then post these images all over the targets’ Facebook pages along with anywhere else on the Internet they could. “What you see on Reddit that is visible is at least 10 times worse behind the scenes,” says Dan McComas, a former Reddit employee. “Imagine two users posting about incest and taking that conversation to their private messages, and that’s where the really terrible things happen. That’s where we saw child porn and abuse and had to do all of our work with law enforcement.”

Jessica Moreno, McComas’ wife, pushed for getting rid of “fatpeoplehate” when she was the company’s head of community. This was not a popular decision with users who really dislike people with a high body mass index. She and her husband had their home address posted online along with suggestions on how to attack them. Eventually they had a police watch on their house. They’ve since moved. Moreno has blurred their house on Google maps and expunged nearly all photos of herself online.

During her time at Reddit, some users who were part of a group that mails secret Santa gifts to one another complained to Moreno that they didn’t want to participate because the person assigned to them made racist or sexist comments on the site. Since these people posted their real names, addresses, ages, jobs and other details for the gifting program, Moreno learned a good deal about them. “The idea of the basement dweller drinking Mountain Dew and eating Doritos isn’t accurate,” she says. “They would be a doctor, a lawyer, an inspirational speaker, a kindergarten teacher. They’d send lovely gifts and be a normal person.” These are real people you might know, Moreno says. There’s no real-life indicator. “It’s more complex than just being good or bad. It’s not all men either; women do take part in it.” The couple quit their jobs and started Imzy, a cruelty-free Reddit. They believe that saving a community is nearly impossible once mores have been established, and that sites like Reddit are permanently lost to the trolls.

When sites are overrun by trolls, they drown out the voices of women, ethnic and religious minorities, gays–anyone who might feel vulnerable. Young people in these groups assume trolling is a normal part of life online and therefore self-censor. An anonymous poll of the writers at TIME found that 80% had avoided discussing a particular topic because they feared the online response. The same percentage consider online harassment a regular part of their jobs. Nearly half the women on staff have considered quitting journalism because of hatred they’ve faced online, although none of the men had. Their comments included “I’ve been raged at with religious slurs, had people track down my parents and call them at home, had my body parts inquired about.” Another wrote, “I’ve had the usual online trolls call me horrible names and say I am biased and stupid and deserve to be raped. I don’t think men realize how normal that is for women on the Internet.”

The alt-right argues that if you can’t handle opprobrium, you should just turn off your computer. But that’s arguing against self-expression, something antithetical to the original values of the Internet. “The question is: How do you stop people from being a–holes not to their face?” says Sam Altman, a venture capitalist who invested early in Reddit and ran the company for eight days in 2014 after one of its many PR crises. “This is exactly what happened when people talked badly about public figures. Now everyone on the Internet is a public figure. The problem is that not everyone can deal with that.” Altman declared on June 15 that he would quit Twitter and his 171,000 followers, saying, “I feel worse after using Twitter … my brain gets polluted here.”

Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Del Harvey, struggles with how to allow criticism but curb abuse. “Categorically to say that all content you don’t like receiving is harassment would be such a broad brush it wouldn’t leave us much content,” she says. Harvey is not her real name, which she gave up long ago when she became a professional troll, posing as underage girls (and occasionally boys) to entrap pedophiles as an administrator for the website Perverted-Justice and later for NBC’s To Catch a Predator. Citing the role of Twitter during the Arab Spring, she says that anonymity has given voice to the oppressed, but that women and minorities are more vulnerable to attacks by the anonymous.

But even those in the alt-right who claim they are “unf-ckwithable” aren’t really. At some point, everyone, no matter how desensitized by their online experience, is liable to get freaked out by a big enough or cruel enough threat. Still, people have vastly different levels of sensitivity. A white male journalist who covers the Middle East might blow off death threats, but a teenage blogger might not be prepared to be told to kill herself because of her “disgusting acne.”

Which are exactly the kinds of messages Em Ford, 27, was receiving en masse last year on her YouTube tutorials on how to cover pimples with makeup. Men claimed to be furious about her physical “trickery,” forcing her to block hundreds of users each week. This year, Ford made a documentary for the BBC called Troll Hunters in which she interviewed online abusers and victims, including a soccer referee who had rape threats posted next to photos of his young daughter on her way home from school. What Ford learned was that the trolls didn’t really hate their victims. “It’s not about the target. If they get blocked, they say, ‘That’s cool,’ and move on to the next person,” she says. Trolls don’t hate people as much as they love the game of hating people.

Troll culture might be affecting the way nontrolls treat one another. A yet-to-be-published study by University of California, Irvine, professor Zeev Kain showed that when people were exposed to reports of good deeds on Facebook, they were 10% more likely to report doing good deeds that day. But the opposite is likely occurring as well. “One can see discourse norms shifting online, and they’re probably linked to behavior norms,” says Susan Benesch, founder of the Dangerous Speech Project and faculty associate at Harvard’s Internet and Society center. “When people think it’s increasingly O.K. to describe a group of people as subhuman or vermin, those same people are likely to think that it’s O.K. to hurt those people.”

