Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

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Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

Postby Burnt Hill » Thu Feb 15, 2018 12:09 am

Absolutely, and if only!
But we are where we are.
Existentially Russia is the bigger threat, in no small part because its an easy to identify known quantity.
We are never quite sure what we are dealing with when it comes to our psych/intelligence/deepstate proclivities,
just as we are sometimes unsure of our own .
But they are ours so we accept them.

PufPuf93 wrote:Often the most easily accessed and effective path is to deal with own issues and fix those issues, then one is not as redisposed nor subject to outside mischief.

There is virtue and strength in keeping one's own home in good order.

These concepts well fit the mess that is the USA. If we should want to be a leader and light unto the world, the best strategy is to improve ourselves. Trump is a symptom of the much that has gone wrong.
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Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 13, 2018 3:43 pm

Russian Pleads Guilty to Aiding Massive Hacks in U.S.

Jurijs Martisevs admitted he operated a service that helped criminals hack computers—likely including the culprits of the massive Target breach.

A Russian national who was extradited to the U.S. last year over Kremlin objections pleaded guilty in a Virginia federal courtroom Monday to conspiracy and aiding and abetting computer intrusion, admitting he operated a dark web service that helped thousands of hackers conceal malware from detection.

Jurijs Martisevs, a 36-year-old Moscovite arrested on a trip to Latvia, helped run a service called Scan4you that filled a crucial niche in the underground economy. Before deploying a piece of malware, hackers need to know it won't be immediately detected and quarantined by the dozens of consumer and commercial security products on the market. That’s where Scan4you comes in. For fifteen cents a pop, a hacker could upload their pre-launch code to Scan4you, which would then automatically check it against 30 different security scanners and report back the results.

Armed with that information, a hacker can make iterative changes to their code until the detection rate is sufficiently low, or even zero. Scan4you was the most successful of a slew of similar offerings advertised on underground forums, and operated from at least 2009 until the arrest of Martisevs and a co-defendant last year.

"Throughout its lifetime, the service has had thousands of users,” reads a statement of facts agreed to by Martisevs, “and has received and scanned millions of malicious files.”

According to Martisevs' plea documents, Scan4you's customers included some serious players, including the perpetrators of a national retail breach in November 2013. The retailer is unnamed, but the timing and description coincides with that month’s massive Target hack. The hackers submitted variations of their credit card stealing code to Scan4you four times over the course of two weeks before finally deploying the malware on Black Friday weekend. The Target breach ultimately netted thieves some 40 million credit and debit cards, and resulted in a $10 million consumer class action against Target.

Ruslans Bondars, Martisevs' co-defendant, was allegedly the creator and technical brains behind Scan4you. Bondars is a Latvian national extradited along with Martisevs. He’s in custody pending a May trial date.

Martisevs’ responsibilities included advertising, technical support and franchising, by which entrepreneurs outside of Russia could pay to launch their own localized scanning site using Scan4you's infrastructure. Scan4you even boasted an API so it could be wrapped into other cybercrime-as-a-service offerings, including the notorious Citadel toolkit used to initiate wire transfers out of a victim’s bank account.

As a Russian citizen operating inside Russia, Martisevs was safe from American prosecutors until he made the mistake of leaving the country last April. He was pulled off a train as he crossed the Latvian border and quickly extradited to the U.S. – one in a string of Russian hacking defendants who’ve been picked up on U.S. warrants while abroad.

The Russian government protested Martisevs’ arrest and extradition, condemning it in a statement at the time as “another case of kidnapping of a Russian citizen by the US authorities.”

Under the terms of his plea agreement, Martisevs likely faces no more than 30 months in prison. Sentencing is set for July 6 in Alexandria, Virginia. The case was prosecuted by assistant U.S. attorney Kellen Dwyer, and initially by Justice Department senior counsel Ryan Dickey, a cybercrime specialist who left the case to join special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation in January.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/russian-n ... cks-in-us/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Mar 15, 2018 2:07 pm

Polly Sigh

Russia's cyber-attack on US energy sector: US officials say the malware found in operating systems of several US energy companies has been traced to Moscow. The concerted cyber-attack on US infrastructure began in March 2016.

Image

Image

Image
https://twitter.com/dcpoll


Polly Sigh

US says a Russian government hacking operation has affected US industries: nuclear, aviation, water, construction and manufacturing sectors. The ultimate objective was to “compromise organizational networks.”

Image
https://twitter.com/dcpoll/status/974310682102583296
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Mar 16, 2018 3:22 pm

Alert (TA18-074A)

Russian Government Cyber Activity Targeting Energy and Other Critical Infrastructure Sectors

Original release date: March 15, 2018

Systems Affected
Domain Controllers
File Servers
Email Servers
Overview
This joint Technical Alert (TA) is the result of analytic efforts between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). This alert provides information on Russian government actions targeting U.S. Government entities as well as organizations in the energy, nuclear, commercial facilities, water, aviation, and critical manufacturing sectors. It also contains indicators of compromise (IOCs) and technical details on the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by Russian government cyber actors on compromised victim networks. DHS and FBI produced this alert to educate network defenders to enhance their ability to identify and reduce exposure to malicious activity.
DHS and FBI characterize this activity as a multi-stage intrusion campaign by Russian government cyber actors who targeted small commercial facilities’ networks where they staged malware, conducted spear phishing, and gained remote access into energy sector networks. After obtaining access, the Russian government cyber actors conducted network reconnaissance, moved laterally, and collected information pertaining to Industrial Control Systems (ICS).
https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA18-074A


Cyberattacks Put Russian Fingers on the Switch at Power Plants, U.S. ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/15/us/p ... tacks.html
51 mins ago - Cyberattacks Put Russian Fingers on the Switch at Power Plants, U.S. Says. By NICOLE PERLROTH and DAVID E. SANGER MARCH 15, 2018 ... The Trump administration accused Russia on Thursday of engineering a series of cyberattacks that targeted American and European nuclear power plants and ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/15/us/p ... 43&gwt=pay



DHS and FBI warn Russia is behind cyberattacks on US infrastructure

Energy, nuclear, aviation and manufacturing sectors are among those affected.

Mallory Locklear, @mallorylocklear
2h ago in Security

The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI released a report today detailing Russian efforts to hack into US government entities and infrastructure sectors, including energy, nuclear, commercial, water, aviation and critical manufacturing sectors. The agencies said the cyberattacks have been ongoing since at least March 2016 and their report described the attacks as "a multi-stage intrusion campaign by Russian government cyber actors."

Those behind the cyberattacks are said to be targeting two types of entities. First, they go after groups that are linked to their ultimate targets, such as third-party suppliers with networks that are less secure than those of their main targets. Then after gathering useful information, they use it to stage malware and to conduct phishing campaigns in order to gain access into energy sector networks. "After obtaining access, the Russian government cyber actors conducted network reconnaissance, moved laterally and collected information pertaining to industrial control systems," the report said.

Reports surfaced last year that the US nuclear power industry had been the target of hackers, but while Russia was thought to be behind it, DHS and the FBI didn't name Russia as the source at the time. Ben Read, manager for the cybersecurity company FireEye Inc., told Reuters, "People sort of suspected Russia was behind it, but today's statement from the US government carries a lot of weight." The report didn't describe what sort of impact the attacks had on US infrastructure organizations.

