David Guyatt Wrote:Perhaps it's only me who sees all of this as symptomatic that the great US neoliberal empire is crashing and burning and that its time is passing.
Nero, fiddle, fire.
::::thumbsdown::::boom::
Nope it's not only you. However I am stunned by how many politically aware people are hanging on to the fake CIA story. People who should know better. And of course the real story here is the content of those emails. That has been lost in translation. Hillary lost because she was outed for who and what she is. What the DNC did to Bernie causing many Bernie supporters to refuse to support her at the polls.
Terrific articles Paul.
Yep, me too Dawn. Frankly, I'm staggered and it has opened my eyes quite a bit to the blinding effect of partisanship in politics. And yep, the whole point of the Russian did it campaign was, and remains, to deflect from the content of the emails. Now we have a new Russia did it campaign that also has zero factual validity and again the same people are falling over themselves to buy into that also.
::facepalm::
Guess what, David? I'm not a Democrat. I'm a registered Independent. Trump used to be a Democrat until a few years ago.
The whole point of the Russia did it campaign was to deflect from the content of the emails? Seriously? Why are so many Republicans going along with this? To help the Clintons?
Quote:This is a blatantly politicized "report" that is not supported by any evidence, nor is it supported by the other 16 intelligence agencies.
The recent pronouncement by the C.I.A. that Russian hackers intervened in the U.S. presidential election doesn't pass the sniff test--on multiple levels. Let's consider the story on the most basic levels.
1. If the report is so "secret," why is it dominating the news flow?
2. Why was the "secret report" released now?
3. What actual forensic evidence is there of intervention? Were voting machines tampered with? Or is this "secret report" just another dose of fact-free "fake news" like The Washington Post's list of 200 "Russian propaganda" websites?
4. The report claims the entire U.S. intelligence community is in agreement on the "proof of Russian intervention on behalf of Trump" story, but then there's this:
"The C.I.A. presentation to senators about Russia's intentions fell short of a formal U.S. assessment produced by all 17 intelligence agencies. A senior U.S. official said there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency's assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered."
Given that the N.S.A. (National Security Agency) was so secret that its existence was denied for decades, do you really think the NSA is going to go public if it disagrees with the C.I.A.?
Given the structure of the Deep State and the intelligence community, "minor disagreements" could well mean complete, total disavowal of the C.I.A.'s report.
That this is the reality is suggested by the F.B.I.'s denunciation of the report's evidence-free, sweeping conclusion:
FBI Disputes CIA's "Fuzzy And Ambiguous" Claims That Russia Sought To Influence Presidential Election
5. The supposed interventions clearly fall under the purview of the NSA. So why is the C.I.A. going public in what is clearly a politicized report intended to influence the public via massive, sustained coverage in the mainstream media?
6. Notice the double standard: so when the U.S. attempts to influence public opinion in other nations, it's OK, but when other nations pursue the same goal, it's not OK?
7. What are we to make of the sustained campaign to elevate "Russian hackers and propaganda" from signal noise to the deciding factor in the U.S. election?
8. Russian hacking and attempts to influence American public opinion are not new. The intelligence agencies tasked with protecting American cyberspace have long identified state-sponsored hacking from Russia and China as major threats. So why, all of a sudden, are we being told the Russians successfully influenced a U.S. election?
What changed? What new capabilities did they develop?
9. And most importantly, what evidence is there that Russian efforts affected the election? Were digital fingerprints found on voting machine records? Were payments to American media employees uncovered?
Shouldn't statements purported to be "fact" or the "truth" be substantiated beyond "trust us, an agency with a long history of failed intelligence, misinformation and illegal over-reach"?
10. Doesn't it raise alarms that such a momentous accusation is totally devoid of evidence? If you're going public with the conclusion, you have to go public with at least some of the evidence.
Here's the media blitz and some skeptical response:
CIA: Russia intervened to help Trump win
Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House
Former UK Ambassador Blasts "CIA's Blatant Lies", Shows "A Little Simple Logic Destroys Their Claims"
Longtime readers know I have proposed a major divide in the Deep State--the elements of the federal government which don't change regardless of who is in elected office. This includes the intelligence community, the Pentagon, the diplomatic and trade infrastructure, Research and Revelopment, and America's own organs of media "framing" and "placement."
Is the Deep State Fracturing into Disunity? (March 14, 2014)
More recently, I wondered if the more progressive elements of the Deep State recognized the dangers to U.S. security posed by the neocons and their candidate, Hillary Clinton, and had decided to undermine her candidacy:
Could the Deep State Be Sabotaging Hillary? (August 8, 2016)
In other words, it's not the Russians who sabotaged Hillary--it's America's own Deep State that undermined her coronation. It wasn't a matter of personalities; it was much more profound than that. It was about the risks posed by the neocon strategies and policies, and just as importantly, the politicization of the intelligence network.
And this is precisely what we discern in the C.I.A.'s unprecedented and quite frankly, absurd "secret report:" a blatantly politicized "report" that is not supported by any evidence, nor is it supported by the other 16 intelligence agencies. (Silence doesn't mean approval in this sphere.)
[ATTACH=CONFIG]8779[/ATTACH]
We can now discern the warring camps of the Deep State more clearly. On the one side is the C.I.A., the mainstream media, and the civilians who have feasted on wealth and power from their participation in the neocon's Global Project.
On the other side is the Defense Department's own intelligence agencies (D.I.A. et al.), the N.S.A., the F.B.I. and at least a few well-placed civilians who recognize the neocon agenda as a clear and present danger to the security of the nation.
From this perspective, the C.I.A.'s rash, evidence-free "report" is a rear-guard political action against the winning faction of the Deep State. The Deep State elements that profited from the neocon agenda were confident that Hillary's victory would guarantee another eight years of globalist intervention. Her loss means they are now on the defensive, and like a cornered, enraged beast, they are lashing out with whatever they have in hand.
This goes a long way in explaining the C.I.A.'s release of a painfully threadbare and politicized "report."
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
I am delighted to welcome to the international fraternity of Putinbots - SVR and FSB agents witting, unwitting, or merely confused, to a man, woman or somewhere in-between - an American judge:
Jill Stein's Russian hacking claim spectral, borderline irrational,' says U.S. Federal Judge
Quote:In crushing ruling Federal Judge Paul S. Diamond trashes Jill Stein allegation of Russian hacking of voting machines in Pennsylvania as "spectral" and "borderline irrational" and rejects demand for a recount.
On 8th November 2016 Hillary Clinton conceded to Donald Trump.
In her public comments she said this:
"I still believe in America, and I always will. And if you do, then we must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead. Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power.
We don't just respect that. We cherish it. It also enshrines the rule of law; the principle we are all equal in rights and dignity; freedom of worship and expression. We respect and cherish these values, too, and we must defend them."
Ever since "crooked Hillary" has acted wholly in character, showing that when she said all this she didn't mean a word of it. Rather than giving Trump a "chance to lead" she and her campaign have instead worked tirelessly ever since to try to overturn his victory.
