Russia is fascinated with Private Military Contractors, ever since the US used BlackWater in Iraq. During the Russian invasion of Crimean, the Russian media repeatedly had reports of Blackwater troops in Crimea, even though they had changed names, twice.

In the past few years Russia has onhinted at the use of PMCs, and when PMCs were used in Syria, their use was minimized.

Excellent report, excellent source – SecDev, and excellent work!

</end editorial>

Today we are proud to announce the launch of a new intelligence product from SecDev! Our analysts spend a lot of time on the areas they cover. Sometimes we discover little gems of information that deserve some extra coverage. That’s why we launched SPECTRA Field Notes. Designed as an ad hoc publication, they are a free supplement to regular subscriptions to our weekly Conflict Area Watch reports covering Syria, Iraq, and Libya.

Need to see for yourself? Download our inaugural SPECTRA Field Notes covering Russian military contractors in Syria.

Download here.

Source: https://www.facebook.com/secdev/

221.

Russia repeatedly denied using cluster bombs on its missions in Syria. These denials were published by many Russian publications, including Russia’s Ministry of Defense magazine TV Zvezda. The Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov exclaimed that Russia not only doesn’t use cluster bombs in Syria, but also doesn’t have any such weapons at its airbase in Hmeymim.RT published these denials. Ironically, it was also RT who inadvertently exposed the fact that the opposite is true. Conflict Intelligence Team spotted cluster bombs in RT’s video, prompting a hasty re-edit, followed by subsequent restoration of the telling film footage.

222.

In traditional Russian propaganda style, RT attempted to absolve Russian hooligans of any blame for attacking English fans during Euro 2016 Championship games. Since there weren’t any real journalists justifying these brutal attacks, RT decided to quote 2 nonexistent journos with the notorious ‘Forest Echo News’ (a fake news org). When the ruse was exposed, RT noted that the information in question was disproven, but never removed the article.

223.

Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova angrily reacted to the comments following the release of Ukrainian pilot Nadezhda Savchenko. “This is one big myth that the Savchenko case and her swap for two Russians either complies with or is in line with or is a natural part of the Minsk agreements,” Zakharova told journalists.

In fact, Savchenko’s release is a natural part of the Minsk agreements, which provide for the release of of all hostages and other illegally detained people. Russia’s approach to the fulfillment of the Minsk agreements continues to be flippant and selective at best.

224.

Russian ‘AIDS experts’ claimed that condoms are to blame for the spread of HIV. They’ve also alleged that the HIV epidemic is nothing more than a Western “information war” against Russia. Common sense, medical studies and statistical information easily disprove the theory of condoms as the alleged culprits in the war against HIV.

Up to 1.5 million Russians are HIV/AIDS patients and the numbers are rising. The epidemic is real and has absolutely nothing to do with any type of an alleged “information war” by the West.

225.

Russian media claimed that Estonia banned a number of Russian names “without any rhyme or reason.” These changes were attributed to “Russophobic de-Russification” of the former USSR republics.

In reality, Estonia banned a number of Estonian, Russian and other names, because they were too common and caused confusion.

226.

When there isn’t any violence to report in Kyiv, the Russian media feels free to draw from old stories. Sometimes two years old. Lenta.Ru traveled back in time to 2014, reporting 67 dead in clashes in Kyiv in February 2016. Lenta later deleted the article.

The Unian report, to which Lenta.Ru was referring, was published in 2014 – not 2016.

227.

RIA Novosti decided that old stories are as good as new andpublished an image of bonfires on Maidan.

2016 or 2014 – what’s the difference? Anything that makes Ukraine look like a failed state with constant unrest works for Russian propaganda.

228.

Russia’s president Vladimir Putin likes to fashion himself as the biggest defender of exotic animals. Nothing could be further from the truth. A tiger died because of Putin’s PR stunt. Leopards, who were supposed to be protected under Putin’s Sochi program, are being placed in peril, instead. The Putin-backed campaign to protect the habitat of Persian leopards has been quietly abandoned, clearing the way for the country’s richest man to expand his ski resort. Exotic animals are merely pawns in Putin’s game of power, money and PR.

229.

Russian media exclaimed that in the near future, Ukrainians may be forced to change Russian names and surnames to Ukrainian ones. This fabrication was based on a petition that was supported only by its author at the time the Russian media rushed to publish these stories. To date, the petition in question gathered only 10 signatures and was clearly unworthy of being publicized, if not for its propaganda value.

230.

In a clearly fabricated story, Russia’s state-sponsored Vesti claimedthat in 2006 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny replied to Bill Browder’s message from 2008. The video was later removed, re-edited and uploaded yet again.

Russian state-controlled media continues its unrelenting quest to discredit multiple enemies of Vladimir Putin at once. Hence, Vesti attempted to connect Alexei Navalny, Bill Browder, his deceased lawyer Sergei Magnitsky and the CIA in this ludicrous fake story.

231.

Russia’s state-sponsored Vesti attempted to prove the linksbetween Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, investment banker/human rights activist Bill Browder, his deceased lawyer Sergei Magnitsky and the CIA.

To support these ridiculous connotations, the program demonstrated an obviously fake “CIA memorandum” signed by none other than Valerie Plame. Clumsy fake-makers didn’t bother to check that Valerie Plame resigned from the CIA on Jan 9, 2006 (fraudulent memo was supposedly written in 2009). Valerie Plame was interviewed and described the letter as an obvious fake.

232.

Openly homophobic Russian media claimed that 50 “aggressive participants” were arrested during March of Equality in Kyiv, Ukraine. In reality, multiple opponents (not participants) of the parade were detained.

233.

State-sponsored Vesti and its host, Dmitry Kiselyov, the head of Rossiya Segodnya (Russia Today), demonstrated a purportedly original document belonging to a Ukrainian who allegedly fought on the side of Hitler. The document was a fake, with computer-generated text and the photo of a German Waffen-SS Officer Walter Schmidt.

Kiselyov later admitted that the document was a fake, blamed amateurs for making a cheap novelty item and never apologized for using it during the broadcast.

234.

Russian Ministry of Defense’ publication TV Zvezda and others claimed that Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko authored a memoir, entitled “Mein Kampf” in Ukrainian.

In reality, this book title was a sick joke, made up by Russian pro-Putin bloggers. Nadiya Savchenko’s real book is entitled “’Nadiya’ (‘Hope’) is a Strong Name.”

235.

Russia claimed to be closely following and complying with all the rules of the Convention on “inhumane” weapons.