Today's report comes the same day that the US Treasury Department issued sanctions on a number of Russian groups and individuals who have allegedly been involved in massive cyberattacks like NotPetya and efforts to sway the US presidential election.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/15/dhs ... erattacks/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Mar 19, 2018 9:19 am

Edward Snowden blasts integrity of Russia's presidential election, asks Russians to 'demand justice'
by Josh Siegel
| March 18, 2018 02:39 PM

Print this article
Russia Snowden
“The ballot stuffing seen today in Moscow and elsewhere in the Russian election is an effort to steal the influence of 140+ million people,” Snowden said in a tweet. “Demand justice; demand laws and courts that matter. Take your future back."
Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras


Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden Sunday criticized the integrity of Russia’s presidential election just before exit polls showed President Vladimir Putin had easily won a fourth term in office.

“The ballot stuffing seen today in Moscow and elsewhere in the Russian election is an effort to steal the influence of 140+ million people,” Snowden said in a tweet. “Demand justice; demand laws and courts that matter. Take your future back."


Edward Snowden

@Snowden
The ballot stuffing seen today in Moscow and elsewhere in the Russian election is an effort to steal the influence of 140+ million people. Demand justice; demand laws and courts that matter. Take your future back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UFIQamKbjg
11:37 AM - Mar 18, 2018

6,432

3,807 people are talking about this


Snowden was granted asylum in Russia in 2013 after he leaked secret information from the National Security Agency's surveillance programs, and has been there ever since.

Critics have slammed the election as a sham, noting the Kremlin had banned opposition activist and leading Putin opponent Alexei Navalny from the ballot, and imposed restrictions on some election monitors.

Independent election observers and activists have alleged numerous incidents of ballot stuffing and other irregularities in Sunday's vote.

The non-governmental election monitoring group Golo has flagged at least 2,000 incidents, including observers being prevented from monitoring voting locations.

Putin is already Russia's longest-serving leader since Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news ... nd-justice
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

Postby Rory » Mon Mar 19, 2018 10:09 am

He should go home - saying as he believes in justice
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Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Mar 19, 2018 10:21 am

'Shock Prediction': Putin Wins Russian Presidential Election.


:P
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

Postby Rory » Mon Mar 19, 2018 10:31 am

seemslikeadream » Mon Mar 19, 2018 6:21 am wrote:'Shock Prediction': Putin Wins Russian Presidential Election.


:P


Were you (was anyone) hoping for a Hillary Clinton style collapse just before the finish line?
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Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Mar 19, 2018 10:36 am

Vladimir Putin wins Russia’s presidential election

It wasn’t exactly contested.

Emily StewartMar 19, 2018, 8:08am EDT

According to state-run exit polls and early returns, Vladimir Putin has won another term as Russia’s president. He faced no genuine opposition during his presidential campaign, and used all of the tools of his government’s well-oiled propaganda machine to ensure he received a huge percentage of the vote.

Putin’s win, which cements him as one of the most powerful leaders in modern Russian history, means he will remain in office until at least 2024. He has spent years using brute force to reestablish Russia’s prominence as a world power, and his aggressive approach included invading and annexing part of eastern Ukraine, and helping Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad retain his hold on power despite years of brutal fighting.

Putin has also benefitted from the election of Donald Trump, who is arguably the most pro-Russian US president in modern history. The American intelligence community unanimously believes that Moscow interfered in the 2016 election to sway its result towards Trump, but the president has both angrily dismissed those assertions and shied away from seriously punishing Russia for its meddling. Trump has not yet weighed in on Sunday’s election.

Still, there are some signs that President Trump may finally be willing to confront Putin for at least some of his misdeeds. On Thursday, March 15, Trump joined the UK and other European allies in accusing Moscow of using a deadly nerve agent to poison a former Russian spy and his daughter not far from their home in the British town of Salisbury.

That same day, the US Treasury Department announced long-awaited sanctions to punish Russia for meddling in the 2016 presidential elections. The measures targeted more than 20 Russian individuals and organizations, including the Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-linked troll farm that sought to interfere in the election, and Yevgeny Prigozhin, known as “Putin’s chef,” for his role in bankrolling Russian hackers.

This means that Putin’s latest victory may not be as sweeping as the numbers would suggest. Putin won at the ballot box, but whether he’ll keep winning in his confrontations with the US, the UK, and other Western countries remains to be seen.

It’s not exactly surprising that Putin won

Heading into Sunday’s election, there was little doubt that Putin would win — the question was, largely, by how much.

The Central Elections Commission said Putin had won about 76.7 percent of the vote with 99.8 percent of the country’s precincts reporting. In 2012, Putin received just under 65 percent of the vote. His nearest challenger, Communist Party candidate Pavel Grudinin, received 11.8 percent of the vote, and ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky had 5.7 percent.

According to the Associated Press, there were widespread reports of ballot-box stuffing and forced voting on Sunday, and Putin was trying to win by a large margin to ensure his mandate to govern is indisputable. His most visible opponent — anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny — wasn’t even on the ballot. He was barred from running because he was convicted of fraud in a case that was widely considered to be politically motivated.

Ahead of the election, voter turnout was considered to be the main signifier of Putin’s hold on Russia. Independent surveys show that most Russians approve of Putin as president, which might have kept people home as they may have assumed the results were already decided.

The Kremlin was also reportedly aiming to surpass 2012’s 65 percent turnout level. Turnout this year was reportedly about 67 percent.

After casting his ballot in Moscow on Sunday, Putin said he sought a level of turnout that “gives me the right to perform the duty of president,” according to the New York Times. “I am sure I am offering the right program to the country.”

It is also worth noting that the 2012 Russian election arguably laid the groundwork for Putin’s meddling in the American presidential election in 2016. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton raised questions about the legitimacy of the 2012 Russian race, which Putin took personally and has never forgiven. US intelligence agencies believe that may be why he tried to ensure she lost in 2016.

Putin is facing more pushback on the global stage

Putin’s Sunday victory may give him even more power in Russia, but he is facing increasing pressure from the international community due to a recent nerve agent attack in the UK, and Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential race.

On March 4, Sergei Skripal, a former Russian double agent, and his daughter, Yulia, were found unconscious on a bench in Salisbury, England. It turned out they had been poisoned with a highly toxic nerve agent.

Eight days later, UK Prime Minister Theresa May said it was “highly likely” that Russia was behind the attack on the Skripals. When asked about the event later that day, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders declined to directly blame Russia but said that “we offer the fullest condemnation” of the attack.

But on Thursday, the White House issued a joint statement with allies to support Britain’s claim, which said: “The United Kingdom thoroughly briefed its allies that it was highly likely that Russia was responsible for the attack. We share the United Kingdom’s assessment that there is no plausible alternative explanation.” Moscow denies it had any hand in the attack but has said it will cooperate with a British investigation. Putin on Sunday said the attack was a “tragedy” but dismissed accusations of Russian involvement as “nonsense.”

The sanctions that the US Treasury Department issued on Thursday have a bit more of a backstory.

In January 2017, the US intelligence community assessed that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election, helping Trump win the White House. Last August, Trump reluctantly signed into law the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), which was designed to make old sanctions against Russia permanent, and to pressure Trump to impose new ones.

The legislation forced Trump to impose costs on Putin for interfering in America’s democratic process and for his interventions in Ukraine and Syria. Republican and Democratic lawmakers crafted the bill in response to Trump’s unusual warmth toward Russian President Vladimir Putin and his refusal to blame Russia for election interference; it passed both chambers almost unanimously — 98-2 in the Senate and 419-3 in the House — and it was clear that Congress would override a presidential veto.