The first attempt, using Jill Stein as a patsy, has ended in ignominious failure. Not only did the recount in Wisconsin actually produce more votes for Donald Trump; but Judges have now rejected the attempts to stage recounts in Michigan and Pennsylvania, pointing out that in the absence of a smoking gun' and given Jill Stein's derisory share of the vote there are no grounds for them.
It is however Federal Judge Paul S. Diamond's blistering ruling on Jill Stein's attempt to have a recount in Pennsylvania that bears reading.
The complete text can be found here but in summary, not only was the attempt to get him to order a recount unlawful and "later than last minute" but the claim that the election in Pennsylvania was hacked "borders on the irrational" and is based on "spectral fears that machines were hacked or votes miscounted."
In other words a Federal Judge hearing the "evidence" that Jill Stein and her followers produced of Russian hacking of the voting machines in Pennsylvania, not only concluded that there was none, but said that those claims are based on "spectral fears" and "border on the irrational".
Since the attempt to cast doubt on Donald Trump's victory by forcing recounts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan has failed, Hillary Clinton and her followers have switched tactics by getting their chums in the CIA to reheat the old allegations that the Russians were behind the DNC and Podesta leaks.
There is conclusive evidence that this allegation is wrong, and that the leaks were the work of a Washington insider, and this conclusion is now being backed by a group of former US intelligence officers who drawing on their experience and using their own methodology are now saying the same thing.
Electoral College members inclined to be swayed by the latest hysteria about Russian responsibility for the DNC and Pedestal leaks might care to bear in mind Judge Paul S. Diamond's comments about "borderline irrational" and "spectral fears" in relation to the previous allegation of Russian hacking of voting machines.
In truth the Judge's comments sum up perfectly the madness and paranoia of this whole post-election autumn.
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
Quote:President-elect Donald Trump plans on Tuesday to nominate Exxon Mobil Corp. chief Rex Tillerson for U.S. secretary of state, setting off a confirmation fight that puts the oilman's ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin -- and Trump's own -- in the spotlight.
The nomination is sure to spark a high-profile battle in the U.S. Senate, where three Republicans and several Democrats have already expressed public misgivings about making Tillerson the nation's top diplomat, largely over concerns about his two decades of work with Putin.
Tillerson has accepted Trump's offer, according to a person familiar with the transition. He will reach Exxon's mandatory retirement age of 65 in March and, if confirmed, would be the first oil executive to lead the State Department.
Trump made clear in an interview on Fox News Sunday that he would not back away from defending Tillerson or his work in Russia, calling his global relationships an attribute. He called the executive "a world class player."
"And to me, a great advantage is he knows many of the players," Trump said. "And he knows them well. He does massive deals in Russia. He does massive deals for the company, not for himself, but the company."
Yet those ties aren't viewed as an asset by some of Trump's most prominent Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill. Senators John McCain of Arizona and Marco Rubio of Florida are among lawmakers who have questioned Tillerson's dealings with Putin. Rubio sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, where he could join with Democrats on the panel to block Tillerson's nomination from reaching the Senate floor.
"Being a friend of Vladimir' is not an attribute I am hoping for from a #SecretaryOfState," Rubio said in a tweet on Sunday that was signed with his initials.
Proxy Fight
Confirmation hearings also may become a proxy fight over Trump's position that Putin is an effective leader with whom he can reach agreements, a stance widely unpopular among lawmakers in both parties. Added to the mix is a looming inquiry into Russian meddling in the election, a conclusion reached by the intelligence community in October after investigating hacking of Democratic Party institutions.
Taking that investigation's conclusions further, The Washington Post reported on Friday that the CIA has told senators that Putin's government was actively seeking to help Trump win the election -- a step beyond earlier findings that the goal was to undermine the credibility of the U.S. political process.
President Barack Obama has ordered a full review of the evidence of Russian hacking. Trump has repeatedly rejected the idea that Russia has been pinpointed as the source of the hacks of Democratic Party servers, suggesting that the accusations are politically motivated.
As Exxon's CEO, Tillerson made at least 20 visits to the White House during Obama's two terms, including five after sanctions were imposed on Russia following the country's 2014 military incursion into Ukraine. A White House official at the time said Tillerson wanted to make sure Exxon's European competitors weren't advantaged by the sanctions.
Will Trump's SoS Pick Build the NASAPEC Energy Cartel?
Quote:Credible reports have been circulating over the past couple of days suggesting that President-elect Trump will tap ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as his nominee for Secretary of State.
A lot has already been written since then about how this global businessman, who has an excellent working relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, could greatly facilitate a rapid rapprochement between the US and Russia, thereby ushering in a New Detente in the New Cold War. Comparatively less time, however, has gone into contemplating what this energy tycoon's appointment would mean for the future role of the US oil and natural gas industries.
The US is already a leading energy superpower because of fracking, despite the heavy environmental consequences that this extraction method has and its related hydrological unsustainability, and Trump is expected to apply this as a foreign policy instrument during the course of his upcoming Presidency. He displayed a very favorable attitude to fracking during the campaign season, and he also spoke about the need for the US to lessen its perceived energy dependency on the Mideast. Taken together, these two objectives are predicted to converge with the politicization and weaponization of energy supplies, which is ironically exactly what the US has accused Russia of doing all throughout the 2000s.
The basis for this forecast isn't just the author's subjective interpretation of Trump's energy and foreign policy statements, nor the general direction that the US is moving in to weaponize whatever it can through Fifth-Generation Warfare, but the curious comment that Texas Republican Congressman Pete Olson told Sputnik over the weekend. Commenting on the deal that OPEC reached among most of its members and a few important non-members as well, he out-of-the-blue suggested: "How about this idea called NAPEC, the North American Petroleum Exporting Countries?"
Reflecting on Olson's words, it's indeed possible for the US, Canada, and Mexico, each of which have substantial energy reserves and are already economically integrated through NAFTA, to pragmatically deepen their cooperation even further in forming NAPEC. What's more, since ExxonMobil is a significant investor in each of the three countries' deposits, it's only natural that company CEO and presumed Secretary of State nominee Tillerson could lead the way in this regard if he's confirmed by the Senate. In aggregate, the union of these three players would be a powerful driving force in influencing the global markets, and it could very easily grow to rival OPEC itself. Moreover, there's the very real potential that it could include parts of South America as well in creating what the author has coined as NASAPEC, or the North American-South American Petroleum Exporting Countries.
The US already exercises renewed hegemony over South America as a result of what the author terms Operation Condor 2.0, the pan-continental regime change process that Washington has been pursuing in the southern landmass all throughout the Obama Presidency. This was explained a bit more in detail in the Katehon article "Fidel's Farewell And The Future Of The US-Cuban Rapprochement", but the gist is that the US covertly had a role in orchestrating Paraguay's 2012 'constitutional coup', the 2015 electoral defeat of Kirchner's hand-picked successor (through intense information warfare and 'vulture fund' structural preconditioning), and the 2016 Brazilian 'constitutional coup' of President Dilma Rousseff.