In reality, Russia is using incendiary weapons, specifically prohibited by the Protocol III, Article 1 of the Convention.

236.

Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued commentary, criticizing statements by NATO Military Committee Chairman Petr Pavel, during his meeting with members of the French Senate. Russian MFA complained: “We took note of the NATO military chief’s false and unethical statements regarding the supposed Eastern threats to the exclusively “peaceful and defensive” North Atlantic Alliance. Specifically, the general claimed that Russia employs hybrid tactics against the West, including torture and deception.”

However, that’s not what the General said (video at 15:04 – 15:10). His comment referred to Russia using “hybrid techniques, including narratives that are based on twisted facts or even lies.”

Even after NATO complained that Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs willfully misrepresented the content of General Pavel’s statement, Russian MFA failed to amend its commentary – inadvertently exemplifying Russia’s use of twisted facts and/or lies for propaganda purposes.

237.

In an example of a multilayered lie, the Russian media bemoaned the death of an elderly female WWII veteran, who was said to die the next day after being splashed with “brilliant green” by Ukrainian radicals in Slovyansk, Ukraine.

First of all, close examination of available video footage reveals that the lady wasn’t splashed with anything by the radicals. A group of women painted themselves (and the veteran in question) with “brilliant green” in solidarity with the female politician who was indeed splashed that day. Photos were later used for a cynical photo-op.

Furthermore, contrary to the articles published by TV Zvezda, ITAR-Tass, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Vzglyad, state-controlled Vesti andothers, the granny in question didn’t die. Even after TV Zvezda refuted its own report, finally admitting that the veteran is alive and well, none of the other publications retracted, removed or amended their intentionally deceptive articles. This kind of disregard for the truth is at the core of Russian propaganda.

238.

Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova accused former U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul of “absence of intellect and responsibility,” upset by his alleged statement that the U.S. should rein in/bridle Russia.

However, that is not at all what McFaul said. His quote referred to NATO – not the U.S. – stating: “NATO has to deter Russian threats.”

As usual, Russia was offended by an entirely invented quote.

239.

Vesti claims Ukraine is supplying steel directly to ISIS through illicit trade/ smuggling via Turkey. The host is outraged, crying out: “How, but how did ISIS in Iraq get a hold of Ukrainian steel?” That is hardly a mystery, considering that Iraq is one of the biggest steel importers from Ukraine. The implication of direct links between Ukraine and ISIS rings hollow, in spite of Russia’s multiple desperate attempts of connecting the two.

240.

Russia’s lie factory doesn’t have any off-limit topics. Russian media claimed that Russia’s FSB warned Belgian authorities prior to the Brussels attacks, naming Alexei and Ivan Dovbash as the ISIS terrorists preparing to commit the terrorist acts. After the attacks,Russian publications claimed that the brothers are on the run and Belgian authorities are actively searching for them. “One of them has a beard, that’s for sure!” – reported Sputnik. The part about the beard was the only nugget of truth in this twisted story.

Brothers Dovbash were not in Brussels at the time of the attacksand had nothing to do with their planning. Belgian authorities neither suspected, nor searched for them – contrary to the baseless assertions publicized by the Russian media. So why tell such a lie? The answer is quite simple: to keep Russia relevant. To make it seem important as a “partner in the war in terror,” because one doesn’t sanction or shun its partners.

Source: http://www.russialies.com/russias-top-240-lies-international-edition/

By Roger Dooley

Prior to departing, though, he received a call from the dean of the school he’d be visiting. The dean described the wonderful office Cialdini would be working from, the new computer, the staff support he’d receive, and so on. Everything sounded marvelous, even better than expected.

Then, the second shoe dropped. The dean explained that one of their professors had been sidelined by illness. Would Cialdini mind teaching just one graduate business class? He agreed, even though he knew that now a big part of his time at the school would be taken up by preparing a brand-new course, teaching it, and working with students. The book project would have to wait.

At first glance, that seems like classic reciprocation. The dean presented Cialdini with unexpectedly favorable accommodations for his stay at the university, and attached no strings. Hence, when Cialdini was asked to teach a class, he was more likely to agree than he would have been otherwise – straight out of the Influence playbook.

But when Cialdini reflected on his rapid acquiescence, he realized something else was at work. When I spoke with Cialdini about this experience, he explained:

I wound up agreeing to teach this course because he asked me in the moment after I said how much I appreciated what he had done for me. If he had called me a day later, I think I could have marshalled the ability to say, “Well, you know, I have a book that I need to write. I can’t really do it.” But not in that moment. There was something about the moment before he delivered his message that made me say yes.

The key factor this sequence illuminated for Cialdini was timing. In the short span of the phone call, Cialdini was “pre-suaded” by the generous favor and ended up agreeing to something he would have declined under other circumstances. According to Cialdini, more formal research supports this anecdote: the most powerful reciprocation effect is immediately after the favor. As time passes, its potency declines.

Cialdini cites other pre-suasion techniques that have been shown to work. In Holland, residents were asked to complete a long survey and told they would receive a cash reward. The appeal produced a higher response rate when the residents were given the gift in advance, even though they could have kept it and ignored the survey.

Similarly, U.S. hotel guests were 47% more likely to reuse their towels if they were told the hotel had already made a contribution in their name to an environmental charity than if the contribution occurred only after re-use actually happened.

Scientists like John Bargh, Dan Ariely, and others have demonstrated the power of priming. By exposing people to various stimuli, their subsequent behavior is changed. Often, the stimuli are so subtle that the subjects are entirely unaware they were primed.

In Pre-Suasion, Cialdini marries the priming concept with classic persuasion. For instance, social proof is one of the most commonly applied of his original six principles. Telling people about the large number of others like them who enjoy your product is almost always effective.

But, social proof can sometimes backfire depending on the mindset of the individual. Cialdini describes one experiment that had subjects watch either a scary movie or a romantic one before seeing an ad to promote museum attendance.

Even though neither movie was related to museums, which one the subjects watched changed their receptivity to the persuasive message they saw immediately afterwards.

“Visited by over a million people each year,” a classic example of social proof, worked very well to boost the favorability of the museum among subjects who saw the scary film. The same message, though, actually had a negative effect on the romantically-primed subjects.

For the romantic movie watchers, “Stand out from the crowd” messaging was far more effective.

The mindset change caused by the movies was almost certainly short-lived, though, another example of the importance of time.