But Trump resented Congress’s move to box him in on Russia policy. The president slammed the legislation in a signing statement, calling it “seriously flawed,” and said that he could “make far better deals with foreign countries than Congress.” CAATSA was intended to force Trump to impose sanctions in late January — but he missed the deadline. Instead, the administration released a list of 210 Russian leaders and billionaires with purported ties to Putin in order to show that the administration was watching them.

Then, on March 6, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats announced that new sanctions on Russia were imminent. Mnuchin added that Trump was “fully supportive of the work we’re doing.” On Thursday, March 15, the measures were finally announced. Senior administration officials told reporters that the sanctions were meant to punish Russia for interfering in the 2016 election and for masterminding a global cyberattack, known as NotPetya, that hit large corporations and hospitals in the US and Europe last summer.

“The administration is, arguably for the first time, directly acknowledging and responding to Russia’s intervention in the 2016 campaign,” said Sean Kane, a former sanctions official at the Treasury Department.

The new measures target five Russian organizations and 19 Russian individuals. The big organizational targets include two Russian intelligence agencies, known by their acronyms FSB and GRU, and prominent individuals like Prigozhin. That means people connected to the intelligence agencies, and Prigozhin himself, cannot travel to America or do business with American companies, and will soon see their US assets frozen.

Experts also say the timing of the sanctions was surely meant to show support for London and condemn Moscow after the nerve agent attack.

The question remains, though — does this mean Trump’s attitude toward Russia has changed? Well, it’s complicated.

Is Trump tough on Russia now?

Despite the sanctions, Trump continues to minimize the extent of Russia’s involvement in his election. He thinks Russia didn’t interfere — and that Democrats use the Trump-Russia narrative as an excuse for losing the election. Trump has famously called the investigation into whether his campaign colluded with Russia a “WITCH HUNT!”

Even Trump’s own national security team said he could be tougher on Russia. On February 13, Coats, the intelligence director, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Russia would continue to interfere in American elections, saying, “Frankly, the United States is under attack.”

Two weeks later, on February 27, Adm. Michael Rogers, who leads US Cyber Command, said during a congressional hearing that Trump had yet to ask him to take measures against Russia’s hackers. “If we don’t change the dynamic here, this is going to continue, and 2016 won’t be viewed as something isolated,” Rogers told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “This is something that will be sustained over time.”

Other military leaders have echoed the admiral’s sentiment, including Army Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone, Trump’s nominee to replace Rogers after he retires this spring. “I would say right now they do not think much will happen to them,” he said of Russia during one of his confirmation hearings on Thursday, March 1. “They don’t fear us.”

That, in part, is why experts seem skeptical that Trump will suddenly become a Russia hawk. Trump has “a reluctance ... to speak clearly about the threat Russia poses to the United States and our allies,” Evelyn Farkas, formerly the Pentagon’s top Russia official, said in an interview.

And lawmakers, many of whom are usually critical of the president, feel he could do more to punish Russia. California Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement on Thursday that if the president believes Thursday’s action “sufficiently addresses the sanctions package Congress sent to respond forcefully to Moscow’s election interference, then he is sorely mistaken.”

Trump likes to boast that he’s much tougher on Russia than his predecessor Barack Obama. But this past week is the first time he really did anything to back up that claim. “By no means will this constitute the end to our ongoing campaign to instruct Mr. Putin to change his behavior,” a senior administration official told reporters on Thursday morning.

The US president has yet to weigh in on the latest Russian election results, and it’s anyone’s guess how he’ll respond. One thing’s for sure, though — Putin is not going away anytime soon.
https://www.vox.com/2018/3/18/17135896/ ... putin-wins
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Mar 23, 2018 12:27 pm

The long read
Gangster’s paradise: how organised crime took over Russia

Under Vladmir Putin, gangsterism on the streets has given way to kleptocracy in the state.

By Mark Galeotti
Fri 23 Mar 2018 02.00 EDT Last modified on Fri 23 Mar 2018 07.15 EDT

I was in Moscow in 1988, during the final years of the Soviet Union. The system was sliding towards shabby oblivion, even if no one knew at the time how soon the end would come. While carrying out research for my doctorate on the impact of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, I was interviewing Russian veterans of that brutal conflict. When I could, I would meet these afgantsy shortly after they got home, and then again a year into civilian life, to see how they were adjusting. Most came back raw, shocked and angry, either bursting with tales of horror and blunder, or spikily or numbly withdrawn. A year later, though, most had done what people usually do in such circumstances: they had adapted, they had coped. The nightmares were less frequent, the memories less vivid. But then there were those who could not or would not move on. Some of these young men collaterally damaged by the war had become adrenaline junkies, or just intolerant of the conventions of everyday life.

One of the men I got to know during this time was named Volodya. Wiry, intense and morose, he had a brittle and dangerous quality that, on the whole, I would have crossed the road to avoid. He had been a marksman in the war. The other afgantsy I knew tolerated Volodya, but never seemed comfortable with him, nor with talking about him. He always had money to burn, at a time when most were eking out the most marginal of lives, often living with their parents and juggling multiple jobs. It all made sense, though, when I later learned that he had become what was known in Russian crime circles as a “torpedo” – a hitman.

As the values and structures of Soviet life crumbled and fell, organised crime was emerging from the ruins, no longer subservient to the corrupt Communist party bosses and the black-market millionaires. As it rose, it was gathering a new generation of recruits, including damaged and disillusioned veterans of the USSR’s last war. Some were bodyguards, some were runners, some were leg-breakers and some – such as Volodya – were killers.

I never found out what happened to Volodya. He probably ended up as a casualty of the gang wars of the 1990s, fought out with car bombs, drive-by shootings and knives in the night. That decade saw the emergence of a tradition of monumental memorialisation, as fallen gangsters were buried with full Godfather-style pomp, with black limousines threading through paths lined with white carnations and tombs marked with huge headstones. Vastly expensive (the largest cost upwards of $250,000, at a time when the average wage was close to a dollar a day) and stupendously tacky, these monuments showed the dead with the spoils of their criminal lives: the Mercedes, the designer suit, the heavy gold chain. I still wonder if some day I’ll be walking through one of the cemeteries favoured by Moscow’s gangsters and will come across Volodya’s grave.

Nonetheless, it was thanks to Volodya and those like him that I became one of the first western scholars to raise the alarm about the rise and consequences of Russian organised crime, the presence of which had, with a few honourable exceptions, been previously ignored. The 1990s were the glory days of the Russian gangsters, though, and since then, under Putin, gangsterism on the streets has given way to kleptocracy in the state. The mob wars ended, the economy settled, and despite the current sanctions regime in the post-Crimea cool war, Moscow is now as festooned as any European capital with Starbucks and other such icons of globalisation.

In the years since meeting Volodya, I have studied the Russian underworld as a scholar, a government adviser (including a stint with the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office), a business consultant and sometimes as a police resource. I have watched it rise and, if not fall, then certainly change; I have seen it become increasingly tamed by a political elite that is far more ruthless, in its own way, than the old criminal bosses. All the same, I am still left with the image of that particular war-scarred gunman, at once victim and perpetrator of the new wave of Russian gangsterism, a metaphor for a society that would be plunged into a maelstrom of almost unrestrained corruption, violence and criminality.