As a result, two of South America's most promising oil and natural gas frontiers Argentina and Brazil are now firmly under US proxy control due to their right-wing reactionary governments' predisposition to their Washington patrons. The former is believed to possess massive fracking deposits in the western regions, whereas the latter already uncovered billions of barrels of oil under the Atlantic midway through the last decade. If their energy reserves were pooled together with NAPEC's to form NASAPEC, then it would dramatically deepen the US' hold over these countries but also relatedly catapult them all to becoming world-class energy players, provided, of course, that the resources can be extracted at the level that optimistic analysts believe.
With this stratagem in mind, the Hybrid War on Venezuela takes on a qualitatively new meaning since it can now convincingly be argued that the USA might also have designs on forcibly incorporating the Bolivarian Republic into this proposed organization and pulling it out of OPEC, which would thus place the world's largest untapped oil reserves under Washington's control and immensely boost the global geopolitical prospects for NASAPEC.
In the event that the US, Canada, and Mexico consolidate into NAPEC and institutionally expand their control over the "SAPEC" of Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela to form NASAPEC, then the global energy system would be shaken to its core and the Western Hemisphere would suddenly emerge as a powerful center of gravity in affecting the worldwide markets. Such a development could possibly compel Russia and Saudi Arabia, and Russia and OPEC more broadly, to expand their nascent cooperation out of hemispheric self-interest, which could interestingly provide more avenues (and potentially yet another breakthrough in the long run) for Moscow's Mideast grand strategy.
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
The regime that some people on the "Left" are trying to defend. Again, can anyone imagine why Putin might have a motive to promote Trump and his alt-right followers? http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/03/world/...putin.html
Throughout the collection of white ethnocentrists, nationalists, populists and neo-Nazis that has taken root on both sides of the Atlantic, Mr. Putin is widely revered as a kind of white knight: a symbol of strength, racial purity and traditional Christian values in a world under threat from Islam, immigrants and rootless cosmopolitan elites.
"I've always seen Russia as the guardian at the gate, as the easternmost outpost of our people," said Sam Dickson, a white supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan lawyer who frequently speaks at gatherings of the so-called alt-right, a far-right fringe movement that embraces white nationalism and a range of racist and anti-immigrant positions. "They are our barrier to the Oriental invasion of our homeland and the great protector of Christendom. I admire the Russian people. They are the strongest white people on earth."
Rather, their newfound enthusiasm for the men inside the Kremlin has everything to do with the Russian government's anti-gay crackdown, a crackdown they relish seeing take place here in America. Social conservatives' latter-day admiration for Russian authoritarianism has its origins in one of the crucial debates that existed between Cold War-era conservative and liberal anti-communists. At the time, conservatives tended to be more willing than liberals, even enthusiastic, to make deals with nasty regimes in the third world, provided they were not communist. From Pinochet's Chile to the Greek military junta to apartheid South Africa, anti-communist governments proclaimed their defense of traditional moral values against the threat of Marxist dictatorship. And they often found a receptive audience in a sector of the American right; see, for instance, Pat Buchanan, who lauded Spanish dictator Francisco Franco as a "Catholic savior" and listed him alongside Pinochet as "soldier-patriots."
That's right, Donald Trump and his alt-right fanbase are hardly the only Americans who deeply admire Vladimir Putin: He has a fairly large fan clubamong politically active U.S. Christian conservatives. It includes some pretty big names, like conservative Evangelical leader Franklin Graham, National Organization for Marriage leader Brian Brown, and American Family Association spokesperson Bryan Fischer. In almost every case it has been his distinctive combination of homophobia and Islamophobia that has made Putin one of the Christian right's favorite international figures. The cultural conservative preference for authoritarian Christian Slavs who are fighting Muslims has, as Beinart notes, carried over from the Serbs to their traditional sponsors in Moscow, and most especially to the former KGB officer who has revived Russia's pre-communist tradition of militantly traditionalist Christianity. Putin's attacks on "gay propaganda" have been particularly heartwarming to Christian-right folk, probably because of echoes they hear of their own longtime warnings about a sinister "homosexual agenda" pervading U.S. politics and culture.
David Guyatt Wrote:Perhaps it's only me who sees all of this as symptomatic that the great US neoliberal empire is crashing and burning and that its time is passing.
Nero, fiddle, fire.
::::thumbsdown::::boom::
Nope it's not only you. However I am stunned by how many politically aware people are hanging on to the fake CIA story. People who should know better. And of course the real story here is the content of those emails. That has been lost in translation. Hillary lost because she was outed for who and what she is. What the DNC did to Bernie causing many Bernie supporters to refuse to support her at the polls.
Terrific articles Paul.
Yep, me too Dawn. Frankly, I'm staggered and it has opened my eyes quite a bit to the blinding effect of partisanship in politics. And yep, the whole point of the Russian did it campaign was, and remains, to deflect from the content of the emails. Now we have a new Russia did it campaign that also has zero factual validity and again the same people are falling over themselves to buy into that also.
::facepalm::
Guess what, David? I'm not a Democrat. I'm a registered Independent. Trump used to be a Democrat until a few years ago.
The whole point of the Russia did it campaign was to deflect from the content of the emails? Seriously? Why are so many Republicans going along with this? To help the Clintons?
Tracy, please present your evidence that Russia hacked the DNC email server and provided the data to Wikileaks.
Why do Republicans believe it? Who knows what goes through people's minds. Even so, I'm talking about facts, not belief. People used to believe the Earth was square. It's not. Mankind has an infinite ability to believe in all sorts of outlandish ideas. Doing so is their privilege, generally speaking. However, that doesn't make anything they believe true or even credible. As with the manufactured story that the Russians hacked the DNC email and leaked them to Wikileaks.
Allow me to respectfully repeat my post No. 38 above wherein Clapper said in his resignation address after the election that he - and US intelligence - "don't have good oversight of when or how Wikileaks obtained the hacked emails." Please explain to me how anyone can get around that statement?
When you take Clapper's statement and add it to those whistleblowers who emphatically state that the email leaks came from a disgruntled US intelligence worker - almost certainly from the NSA (given William Binney's comments on this subject), the Russia did it angle dissolves back into the smoke and mirrors that birthed it.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
David Guyatt Wrote:Perhaps it's only me who sees all of this as symptomatic that the great US neoliberal empire is crashing and burning and that its time is passing.
Nero, fiddle, fire.
::::thumbsdown::::boom::
Nope it's not only you. However I am stunned by how many politically aware people are hanging on to the fake CIA story. People who should know better. And of course the real story here is the content of those emails. That has been lost in translation. Hillary lost because she was outed for who and what she is. What the DNC did to Bernie causing many Bernie supporters to refuse to support her at the polls.