A New Principle Of Persuasion

Perhaps the biggest surprise in Pre-Suasion is that Cialdini acknowledges a seventh principle exists. He calls it “unity,” meaning a shared identity. This shared identity can be with family, with others from a similar background or location, and even with a product one helped create.

At first glance, unity seems similar to Cialdini’s long-established “liking” principle, which depends on shared attributes. He distinguishes unity from liking by pointing out that unity is more fundamental. It’s not just, “they are like me,” but rather, “they are of me.”

Family ties are the ultimate form of unity. Cialdini describes an experiment in which parent participation in a survey increased from less than 20% to 97% when an inconsequential benefit for their student was at stake.

He also extends family-based unity to the language one chooses. Cialdini cites Warren Buffett’s letter to shareholders about Berkshire-Hathaway’s succession plan. What will happen to the firm in a post-Buffett, post-Munger era is of great interest to shareholders. When Buffett addressed the issue head-on in one of his famous annual letters, he could have used his normal plain-spoken, direct style.

Continued at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerdooley/2016/09/01/pre-suasion-robert-cialdinis-sequel-to-influence/#2dd9e0491bab

The Russians are training, on their own equipment, using their own tactics.  The US Army has been doing this type training for decades.

It is right of passage to do a tour at NTC.  The OPFOR is world class, they ‘punish’ you for your mistakes.  The After Action Review process is incredibly detailed and damning, if you mess up not only will you relive the horror but the video and graphical displays show exactly how you messed up.  The really good news is by the time you leave you will know what to do, what not to do, and why.

There is also a JRTC for light forces…  oh, the fun never ends!

</end editorial>

September 7, 2016

When soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment take the field at the National Training Center in California, their job is generally to play one of the enemy during war games.

To help complete their new look, the troops operate a whole bunch of Russian-looking tanks and other armored vehicles.

Like many armies around the world, the U.S. Army has long held that making training as realistic as possible gives troops the best chance in real combat. Specially trained “opposing forces” such as the 11th ensure that practice sessions aren’t just two American units using the same tactics against each other.

Troops get “a lot of complex and tough challenges while they are here,” Army lieutenant colonel Jimmy Kimbrough, then the second-in-command of the regiment, told the service’s reporters in 2013. “They’ll make mistakes, but it’s better to make them here than in combat.”

After World War II, the ground combat branch began cooking up elaborate mock enemies to help troops practice against realistic opponents. Watching Israel battle its Arab neighbors in 1973, the Pentagon as a whole worried it might not be ready to fight a major land war against the Soviets or their allies.

In 1979, the Army responded by opening the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, around 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles. The sprawling desert environment gave troops the space to use tanks, howitzers and other heavy weapons in big, conventional exercises.

To give these events added weight, the Center got a number of captured Soviet vehicles, including at least one tracked MT-LB armored personnel carrier and a BTR-60 wheeled troop carrier. But there simply weren’t enough of these real examples to form large faux enemy units.

Enter the Army’s “visually modified” tanks and armored vehicles, commonly referred to as VISMODs.

The ground combat branch built the first of these using old M-551 Sheridans. Designed with paratroopers and scouts in mind, these small tanks were light but heavily armed with an unusual and troublesome 152-millimeter combination gun- and missile-launcher.

With the exception of a single battalion off Sheridans in the 82nd Airborne Division, the Army rushed to replace the vehicles with new Bradley fighting vehicles or Humvees in the early 1980s.

But out in California, the tiny tanks got new life — with the help of numerous cosmetic add-ons — playing the role of Soviet T-80 tanks and BMP-1 personnel carriers. Technicians turned other vehicles into mocked up 2S3 self-propelled howitzers and ZSU-23-4 mobile anti-aircraft guns. In addition, a number of modified UH-1 Hueys played the role of iconic Soviet Mi-24 gunship helicopters.

On top of the ersatz Soviet armored vehicles, the Army fielded a special scoring system. Like souped-up laser tag, the emitters and receivers were tuned so that only appropriate weapons had a chance to “kill” tanks or troops.

“The effect is a greater level of realism than could be achieved with umpires ruling on the effects of engagements,” Lt. Col. John Warsinske from the Army Heritage and Education Center explained in a 2009 retrospective on the National Training Center.

Unfortunately, with the Sheridan out of production and largely out of service, troops had trouble keeping the VISMODs running. In 1998, the Army rolled out the first of its new Opposing Forces Surrogate Vehicles, or OSVs.

Based on the M-113A3 armored personnel carrier, the first of these replacements mimicked BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicles. Eventually, the Army built additional models to stand in for T-80 and T-90 tanks and other types.

“The cost to operate and support an OSV is approximately 50 percent less when compared to the M-551 Sheridan,” a piece in a late-1998 edition ofCombatTraining Center Quarterly Bulletin declared. “Based on the high training operational tempo … which is approximately 3,000 miles per year per vehicle over the course of 10 rotations, this will generate a high cost savings for the Army in the years to come.”

On top of that, the Army had modified a number of Humvees to look similar to the BRDM-2 armored car. The National Training Center already had one of the actual Soviet-era types fitted with a TOW missile launcher so it could more easily use the laser training gear.

The ground combat branch ultimately got more than 100 OSVs to take over from the old M-551s. The Joint Multinational Readiness Center, a collection of American training facilities in Germany, received some of the unique vehicles for their own opposing force unit.

Like the 11th ACR, the 1st Battalion, 41st Infantry Regiment regularly brings these vehicles out for mock battles with NATO members and other U.S. allies. But unlike the sand-and-brown-color vehicles at the National Training center, the VISMODs in Germany feature a slightly more colorful camouflage scheme.

After the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the National Training Center and other facilities began to focus more on teaching soldiers how to fight insurgents. But militants often seized heavy weapons during their fighting with government troops.

Since 2014 in Iraq and Syria, Islamic State terrorists have captured tanks, armored personnel carriers and other vehicles. The terror group has sent them into combat in their intended role — and also turned them into mobile suicide bombs.

So whether troops are practicing to fight a traditional enemy or terrorists, the Army’s fake tanks — or newer models — are likely to be an important tool for the foreseeable future.

Source: http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/revealed-the-us-army-has-bunch-fake-russian-tanks-17608

Russian propaganda is pervasive, and America is behind the power curve in countering it.