As more trolling occurs, many victims are finding laws insufficient and local police untrained. “Where we run into the problem is the social-media platforms are very hesitant to step on someone’s First Amendment rights,” says Mike Bires, a senior police officer in Southern California who co-founded LawEnforcement.social, a tool for cops to fight on-line crime and use social media to work with their communities. “If they feel like someone’s life is in danger, Twitter and Snapchat are very receptive. But when it comes to someone harassing you online, getting the social-media companies to act can be very frustrating.” Until police are fully caught up, he recommends that victims go to the officer who runs the force’s social-media department.

One counter-trolling strategy now being employed on social media is to flood the victims of abuse with kindness. That’s how many Twitter users have tried to blunt racist and body-shaming attacks on U.S. women’s gymnastics star Gabby Douglas and Mexican gymnast Alexa Moreno during the Summer Olympics in Rio. In 2005, after Emily May co-founded Hollaback!, which posts photos of men who harass women on the street in order to shame them (some might call this trolling), she got a torrent of misogynistic messages. “At first, I thought it was funny. We were making enough impact that these losers were spending their time calling us ‘cunts’ and ‘whores’ and ‘carpet munchers,’” she says. “Long-term exposure to it, though, I found myself not being so active on Twitter and being cautious about what I was saying online. It’s still harassment in public space. It’s just the Internet instead of the street.” This summer May created Heartmob, an app to let people report trolling and receive messages of support from others.

Though everyone knows not to feed the trolls, that can be challenging to the type of people used to expressing their opinions. Writer Lindy West has written about her abortion, hatred of rape jokes and her body image–all of which generated a flood of angry messages. When her father Paul died, a troll quickly started a fake Twitter account called PawWestDonezo, (“donezo” is slang for “done”) with a photo of her dad and the bio “embarrassed father of an idiot.” West reacted by writing about it. Then she heard from her troll, who apologized, explaining that he wasn’t happy with his life and was angry at her for being so pleased with hers.

West says that even though she’s been toughened by all the abuse, she is thinking of writing for TV, where she’s more insulated from online feedback. “I feel genuine fear a lot. Someone threw a rock through my car window the other day, and my immediate thought was it’s someone from the Internet,” she says. “Finally we have a platform that’s democratizing and we can make ourselves heard, and then you’re harassed for advocating for yourself, and that shuts you down again.”

I’ve been a columnist long enough that I got calloused to abuse via threats sent over the U.S. mail. I’m a straight white male, so the trolling is pretty tame, my vulnerabilities less obvious. My only repeat troll is Megan Koester, who has been attacking me on Twitter for a little over two years. Mostly, she just tells me how bad my writing is, always calling me “disgraced former journalist Joel Stein.” Last year, while I was at a restaurant opening, she tweeted that she was there too and that she wanted to take “my one-sided feud with him to the next level.” She followed this immediately with a tweet that said, “Meet me outside Clifton’s in 15 minutes. I wanna kick your ass.” Which shook me a tiny bit. A month later, she tweeted that I should meet her outside a supermarket I often go to: “I’m gonna buy some Ahi poke with EBT and then kick your ass.”

I sent a tweet to Koester asking if I could buy her lunch, figuring she’d say no or, far worse, say yes and bring a switchblade or brass knuckles, since I have no knowledge of feuding outside of West Side Story. Her email back agreeing to meet me was warm and funny. Though she also sent me the script of a short movie she had written (see excerpt, left).

I saw Koester standing outside the restaurant. She was tiny–5 ft. 2 in., with dark hair, wearing black jeans and a Spy magazine T-shirt. She ordered a seitan sandwich, and after I asked the waiter about his life, she looked at me in horror. “Are you a people person?” she asked. As a 32-year-old freelance writer for Vice.com who has never had a full-time job, she lives on a combination of sporadic paychecks and food stamps. My career success seemed, quite correctly, unjust. And I was constantly bragging about it in my column and on Twitter. “You just extruded smarminess that I found off-putting. It’s clear I’m just projecting. The things I hate about you are the things I hate about myself,” she said.

As a lesbian feminist stand-up comic with more than 26,000 Twitter followers, Koester has been trolled more than I have. One guy was so furious that she made fun of a 1970s celebrity at an autograph session that he tweeted he was going to rape her and wanted her to die afterward. “So you’d think I’d have some sympathy,” she said about trolling me. “But I never felt bad. I found that column so vile that I thought you didn’t deserve sympathy.”

When I suggested we order wine, she told me she’s a recently recovered alcoholic who was drunk at the restaurant opening when she threatened to beat me up. I asked why she didn’t actually walk up to me that afternoon and, even if she didn’t punch me, at least tell me off. She looked at me like I was an idiot. “Why would I do that?” she said. “The Internet is the realm of the coward. These are people who are all sound and no fury.”

Maybe. But maybe, in the information age, sound is as destructive as fury.
This appears in the August 29, 2016 issue of TIME.

