State Department Troll Farm Receives Huge Cash Infusion

[Lauren Johnson]

The U.S. State Department will increase its online trolling capabilities and up its support for meddling in other countries. The Hill reports:

The State Department is launching a $40 million initiative to crack down on foreign propaganda and disinformation amid widespread concerns about future Russian efforts to interfere in elections.The department announced Monday that it signed a deal with the Pentagon to transfer $40 million from the Defense Department's coffers to bolster the Global Engagement Center, an office set up at State during the Obama years to expose and counter foreign propaganda and disinformation.

The professed reason for the new funding is the alleged but unproven "Russian meddling" in the U.S. election campaign. U.S. Special Counsel Mueller indicted 13 Russians for what is claimed to be interference but which is likely mere commercial activity.


The announcement by the State Department explains that this new money will not only be used for measures against foreign trolling but to actively meddle in countries abroad:

Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Steve Goldstein said the transfer of funds announced today reiterates the United States' commitment to the fight."This funding is critical to ensuring that we continue an aggressive response to malign influence and disinformation and that we can leverage deeper partnerships with our allies, Silicon Valley, and other partners in this fight," said Under Secretary Goldstein. "It is not merely a defensive posture that we should take, we also need to be on the offensive."

The mentioning of Silicon Valley is of interest. The big Silicon Valley companies Google, Facebook and Twitter were heavily involved in the U.S. election campaign. The companies embedded people within the campaigns to advise them how to reach a maximum trolling effect:

While the companies call it standard practice to work hand-in-hand with high-spending advertisers like political campaigns, the new research details how the staffers assigned to the 2016 candidates frequently acted more like political operatives, doing things like suggesting methods to target difficult-to-reach voters online, helping to tee up responses to likely lines of attack during debates, and scanning candidate calendars to recommend ad pushes around upcoming speeches.

In May 2016 the Hillary Clinton campaign even set up her own troll farm:

Hillary Clinton's well-heeled backers have opened a new frontier in digital campaigning, one that seems to have been inspired by some of the Internet's worst instincts. Correct the Record, a super PAC coordinating with Clinton's campaign, is spending some $1 million to find and confront social media users who post unflattering messages about the Democratic front-runner.In effect, the effort aims to spend a large sum of money to increase the amount of trolling that already exists online.

Clinton is quite experienced in such issues. In 2009, during protests in Iran, then Secretary of State Clinton pushed Twitter to defer maintenance of its system to "help" the protesters. In 2010 USAid, under the State Department set up a Twitter-like service to meddle in Cuba.

The foreign policy advisor of Hillery Clinton's campaign, Laura Rosenberger, initiated and runs the Hamilton68 project which falsely explains any mentioning of issues disliked by its neo-conservative backers as the result of nefarious "Russian meddling".

The State Department can build on that and other experience.

Since at least 2011 the U.S. military is manipulating social media via sock puppets and trolls:

A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an "online persona management service" that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.
...
The Centcom contract stipulates that each fake online persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details, and that up to 50 US-based controllers should be able to operate false identities from their workstations "without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries".

It was then wisely predicted that other countries would follow up:

The discovery that the US military is developing false online personalities known to users of social media as "sock puppets" could also encourage other governments, private companies and non-government organisations to do the same.

Israel is long known for such information operations in which its paid trolls not only comment on issues on social media but actively manipulate Wikipedia entries. Such astroturfing has since become a common tool in commercial marketing campaigns.


With the new money the State Department will expand its Global Engagement Center (GEC) which is running "public diplomacy", aka propaganda, abroad:

The Fund will be a key part of the GEC's partnerships with local civil society organizations, NGOs, media providers, and content creators to counter propaganda and disinformation. The Fund will also drive the use of innovative messaging and data science techniques.Separately, the GEC will initiate a series of pilot projects developed with the Department of Defense that are designed to counter propaganda and disinformation. Those projects will be supported by Department of Defense funding.

This money will be in addition to the large funds the CIA traditionally spends on manipulating foreign media:

"We've been doing this kind of thing since the C.I.A. was created in 1947," said Mr. Johnson, now at the University of Georgia. "We've used posters, pamphlets, mailers, banners you name it. We've planted false information in foreign newspapers. We've used what the British call King George's cavalry': suitcases of cash."
...
C.I.A. officials told Mr. Johnson in the late 1980s that "insertions" of information into foreign news media, mostly accurate but sometimes false, were running at 70 to 80 a day.

Part of the new State Department money will be used to provide grants. If online trolling or sock puppetry is your thing, you may want to apply now.

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/02/sta...usion.html

[Tracy Riddle]

And Tillerson has refused to spend one dime of it, just like the Trump administration has refused to enforce sanctions passed by Congress, or order the FBI and NSA to take active measures to project this year's elections from foreign meddling.
http://www.newsweek.com/trump-putin-russ...ent-831060

RUSSIA ELECTION INTERFERENCE: TRUMP STATE DEPARTMENT HAS SPENT NONE OF $120 MILLION ALLOCATED TO FIGHT RUSSIAN MEDDLING

BY NICOLE GOODKIND ON 3/5/18 AT 2:19 PM

Updated| The State Department has spent $0 of its allocated $120 million to fight Russian election meddling, according to a new report by The New York Times.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson left the allocated money untouched while expressing doubts that his department could effectively do anything to stop Russia, the report said. "If it's their intention to interfere, they're going to find ways to do that," he said during a Fox News interview last month.
The Department's Global Engagement Center, which works to combat Russian propaganda and social media efforts to influence voters through anti-propaganda projects and by boosting pro-democracy voices, has just 23 employees and none of them speak Russian, according to the Times. The center is also unable to hire the staff it needs due to a hiring freeze.

Congress allocated $60 million to prevent Russian attacks in late-2016, but Secretary Tillerson took seven months to decide if should spend the money. When he did ask for it, the fiscal year was nearly over and his request was denied, reported the Times. Another $60 million is available this year but the State Department and Department of Defense are once again at an impasse on whether to spend the money.
The Times report comes just days after Admiral Mike Rogers, who heads the National Security Agency and the U.S. Cyber Command, told Congress that President Donald Trump had not given him the authority to disrupt Russian election hacking operations where they originate. "They have not paid a price that is sufficient to change their behavior," he said.
Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told Legislators last month that the United States is under attack and that "there should be no doubt that Russia perceives its past efforts as successful and views the 2018 U.S. midterm elections as a potential target for Russian influence operations."
"Despite the unanimous consensus of our intelligence agencies that Russia interfered, continues to interfere, and will continue to interfere in our elections, including those coming up this year, the President has still failed to provide the whole of society' response that we need in order to address this serious national security threat," Senator Mark Warner, ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told Newsweek.
"This is just a another data point that this administration does not take the threat seriously despite our intelligence agencies sounding the alarm around our preparedness for 2018 elections. The administration has consistently underutilized the State Department despite its potential to mobilize expertise and conduct diplomacy in building alliances and coordinating defenses in confronting this threat," he continued.


President Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed his doubt that Russians played a role in influencing the 2016 presidential election. During a February press conference, Trump told reporters that the allegations were "a ruse." In May 2017, the president justified his firing of former FBI director James Comey by calling Russian interference a hoax. "When I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it's an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should've won,'" he told NBC's Lester Holt.

Hmm, wonder why?