By William Courtney and Christopher Paul

Russian propaganda does not shy away from making inconsistent claims; its goal is to see which gain acceptance with various audiences. When in July 2014 Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine, various Russian sources claimed: A Ukrainian jet fighter was responsible, Ukrainian ground forces were trying to down an aircraft carrying Putin and Ukrainian air traffic control forced MH-17 to fly over a war zone. But the propagandists were clumsy. Just after the crash, ITAR-TASS reported that a “Ukrainian Air Force An-26 transport plane” had been downed by a missile. A few weeks earlier Russian-backed rebels bragged of acquiring a Russian Buk anti-aircraft missile system, the weapon that Dutch investigators found had brought down the airliner.

Source: http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-09-09/putins-propaganda-network-is-vast-and-us-needs-new-tools-to-counter-it

The media monitoring system is named Katyusha, the same as the Soviet multiple launch rocket system.

</end editorial>

Loss of public trust killed the USSR and it can bring down Western elites too

Dmitri Trenin

Asked by Bloomberg this month about Russian involvement in the hacking of the US Democratic national committee, Vladimir Putin issued a non-denial denial. Basically, his answer boiled down to this: whoever did it did a good thing. This response only added to the stir created by the initial accusation that Russia was behind the activities of the “Fancy Bears”. The fear of Russiamanipulating presidential elections in the world’s mightiest democracy has been spreading across the United States.

Getting to the real perpetrators of hacking attacks is notoriously difficult. Yet seen from the Kremlin hackers perform a valuable public service by revealing secrets – not to foreign intelligence services, but to the western public. The political power of these revelations was first demonstrated by WikiLeaks, which broke the confidentiality of US diplomatic cables. The effect was much enhanced by the Snowden files, which exposed, inter alia, US spying on other western leaders.

Information warfare has become, alongside geo-economics (sanctions and counter-sanctions), one of the principal battlefields in the new confrontation between Russia and the west.

Some cases look like direct tit-for-tats. The exposure of the Democratic national committee leadership secretly supporting one candidate against another and thus rigging the primary vote appears as payback for Hillary Clinton’s diatribes against Russia’s own flawed parliamentary elections of December 2011. The opening of World Anti-Doping Agency medical files shows that US Olympic champions did take banned drugs, while Russian athletes were banned en masse from participating in the Rio Games.

However, all this is just the tip of the iceberg. It may seem that all Russia is doing is trying to get even and making its accusers appear guilty of the same crimes with which they charge Moscow. There is a big difference, though. Russian public life is permeated with cynicism. The president is a tsar. Elections are about confirming rulers in power, not changing them: “You first get into the Kremlin, and then I’ll vote for you.” People get rich not before they enter government service or after they leave it, but while they are in government. Law is a tool of the high and mighty. This cynicism has its limits, and the Russian people’s proverbial patience may suddenly snap, but their level of tolerance is generally high. By contrast, western political systems have become used to more than a fair share of hypocrisy. Call it political correctness, or values, or ideology, but western societies are more vulnerable to the exposure of wrongdoing and abuse which is not individual but systemic, particularly when it comes to democracy.

It is one thing for the Russian people to be told that their vote has been stolen; it is totally different for the American electorate to believe, as Donald Trump has suggested, that presidential elections can be rigged. And democracy is again becoming an issue all over the European Union and America.

Putin certainly sees the widening gulf separating western elites from their disgruntled co-citizens, left behind in the process of globalisation and unrestrained money-making, and – insult to injury – branded “deplorable”. He also notes that the triumph of democracy over communism three decades ago has led to the political systems of Europe and America essentially eschewing any meaningful competition within those systems.

With inequality on the rise, this only leads to dissent and challenge emerging from outside the established systems and against them. As someone who is now locked in a battle with the US political establishment, he closely studies the state of his adversary and draws conclusions from it.

One conclusion which might surprise him is the notion that he can manipulate not just European politicians but also American elections, and lead, single-handedly, a global challenge against the existing liberal democratic order. By now Putin paranoia has reached a level far above the occasional playing of the “Russia card” against the opponent. This betrays a degree of uncertainty among the ruling elites of the western world which one could not imagine even a few years ago. This uncertainty is not necessarily good for Russia, as the risks tend to mount, but it surely can and will be exploited in the ongoing great power struggle.

There are many lessons to be drawn from the demise of the Soviet Union a quarter of a century ago. One is that imperial hubris is eventually punished; another is that attempts to bring a supposedly advanced political system to a nation unprepared for it usually ends in failure, and that the elites who get too far away from their public are caught up with the reality when it is already too late.

Modern western nations are not like the USSR, but their leaders might wish to consider that, in the end, what killed the Soviet system was not Reagan’s Star Wars, or even the scarcity of goods in the shops; the people in that part of the world had known worse. What actually did it was the loss of public faith in the domestic political system. So, improve or beware of exposure.

Dmitri Trenin is director of the Carnegie Moscow Center

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/17/hacking-politics-us-russia

http://www.voanews.com/embed/player/0/3526741.html

LONDON — 

The West must step up its efforts to combat and counter the information war being waged by its opponents, according to NATO officials. They warn that countries like Russia are exploiting the freedom of the press in Western media to spread disinformation.

The term “hybrid warfare” is frequently used to describe the tactics used by the Kremlin in its forceful takeover of Crimea in 2014, when unmarked, heavily armed gunmen now widely known as the ‘little green men’ began storming Ukrainian military bases in the region.

Moscow initially denied they were Russian military, yet weeks later similar unidentified armed units appeared in eastern Ukraine. That conflict between Russia-backed rebels and the Ukrainian military is still continuing.

The West is under attack

Speaking at this month’s United Nations General Assembly, Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko said hybrid warfare is being waged against the whole Western world.

“Political pressure, blatant propaganda, interference with the electoral process, economic coercion, secret subversive and military operations, cyberattacks, misuse of diplomatic measures, these are modern and congenial methods of the undeclared war,” Poroshenko said.

At a recent conference on Information Warfare at the London-based Royal United Services Institute, the Director of the NATO StratCom Center of Excellence Janis Sarts said the West is playing catch-up.

West not focused on this type of warfare

“The technology is ours. The marketing powerhouses are in our countries. Yet we’re having this discussion against the feeling of being pushed. Against the feeling of being pushed by different actors: Russia, Daesh… also China in more subtle ways,” said Sarts, using and Arabic term for the Islamic State.

The conference focused on the growing reach of Russian state media such as the 24-hour news channel Russia Today or RT, often accused of being a propaganda outlet for the Kremlin.

FILE – Armed men, Russian servicemen as the Kremlin later admitted, stand guard outside a Ukrainian military base in Perevalne, Crimea, March 9, 2014. Moscow’s initial denials that the men were its soldiers was seen as part of its disinformation strategy.