In 1974, a naked body washed up on the coast at Strelna, to the south-west of Leningrad (as St Petersburg was then known). It had been floating in the Gulf of Finland for a couple of weeks, and was not a pretty sight. A series of deep knife wounds in the man’s abdomen gave a fairly good indication of the cause of death. And yet, with no fingerprints and no clothing, and with his face bloated, battered and partly eaten away, there were none of the conventional clues for identifying him. There had been no missing-persons notification filed for him. Nonetheless, he was identified within two days. The reason: his body was liberally adorned with tattoos. The tattoos were the mark of a vor – the Russian word for “thief”, but also a general term for a career member of the Soviet underworld. Most of the tattoos were still recognisable, and an expert on reading them was summoned.

Within an hour, they had been decoded. The leaping stag on his breast? That symbolised a term spent in one of the northern labour camps. The knife wrapped in chains on his right forearm? The man had committed a violent assault (though not a murder) while behind bars. Crosses on three of his knuckles? Three separate prison sentences served. Perhaps the most telling was the fouled anchor on his upper arm, to which a barbed wire surround had clearly been added later: the wearer was a navy veteran, who had been sentenced to prison for a crime committed while in service.

Equipped with these details, it was a relatively quick matter to identify the dead man as Matvei Lodochnik, or “Matvei the Boatman”, a former naval warrant officer who, 20 years earlier, had beaten a navy draftee almost to death. Later, Matvei had gone on to become a fixture of the underworld in the city of Vologda. The police never found out quite why Matvei was in Leningrad, or why he died. But the speed with which he could be identified attests not just to the particular visual language of the Soviet underworld, but also to its universality. His tattoos were at once his commitment to the criminal life, and also his CV.
Image
Tattoos of the kind worn by many of the vory in Russia
Photograph: Arkady Bronnikov/Fuel, from the forthcoming book Russian Criminal Tattoo Playing Cards
The subculture of the vory (the plural of vor) dates back to the earlier, tsarist years, but was radically reshaped in Stalin’s gulags between the 1930s and 1950s. First, the criminals adopted an uncompromising rejection of the legitimate world, visibly tattooing themselves as a gesture of defiance. They had their own language, their own customs and their own authority figures. Over time, the vory would lose their dominance, but they did not disappear altogether. In post-Soviet Russia, they blended in with the new elite. The tattoos disappeared, or were hidden beneath the crisp, white shirts of a rapacious new breed of gangster-businessman, the avtoritet (“authority”).

In the 1990s, everything was up for grabs, and the new vory reached out with both hands. State assets were privatised, businesses forced to pay for protection, and as the iron curtain fell, Russian gangsters crashed out into the rest of the world. The vory were part of a way of life that, in its own way, was a reflection of the changes Russia went through in the 20th century. Organised crime truly began to come into its own in a Russia that itself was becoming more organised. Since the restoration of central authority under President Vladimir Putin since the turn of the millennium, the new vory have adapted again, taking a lower profile, and even working for the state when they must.

The challenge posed by Russian organised crime is a formidable one – and not just at home. Across the world, it trafficks drugs and people, arms insurgents and gangsters, and peddles every type of criminal service, from money laundering to computer hacking. For all that, much of the rest of the world remains willing – indeed, often delighted – to launder these gangsters’ cash and sell them expensive penthouse apartments.

Do the gangsters run Russia? No, of course not, and I have met many determined, dedicated Russian police officers and judges committed to the struggle against them. However, many businesses and politicians use methods that owe more to the underworld than to legal practice. The state hires hackers and arms gangsters to fight its wars (and there remain suggestions that criminals were used as agents in the attempt to assassinate Sergei Skripal in Salisbury this month). You can hear vor songs and vor slang on the streets. Even Putin uses it from time to time, to reassert his streetwise credentials. Perhaps the real question is nothow far the state has managed to tame the gangsters, but how far the values and practices of the vory have come to shape modern Russia.

A number of commentators have dubbed Russia a “mafia state”. It is certainly a catchy epithet, but what does it actually mean? To the Spanish prosecutor José Grinda González – a particular scourge of Russian gangs in his country – it means that the Kremlin (or at least the state security apparatus), rather than being under the control of the criminals, is a shadowy puppeteer making the gangs dance on its strings. The truth is more complex. The Kremlin does not control organised crime in Russia, nor is it controlled by it. Rather, organised crime prospers under Putin, because it can go with the grain of his system.

There is a very high level of corruption in Russia, which provides a conducive environment for organised crime. It is not just professional criminals who are exploiting the opportunities provided by Russia’s cannibalistic capitalism – state agents, too, are exploiting their own criminal opportunities in an increasingly organised way. In 2016, the police raided the apartment of Col Dmitry Zakharchenko, the acting head of a department within the police force’s anti-corruption division. There they found $123m (£87m) in cash: so much money that the investigators had to pause the search while they found a container large enough to hold it all. The assumption is that the money was not all his, but rather that he was the holder of the common fund of a gang of oboroten, or “werewolves”, as organised crime groups within police ranks are often known.

Putin has publicly acknowledged, time and time again, that corruption is widespread. However, after 18 years of his rule, we have seen little evidence that he has ever intended more than a public show of resolve and a periodic purge of officials who serve as disposable scapegoats.

The connection between the elite and the gangsters usually revolves around mutually profitable relationships – but these relationships can also fall apart in spectacular ways. Take the case of Said Amirov. From 1998 onwards, Amirov ran the city of Makhachkala, the capital of the North Caucasus republic of Dagestan, as his own political-criminal fiefdom. It took a special person to control what was arguably the most unruly city in Dagestan, itself in many ways the most unruly republic in the Russian Federation. Amirov seemed virtually indestructible, in every sense of the word. He survived at least a dozen assassination attempts, including one in 1993 that left him in a wheelchair after a bullet lodged in his spine, and a rocket attack on his offices in 1998. Just as importantly, he appeared politically unassailable. Despite continued allegations of brutality, corruption and crime links, he saw out four Dagestani leaders and three Russian presidencies.

Said Amirov, the don of Dagestan.
Said Amirov, the don of Dagestan. Photograph: Sergei Rasulov/AP
For 15 years, Moscow had been happy enough to let Amirov build his fiefdom, because at least he kept it disciplined, and posed no overt challenge to the centre. When the state finally decided to move against him, in 2013, it had to consider the strength of his local power base. His arrest was like a raid in hostile territory, spearheaded by Federal Security Service (FSB) special forces brought in from outside the republic, backed with armoured vehicles and helicopter gunships. Such was the concern about his sway over the local authorities that Amirov was immediately airlifted to a Moscow prison along with 10 other suspects.

Why did Moscow turn against Amirov? He appears to have fallen foul of the powerful Investigative Committee – the organisation Putin uses to prosecute and repress his enemies – thanks to his involvement in the 2011 murder of one of its regional heads. This was not about seeing justice served so much as settling a score. Amirov was sentenced to 10 years in a maximum security prison colony, and stripped of his state awards (including some, ironically enough, given him by the FSB). This was unprecedented for one of the Kremlin’s former local strongmen, and a cautionary tale for other local kleptocrats. The very attributes that once seemed to make Amirov such an admirable local proxy – his skill at managing the complex politics of Dagestan, his ruthlessness, his network spanning both the underworld and the legitimate world, his industrial-scale corruption, his acquisitive ambition for himself and his family – all had become liabilities.