Source: http://time.com/4457110/internet-trolls/

For 20 years Anjem Choudary stood on street corners, in shopping precincts, outside mosques, embassies and police stations and used his megaphone to drive a wedge between Muslims and the rest of Britain. Now he has been convicted of inviting others to support the Islamic State militant group.

The scenes would change – but not the words.

The flag of Islam will fly over Downing Street, was his favourite prediction, followed by some kind of rhetorical flourish. “The Muslims are rising to establish the Sharia… Pakistan, Afghanistan and perhaps, my dear Muslims, Londonistan.”

He would greet the journalists with a smile, and some guile, dressed up as charm.

One day outside Regent’s Park Mosque (he was banned from ranting inside its premises) he told the crowd he was honoured that I had turned up to hear him speak. He liked playing games. It gave him a sense that he was winning.

Except it wasn’t a game. The evidence now shows that Anjem Choudary is one of the most dangerous men in Britain. Not a bomb-maker. Not a facilitator. But an ideologue, a thinker, who encouraged others not to stop and think for themselves before they turned to violence to implement their shared worldview.

Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES

Choudary’s mindset is really simple. There are two worlds – the world of belief, meaning Muslims, and the world of disbelief, everyone else. Assuming for a moment that the world neatly divides into such camps, these worlds are incompatible because the way of life of one threatens the existence of the other.

In his head there can be no compromise, no meeting of minds. Liberal democracy, personal freedom, the rule of law mandated by the people is all an affront to the will of Allah.

And the solution to all of this? A single Islamic state, under Sharia, for the whole world, for all areas of life.

What if you disagree? Well then you are not with him. You are against him – you’re a hostile.

Adam Deen was one of the early recruits to the network that Choudary helped forge.

“What attracted me was the simplicity, that I was a Muslim, that I should represent these ideas and I belonged inside an Islamic state and everything else was wrong and evil,” he said.

“This was extremely comforting as a young man immersed in a world where I was seeing complexity and not knowing who was right and wrong.

“It’s a type of outlook that is completely splitting the world in a cosmic battle of good and evil. And on the side of good is everyone who agrees with what he says.

“That polarisation creates a type of mindset towards non-Muslims – and then you can start rationalising acts of violence.”

But Choudary would never have been charged or convicted of a violent plot – if he saw a bomb recipe he wouldn’t have known where to start.

Instead, he and his network took the ideological ingredients of hate and division and poured them into the minds of a band of brothers who hung on his every word.

And then he left it to them to make the final decision. Men like Omar Sharif, a British suicide bomber who attacked Tel Aviv in 2003, and Brusthom Ziamani, jailed 12 years later for planning to kill in the streets of London.

Image copyrightAP

Image copyrightDEMMOTIC

“I never heard Anjem overtly condoning acts of violence and terrorism,” says Adam Deen, who now works in counter-extremism for the Quilliam Foundation think tank.

“But there was an attitude and atmosphere that would tacitly approve it and at one point it became policy not to condemn acts like 9/11 because it would be seen as supporting the kuffar [disbelievers] and the infidels. So there was a tacit approval behind closed doors.”

And that’s why the charge that led to Choudary’s conviction was perhaps the only one he would ever face – inviting others to support Islamic State, a banned organisation bent on doing what he would never actually do himself. But it would take years, and the freak circumstances of the war in Syria, to lead to the evidence.

Anjem Choudary could probably have been anything he wanted to be.

Now 49 and a father of five, he went to university to study medicine. Then he did that rare thing and jumped to law instead, qualifying as a solicitor, and ending up working on civil and human rights issues, such as race discrimination.

Image copyrightSOLENT NEWS AND PHOTO AGENCY

He drank and partied his way through part of his student days but then found God – and more specifically – Omar Bakri Mohammed. The Syrian-born cleric founded one strand of the complex world of Islamist-jihadist politics that developed in the UK during the early 1990s.

Bakri is now in prison in Lebanon – but 20 years ago he split from the influential international Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir to form the British group al-Muhajiroun.

He believed the whole world should fall under Sharia law – not just the historic lands of Islam – and Choudary became his right-hand man.

Bakri fled the UK after the 7/7 bombings – although he was not directly involved – and the student became the master. Choudary loved the limelight and revelled in media attention.

In one talk about the welfare state – from which he benefited greatly – Choudary quipped: “Not that I am not on jobseeker’s allowance. I’m on jihad seeker’s allowance.”

One man who took Choudary very seriously was Michael Adebolajo. Alongside Michael Adebowale, he murdered Fusilier Lee Rigby outside Woolwich barracks in south-east London in May 2013. Adebolajo once stood alongside Choudary at demonstrations.

When this self-proclaimed “holy warrior” recorded his murder scene video, the rhetoric was straight out of the Choudary network’s book of soundbites.

Choudary said he didn’t “agree” with the killing. But he didn’t condemn it. And he didn’t condemn the 7/7 bombers either.

Richard Dart, a young man seeking answers to life, was converted by Choudary himself. He’s now in jail for trying to train in bomb-making in Pakistan. He had also talked about targeting the Wiltshire town of Royal Wootton Bassett, a focal point for the repatriation of soldiers killed in Afghanistan.