Senior editor at The Economist Edward Lucas argued channels like RT should not be considered as journalism.

“Russia has really grasped the post-truth environment. And they will lie about things absolutely brazenly. They understand the weaknesses of our media in the post-Cold War environment: that we prioritize fairness over truth.”

Russia investing big money

Lucas added the West should do more about what he termed “social media hygiene.”

“There’s a real problem with comment fields, and with fake social media accounts, particularly on Twitter. The Russians are putting lots and lots of money into creating tens of thousands of trolls.”

Mark Laity, the chief of Strategic Communications at NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe or SHAPE, noted that Russia includes information strategy as a key pillar of its conflict planning, but in the West the communications are often handed off to separate public relations teams.

“We are still fighting on the margins,” he said, “when actually a properly funded, strategic communication effort is incredibly cheap compared to other costs.”

Laity warned Russia was deploying disinformation and hybrid warfare in its intervention in Syria — most recently in the disputed bombing of an aid convoy outside Aleppo earlier this month. He added the West must learn how to fight back.

When liberal rights activist Ella Pamfilova was named to head Russia’s election commission in March, she promised to clean house and oversee transparent, democratic elections.

“We will change a lot, and radically, in the way the Central Election Commission operates. A lot and radically — this is something I can promise you,” she said at the time.

However, a statistical analysis of the official preliminary results of the country’s September 18 State Duma elections points to a familiar story: massive fraud in favor of the ruling United Russia party comparable to what independent analysts found in 2007 and 2011.

“The results of the current Duma elections were falsified on the same level as the Duma and presidential elections of 2011, 2008, and 2007, the most falsified elections in post-Soviet history, as far as we can tell,” physicist and data analyst Sergei Shpilkin told RFE/RL’s Russian Service. “By my estimate, the scope of the falsification in favor of United Russia in these elections amounted to approximately 12 million votes.”

According to the CEC’s preliminary results, official turnout for the election was 48 percent, and United Russia polled 54.2 percent of the party-list vote — about 28,272,000 votes. That total gave United Russia 140 of the 225 party-list seats available in the Duma. In addition, United Russia candidates won 203 of the 225 contests in single-mandate districts, giving the party an expected total of 343 deputies in the 450-seat house.

Shpilkin, who in 2012 won the independent PolitProsvet award for political analysis for his statistical work on the 2011 vote, posted his examination of the latest election on his blog on September 19.

Using data from the Central Election Commission’s website, Shpilkin organized all 95,800 polling stations on a graph according to the turnout that they reported.

In fair elections, the graph would form a bell curve, with its peak indicating the average turnout for the entire election. Reading from left to right, Shpilkin’s graph shows a relatively normal bell curve that peaks at about 36 percent turnout and then, as it moves right, shows a jagged curve that dips unevenly and then begins rising again, as vast numbers of polling stations begin reporting turnouts of 70 percent or more.

Moreover, Shpilkin shows that almost all “extra” votes from polling stations reporting higher-than-average turnout went to United Russia. That is, a party such as ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s LDPR received virtually the same number of votes from polling stations reporting a turnout of 95 percent as it did from stations reporting turnouts of 65 percent. United Russia, by contrast, received about four times as many at the 95 percent stations.

“The easiest form of falsification in terms of cost and intellectual effort on the part of the falsifiers is simply to add votes in favor of the desired party or candidate,” Shpilkin explained. “But adding votes means that the turnout changes in an upward direction from the typical distribution. … A peculiar characteristic of these elections is that we don’t see the transfer of votes from one party to another. Perhaps this is a sign of the good influence of Ella Pamfilova.”

In addition, Shpilkin’s graph is spiked because there were an improbable number of polling stations at the high end of the turnout scale reporting round-number turnouts ending in 5 or 0, such as 75, 80, or 85 percent. This is a phenomenon Shpilkin and other analysts noted in previous elections and dubbed “Churov’s saw,” after former CEC head Vladimir Churov.

In 2008, Shpilkin estimated that United Russia actually won 277 seats in the Duma instead of the constitutional majority of 315 that it was awarded.

This time around, it is somewhat more difficult to tell how the alleged falsification might have influenced the results because half of the Duma was elected from single-mandate districts, from which United Russia got a majority of its deputies. Shpilkin estimates United Russia actually got about 40 percent of the party-list vote, which would have reduced its party-list seats from 140 to around 110.

But, with a projected 343 deputies in the new parliament, United Russia once again has enough votes to unilaterally alter the constitution.

Although Pamfilova has promised to investigate reports of fraud and election officials have already annulled results in at least three polling stations, she maintains that there was no systematic falsification and that the vote was legitimate. On September 20, Russia’s Prosecutor-General’s Office denied there were any significant violations during the voting and said the number of complaints was “significantly lower” than for previous elections.

But videos recorded by official cameras from several polling stations seem to tell a different story. In almost all of them, local election officials can be seen working as teams to apparently stuff ballot boxes and prevent outsiders from observing their actions.

Pamfilova has said that such videos do not constitute proof of fraud and, Shpilkin recalls, courts rejected dozens of fraud cases based on similar videos in 2012.

Shpilkin hopes his analysis will help Pamfilova come to grips with what he sees as massive fraud embedded in Russia’s election system from the ground up.

“I am not entirely sure that Ella Pamfilova has a good understanding of the actions of the heads of polling stations on the ground, how they compile their protocols, how they fill in the data and submit it to their regional election commissions,” Shpilkin said. “Moreover, she most likely does not understand how the results are aggregated and how many votes were added in for those 96,000 polling stations.”

Shpilkin emphasizes that his analysis does not mean that the genuine opposition parties that did not get seats in the Duma would have, if not for the alleged falsification.

“It is possible that some changes might have been seen on the local level in places like Moscow and St. Petersburg on the level of single-mandate districts,” he said. “But on the level of federal party lists, the position of the opposition looks entirely hopeless.”

Source: http://www.rferl.org/a/statistics-point-to-massive-fraud-russia-state-duma-elections/28002750.html

by John Harrington

Bell Pottinger created propaganda videos in Iraq on behalf of the US Government in a contract worth more than half a billion dollars over several years, according to revelations unearthed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

The work included creating short news segments made to look like Arabic news networks and fake insurgent videos, The Sunday Times, which worked with the Bureau on the investigation, and other news outlets reported over the weekend.

The scale of Bell Pottinger’s operation in Iraq was significant; costing, on average, more than a hundred million dollars per year, with the agency at one point employing almost 300 British and Iraqi staff.