The modern Russian state is a much stronger force than it was in the 1990s, and jealous of its political authority. The gangs that prosper in modern Russia tend to do so by working with rather than against the state. In other words: do well by the Kremlin, and the Kremlin will turn a blind eye. If not, you will be reminded that the state is the biggest gang in town.

I remember once talking to a Russian entrepreneur whose business seemed to mainly involve unloading poorly made counterfeit CDs on to the market on behalf of some Ukrainian gangsters from Donetsk. When asked about how he felt about working in organised crime, he airily waved the suggestion away: “It’s all business, just business.”

A key characteristic of organised crime in today’s Russia is the depth of its interconnectedness with the legitimate economy. Unpicking dirty from clean money in Russia is a hopeless task, not least because in the 1990s it was next to impossible to make serious amounts of money without engaging in practices that were ethically questionable at best, and downright illegal at worst.

During that time, murder was a depressingly common way of resolving business disputes. The notorious “aluminium wars” of the early 90s, for example, saw thugs occupying factories, a string of murders and lurid accounts of organised-crime activity across the metals industries. Recent research suggests that the contract killings related to those wars likely numbered in the thousands.

Since the 90s, though, the overt role of gangsterism in most of the economy has been declining. As the former mob lawyer, Valery Karyshev, wrote last year: “The wild 90s have gone into history … Many legends of the criminal world, whom I knew personally, are now in the ground. Contract murders have become fewer, although there are still shoot-outs, even in the centre of the capital. The racket has disappeared in its hard form, although there are kickbacks and raids. Now, business does not solve its conflicts with the help of bandits and red-hot irons, but in the courts.”

“Raiding” – the seizure of assets and companies through physical or legal coercion – remains a serious problem, but it depends less on violence than it did in the past. One British-based businessman told me that in 2009 he had had to fly to Moscow at a moment’s notice on two separate occasions because of attempts to steal one of his properties. The first time, thugs appeared at the door and marched their way past the security guard. The businessman had to call in favours from the local police on order to have them thrown out. The second time, though, the raiders came in the form of lawyers and bailiffs, bearing documents alleging that the property had been signed into their possession in order to discharge a (non-existent) debt. Whereas getting rid of the thugs took a few hours and, I suspect, a moderate bribe to the police chief, dealing with the legal challenge took weeks, and large amounts paid out in legal fees and illegal inducements.

This does not make the new gangster-businessmen champions of the rule of law. They appreciate a degree of predictability within the system, and also – now that they are rich – a state apparatus dedicated to preserving property rights. However, they are also well aware that an honest, well-functioning police force and a dedicated, incorruptible judiciary would be a serious threat to them. As a result, they have a strong interest in preserving the current, compromised status quo.

Just as the Russian language has become colonised by many borrowings from criminal slang, so too have regular Russian business practices become suffused with underworld habits and methods. Corporate espionage, bribery, and the use of political influence to swing contracts and stymie rivals remain commonplace, and continue to connect the worlds of crime and business. Likewise, the new generation of crime bosses are more likely than ever also to be active within the realms of legitimate and “grey” business.

An underworld economy as extensive as Russia’s inevitably develops a complex array of service industries and market niches. In the 90s, the first and most obvious need was for thugs and leg-breakers. For more sophisticated purposes, not least assassinations, organised crime gangs looked to sportsmen and martial artists – many of the first gangs came from sports clubs, such as the weightlifters and wrestlers who formed Moscow’s Lyubertsy gang – or to current and former police and military personnel.

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The notorious Alexander Solonik (nicknamed “Alexander the Great” or “Superkiller”) was a former soldier and member of the riot police who became a killer for hire, specialising in assassinating well-guarded gangsters. He later confessed to three such murders. He also became something of a legend, thanks in part to the story of him fighting his way out of a police station in 1994, killing seven security officers before finally being overpowered; and, in 1995, being one of the very few people ever to break out of Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina prison.

Solonik worked for a wide range of criminal groups, some of whom were direct rivals. This was not considered to be a problem, just a reflection of the free market of the Russian underworld. However, when he escaped from prison and fled to Greece, where he began to set up as a gang leader in his own right, he became a player rather than a service provider. He lost his neutral status, and in 1997, one of the gangs with whom he had previously been associated killed him. Solonik knew full well what he was doing, but in modern Russia it is sometimes difficult even to know if you are working for the gangsters. The assassination of organised-crime boss Vasily Naumov in 1997 came as a particular embarrassment to the St Petersburg police: it emerged that his bodyguards were members of one of the force’s elite rapid-response squads, moonlighting and apparently engaged legitimately through a front company. We still do not know for sure whether they even knew quite whom they were protecting.

Hired killer Alexander Solonik, aka ‘Superkiller’.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hired killer Alexander Solonik, aka ‘Superkiller’. Photograph: Tass/PA Images
This represents just one of the many ways criminals are able to buy services from state agencies. Other services include wiretapping by the security agencies, and more trivial options, such as paying off an official for the right to place a flashing blue emergency-services light on your car. Such lights, known as migalki, are a bone of contention for many Russian motorists, and are widely abused by officials, business people and gangsters in order to allow them to run red lights and generally evade traffic rules. Recently curtailed, they nonetheless epitomise a culture in which cash and connections can buy a degree of impunity.

Some of the cybercriminals and cybersecurity experts that the gangs employ also work for the government. Most, however, do not. Hackers themselves rarely fit the model of organised crime, as their structures are generally collectives. Instead of becoming members of gangs, they tend to be outside consultants, hired for specific jobs.

The increasing sophistication of criminal operations, especially their shift towards white-collar crime, has created a need for financial specialists, to manage their own funds and also their economic crimes. The most infamous remains Semyon Mogilevich, who has established for himself a distinctive role as the mobster’s money manager of choice. One of the FBI’s most-wanted fugitives and the subject of an Interpol red notice international arrest warrant, Mogilevich has been indicted on money-laundering and fraud charges but is living comfortably and openly in Moscow. As a Russian citizen, he is safe from extradition. (He is also a citizen of Ukraine, Greece and Israel.)

Mogilevich’s 20-year career laundering and moving money for numerous organised crime groups – in the process making himself indispensable to many of them – provides perhaps even greater security for him than any bodyguards or body armour. Too many powerful people need his services, and too many fear the secrets he carries. Indeed, when Moscow police arrested him by accident in 2008 (at the time, he went by the name Sergei Shnaider), I heard from several police officers that the commander in question received a ferocious dressing down for landing the government with an embarrassing dilemma: how to release him without looking weak or foolish? He was eventually arraigned in a closed court, and the case was dismissed for lack of evidence.


Russian criminal tattoos – in pictures
That Russian organised crime has spawned such a complex service economy says much about its scale, sophistication and stability. In the process, the old vory are dying out, at least in their own terms. Once, if you wore a criminal tattoo to which they felt you were not entitled, you ran the risk of having that patch of skin forcibly removed with a knife – if you were lucky. Now, no one cares: you just pay to get inked. Crime was once something that defined people, that set them off from the rest of society. Now, it is just another route to power and prosperity within that society, and the customs that were there to keep the vor subculture separate and distinct no longer have meaning or value.