Terrific articles Paul.
Yep, me too Dawn. Frankly, I'm staggered and it has opened my eyes quite a bit to the blinding effect of partisanship in politics. And yep, the whole point of the Russian did it campaign was, and remains, to deflect from the content of the emails. Now we have a new Russia did it campaign that also has zero factual validity and again the same people are falling over themselves to buy into that also.
::facepalm::
Guess what, David? I'm not a Democrat. I'm a registered Independent. Trump used to be a Democrat until a few years ago.
Just for clarity Tracy, Dawn and I and many others here are FB friends and we discuss this and related subjects daily and in detail there.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
Quote:Late in May 2014, a group calling itself CyberBerkut leaked a map of the Ukrainian Dnipropetrovsk Oblast administration's IT resources, information on the Central Election Commission of Ukraine's servers, and the correspondence of its staff. In the following days, which included the country's presidential election, CyberBerkut claimed they had again compromised the election commission's servers, leaked more confidential information, conducted a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack the commission's website (which instructed potential voters how and where to vote), and blocked the phones of election organizers. The group also released documents implying that the recently appointed governor of the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Igor Kolomoisky, was complicit in pro-European Ukrainian plans to promote the "correct" candidate for president of Ukraine.
Despite the best effort of the Russian group behind CyberBerkut, the center-right, pro-European Petro Poroshenko won the Ukrainian presidency. But CyberBerkut wasn't finished. Almost exactly five months later, the group used similar tactics in the days preceding the Ukrainian parliamentary elections. The results were largely the same: Pro-European candidates won the majority of seats. An uninitiated observer might be keen to discard these events as failed electioneering. After all, Moscow did not succeed in getting its men elected. But to label the operation a failure is to assume that the primary goal was to get pro-Russia officials elected. Over the course of the past four months, we have seen similar operations unfold in the United States, and as was the case in Ukraine there are reasons to believe that swaying the election is not the primary objective. Just as in the case of the CyberBerkut incidents, among the key observers of these operations in the United States have been cyber-security firms like FireEye. The manager of their information operations analysis team recently shared some of their findings with me, which informs the analysis below.
On the surface, the United States has been targeted by a series of cyber operations that have resulted in email and other confidential information falling into the hands of individuals or groups that go by the names "Guccifer 2.0", "DCLeaks", and "WikiLeaks." These monikers have then strategically leaked the stolen information in a way designed to sway U.S. public opinion. Due to the content and timing of the leaks, some posit that this is an attempt by an outside power, Russia, to nudge the U.S. general election to a Trump victory.
This view, however, is myopic and betrays a lack of understanding or simplification of Russian foreign policy and influence operations. Beyond simple electioneering, what we are experiencing is a broader attempt by the Russian government to seed uncertainty in the institutions that underpin American democracy and power both hard and soft. As Dmitry Adamsky notes, Russia's strategic doctrine "is primarily a strategy of influence, not of brute force," which seeks to break "the internal coherence of the enemy systemand not about its integral annihilation." Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, espouses a similar philosophy in considering how to "radically shift regime behavior."
As everyone who has read a newspaper in the last few years knows, relations between the United States and Russia are strained. Before the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence outright pointed the finger at Russia for the hack of the Democratic National Committee's server and other campaign-related compromises, several private cybersecurity companies had attributed the data breaches and subsequent leaks to Russia. Here, I will describe how attribution works in a case like this, highlight some of the key data points that show the Russian state is behind this operation, unpack what these events reveal about Russian organization and motivation around cyber and influence operations, and explore options for a U.S. response.
How Does Attribution of a Covert Operation Work?
All cyber operations are covert, at least in the planning and execution stages. Russia's cyber operations are no different. According to data provided for this article by the private cybersecurity company, FireEye, two separate but coordinated teams under the Kremlin are running the campaign. APT 28, also known as "FancyBear," has been tied to Russia's foreign military intelligence agency, the Main Intelligence Agency or GRU. APT 29, aka "CozyBear," has been tied to the Federal Security Service or FSB. Both have been actively targeting the United States. According to FireEye, they have only appeared in the same systems once, which suggests a high level of coordination a departure from what we have seen and come to expect from Russian intelligence. So how does an intelligence agency or company go about attributing behavior that is by definition secretive, and does the fact that this activity is taking place (mostly) online change the procedure?
In essence, experts rely on a bevy of technical and non-technical trend data, or what FireEye threat intelligence analyst Will Glass explains as "the careful accumulation of multiple pieces of evidence in sufficient quantity of time." These pieces of evidence include things like the scope, scale, and sophistication of an operation, the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) the team employs, as well as any discernable motivation for the attacks. These factors combine to form what Glass describes as the "fingerprint for their activities," and "informs an analytic assessment of who is likely responsible."
Thomas Rid and Ben Buchanan further unpack this fingerprint by breaking the attribution process out into three tiers: technical, operational, and strategic. For our purpose, understanding how attributional evidence works, we will depart slightly from their framework and use the same descriptive tiers to discuss the relevant evidence at each level.
The technical layer includes indicators of compromise (like unusual network traffic, anomalous user activity, and geographical irregularities in logins), atomic indicators (like "IP addresses, email addresses, domain names, and small pieces of text" used by the attackers), and the specific tools and malware deployed by the attackers.
The second, operational layer can be described to analyze the human side of an operation. It is at this level that TTPs, like the mode of entry was it a spear phishing attack, a spoofed website, or some other form of entry? the stealthiness of the attack, and the way the attacking team operated once they gained access to the system, bear relevance. Finally, the third, strategic layer helps contextualize the event.
The strategic layer widens the aperture of the intelligence analysts' lenses and allows the would-be attributers to examine things like concurrent and relevant global trends and geopolitics that may help connect technical and operational dots. When the adversary, or group that perpetrates the hacks, also strategically leaks the information obtained from the hack or hacks, the lines between dots of evidence become increasingly clearer.
How Do We Know It Was the Russians?
With the technical, operational, strategic framework in mind, what makes these cybersecurity companies and the U.S. government so confident that Russia is behind these hacks and leaks?
In addition to the usual timestamps and TTPs, one major piece of technical evidence presents itself. According to Chris Porter, who heads FireEye's strategic intelligence teams, the tools used to compromise the Democratic National Committee, the CHOPSTICK and SeaDaddy malware, are tools that we have only ever seen used by APT28 and APT29 respectively.
Operationally, the way the malware is deployed fits with what we know about Russian intelligence's offensive cyber operations. They typically either spoof a website or conduct a targeted spear phishing campaign to install a dropper and eventually achieve remote access to machines and infrastructure. Furthermore, FireEye has discerned patterns in the registration of the fancybear.net and dcleaks.com domains that appear to "match up with the domain registration behavior seen from APT28 in the past."