Bell Pottinger made about £15m a year in fees from the work, agency founder Lord Bell told The Sunday Times, with the bulk of the money going on costs such as production and distribution.

The agency’s work started in Iraq in March 2004 when it was tasked with “promotion of democratic elections”, but the Bureau said it has identified transactions worth $540m (£420m) between the Pentagon and Bell Pottinger relating to contracts issued from May 2007 to December 2011, with a contract worth a similar annual rate ($120m, £93m) reportedly in force in 2006 too.

Quoted widely in the media, former Bell Pottinger employee Martin Wells said his work consisted of three types of products: TV ads portraying al Qaeda in a negative light; news items made to look as if they had been “created by Arabic TV” and with the origins sometimes hidden; and the production of fake al Qaeda propaganda films.

The latter would be put on CDs and dropped into areas that were raided. The CDs had a code embedded in them that gave the location of where they had been played.

The Pentagon has confirmed that Bell Pottinger did work for it as a contractor in Iraq under the Information Operations Task Force (IOTF), producing some material that was openly sourced to coalition forces, and some which was not. It insisted all material put out by IOTF was “truthful”.

Wells said Bell Pottinger also carried out some work under the Joint Psychological Operations Task Force, which a US defence official confirmed but declined to give details of.

Wells said Bell Pottinger’s work was signed off by the commander of coalition forces in Iraq, General Petraeus, although some of it went higher up the command chaion and was approved by the White House.

Bell, who in August announced his departure from the agency to form a new venture Sans Frontières, told The Sunday Times he was “proud” of Bell Pottinger’s work in Iraq, saying: “We did a lot to help resolve the situation. Not enough. We did not stop the mess which emerged, but it was part of the American propaganda machinery.

“I mean if you look at the situation now, it wouldn’t appear to have worked. But at the time, who knows, if it saved one life it [was] a good thing to do.”

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism traced Bell Pottinger’s activities through US army contracting censuses, reports by the Defense Department’s Inspector General and federal procurement transaction records, plus the agency’s own corporate filings and specialist publications on military propaganda.

Bell Pottinger declined to comment further when contacted by PRWeek this morning.

Some have seen Bell’s departure from Bell Pottinger as an opportunity for the agency to distance itself from the controversial geopolitical work it has been associated with in the past, including work with foreign governments accused of human rights abuses. It remains to be seen if the new revelations will hamper that process.

Bell Pottinger and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism clashed in 2012 in relation to a sting operation in which journalists posed as executives of a fictitious Uzbeki firm and met senior Bell Pottinger executives over a supposed PR brief. The agency complained to the Press Complaints Commission over the incident but the complaint was not upheld.

Source: http://www.prweek.com/article/1410858/bell-pottinger-spotlight-creating-propaganda-videos-us-military-iraq

Influencing an election is the ultimate inform and influence activity.

Keep in mind there is a foreign power, Russia and probably others, attempting to influence this US election. Look for signs of foreign involvement, foreign origins, foreign accounts, bots, trolls, and zombies.

</end editorial> ht to jl

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Could automated online propaganda sway the election?

When Donald Trump confronted revelations that he used money from his charitable foundation to settle private legal disputes and purchase portraits of himself, a tireless army of tweeters went to work to keep the focus on Hillary Clinton’s foundation instead.

Then Trump stumbled on a debate question about why he refuses to release his taxes, and the same army has since rushed to create the appearance of a grass-roots demand that Clinton be held accountable, instead.

@Rage_and_War tweeted “Trump’s Taxes? Audit the Clinton Foundation!” with a link to a blog post suggesting the same. @Flossy_gurl tweeted, “CORRUPT #FBI #JamesComey Received Million$ From #ClintonFoundation- Brother’s Law Firm Does #Clinton’s Taxes.” And @Luminaria98 tweeted, “Hillary Clinton’s Philanthropic Controversy: The Clinton Foundation,” with a link to a critical article.

The accounts pumping out the tweets created the appearance of authentic outrage but had all the hallmarks of fakes, according to researchers who specialize in “bot” networks — short for robot — that shower social media with phony messages appearing to spring up from the grass roots.

The pro-Trump networks tweet incessantly, but only to praise Trump and bash Clinton and the media, constantly retweeting Trump staff, pro-Trump pundits and other fake accounts, thousands of which recently added “deplorable” to their usernames.

Indeed, the Clinton Foundation tweets follow a pattern of pro-Trump Twitter activity spotted by professionals throughout the campaign — accounts made to look like real people that are instead run by software and designed to amplify a certain messages — that serves to neuter negative coverage of the New York businessman.

“The bot nets usually turn whatever the issue is back on Hillary,” said Phil Howard, a professor at Oxford University’s Internet Institute and the principal investigator at the Computational Propaganda Project, which has closely tracked the networks. Howard has noted the same pattern in response to stories about Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns, with bots alleging that Clinton is keeping even bigger secrets from the public. “They tend to be used to confused or muddy,” he said.

In addition to fully automated bots, Trump has benefited from the Twitter activities of “trolls,” dedicated, human provocateurs, and “cyborgs,” accounts that blend automated activity with human input.

Revelations like Trump’s allegedly illegal use of his foundation to settle lawsuits and the foundation’s allegedly illegal donation to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi have not taken the same toll on Trump that they would on other politicians, signs of what some exasperated commentators are calling a “post-truth election.” And analysts are pointing to the growing role of these bots in polluting the online information environment.

The use of Twitter bots by pro-Trump forces is also noteworthy because the businessman has eschewed many of the traditional requisites of modern campaigning, and he has largely ceded the expensive television ad war to Clinton. Meanwhile, his message dominates the subterranean world of manufactured content on Twitter, a platform that plays an outsize role in shaping the political discourse.

As one hacker, now imprisoned in Colombia, told Bloomberg Businessweek earlier this year about his use of Twitter bots to manipulate elections across South America, “When I realized that people believe what the Internet says more than reality, I discovered that I had the power to make people believe almost anything.”

Before last year, the use of automated scripts in combination with troll labor to influence elections on social media was primarily the province of Latin America, the former Soviet Union, Syria and South Korea, where the nation’s former top intelligence official was indicted in 2013 for allegedly instructing his agency’s Psychological Operation Group to use bots in a misinformation campaign against the opposition party.