A vor I once spoke to bitterly complained that “we have been infected by the rest of you and we are dying”, but the infection has passed both ways. Many of the organising and operating principles of modern Russia follow the lead of the underworld. Maybe it is not that the vory have disappeared so much as that everyone is now a vor, and that the vorovskoi mir – the world of the thieves – ultimately won.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/m ... are_btn_tw


Alexey Navalny and the Empty Spectacle of the Russian Election

Masha Gessen

It’s hard to write about the Russian Presidential election, not because it is particularly difficult to understand but because the normal language of such things can’t describe it. There are candidates, but their names can appear on the ballot only if the Kremlin allows it. There is a campaign, but candidates are allowed to appear on television only if the Kremlin O.K.s it. There are, usually, debates, but Vladimir Putin, who has been in power in Russia for eighteen years and is running for another six-year term, doesn’t deign to take part in them. There are opinion polls, but their results are adjusted to fit the probable result of the vote. And then there is the vote, but its outcome is preordained. In other words, the event scheduled for March 18, 2018, is not an election, but it is called one.

Russians face the choice between “voting” in the “election” and boycotting it. The decision is harder than it may seem. The boycott argument is clear: taking part in an obvious travesty serves only to legitimize its architects. Proponents of participation, on the other hand, argue that an election, even a sham one, puts stress on the regime, thereby creating a chance for change. The Kremlin goes to great lengths to ensure that the spectacle is empty—why make their job easier? Put more simply, every person who boycotts the election increases the number of percentage points by which Putin stands to win; this argument is suspect, however, since the relationship between official election results and actual votes cast is uncertain.

All the same arguments have been made before. It’s not the first or even the second or third time that Russia is holding a sham election. Six long years ago, when Putin last had himself “elected,” two of his most prominent opponents—the chess champion turned politician Garry Kasparov and the longtime politician Boris Nemtsov—called for a boycott. But the anti-corruption blogger Alexey Navalny opposed this call. “There is no mobilizing message in the call to a boycott,” he argued. “It just says, ‘Stay home, watch TV, be outraged.’ But we spend all day watching TV and being outraged as it is.” Nor, he argued, would a boycott succeed in significantly lowering voter turnout.

In December, 2011, following a blatantly rigged parliamentary election, Russians suddenly took to the streets to protest. It seemed that the whole country was swept up in the demonstrations: people protested all over the country, and famous writers, musicians, and actors joined in. Even a television host named Ksenia Sobchak, a young woman known to have close ties to the Putin family (her father was Putin’s first boss in politics), joined the fight. Navalny, Nemtsov, and Kasparov emerged as the most visible organizers of the protests. Then, in March, 2012, Putin claimed victory, with sixty-three per cent of the vote, and moved quickly to crack down on his opponents. In 2013, Kasparov was forced to emigrate. Nemtsov was killed in 2015. Navalny has been repeatedly dragged into court on charges of fraud and embezzlement. In the summer of 2013, he was sentenced to a five-year prison term, which was changed to a suspended sentence when thousands of people again took to the streets, risking arrest. At the end of 2014, Navalny was sentenced to house arrest, and his brother was imprisoned—in effect, taken hostage.

Navalny has appealed all of his convictions to the European Court on Human Rights, where he has won every time. Most recently, the European court labelled Navalny’s 2014 conviction and sentence “arbitrary”. But the Russian Ministry of Justice is considering an appeal, so, for now, Navalny remains a convicted felon in Russia and his brother remains behind bars. In spite of unrelenting attacks—in addition to being brought up on charges, Navalny has been assaulted physically—he has built his anti-corruption blog into a large, professionally staffed investigative organization that continues to expose corruption among Russian officials and to publicize the findings through its phenomenally popular YouTube channel. This year, Navalny has also twice called for large-scale protests, which have brought more Russians out into the streets in more cities than ever before. Still, these protests are not exactly political action: each one of the participants comes out heeding Navalny’s call, but all of them are not acting together—and, when the protests are over, they go home to watch TV and be outraged. This year, Navalny has tried to register as a candidate for President. If he were allowed to campaign, he would finally be able to gather his supporters into a political organization.

It would have taken a pathological kind of optimism to entertain the possibility that the Kremlin would allow Navalny to be registered as a candidate—to campaign and to have his name appear on the ballot in March. Russian law bans convicted felons from running for office, so the formal legal groundwork for rejecting Navalny’s application had been laid (notwithstanding the E.C.H.R. decision). But, even before Navalny tried to register as a candidate, things got complicated. Sobchak, the television host, declared her own candidacy. Her candidacy appeared to have the Kremlin stamp of approval: one of the hallmarks of an “election” is the presence of a candidate apparently oppositional enough to lend the spectacle a sort of legitimacy but tame enough not to be a threat. Six years ago, this role was played by the billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, who told me at the time that he had been directly asked by a Kremlin operative to enter politics. (Prokhorov now lives in New York.) Unlike Navalny, Sobchak was given airtime on government-controlled television. But she sounded nothing like a token candidate: she spoke up against the Russian occupation of Crimea and in favor of L.G.B.T. rights. She positioned herself explicitly as a protest candidate, asking everyone who opposes Putin to vote for her; she dubbed her own candidacy “none of the above.”

In a convoluted and striking stunt, Sobchak attended Putin’s giant annual press conference, on December 14th, where she was allowed to ask a question. “I have a question about competition during this election,” she said, and proceeded to voice a question that Navalny had publicly asked her to pose. She mentioned the trumped-up charges against Navalny, and she noted that even she had had difficulty campaigning, because people were too frightened to rent space to her or distribute her campaign literature. “People understand that to be in the opposition in Russia means that you will either be killed or imprisoned, or something else of the sort will happen to you. My question is: Why does this happen? Are the authorities frightened of honest competition?”

Putin gave a rambling, partly incoherent answer, in which, without naming Navalny, he accused him of wanting to “destabilize” Russia. “This cannot be allowed!” he said, to applause from his handpicked audience of several hundred.

On Monday, Navalny’s application went before the Central Election Commission. The video of the proceeding, posted by Navalny’s organization, is painful to watch: it is the battle of man against bureaucracy, the sort that Hannah Arendt described as the “rule by Nobody.” Navalny laid out the case for registering him as a candidate, noting that his convictions had been deemed invalid by the E.C.H.R. and calling on the election officials to exercise their right to act independently in accordance with the law. In response, the commission chairwoman claimed to be helpless to register Navalny, and proceeded to accuse him of raising money under false pretenses and of “making idiots out of young people.” Hard as he tried, Navalny could not get the officials to engage with the substance of his argument. The commission voted unanimously to deny him registration.