Dart’s step-brother Rob Leech, a film-maker, has spent years trying to get inside Anjem Choudary’s head.

“The reason why he is so influential is because of his charisma,” he said. “He is incredibly charming and he is clever and he knows how to manipulate people. If you are a young guy who meets him for the first time quite often you’re overawed by him.

“He knows exactly what you want and what your needs are – a lot of these guys have things missing from their lives and he provides them.”

Ideologues and the authorities

Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES

Abu Hamza al-Masri: Found guilty of supporting terrorism by a court in New York and sentenced to life in prison in 2014. He was extradited from the UK where he had already been jailed for inciting murder and racial hatred. Born in Egypt, he moved to the UK in 1979. (Pictured above.)

Omar Bakri Mohammed: Banned from the UK in 2005, where he had lived for nearly 20 years, because his presence was considered “not conducive to the public good”. He is now serving a life sentence in Lebanon for forming a militant group with the purpose of weakening the government in Beirut. He was born in Syria.

Anwar al-Awlaki: Radical American Muslim cleric killed in a US drone strike in Yemen in 2011. He was linked to a series of attacks and plots across the world – from 11 September 2001 to the shootings at Fort Hood in November 2009.

But other than a minor conviction for failing to notify police of a demonstration – Choudary stayed the right side of the law – until June 2014 rocked his world.

Militants smashed through the border between Syria and Iraq and declared they were now “The Islamic State”. A state supposedly ruled by Sharia law, under a supposed leader, or caliph. The group said that it had fulfilled the ancient criteria to claim the title.

The West didn’t know how to respond – and neither did Anjem Choudary.

This was his moment of truth. Whatever he had failed to say in the past, he now had to make a call.

For three days he came under intense sustained pressure from his acolytes to put his money where his mouth had always been.

Was this the Islamic State he had always called for in his long, long lectures?

One of his closest confidants, Siddartha Dhar, demanded action. “We have to declare our position – enough stalling!” he said in a private social media message.

Choudary and his lieutenants met and ate in one of their favourite Indian restaurants on the Mile End Road in London’s East End.

Two hours later he sent a single word message to his wife, Rubana. “Done,” he wrote.

“Allahu Akbar,” she replied. “I’m so happy.”

And later that night he sent a simple tweet. “May Allah grant success to the Caliph.”

He had backed the Islamic State – and went about telling others in more long lectures about how it met the historic and long-hoped for criteria that he was in a learned position to judge.

He thought he had avoided breaking the law because he was supporting a political concept – not the proscribed terrorist group behind it.

The distinction was lost on supporters who were packing their bags. Siddhartha Dhar – one of those who had lobbied hardest – skipped police bail while under investigation. He reappeared in the war zone with his child in one arm and a rifle in the other. He’s believed to be the latest Briton to appear in a black mask in an IS execution video.

Choudary claimed he would go to sample the simple Sharia life if only the home secretary would return his passport. He later told his trial that he wouldn’t go because he had work to do in London, spreading the good word of Islam.

Image copyrightDEMOTIX

Was there now an opportunity to charge him? Scotland Yard reviewed 20 years of intelligence. The Crown Prosecution Service found the key in Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000. Anjem Choudary was charged not because of his beliefs in “an” Islamic state – but because he had invited others to support “the” Islamic State group.

Police arrested and later bailed him as they began months of trawling social media for precise evidence that could meet the prosecution test.

When I spoke to Choudary last year, he thought he’d beaten the rap and was absolutely fired up by what was coming over the horizon in Syria and Iraq.

He wasn’t the least bit concerned about the beheading of hostages, the taking of slaves and rape of women and girls by IS fighters. In fact, he offered me a box of sweets to celebrate the momentous unfolding events.

But he was wrong. Detectives found the evidence – including a crucial IS oath of allegiance published by one of his Indonesian supporters that could be traced back to private social media conversations.

And so as his trial approached, he began to look nervous. Not quite broken – but not the Anjem we knew.

He tried in vain to get the Supreme Court to stop the prosecution. He asked some journalists if they would act as character witnesses (I wasn’t one of them).

He didn’t rant in the witness box – he kept his cool – and there were flashes of the old Anjem. Confident, witty and, in his head, winning.

We debated how he would react as the great victim, were he to walk free from court.

Instead, when the guilty verdict came, he said nothing.

Anjem Choudary’s mouth had finally shut.

Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36979892

Patrick Howell O’Neill —

Aug 11 at 12:08PM | Last updated Aug 11 at 2:49PM

Russia’s long war in Ukraine has been relatively quiet of late, but a newly unveiled British Army report has pointed spotlights on the conflict once again to reveal a sophisticated battle.

The document pinpoints how Moscow’s military allegedly used a mix of high technology and striking creativity to wage war in Ukraine, rehearse for fighting with the West, and even surpass British troops in the battlefield.

“In the unlikely event of a direct confrontation between NATO and RUS [Russia], we must acknowledge that RUS currently has a significant capability edge over U.K. force elements,” the paper read, according to the Times of London.