It is nearly impossible to trace the financing of these efforts because multiple bot networks often engage in uncoordinated campaigns, and nearly every presidential candidate this cycle has been the beneficiary or target of apparently fraudulent Twitter activity. Further complicating matters, researchers have found that when they publicly identify automated accounts, the bots’ creators will take over and protest that the account has been run manually all along. But the lion’s share of Twitter bots, cyborgs and organized trolls in this election have worked to promote a single candidate: Trump.

“The sheer scale of bot activity being perpetrated on behalf of the Trump campaign is completely unprecedented in American politics,” said Samuel Woolley, director of research at the Computational Propaganda Project, who has traveled to New York City and primary states for a dissertation on the use of Twitter bots in the presidential election. “It’s really evident that there’s hundreds of thousands of political bots that only tweet our pro-Trump content.”

Woolley estimates that 50-55 percent of Clinton’s Twitter traffic — followers, like and retweets — is artificial, a typical proportion for a public figure, compared to a whopping 80 percent for Trump. Woolley said automated propaganda has become one of the biggest communication problems in politics.

A spokesman for Twitter rejected those concerns, pointing to the network’s rules against spam and saying, “Anyone claiming that spam accounts on Twitter are distorting the national political conversation is misinformed.”

And Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks disavowed any ties to automated Twitter activity. “The Trump Campaign and the Trump Organization have not and will not be purchasing any bots for social media,” she wrote in an email.

Whoever controls the Trump bots, the uses of such networks are many. They seek to shape the information environment that voters encounter by harassing critics into silence, spreading misinformation, energizing supporters by making them feel like part of a thriving movement, making the expression of fringe views appear socially acceptable, and shutting down conversation around certain keywords by flooding that conversation with disturbing or useless information.

In the case of pro-Trump bots, a favored tactic is to muddy the waters around the candidate’s most controversial statements by broadcasting contradictory messages about them. Howard said that when online conversation heats up about Trump’s proposed border wall, bots designed to look like Latino Trump supporters will spring into action with mixed messages.

“They will say things like ‘We want a wall too’ or they’ll say, ‘He didn’t say wall, he meant a better border,’ or ‘he meant a wall but it’s actually much smarter than you think,’ ” Howard said.

Howard said the spreading of such mixed messages on Twitter was pioneered by Kremlin bots after a Russian-made missile shot down a Malaysian airliner over eastern Ukraine in July 2014. The networks promoted contradictory reports that Americans shot down the plane or that Ukranians shot it down because they believed Vladimir Putin was aboard. The misinformation campaign successfully muddled public opinion in former Warsaw Pact countries.

“A lot of these unsavory tactics that you would see in international elections are being imported to the US,” said Republican strategist Patrick Ruffini. In April, Ruffini tracked the activity of 465 Twitter accounts that all urged recipients of Ted Cruz robocalls to complain to the Federal Election Commission. He found the accounts tweeted more than 400,000 timesabout Trump in a month and retweeted Trump’s social media director Dan Scavino 13,000 times. He also found that the accounts simultaneously tweeted identical messages promoting “social media marketing tips” and “fashion beauty news.”

Ruffini, like many prominent figures who tweet information adverse to Trump’s interests, was besieged by bots after he publicized those findings. “I had 30,000 mentions over a weekend,” he said. “There is very clearly now a very conscious strategy to try to delegitimize opposition to Trump.”

In the months since Ruffini’s investigation, pro-Trump Twitter bot and cybog activity has grown more sophisticated. According to Howard, the pro-Trump bots activated in recent weeks are from older “sleeper” accounts — more expensive ones that lie low for years after their creation so that they do not appear to have been created in the middle of a campaign for the sole purpose of spreading propaganda. “My concern is that most social media users can’t differentiate between a real person and a good bot,” Howard said.

Today, fewer of the bots are “eggs,” accounts that have not bothered to upload a profile picture and are therefore more easily identified as fraudulent. According to Vlad Shevtsov, a Russian computer scientists who has obsessively tracked fraudulent Twitter activity related to the election, algorithms now scrape profile pictures from the Internet, stamp them with one of a variety of pro-Trump logos and upload them to bot accounts. Shevstov has discovered a number of examples of the algorithms accidentally stamping one pro-Trump logo on top of a scraped picture that already featured another algorithm’s pro-Trump logo, like a rare, misstamped coin.

Since Clinton made her much-criticized remark that half of Trump’s supporters belong in a “basket of deplorables” and his campaign moved to own the label, thousands of Trump’s bot supporters have stayed in step with the messaging by updating the names of their accounts to “Deplorable Melissa,” “Deplorable Mr. Nobody” and “Deplorable Con Man,” who on Monday replied to a tweet by “Deplorable Tax Dude” with a picture of Trump antagonist Mark Cuban posing with a scantily clad woman.

Among other tactics, the “deplorable” accounts have been working to promote hashtags related to Clinton’s health. An account called Deplorable Susie, tweeted “Omg, Hillary’s having a mental breakdown. #SickHillary.” An account called “Deplorable-Eddie T” tweeted an unflattering photo-shopped image of Clinton wearing 3-D glasses with the caption, “Feeling fine & back on the campaign trail ! I just need these glasses so I don’t faint #HillarysHealth.” And “Deplorable Colleen” responded to a Clinton tweet about standing up to Trump with, “Lady U Can’t STAND Unassisted Never mind STAND Up 2 Anything #CrookedHillary #HillarysHealth.”

Clinton’s health became a major news story earlier this month after she fainted at a Labor Day event in New York, but there is now little Twitter activity related to the topic other than manufactured tweets like those, according to Shevtsov.

While pro-Trump bots and cyborgs are far and away the most active, automated Twitter activity it is not regulated by the FEC, and its use extends well beyond promoting the New York businessman.

In June, when Clinton responded to a Trump attack by tweeting at him, “Delete your account,” she earned glowing media attention for breaking this election cycle’s retweet record.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/donald-trump-twitter-army-228923#ixzz4M2FKW5sf
Follow us: @politico on Twitter | Politico on Facebook

But Shevtsov found thousands of bot accounts with variations of the name “Order followers” — barely disguised bots — among those retweeting the former secretary of state. During the Democratic primary, Shevtsov also tracked a large network promoting Bernie Sanders. When Sanders received bad press because a group of supporters known as “Bernie Bros” was apparently harassing journalists online, his digital director, Kenneth Pennington, suspected the Vermont senator was being set up by opponents looking to manufacture negative headlines.

“We’d look at the account and it would be a brand new account created this month and it had four tweets and it was all trying to bait journalists into quoting it,” he said.

Trump has also been the target of Twitter shenanigans. On Tuesday, a photo purporting to show that the post-debate hashtag #TrumpWon originated from accounts in Russia went viral before it was revealed as a fake.