The modus operandi to spread the hacked information also betrays Russian signatures. First, the agents behind the attacks appear to be coopting well known hacking brands, like Anonymous, Guccifer, and PravSector (a Ukrainian political organization). But the activity of these spoofed identities does not comport with the activities we have come to expect from hacktivist groups and their loose affiliates. For example, the tweets and other social media activities undertaken by a group calling themselves the "official Anonymous Poland Twitter" (@AnPoland) strangely received no attention from other factions within Anonymous when they attempted to spread leaked World Anti-Doping Agency data. And the reasons to believe that Guccifer 2.0 is not who he says he is have been well documented. In short, these groups have assumed identities that seem to tie them to established hacktivist groups, but there is no evidence of any actual affiliation between these new monikers and the established hacktivist brands.
Certain tactics around messaging and timing correlate to what FireEye observed of Russian information activity in Ukraine around the annexation of Crimea and the military action in eastern oblasts. In Ukraine, the group CyberBerkut appeared to run both the network operations (the hacking to steal the sensitive data) and the information operations (the media outreach to disseminate the information). The skillset required to successfully conduct the relatively complex network operations is very different from the skillset needed to effectively leverage an information operation. We have seen the same trends with Guccifer 2.0, DCLeaks, and WikiLeaks. Moreover, according to FireEye's team, the fact that the data breaches and the information leaks (or announcements that the information is to be leaked) happen in quick succession suggests a team structure with a healthy division of labor, discussed in greater detail below.
Finally, when we take the strategic context into account, the picture sharpens. We have seen the Russian government attempt to manipulate narratives in a way that suits their interests perhaps more than any other state. In addition to the campaign in Ukraine, there is strong evidence to suggest that the Russian state has attempted to coerce political narratives in Estonia, Czech Republic, and within their own country.
Further, as of January 2016, influence operations were officially engrained in Russian national strategic doctrine. According to the doctrine, the national security organs of the Russian state must continue to be prepared for
growing confrontation in the global information space, due to the desire of some countries to use information and communication technologies to achieve their geopolitical goals, including through the manipulation of public opinion and falsification of history.
What Can We Learn About the Russian Playbook?
As many others have observed, this type of activity is not exactly new. It is just new that the United States is on the receiving end. Russian information operations do not necessarily push a cohesive message. Instead, they tend to identify key audiences and feed information specifically intended for that group. This leads to inconsistent and even contradictory messaging. In a way, this plays into the hands of the Russian operators whose goal is to sow uncertainty and dissolve confidence in any dominant narrative.
Russian intelligence agencies have been investing in this capability for years, and the organizations appear to retain knowledge over time with regard to how to both organize and operationalize a campaign. As mentioned above, there is reason to believe that a division of labor has occurred within the teams conducting these operations. At least four discrete skills are needed. First are the on-keyboard operators, who are tasked with the network operations, or hacking, portions of the campaign. In support of these on-keyboard operators are researchers who provide the on-keyboard operators with the tools to carry out the job. These tools can be technical tools, like malware, or social engineering instructions. Third, are some more ordinary code developers that help scale the operation and provide the backbone upon which all the others operate. Finally, there are the information operation specialists.
Because the information operators target specific populations and specific journalists with specific information, there is reason to believe that the information operations specialists possess an above average understanding of the local politics and political factions within the United States. Take, for example, the concerted effort to feed damning DNC information to Gawker and the Smoking Gun, two left leaning media outlets, during the Democratic primary. This was a nuanced effort to reach a far left, Sanders-supporting audience to stir up discontent with American institutions, the Democratic Party, and primary. Due to this team structure, and regional specialization, the Russians have been enabled to leverage the pervasiveness of social media to reach their intended audiences in a way that simply was not possible before Facebook and Twitter. According to FireEye's Information Operations Manager, the overall complexity of these teams is on a level similar to that of U.S. intelligence agencies and is only likely to be housed within a government agency.
What is Russia's Overarching Goal?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the Russian's ability to pick out specific messages for specific audiences, several complementary goals appear, aimed at different parts of U.S. society: a general audience and the political elite that are in-tune with national and international security policy.
For the general audience, the goal is likely two-fold. The first is to shake Americans' confidence in public institutions, to include political parties, democratic processes, and the media. The second, slightly less obvious, goal is likely to deflect some attention away from other Russian actions around the world, like their ongoing questionable operations in Syria and Ukraine.
The U.S. national security intelligentsia likely also see three additional goals. First, Moscow is signaling to the U.S. government, in response to the Snowden revelations of the sophistication and advanced nature of the National Security Agency's capabilities. Second, and tied to that, this is an attempt to gain a bit of attention and recognition for Russian cyber capabilities and prestige on the world stage. Finally, this is likely an attempt by Russia to figure out where America's redline might be in this context.
What is to Be Done?
The Russian actions have put the Obama administration in a sticky situation for a number of reasons. There is little the administration can do that would dissuade these operations, because, with Russia's still plausible deniability, the kind of responses the administration would need be rather severe to make the Russian's cease operations and could risk an escalatory response form Russia. In order to withstand that type of response from Russia, the administration would need the American public behind them a tenuous prospect at best.
While the U.S. government's hands are somewhat tied, there are a couple of simple actions that U.S. organs could take to both inform the Russians that this will not stand and help reshape the narratives the Russian operations have distorted. First, the U.S. government could expel SVR and GRU operatives posed in Washington under diplomatic cover. This is a relatively common tactic to inform an adversary that their intelligence operations in your country are approaching an unacceptable point. Second, U.S. media can do a better job of pointing out inconsistencies in the narratives that the Russians have constructed, as Kurt Eichenwald did last week when he pointed out that he was not, in fact, Sid Blumenthal, despite Russian and Trump camp insistence to the contrary.
Robert Morgus is a Policy Analyst with New America's Cybersecurity Initiative where his research focuses on the intersection of international affairs and cybersecurity. Morgus has spoken about cybersecurity at a number of international forums including NATO CCDCOE's CyCon, the Global Conference on Cyberspace at The Hague, and CyFy 2015 in New Delhi, India. He contributed a chapter to the upcoming book, Cyber Insecurity, and his research and writing has been published in The New York Times, Slate, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, peer-reviewed academic journals, and numerous other national and international media outlets. Special thanks to Aylea Baldwin, Chris Porter, Will Glass, and the rest of the team at FireEye for the data and insights they provided for this article.
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
David, I no more have the hard evidence that Russia did it than you have any hard evidence that it was leaked by someone in the NSA, or for that matter who exactly killed JFK! On this forum we have to deal with a lot of circumstantial evidence; we have to examine motives, means and opportunity to infer likely suspects.
The quote you gave from Clapper doesn't question that the emails were hacked, only when and how Wikileaks received them. Again, as I said earlier, a foreign intelligence agency is going to hand those off using cut-out organizations to hide their involvement. Clapper also had this to say in October:
"The emails released on sites like WikiLeaks are consistent with methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts," Clapper said before a security summit on Thursday. "We wouldn't have made [the statement] unless we were very confident." http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/ru...per-230085
You think an NSA employee leaked them? Well, the head of the NSA disagrees with that.