After a dramatic decline following the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has spent the last decade rapidly growing their fighting power by mixing old-fashioned conventional weapons with some of the 21st century’s most devastating and innovative battlefield ideas: cyberwar, propaganda, psychological war, and more. The approach is commonly called “hybrid warfare.”

In Ukraine, the British report alleges that Russians used mass text messaging to sow chaos in communities where fighting was about to break out. They reportedly used acoustic locators to find hiding snipers; hacked the GPS of enemy troops, getting them lost on the way to the fight; and used civilians in efforts to intercept enemy communications.

By the middle of the last decade, the U.S. waged cyberwar against Iraqi and Afghani insurgents. Israel was accused of the same in a conflict with Syria. They also hacked Hezbollah television during war in Lebanon.

The 2008 conflict between Russia and Georgia was unprecedented in the scale of cyberwar. Attacks on dozens of websites owned by Georgian government, finance, and communications institutions began before the fighting and led to chaos and confusion once the ground war truly broke out. Hackers accessed and stole military and political intelligence from Georgian networks, while Georgia’s own hackers were hamstrung by denial-of-service attacks against their community websites to prevent counter-attacks.

These tactics are increasingly common around the world and, as cyberwar rapidly evolves, hackers become more potent. But Russia is one of the most effective and innovative forces in cyberspace—U.S. authorities claim the Kremlin was behind the recent hack of the Democratic National Committee, for example—occupying a tier of power and action not too far from the United States, another cyber superpower that can throw its weight around the world through the internet.

Update 1:50pm CT, Aug. 11: Added additional context regarding U.S.-waged cyberattacks and Russian conflicts.

Source: http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/russia-uk-hybrid-war-leak/

By Olena Makarenko

An email dump of a “DNR Ministry of information” employee, Tatyana Egorova, reveals that Ukrainian leading TV channels collaborated with the so-called “Donetsk People’s Republic” (“DNR”), one of the two Russian-backed unrecognized statelets waging war against Ukraine since 2014.

According to the letters, TV channels Inter and TRK Ukrayina coordinated their materials about the occupied territories with the representatives of the “DNR Ministry of information.”

This isn’t the first such leak. Recently this year, the site Myrotvorets revealed a list of Ukrainian media outlets which were accredited in the republics considered terrorist organizations in Ukraine, labeling them “collaborators with terrorists.” The case raised a scandal related to ethical aspects of revealing journalists’ personal data and whether a journalist can be called a “terrorist collaborator” (which led to labeling of the journalists as “betrayers”) for receiving accreditation from a terrorist organization.

However, the new leak with the e-mails of Egorova is not about betrayal but about the danger to Ukraine’s national security.

Inter and TRK Ukrayina – Ukraine’s largest TV channels

Why is this important? Inter and TRK Ukrayina are two of the largest Ukrainian national channels. A recent TV rating measures TRK Ukrayina as having the largest audience. Inter is third. They are most popular in the East, places where the Russian language prevails and which Russian President Vladimir Putin attempted to chip away from Ukraine as a so-called “Novorossiya” (New Russia) – unsuccessfully.

As a result of Ukraine’s media reform efforts, all TV and radio companies were obligated to make public their ownership structure. Until recently, Dmytro Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch, and Serhiy Lyovochkin, an MP and ex-head of the administration of the disgraced president Viktor Yanukovych, were believed to be the owners of Inter. However, now it was also revealed that Valeriy Horoshkovskyi, an oligarch who now lives in London, formerly the head of Ukraine’s Security Service and the Customs Service, is another owner. Their ownership was traced through multiple offshore companies located in the tax heavens of Cyprus, Belize and the Virgin Islands.

The structure of TRK Ukrayina is simpler. There is only one ultimate beneficiary – the oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, which was already no secret. Akhmetov is #1 on the list of the richest Ukrainians, he used to be the most influential figure in Donetsk Oblast, nearly half of which is now occupied by the “DNR,” a Moscow puppet regime. Nevertheless, Akhmetov continues to be influential there, as his enterprises continue working in these areas not controlled by the Ukrainian government.

Before the Euromaidan revolution of 2013-2014, Inter and TRK Ukrayina were considered to be the main podiums for the ousted President Yanukovych and his Party of Regions [Note: Paul Manafort, the head of Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign, was the top political and US public relations consultant to all three entities – the richest Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, the escaped former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych and the pro-Moscow Party of the Regions — Ed.]. During the Euromaidan revolution, these channels either deliberately ignored the mass protests in Kyiv’s main square or presented them in a negative light. After the revolution won and Yanukovych fled the country, these channels’ coverage policies appeared to become less biased (e.g. Euromaidan was recognized). The channels attempted to present themselves as neutral outlets, which covered the situation from both sides. However, this “neutrality” often takes the side of a stiff opposition to the current government, featuring it as “the main enemy” of the Ukrainian populace. Starting from the Presidential election in 2014, when President Poroshenko was overwhelmingly elected by Ukrainians of all regions and until now, the two channels have been the main media platforms for the Opposition Bloc party, the successor to Yanukovych’s Party of Regions.