Often, the beneficiaries of bots do not even know about them, because they are controlled by PACs, outside supporters, subcontractors or overzealous staffers. “It’s someone on the team who goes rogue,” said Seth Weathers, a Republican operative who briefly served as Trump’s Georgia state director.

The Computational Propaganda Project has found bot creators in Seattle, Silicon Valley and throughout the country. “Where do these fake messages come from? Content management firms and advertising firms that have been using bots for ages and ages to sell crappy products,” explained Woolley.

While political operatives know which content management firms to go to for Twitter astro-turfing, campaigns take care to keep their distance from such activity with subcontracting arrangements that will not show up on FEC reports. And the firms that create or purchase bots on behalf of politicians take care to cover their tracks.

“They’re smart about it,” said Jim Vidmar, a computer programmer who operates bot networks commercially and has sold to clients working on behalf of House and Senate candidates. “It’s done under total secrecy: profile just created, burner phone, not traceable.”

The pro-Trump activity is especially mystifying because it is so varied. For one, the candidate has inspired significant organic activity from real-life super fans on social media. Many of them spend hours a day on social media, sharing and creating content about the election. Ken Crow, an Iowa Tea Party activist who helped create the grass roots group Citizens for Trump, said the organization has a squad of several supporters dedicated to pushing pro-Trump messages on social media and pushing back on negative stories.

Much bot activity is designed to interact with and energize real supporters like these, blurring the lines between organic and artificial support. “It looks like they’re getting action, so they’re getting reinforced,” said Weathers of the psychology behind using bots to retweet and follow real supporters.

Crow said his Twitter following has nearly tripled to 18,000 since Trump entered the race, and he credited that growth to his use of the #MAGA hashtag, an abbreviation of Make America Great Again. “If you put that in every one of your messages, you get followers,” he said. (According to Shevtsov, the bot networks also engage with tweets by journalists, to subtly reinforce the behavior of tweeting about Trump.)

Other bots are controlled by Trump’s alt-right and white nationalist fans. After experimenting with a script — a short program for automating activity — that automatically replies to Trump’s tweets, Nathan Bernard, a young coder who is neither a Trump supporter nor a white nationalist, started a podcast about Twitter bots. Through those forays into that underworld, Bernard has struck up online conversations with owners of pro-Trump white nationalist Twitter accounts like keksec_org and the now-banished WhiteGenocideTM (which Trump has retweeted more than once), who have told Bernard about their use of bot networks to promote the New York businessman.

Still other pro-Trump bot activity has foreign origins. Last year, journalist Adrian Chen investigated a Russian organization that runs Kremlin-aligned trolls and bots. In December, Chen said he checked in on list of the Kremlin bots and found they had changed their identities to look like American conservatives and were tweeting about Trump — a sign either that Russia is working to boost the Republican nominee or that the bots have been repurposed for a new client.

Trump has placed himself much closer to the bot activity taking place on his behalf, pioneering the unprecedented practice — for an American political figure — of regularly retweeting pro-Trump bots and cyborgs. By Shevtsov’s count, Trump quoted 150 fake accounts in the first three months of 2016 alone. At least some of that appears to be inadvertent, like when Trump infamously retweeted a Benito Mussolini quote from a bot set up by Gawker for the sole purpose of tricking Trump into quoting the Italian fascist dictator.

But Shevtsov believes Trump, or his team, quotes bots intentionally, citing Trumps’s retweet of a bot to promote Miss Universe in January 2015, before his presidential run and his notorious retweet of an unflattering picture of Heidi Cruz.

In March, Trump drove days of coverage when he retweeted a picture of Cruz that had been posted by @Don_Vito_08, an account that recently changed its named to “DEPLORABLE Don Vito” and that Shevtsov has identified as a partly automated pro-Trump cyborg. The Russian computer scientist believes Trump allies planted the photo so that he could retweet it — allowing him to use his oft-deployed defense of inflammatory tweets that he was merely retweeting something.

“If Trump declared himself the author of the picture, it would be too straightforward. It would have looked like a violation of the rules,” wrote Shevtsov on SadBotTrue, his wryly written blog, composed in stilted English, about fraudulent Twitter activity in the presidential election and beyond.

“This is totally and completely false,” Hicks responded, pointing out that bots violate Twitter’s rules.

Because advanced uses of Twitter bots are so new and employed secretly, researchers have had trouble quantifying their impact. Whether pro-Trump bots are making a sizeable impact remains an open question.

Andres Sepulveda, who hacked elections across Latin America and is now serving a 10-year prison sentence in Colombia, is convinced these tactics works.

And Sepulveda told Bloomberg Businessweek he is “100 percent sure” the U.S. presidential election is being manipulated in a disturbing April article about his election-rigging work across the hemisphere.

Supulveda also told the magazine he did most of his work while on the payroll of JJ Rendon, a consultant sometimes called “the Karl Rove of Latin America” who denied Sepulveda’s account of their relationship and said he never employed the jailed hacker to do anything illegal.

Rendon told POLITICO that he does not advise his clients to use bots and that he considers them next to useless. “They are as effective as mosquitos without Zika,” said the Miami-based consultant.

And despite his knowledge of bots, Weathers, the Georgia operative, said he does not advise his clients to use them and does not consider them effective. “They’ve left no mark on history, let’s put it this way,” he said.

At least not yet. But Howard, the Oxford professor, believes they have already affected the information ecosystem around the campaign, beyond the social network itself. And he’s alarmed by the possibility that they have a dramatic last act in store: millions of dormant Twitter bots awakening to unleash a nasty November surprise, spreading misinformation that tips the election at the last minute.

“What keeps me up at night is that a massive bot network might pick up a piece of misinformation the night before the election and really mess with public opinion,” he said. “If [Trump allies] were to activate them the night before the election or the day of and say, ‘Hillary Clinton’s dead’ or something, that would cause huge problems.”

Source: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/donald-trump-twitter-army-228923

Russia is strategically neutered but tactically powerful. Aided by Iran, this would be an operational battle, denying much of the region to the US.

Iran and Syria, both have Russia’s most advanced surface to air missile system, with a range of 150 miles.  While meaningless as a threat to the continental United States, this does pose a threat to planes from US carriers off the Syrian coast and Turkey.  If Iran joins Russia, this poses a threat to US planes flying out of Bahrain and the Persian Gulf.

</end editorial>

World War III Begins If US Continues Bombing Syrian Army