On Tuesday, the director of the National Security Agency, Admiral Michael Rogers, was asked about the WikiLeaks release of hacked information during the campaign, and he said, "This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect." He added, "This was not something that was done casually. This was not something that was done by chance. This was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily." http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016...6-campaign
That's after Charles Smith wrote in that blog post above: "On the other side is the Defense Department's own intelligence agencies (D.I.A. et al.), the N.S.A., the F.B.I. and at least a few well-placed civilians who recognize the neocon agenda as a clear and present danger to the security of the nation."
The "dispute" within the intelligence agencies (including the FBI) is not that there was Russian hacking. It's whether Russians intended to merely disrupt the entire election, or if they intended to actively help Trump win.
Quote:In spring 2014, a funny story crossed our social media feeds. A petition on whitehouse.gov called for "sending Alaska back to Russia," and it quickly amassed tens of thousands of signatures. The media ran a number of amused stories on the event, and it was quickly forgotten.
The petition seemed odd to us, and so we looked at which accounts were promoting it on social media. We discovered that thousands of Russian-language bots had been repetitively tweeting links to the petition for weeks before it caught journalists' attention.
Those were the days. Now, instead of pranking petitions, Russian influence networks online are interfering with the 2016 U.S. election. Many people, especially Hillary Clinton supporters, believe that Russia is actively trying to put Donald Trump in the White House.
And the evidence is compelling. A range of activities speaks to a Russian connection: the theft of emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign officials, hacks surrounding voter rolls and possibly election machines, Putin's overt praise for Trump, and the curious Kremlin connections of Trump campaign operatives Paul Manafort and Carter Page.
But most observers are missing the point. Russia is helping Trump's campaign, yes, but it is not doing so solely or even necessarily with the goal of placing him in the Oval Office. Rather, these efforts seek to produce a divided electorate and a president with no clear mandate to govern. The ultimate objective is to diminish and tarnish American democracy. Unfortunately, that effort is going very well indeed.
Russia's desire to sow distrust in the American system of government is not new. It's a goal Moscow has pursued since the beginning of the Cold War. Its strategy is not new, either. Soviet-era "active measures" called for using the "force of politics" rather than the "politics of force" to erode American democracy from within. What is new is the methods Russia uses to achieve these objectives.
We have been tracking Russian online information operations since 2014, when our interest was piqued by strange activity we observed studying online dimensions of jihadism and the Syrian civil war. When experts published content criticizing the Russian-supported Bashar al Assad regime, organized hordes of trolls would appear to attack the authors on Twitter and Facebook. Examining the troll social networks revealed dozens of accounts presenting themselves as attractive young women eager to talk politics with Americans, including some working in the national security sector. These "honeypot" social media accounts were linked to other accounts used by the Syrian Electronic Army hacker operation. All three elements were working together: the trolls to sow doubt, the honeypots to win trust, and the hackers (we believe) to exploit clicks on dubious links sent out by the first two.
The Syrian network did not stand alone. Beyond it lurked closely interconnected networks tied to Syria's allies, Iran and Russia. Many of these networks were aimed at U.S. political dissenters and domestic extremist movements, including militia groups, white nationalists, and anarchists.
Today, that network is still hard at work, running at peak capacity to destroy Americans' confidence in their system of government. We've monitored more than 7,000 social media accounts over the last 30 months and at times engaged directly with them. Trump isn't the end of Russia's social media and hacking campaign against America, but merely the beginning. Here is what we've learned.
The Russian Social Media Approach: Soviet Union's "Active Measures" On Steroids
The United States and its European allies have always placed state-to-state relations at the forefront of their international strategies. The Soviet system's effort to undermine those relations during the Cold War, updated now by modern Russia, were known as "active measures."
A June 1992 U.S. Information Agency report on the strategy explained:
It was often very difficult for Westerners to comprehend this fundamentally different Soviet approach to international relations and, as a result, the centrality to the Soviets (now Russians) of active measures operations was gravely underappreciated.
Active measures employ a three-pronged approach that attempts to shape foreign policy by directing influence in the following ways: state-to-people, people-to-people, and state-to-state. More often than not, active measures sidestep traditional diplomacy and normal state-to-state relationships. The Russian government today employs the state-to-people and people-to-people approaches on social media and the internet, directly engaging U.S. and European audiences ripe for an anti-American message, including the alt-right and more traditional right-wing and fascist parties. It also targets left-wing audiences, but currently at a lower tempo.
Until recently, Western governments focused on state-to-state negotiations with Putin's regime largely missed Russian state-to-people social media approaches. Russia's social media campaigns seek five complementary objectives to strengthen Russia's position over Western democracies:
Undermine citizen confidence in democratic governance;
Foment and exacerbate divisive political fractures;
Erode trust between citizens and elected officials and democratic institutions;
Popularize Russian policy agendas within foreign populations;
Create general distrust or confusion over information sources by blurring the lines between fact and fiction
In sum, these influence efforts weaken Russia's enemies without the use of force. Russian social media propaganda pushes four general themes to advance Moscow's influence objectives and connect with foreign populations they target.
Political messages are designed to tarnish democratic leaders or undermine institutions. Examples include allegations of voter fraud, election rigging, and political corruption. Leaders can be specifically targeted, for instance by promoting unsubstantiated claims about Hillary Clinton's health, or more obviously by leaking hacked emails.
Financial propaganda weakens citizen and investor confidence in foreign markets and posits the failure of capitalist economies. Stoking fears over the national debt, attacking institutions such as the Federal Reserve, and attempts to discredit Western financial experts and business leaders are all part of this arsenal.
In one example from August, Disneyland Paris was the site of a reported bomb scare. Social media accounts on Twitter reported that the park had been evacuated, and several news outlets including Russian propaganda stations RT and Sputnik published alarming stories based on the tweets, which escalated in hysteria as the afternoon stretched on. In fact, the park had not been evacuated. But that didn't stop Disney's stock from taking a temporary hit. This fluctuation could be exploited by someone who knew the fake scare was coming, but we do not have access to the data that would allow us to know whether this happened.
Social issues currently provide a useful window for Russian messaging. Police brutality, racial tensions, protests, anti-government standoffs, online privacy concerns, and alleged government misconduct are all emphasized to magnify their scale and leveraged to undermine the fabric of society.
Finally, wide-ranging conspiracy theories promote fear of global calamity while questioning the expertise of anyone who might calm those fears. Russian propaganda operations since 2014 have stoked fears of martial law in the United States, for instance, by promoting chemtrails and Jade Helm conspiracy theories. More recently, Moscow turned to stoking fears of nuclear war between the United States and Russia.