The latest scandal over the channels’ links to the Russian occupation administration in the Donbas is not the first one. For example, in the spring of 2016, TRK Ukrayina was broadcasting the TV series called Do Not Promise. It presented the pro-Russian militants of the so-called “republics” in a positive light. In one episode, an anti-Ukrainian militant took a soldier of the “Kyiv junta” captive (“junta” being a term out of the Kremlin’s propaganda playbook, which insists that the ousting of a pro-Russian dictator Yanukovych in the Euromaidan protests could not possibly be the result of a popular uprising). Later, the National TV and Radio Broadcasting Council issued a warning to the channel based on an unscheduled inspection.

In winter of 2015, the Council issued a warning to Inter because of the dubious New Year’s program. Deputy of the Russian Parliament from the ruling United Russia party and singer Iosif Kobzon, who is a persona non grata in Ukraine due to his support for Vladimir Putin’s anti-Ukrainian policies, performed in Inter‘s program among other singers known for their support of Russia’s intentions for dismembering Ukraine.

These incidents show that a channel does not have to broadcast direct lies or fakes to promote the ideology of a foreign power. It just needs to adopt a so-called “neutral position” while saying “we are just standing for peace” and then to spin outrageous information as just being “ordinary.”

These two channels were the ones who concealed the fact of the birth of civil society in Kyiv during Euromaidan from Ukrainian viewers in the East, and who presented Russia as an “older brother” whom Ukraine should obey.

Even though now they do not express their pro-Russian position directly, it can still be read between the lines.

Ukrainian TV materials OK’d by the “DNR Ministry of Information”

Inter. The dump of Egorova’s e-mails contains letters which show the collaboration of a Russian propagandist Leonid Muravyov and one of Inter’s editors Mariya Stoliarova. According to it, Muravyov sent the materials he filmed in the “DNR” for approval by the “Ministry of Information” of the Russian puppet “republic.” According to Ukrainian journalist Dmytro Zolotukhin writing for the media monitoring website Detector Media, the collaboration followed the following pattern:

1. Stoliarova and Muravyov discussed a future topic of coverage in the Russia-occupied territories.
2. Then Muravyov worked on the chosen topic with an Inter journalist accredited in the “DNR”.
3. When the draft work was ready, Muravyov sent it to the “Ministry of Information of the DNR” to Egorova in the occupied Donetsk for her review and approval.
4. If she did not have any changes to the draft, he sent the material to Stoliarova in Kyiv. Otherwise, he edited it according to Egorova’s requirements first.

Up to November 2015, it seems all of the reports from the occupied territories for Inter‘s leading evening news service Podrobnosti Nedeli were vetted by the propaganda apparatus of the Russian puppet regime. All materials that the rest of Ukraine watched about the territory controlled by the Russian proxies, from reports about fishing to combating the contraband, were “approved” this way. In one case, Egorova even helped Myravyov with information for his reports by providing a file titled “War Crimes of Ukrainian Soldiers.”

The jewel in the crown of this effective collaboration could have been a story about the “valiant foreigners supporting the ‘DNR’ army,” but it seems that Podrobnosti Nedeli got cold feet before releasing it.

Interestingly, the cooperation of the Russian propagandist Muravyov with Inter‘s chief editor Stoliarova didn’t end with reports praising life in the “DNR.” The Egorova dump also contains plans for a smear campaign against Ukrainian politicians, including a material against former Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk, in which he was to be pictured as one of the “horsemen of the Apocalypse leading Ukraine into an abyss.” Another project was the creation of promotional TV coverage for Opposition Blocmembers.

Another interesting fact is that Muravyov was even employed by Inter in winter 2015, but later he was deported from by Ukraine’s Security Service and officially stopped working for the company. Chief editor Stoliarova herself was deported from Ukraine in February 2016 because of the obscenities she used on air towards relatives of the heroes shot to death by Yanukovych’s special police force at Euromaidan. The Security Service then expressed their suspicions about her visits to the Russia-occupied territories and her collaboration with the “DNR” and “LNR” (“Luhansk People’s Republic”).

One letter where Stoliarova “punished” an Inter journalist caused the greatest outrage in Ukraine after the dump of Egorova’s e-mails was made public. In it, Muravyov wrote an apology letter to Egorova because Inter journalist Roman Bochkala used the word “terrorists” towards Russian mercenaries in his material – something that the “DNR” explicitly prohibited. Muravyov wrote to Egorova that the journalist was already severely punished for that and tried to pacify her by informing that the ratings ofPodrobnosti Nedeli are on the rise. After the scandal, Bochkala said that nobody ever punished him and that the Russian propagandist likely made it up to curry favor with Egorova. After this incident, the journalist left the channel.

TV channels TRK Ukrayina and Donbas had also systematically coordinated their materials with Egorova. The channel’s owner Rinat Akhmetov has a humanitarian fund which provides aid to the occupied territories. The task of the journalists there is often to cover the activities of the fund of their channel’s owner.