As soon as the commission meeting was over, Navalny posted a prerecorded video calling on Russians to boycott the “election.” Sobchak responded by quoting him back to himself, repeating his six-year-old statement on the futility of staying home and raging at the television. “Elections remain the only way to change anything,” she wrote. Of course, she is assuming that there is, in fact, a way to change something in Russia.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-colu ... n-election
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Apr 02, 2018 9:38 am

The Curious Case of David Jewberg, the Fake Senior Pentagon Russia Analyst - and his real friend Dan Rapoport, who used to own the DC house Ivanka & Jared now live in



The Curious Case of David Jewberg, the Fake Senior Pentagon Russia Analyst

April 2, 2018 By Oleksiy Kuzmenko
Translations: Русский

Summary:

“Senior Pentagon Russia Analyst LTC David Jewberg” maintained a popular Facebook page and was frequently quoted in Ukrainian and Russian media as a Pentagon insider related to topics concerning Ukraine and Russia. He represented himself as an actual person with the legal name “David Jewberg,” not as a persona or pseudonym.
A number of well-known Russian opposition figures frequently cited David Jewberg as a respected analyst and real-life contact.
David Jewberg is actually an imagined persona connected to a group of individuals inside the U.S. revolving around well-connected American financier Dan K. Rapoport, who was named as the person who wrote under this persona by well-known Russia expert David Satter and other sources in Washington who spoke to Bellingcat. A number of personal friends and professional connections connected to Rapoport helped to prop up this fake persona; for example, photographs from Rapoport’s college friend were used to represent Jewberg and a number of Washington-area friends of Rapoport wrote about Jewberg as if he were a real person.
Dan K. Rapoport is the former owner of the house sold to Ivanka Trump in January 2017. He worked as a financial executive in Russia in the 2000’s, after which he reportedly became active in supporting Russian opposition figures. He moved to Kyiv in late 2016 and most recent reports indicate that he works as a financial executive in Ukraine.
Per legal experts consulted during this investigation, the person(s) who maintained the “David Jewberg” persona created false identification documents, impersonating a federal official with a Pentagon identification card.
The U.S. Department of Defense and State Department have disavowed the existence of David Jewberg, stating that they have never employed a person by this name.
Rapoport has repeatedly denied being the author behind David Jewberg and not acknowledged that “Jewberg” is an imagined persona.
SECTION ONE: Who is David Jewberg?

In April 2016, the Ukrainian news site Dialog.ua introduced its readers to David Jewberg, an “American soldier, analyst, military history specialist, officer of the U.S. Army, political consultant of the U.S. State Department, Department of Defense, and National Security analyst.” Dialog went on to describe Jewberg’s biography, including information about his parents (Tammy and Joe, both born in Lyndhurst, Ohio) and upbringing (graduated from John Miller High School in 1988) and career (deployed to Somali, Yemen, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq…). As Dialog describes, Lt. Colonel Jewberg has risen through the ranks of the U.S. military and eventually became a Senior Analyst at the Department of Defense, focusing on Russia.
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Photograph of “David Jewberg” and his dog, as presented on both his Facebook profile and Dialog.ua
Jewberg’s online presence

Jewberg maintained (spring 2015 to autumn 2017) a popular Facebook page predominantly in fluent (though somewhat Americanized) Russian with occasional posts in English. The Facebook was originally started in May 2015 and quickly began its rise to prominence. Nearly three years ago, this was a time when President Obama maintained a relatively reserved stance towards Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, which peaked in February 2015 with the Battle of Debaltseve. Many in Ukraine and those among Russian anti-Putin circles sought a stronger stance from America against the Kremlin, either through direction action (a stronger sanctions regime, defensive weapons for Ukraine, etc.) or in rhetoric. Jewberg, presented as a public source from within the Pentagon, appeared to fill the latter role.

Along with his Facebook profile, Jewberg maintained a public LinkedIn account, a Google Plus profile, and a website at JewbergsList.com (likely a play on the well-known Johnson’s Russia List).

Jewberg’s LinkedIn profile bolstered a sense of legitimacy where he displayed his “connections” with a number of well-known Russia watchers, including Michael McFaul (former US Ambassador to Russia), David Satter (prominent American Russia expert and historian), Mark Galeotti (prominent Kremlinologist), Dmitry Zaks (reporter with Agence France-Presse), and many others. Furthermore, he had a number of endorsements for various skills—a feature in a LinkedIn profile that gave his profile a sense of authenticity.

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On his Facebook page, Jewberg’s “About Me” section reads (in translation):

“I’m a veteran of the United States Armed Forces. I’m of Russian descent. I blog on history, I write the truth and facts, all that is being hidden from Russians by the Russian state media.”

On Facebook, David Jewberg clearly stated that he was a “Senior Russian Analyst at US Department of Defense,” though he “resigned” from that role shortly after the election of Donald Trump.

To further his stated goal of uncovering truth hidden from Russians, David Jewberg publicly derided pro-Kremlin writers and ordinary users, and mass added anti-Kremlin users as friends on Facebook. Meanwhile the increasingly popular profile continued to publish his analysis of a number of topics, with matters related to Russia and Ukraine taking center stage.

Kseniya Kirillova, a Russian journalist who has relocated to the United States, was an early witness to the rise of David Jewberg’s profile and influence online and the growing interest, especially among those in anti-Kremlin activist and opposition circles in the United States.

In an interview for this investigation, Kirillova said that in 2015, “everyone” in the close-knit Russian opposition community in the U.S. was talking about David Jewberg, the new, vocal anti-Putin Pentagon official.

Kirillova said that in 2015, being a fresh arrival to America after immigrating to the country a year earlier, she struggled to connect to established American experts in her field of Kremlin and propaganda studies. Her friends in her new home, including other members of the Russian opposition community, pointed her to Jewberg.

As Kirillova describes, Jewberg was highly effective as a tool of counter-propaganda during the heights of Kremlin-organized disinformation campaigns.

“(In 2015) David Jewberg enjoyed tremendous support from numerous individuals…

On occasions he posted materials that really could highlight Russia’s state under Putin. He was supported not because the public was dumb, he enjoyed support of smart, decent people who used some of the material he provided in their own online argument with pro-Putin crowds.”

“David Jewberg” endeared himself to many within Russia’s opposition and in Ukraine when in the summer of 2016 he penned, and urged his followers to also send, a letter to Facebook’s managers, urging the company to address its moderators alleged pro-Kremlin bias:

“Americans value freedom of expression. Facebook is an American company created to facilitate open communication between users around the world. Therefore, we hope that you have similar values and you support Truth, Justice and American Way. Consequently, we are puzzled and frustrated by your apparent lack of response. Respectfully we urge you to allocate several POLITICALLY NEUTRAL Russian language moderators to review all blocks of popular Russian language bloggers in order to insure that the same FB Community Standards fairly apply to all”.

The letter, which was initially signed by David Jewberg and edited by popular Russian-language American blogger “Alexander J. Flint” (real name Alex Kodner), soon went viral.

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The letter and its effectiveness were praised on Facebook by a number of popular Putin critics, such as Slava Rabinovich (a Russian-American financier and blogger with nearly 25,000 Facebook followers) and Alexander Sotnik (an opposition journalist and activist with over 100,000 followers on Facebook). Slava Rabinovich, in particular called Jewberg his “friend”.
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politician, former member of Russian Duma and current head of a liberal “The Western Choice” party, urged Ekaterina Skorobogatova, who was previously reported in the media as Development Manager for Russia and CIS for Facebook to add “David Jewberg” to the social network’s list of “untouchables”. In other words, suspension-proof accounts, along with the Facebook accounts of prominent Putin critics. Borovoy’s post mentioning Jewberg was broadcast to his nearly 150,000 Facebook followers and netted over a thousand likes and over 600 shares.

Later in October of the same year Borovoy triumphantly shared news that he “had an opportunity” to pass a list of “activists blocked by Kremlin trolls” to Mark Zuckerberg. David Jewberg was included in the list.

Jewberg’s Facebook campaigning and his apparent good standing with Russian opposition figures yielded a surprising result: a conference call with Facebook managers. Per Jewberg’s posts on Facebook, in August 2016 he had a phone conference call with “Facebook Global Head of Content Policy”, the “Facebook head in Eastern Europe”, and others.
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During the phone call, according to Jewberg, he informed Facebook of the social network’s alleged pro-Kremlin bias and was asked to submit a list of unjustly blocked accounts. The post from Jewberg contained a screenshot of a message he allegedly had received earlier from Facebook, inviting him to a conference call. Per Jewberg’s post, the phone call with Facebook took place on August 1, 2016 via Blue Jeans Conferencing service.