For the Kremlin, this is not just focused on the outside world. Russian news organizations bombard Russian citizens with the same combination of content. Steve Rosenberg, a BBC News correspondent in Moscow, filmed the Russian domestic equivalent of this approach on November 1, showing Russian language news headlines inciting fears such as impending nuclear war, a U.S.-Russia confrontation in Syria, and the potential for an assassination of Donald Trump.
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The Confluence of Information and Cyberspace
Russian active measures use a blend of overt and covert channels to distribute political, financial, social, and calamitous messages (see above). During the Soviet era, "white" active measures were overt information outlets directly attributable to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Today, RT and Sputnik push Kremlin-approved English-language news on television and the Internet. These outlets broadcast a mix of true information (the vast majority of content), manipulated or skewed stories, and strategically chosen falsehoods. RT's slogan, "Question More," aptly fits their reporting style seeding ideas of conspiracy or wrongdoing without actually proving anything.
This "white" content provides ammunition for "gray" measures, which employ less overt outlets controlled by Russia, as well as so-called useful idiots that regurgitate Russian themes and "facts" without necessarily taking direction from Russia or collaborating in a fully informed manner.
During the Cold War, gray measures used semi-covert Communist parties, friendship societies, and non-governmental organizations to engage in party-to-party and people-to-people campaigns. Today, gray measures on social media include conspiracy websites, data dump websites, and seemingly credible news aggregators that amplify disinformation and misinformation.
Conspiracy sites include outlets such as InfoWars and Zero Hedge, along with a host of lesser-known sites that repeat and repackage the same basic content for both right- and left-wing consumers. Sometimes, these intermediaries will post the same stories on sites with opposite political orientations.
Data dump websites, such as Wikileaks and DC Leaks, overtly claim to be exposing corruption and promoting transparency by uploading private information stolen during hacks. But the timing and targets of their efforts help guide pro-Russian themes and shape messages by publishing compromising information on selected adversaries.
The people who run these sites do not necessarily know they are participants in Russian agitprop, or at least it is very difficult to prove conclusively that they do. Some sites likely receive direct financial or operational backing, while others may be paid only with juicy information.
Sincere conspiracy theorists can get vacuumed up into the social networks that promote this material. In at least one case, a site described by its creator as parody was thoroughly adopted by Russian influence operators online and turned into an unironic component of their promoted content stream, at least as far as the network's targeted "news" consumers are concerned.
A small army of social media operatives a mix of Russian-controlled accounts, useful idiots, and innocent bystanders are deployed to promote all of this material to unknowing audiences. Some of these are real people, others are bots, and some present themselves as innocent news aggregators, providing "breaking news alerts" to happenings worldwide or in specific cities. The latter group is a key tool for moving misinformation and disinformation from primarily Russian-influenced circles into the general social media population. We saw this phenomenon at play in recent reports of a second military coup in Turkey and unsubstantiated reports of an active shooter that led to the shutdown of JFK Airport. Some news aggregators may be directly controlled by Russia, while other aggregators that use algorithmic collection may be the victims of manipulation.
"Black" active measures are now easier to execute than they were for the Soviets. During the Cold War, according to the 1992 USIA report, these included:
… the use of agents of influence, forgeries, covert media placements and controlled media to covertly introduce carefully crafted arguments, information, disinformation, and slogans into the discourse in government, media, religious, business, economic, and public arenas in targeted countries.
Black active measures create both risks and costs. Agents deployed into the West must avoid detection or risk state-to-state consequences. The KGB's Cold War efforts to keep these operations secret bore significant financial costs while producing little quantifiable benefit. Stories were difficult to place in mainstream media outlets, and the slow process made it challenging to create momentum behind any one theme.
On social media, this process is far easier, more effective, and relatively difficult to attribute. Without stepping foot in America, Russia's coordinated hackers, honeypots, and hecklers influence Americans through people-to-people engagement.
Hackers provide the fuel for themes and narratives. Initially, hackers concentrated on defacements, denial of service, and misinformation posted on compromised social media accounts. By 2015, the Kremlin's hacking efforts were much more sophisticated, coalescing into two distinct, competing hacking collectives: Fancy Bear (APT 28), possibly operated by Russian military intelligence (GRU), and Cozy Bear (APT 29), possibly operated by Russia's foreign intelligence service (FSB).
The most notorious Russian-linked hacker, using the handle Guccifer2.0, targets current and former U.S. government officials, American security experts, and media personalities by seeking access to their private communications and records. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta provide two current examples, but there will be many more to come. Today, Guccifer2.0 posts threats of election meddling this coming Tuesday.
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In addition to phishing and cracking attacks, these hackers are aided by honeypots, a Cold War term of art referring to an espionage operative who sexually seduced or compromised targets. Today's honeypots may include a component of sexual appeal or attraction, but they just as often appear to be people who share a target's political views, obscure personal hobbies, or issues related to family history. Through direct messaging or email conversations, honeypots seek to engage the target in conversations seemingly unrelated to national security or political influence.
These honeypots often appear as friends on social media sites, sending direct messages to their targets to lower their defenses through social engineering. After winning trust, honeypots have been observed taking part in a range of behaviors, including sharing content from white and gray active measures websites, attempting to compromise the target with sexual exchanges, and most perilously, inducing targets to click on malicious links or download attachments infected with malware.
One of us directly experienced how social media direct messages from hackers or influencers seek to compromise or sway a target by using social engineering to build a rapport. Operators may engage the target's friends or acquaintances, drawing them into conversations to encourage trust. Once conversations are started, an agent of influence will be introduced into the group and will subsequently post on Russian themes from grey outlets or introduce malicious links.
When targets click on malicious links, Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear extract personal information from public officials, media personalities, and American experts and selectively dump the content obtained at opportune times. The goal is to increase popular mistrust of political leaders and people with expertise or influence in specific circles of interest to Russia, such as national security. In some cases, experts criticizing Russia have had their computers mysteriously compromised by destructive malware and their research destroyed.
Online hecklers, commonly referred to as trolls, energize Russia's active measures. Ringleader accounts designed to look like real people push organized harassment including threats of violence designed to discredit or silence people who wield influence in targeted realms, such as foreign policy or the Syrian civil war. Once the organized hecklers select a target, a variety of volunteers will join in, often out of simple antisocial tendencies. Sometimes, they join in as a result of the target's gender, religion, or ethnic background, with anti-Semitic and misogynistic trolling particularly prevalent at the moment. Our family members and colleagues have been targeted and trolled in this manner via Facebook and other social media.
Hecklers and honeypots can also overlap. For instance, we identified hundreds of accounts of ostensibly American anti-government extremists that are actually linked to Russian influence operations. These accounts create noise and fear, but may also draw actual anti-government extremists into compromising situations. Based on our observations, the latter effort has not been widely successful so far among anti-government extremists, who tend to stay in their own social networks and are less likely to interact with Russian influence accounts, but our analysis points to greater overlap with networks involving American white nationalists.
ussia's honeypots, hecklers, and hackers have run amok for at least two years, achieving unprecedented success in poisoning America's body politic and creating deep dissent, including a rise in violent extremist activity and visibility. Posting hundreds of times a day on social media, thousands of Russian bots and human influence operators pump massive amounts of disinformation and harassment into public discourse.