But another task, as seen from their materials, is to present the life under the occupation in a so-called “neutral way” which ignores the cases of pressure, torture, killings, lawlessness and political prisoners in the “DNR.” To get accreditation from the self-proclaimed republics, one has to cover the situation there from the “right angle” and use approved terminology. Otherwise, a journalist will not be accredited. That is why many international and Ukrainian journalists are denied accreditation.

Read more: “DNR’s” propaganda apparatus exposed, part 1. “Russophobe, get him out of Donetsk”

Journalists of the channel had asked Egorova for contacts of people to use as sources to cover the topics they thought will be interesting. For example this one:

“Hi! Tanya, what do you know about this? Can you give the contacts of the head to cover the topic one day. Thank you!

The first Youth Journalism School in the DNR opened in the Republican Palace for Children and Teenagers.

Practical classes are to begin next week and will last for the whole summer, training will be for free… The ultimate goal of the project is to unite young correspondents and to prepare future authors. After the end of the studying, the guys will receive an opportunity to get an internship in media and to be employed later.”

So while the words “professional standards” and “journalism” are used together only in jokes when talking about journalism in Russia (and Russia-occupied territories of Ukraine), this Ukrainian channel was not only ignoring the issue, on the contrary, it wanted to present a false image of the situation with journalism in the occupied territories.

Writing balanced materials from the “LNR”and “DNR” is impossible, says famous Ukrainian blogger from Donetsk Denis Kazanskyi:

“The choice there [on the occupied territories – Ed.] is very simple – either to collaborate with separatists, or to be sent to a basement [improvised prison – ed.]. Any calls to Ukrainian journalists to ‘come and film balanced materials’ which were heard from Russian colleagues were provocations. One can not shoot any objective materials in Donetsk and Luhansk. Only secretly, risking your life… All the journalists who openly work in ORDLO [Separate Regions of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts – a legal term for the ‘LNR’ and ‘DNR’] are working under the militants’ censorship and present biased information. The only exception can be foreigners from far-away countries, the reports of which will be never read in ‘DNR.’”

After the Egorova dump, the Ukrainian Security Service stated they are going to check the email messages of the “Ministry of Information of DNR” and the Ukrainian channels and that until they do so, it is too early to give any comments.

Source: http://euromaidanpress.com/2016/08/18/96606/#arvlbdata

I believe there is an unsubstantiated and difficult to unprove parallel being drawn between Trump’s presidential campaign and the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service.  I’m not saying it is wrong or right, but in the process of researching this, I discovered one helluva probable SVR website which I would like to highlight.  Oh, and yes, I’m putting it on the Russian proxy site list, now.

Before you proceed, KateHon, where the article is hosted, is reputedly an SVR foreign propaganda site.  I took a look at KateHon and a few things jumped out at me.  Alexandr Dugin is prominently highlighted here.  Russia Insider, a bona fide Russian proxy site with incredibly thick ties to the Russian propaganda hierarchy has a close relationship with KateHon.  A big clue on the article’s page is this link at the top, which is actually not easy to see:  Главная » News » Hillary Clinton has serious Neurological Problems. That is KateHon’s homepage in Russian, by the way.

By the way, I seriously doubt the SVR and Trump have even a working relationship, it’s just that they both want to undermine Hillary.  I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, many, if not most, people think that way.

So I checked it out.  It’s a doozy and really not bad, as Russian disinformation or Active Measures go.

But, notice, no links until you get to the end, and it’s to an accusatory website saying Hillary is a warmonger.  There is no substantiation, no references from a legitimate source, no certified medical expert is cited.  It is all rumor, hearsay, and a big smear.

If you look on the first line, that was my first clue the article is absolutely and completely bogus.  It mentions Infowars, which is the US’ mother of all conspiracy theory sites. Infowars is reputedly also being funded by Russia, I’d love to see some proof on that!

Now, just for a second, let’s discuss the Trump-SVR allegation.  The allegation is all circumstantial.  Absolutely totally, without a doubt.

Next, who is the source for this article?  I am 99% sure this is an SVR product, fully intended to sow doubt and distrust, and it’s actually doing a credible job. See the publicity it’s getting?  BUT, the blowback is if Russia is trying to prop up Trump by undermining Clinton, they’re also undermining Trump by establishing an alleged and seemingly more-than-circumstantial link between Trump and the SVR aka Russia.   It is too transparent, too bold, lazy, and just typical of SVR products lately. #RussiaFail

</end editorial>

HILLARY CLINTON HAS SERIOUS NEUROLOGICAL PROBLEMS

August 17, 2016

BY BEN NIMMO

It may seem strange, but the Kremlin’s propaganda machine is not backing US Presidential Republican Candidate Donald Trump. It has a bigger goal: Discrediting democracy in the United States.

The Kremlin’s main propaganda outlets in the US are the television station RT—formerly Russia Today—and the radio and online outlet Sputnik. Both are headed by Kremlin loyalists and closely mirror Russia’s foreign policy. While their effect on the presidential race is likely to be minimal, their reporting is useful for the insight it provides into the Kremlin’s intentions.

That reporting focuses on specifically attacking US Presidential Democratic Candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the general nature of US democracy . As such, it appears that the Kremlin is less interested in promoting Trump than promoting discontent.

Coverage of Trump by RT and Sputnik is uncharacteristically balanced. Some recent reports have presented the Republican candidate favorably, such as when he endorsed a number of his critics for re-election “in an attempt to ease party tensions”, or accused Clinton of founding ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria).

Other coverage, however, was unfavorable. Some have quoted a neo-Nazi leader as backing Trump’s candidacy, and accused him of hypocrisy. Onereport even asked: “Is Trump an embarrassment to the [Republican Party] because he’s an incompetent, uninformed, pathological menace, or because he’s just saying out loud what most Republicans now believe?”

No such balance is apparent in the two outlets’ coverage of the other candidates.

Clinton is the most obvious target. In August of 2016 alone, RT reports covered accusations of corruption, lying, and ill health against her; accused her of launching a McCarthy-style “witch hunt” against Trump; and linked her to the use of nuclear weapons in 1945. Sputnik’s reporting called her and her team “war hawks”, accused her of wanting to “make more families suffer” the deaths of soldiers, and named her the “Queen of War”.

If the Kremlin has nothing good to say about Clinton, it has nothing but good to say about Jill Stein—the Green Party’s candidate for president—who is currently polling at 3.8 percent. RT and Sputnik have given the Green Party so much coverage that they appear to be serving as a public-relations agency.

Between December 28 of 2015 and July 31 of 2016, RT and Sputnik interviewed Stein a total of nine times, with soft questions such as “Why does it make sense to step outside the system and support the Green Party?” and an introduction terming her “a better woman than Clinton, a better democrat than Sanders”. RT even hosted a presidential debate among the Green Party candidates, and ran a report on the highlights of the Green Party convention.

Earlier in the electoral cycle, Bernie Sanders enjoyed similar coverage, with headlines such as “Why only Sanders can prevent President Trump”. In March of 2016, RT even ran an interview claiming that Clinton and Google were collaborating to rig voting results—with the interviewer asking, “Sanders scored a 35 percent swing, maybe, in Michigan, I mean, it hasn’t worked so well for Clinton, has it?”

The Kremlin’s propaganda is not so much pro-Trump as it is anti-Clinton and anti-establishment. This fits into a broader pattern of behavior.

Liz Wahl—an RT whistle-blower who resigned on air in 2014 in protest at the station’s violation of journalistic standards—wrote in March: “RT’s main goal is not to seek truth and report it. Rather, the aim is to create confusion and sow distrust in Western governments and institutions by reporting anything which seems to discredit the West.”

This is the optic through which the Kremlin’s coverage—and the related hacking of the Democratic National Convention—can be understood: It is not about making a candidate look good, but making American democracy look bad.

One recent RT headline read, “Leaked emails, rigged elections, media blackout: Welcome to democracy, American-style.” An editorial described US politics as an establishment conspiracy; another was headlined, “Did you think US presidential debates were open and fair? Think again.” Sputnik, meanwhile, ran stories talking up the chances of third parties—despite poll numbers to the contrary—before repeating the accusation of a Google conspiracy.

In this campaign, the media are a prominent target. Some comments are aimed at the media as a whole, such as this RT editorial: “The surging fundraising and poll numbers for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein since the end of the Bernie Sanders campaign must be hitting a nerve, because Democratic insiders and the mainstream media are resorting to smear tactics.” Some are aimed at specific targets, such as Google, BuzzFeed, and Vice. Trump’s own accusations of media bias and rigged voting procedures reinforce that narrative: in that sense, he seems to be supporting Russia’s propaganda rather more than Russia’s propaganda is supporting him.

Not all of the reported comments can be attributed directly to Kremlin writers. However, on both RT and Sputnik, the choice of third-party quotes is so systematically anti-Clinton and anti-establishment that it can only be the result of a deliberate policy.

There are two possible reasons for this anti-establishment drive. The first is that it is part of the Kremlin’s effort to deflect accusations that it has abandoned the path of democracy by painting its critics as equally undemocratic. In this sense, Putin’s comment on June 17 to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria is instructive:

“Well, (the Americans) lecture everyone on how to live and on democracy. Now, do you really think presidential elections there are democratic?”

The second is more troubling. Russia’s military doctrine—updated in December of 2014—identifies the “wide use of the protest potential of the population” as one of the key elements of modern conflict. The Kremlin tried to harness that potential in its annexation of Crimea and its invasion of the Donbas; it appears to have attempted to stir up protest in Scotland in September of 2014—following the Scottish referendum on independence—when a Russian election observer claimed the vote did not meet international standards.

Given that Russia sees rabble-rousing as an integral part of modern conflict, and positions itself rhetorically as in a state of geopolitical conflict with the US, it would be logical for the Kremlin to attempt to seed discontent in the United States. Its media coverage is certainly consistent with that goal.

Ben Nimmo is an information defense fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab. You can follow him on Twitter @benimmo.

Source: http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/understanding-the-role-of-russian-propaganda-in-the-us-election