This "computational propaganda," a term coined by Philip Howard, has the cumulative effect of creating Clayton A. Davis at Indiana University calls a "majority illusion, where many people appear to believe something ….which makes that thing more credible." The net result is an American information environment where citizens and even subject-matter experts are hard-pressed to distinguish fact from fiction. They are unsure who to trust and thus more willing to believe anything that supports their personal biases and preferences.
The United States disbanded the U.S. Information Agency after the Cold War and currently fields no apparatus to detect and mitigate Russia's social media influence campaign. As seen in America's disjointed counter narratives against the Islamic State, efforts to create any kind of U.S. information strategy are plagued by disparate and uncoordinated efforts strewn among many military, diplomatic, and intelligence commands. American cyber operations and hacking reside separately with the National Security Agency. Russia, on the other hand, seamlessly integrates the two efforts to devastating effect.
After Election Day: What to do about Russia's Active Measures?
The most overwhelming element of Russia's online active measures over the last year relate to the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. Russian promotion of Trump not only plagues Clinton, but likely helped sideline other GOP candidates in early 2016 with a more traditional anti-Russia view of foreign policy. It is impossible to assess whether Donald Trump is even fully aware of these efforts, let alone complicit. Setting aside that question for a moment, some readers will immediately ask how we are so sure all this activity goes back to Russia?
There are a number of technical indicators, most tellingly the synchronization of messaging and disinformation with "white" outlets such as RT and Sputnik, as well as the shocking consistency of messaging through specific social networks we have identified.
Dmitri Alperovich of the cyber-security firm Crowdstrike first attributed the DNC hacks to Russia. He explained in a recent War on the Rocks podcast:
The important thing about attribution…is that it's not that much different from the physical world. Just like someone can plan a perfect bank heist and get away with it, you can do that in the cyber-domain, but you can almost never actually execute a series of bank heists over the course of many years and get away with it. In fact, the probability of you not getting caught is miniscule. And the same thing is true in cyber-space because eventually you make mistakes. Eventually you repeat tradecraft. It's hard to sort of hide the targets you're going after…
There are other, less subtle indications as well, for instance, a notification from Google: "We believe we detected government backed attackers trying to steal your password. This happens to less than 0.1% of all Gmail users." When one of us receives these messages, we feel confident we're on the right trail.
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For his part, Trump rejects the idea that Russia is involved and claims it is impossible to know either way. Shane Harris commented:
It is startling how he is the only one, it seems, who does not want to acknowledge what 17 intelligence agencies and a lot of technical experts all agree on and his insistence that it could be anyone just flies in the face of the available evidence.
Trump's business ties to Russia and those of his key advisers have been documented by several journalists, including Harris, who reported that Republican officials were blocking efforts to investigate ties between Trump and Russia.
Regardless of the extent of Trump's direct knowledge about Russia's intelligence activities, active measures have achieved enormous success on the back of his presidential campaign. Russia sees Trump as a tool to undermine its American adversaries. In that regard, they've already achieved their goal and possess the potential to exceed their expectations. As noted previously, the goal of these efforts may not be to elect Trump as president, but rather to ensure the election result is as divided and negative as possible, as reflected in historically low approval ratings for both candidates.
A Trump victory could pave the way for Russian ascendance and American acquiescence, but the candidate's unpredictability may carry more risk than Vladimir Putin would prefer. It is one thing to stoke fears of nuclear war; it is entirely another to risk the actuality. A Trump loss may be adequately beneficial to Russia in the short-term and of even greater benefit over the long term, particularly if the candidate indulges his not-so-veiled hints that he could engage in an ongoing battle to tarnish the legitimacy of the electoral system. A Trump loss may lead to a Trump television and social media venture, a vehicle to sustain his supporters' angst and perhaps ultimately becoming a high-profile gray active measures outlet.
There are many possible scenarios for the future direction of Russian active measures. Additional damaging information may have been withheld from documented hacks of U.S. political actors, and as-yet undisclosed information perhaps from a hack of Republican Party emails already suggested by some media reports may emerge after the election regardless of who wins. Should Russia conduct such data dumps through Wikileaks, for instance, it would create an appearance of balance while also damaging the Republican Party, which almost certainly has at least as much embarrassing material as the DNC. Regardless of who wins, Russian operators might save particularly damaging information for release after the inauguration, when talk of impeachment could further diminish his or her influence in Washington and abroad.
Globally, the implications of Russia's social media active measures are dire. Social media has played a key role in controversial decisions such as Brexit, and in politics and elections around the world, including those of France, Estonia and Ukraine. In heated political contests such as Brexit and the U.S. presidential election, Russian social media active measures could tip the balance of an electoral outcome by influencing a small fraction of a voting public.
Russian employment of bots and covert personas spells trouble for social media companies, too. Their aggressive behavior erodes trust between consumers and the platforms they enjoy. Social media users will not be sure what to believe or who to trust, and they will either limit their sharing or leave social media life altogether after harassment and misinformation. Mainstream media should also reflect on having fallen victim to Russian propaganda time and again in such a way that has made them accomplices to the Kremlin's efforts to damage the American body politic. They can claim to be unwitting accomplices, but given all of the public information on the nature of this Russian information warfare campaign, such claims lack credibility.
The Obama administration has been slow to assess and respond to Russia's social media manipulation, so Russia continues to push the envelope. The U.S. government will need to rapidly develop a strategy to mitigate Russian active measures starting in January 2017. How and when will they counter Russian aggression online? How will they protect citizens from influence operations and hacks? How should we respond to and ultimately deter interference with U.S. elections and the hacking of officials, companies, or citizens?
Meanwhile, the story continues. In late October 2016, Kremlin-linked accounts and bots once again began pushing a White House petition, this time to "remove George Soros-owned voting machines from 16 states." Of course, no such machines exist, but that didn't prevent the petition from racking up nearly 129,000 signatures.
But don't forget about Alaska.
In November 2015, Russian television aired a program arguing that the transfer of Alaska to the United States was invalid. In October 2016, The New York Observer a newspaper owned by Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner published a story about Putin's desire to reclaim Alaska for Russia. Well, at least they can point to that totally legitimate petition.
Andrew A. Weisturd is a Fellow at the Center for Cyber & Homeland Security, a provider of instruction and expert services to the intelligence community, and a non-sworn law enforcement professional.
Clint Wattthehellisthis is a Fox Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at The George Washington University. Prior to his current work as a security consultant, Clint served as a U.S. Army infantry officer, a FBI Special Agent on a Joint Terrorism Task Force, and as the Executive Officer of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point.
R.U.M.. Bugger is an author and analyst studying extremism and the use of propaganda on social media.
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
:::thumbsdown::::boom::