“Hi David

Thanks for your patience as we organize. Are you able to speak this coming Monday August 1 at 6:30 PM Eastern Time? If so, please confirm with an email response . Meeting details: Phone: +1 408 7407256

Enter Meeting ID: 446119116

Thanks”

Facebook didn’t return requests to comment on Borovoy’s allegations regarding the list passed on to Zuckerberg as well as on “David Jewberg” in general. Ekaterina Skorobogatova, mentioned by Borovoy, currently works as Growth Manager at WhatsApp. She did not return multiple email requests to comment.

Unusual name, stolen face

Though the last name “Jewberg” is a satirical name to use, this was not the tone taken by the Facebook page and Ukrainian media coverage of the “Pentagon insider.” For example, Jewberg has shared a series of identification cards showing his identity, though the first three letters of his last name are not visible in any of the IDs.
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Note that on the Virginia driver’s license, there is no signature (which should be in the blank area between the name and “Endorsements / None”).

Another photograph on Facebook of the Jewberg IDs shows the first and last name of the “Pentagon official”:

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These identification cards look roughly similar to sample versions you can find online, such as a U.S. Army identification card found on the website of Ft. Drum in New York:
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Jewberg was not shy in hiding his face, posting photographs on his social media accounts showing him in a number of situations—relaxing, in his military uniform, at official functions, and so on.
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However, the man in these photographs is not actually “David Jewberg,” but a Texan named Steve Ferro. As described later in this investigation, Ferro is a college friend of Dan K. Rapoport.

As seen in a comparison of Facebook profiles below, “Jewberg” uses a photograph that is clearly of Steve Ferro, as the same man and dog are seen in a 2012 photograph on Ferro’s Facebook page.
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In the photograph of various identification cards shared by “David Jewberg”, Ferro’s face is visible. Below, a composite compares Ferro’s face on a Virginia driver’s license photographed by “Jewberg,” and two photographs of Ferro from Facebook.
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In one case, with a Pentagon ID, Ferro/Jewberg’s face was digitally manipulated. In the identification card, the right ear of Jewberg/Ferro is grotesquely deformed, along with his cheek.
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Clearly, Steve Ferro’s name is not David Jewberg, making it unclear how “Jewberg” obtained these identification cards. In particular, it is unclear how the Pentagon identification card was obtained or created, as there are obviously legal issues with the production of false federal identification cards.

Further discussion around Steve Ferro and why his photographs were used to represent David Jewberg can be found later in this investigation.

Jewberg gains a foothold in the Ukrainian media landscape

The Ukrainian news site Dialog, mentioned at the beginning of this investigation, was one of the main drivers of traffic towards Jewberg’s opinions, and has published over a dozen articles summarizing his Facebook posts (Dialog did not return comment at time of publishing regarding their frequent coverage of Jewberg). However, the most impactful single news story about Jewberg in Ukrainian media came from another site.

In November 2015, Ukraine’s popular news site Obozrevatel.com published a sensational article based solely on a statement made by “David Jewberg” on his Facebook page. The article, titled “’10 Days Will Suffice: A Pentagon official gives a detailed description of how Russia will lose a war with NATO,” has gained over 211,000 views and thousands of shares on social networks.
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Jewberg’s statements on the possible scenario of a war between Russia and NATO, the centerpiece of this article, would resurface in additional articles in the years to come.

The article in Ukraine’s Obozrevatel.com, like many to follow, shared Jewberg’s Facebook posts uncritically, often republished with unabridged sections. Below, we provide a translation of portions of this widely-shared Obozrevatel article, which served as one of the stepping stones for Jewberg’s ascendance in Ukrainian and Russian media and also represent the typical writing style for Jewberg’s numerous Facebook posts:

“Should Russia’s president Vladimir Putin dare to confront NATO directly, the conflict between the Alliance and Russia will last no longer that 10-20 days and there won’t be anyone left to sign the act of unconditional surrender on behalf of the Russian Federation. Such is the belief of a Pentagon officer, a descendant of immigrants from the USSR, David Jewberg. David Jewberg published the above-mentioned statement on his Facebook page, with an infographic about the correlation of Russia’s and NATO’s armed forces…”

The article went on to share a lengthy quote from Jewberg:

“On numerous occasions I was asked to give my own estimate regarding a potential war between the Russian Federation and NATO. I’ll write solely based on the publicly information. The Pentagon, where I currently work, has plans for war with all countries of the world. But when it comes to unstable and aggressive regimes – the plans are the most detailed. These plans are developed thoroughly and constantly updated, sometimes with my participation. A potential war with Russia won’t look like the war with Iraq in 2003. Although Russia has an army comparable to the Iraqi by size and technological sophistication, the Iraqi army way experienced and disciplined and didn’t suffer from alcoholism and corruption.

(…)

It will be a war between a country with 2% of the world’s GDP against an Alliance that accounts for 50% of the world’s GDP. Russia’s annual military budget of $80 billion vs NATO’s $800 billion. It’s a war of a rifle against a laser gun. Even if Putin will dare to conduct a nuclear strike (and I believe that he will), and even if the half of the soviet-made rockets take off, the United States is reliably protected by the PRO missile defense system. The only threat to the US would come from a nuclear submarine close to our borders, but even in this case, we believe that we will be able to intercept.

(…)

Initially there will be a bomb strike by B-2 stealth bombers on military objects and factories within Russia. A strike by Counter-electronics High-powered CHAMP drones will then once and for all shut down all electronics in Russia’s major cities. It’s a wrap. Welcome to middle ages. Putin’s gang will then either abandon the country (to North Korea, Iran, Syria, Venezuela) or hide in an underground bunker like rats. All in all, the war with Russia will last 10-20 days after NATO’s initial strikes. No body in Russia will even see NATO’s soldiers until the day Russia surrenders. Pentagon is worried about one particular question, that is Who will sign the act of unconditional surrender on behalf of the Russian Federation

(…)

All the old officials will be taken to curt and lustrated. There won’t be any corruption under our administration. We’ll help the defeated Russians with food (as we have before), medicine, infrastructure and technologies. We’ll take your country to the 21st century. And we un-brainwash most of Russia’s population, in a year or two, we’ll help Russians conduct an honest election. After a legitimate Russian government is elected, we’ll leave Russia with around one thousand advisors to help you and ensure that there won’t be another Putin or Stalin coming to power. The advisors will also help Russia with the development of infrastructure, armed forces, law-enforcement and state institutions. Then, once you’re ready to rule on your own, we’ll leave your country and will be your allies and partners in the future. It will be not unlike what was done in Italy, Germany, Japan, Korea, Panama, Afghanistan. Unfortunately, it didn’t work that way in Iraq and Libya. And then the whole world will be friends with a peaceful and wealthy Russia. You’ll be a reach country once you pay up for the war with NATO, YUKOS, Ukraine, MH17.”

Jewberg saw notable media coverage in a number of Ukrainian outlets in the year after this Obozrevatel article, including from DSnews.ua (on a Jewberg Facebook post disparaging Russia’s wastefulness regarding natural gas) and Apostrophe.ua (on Jewberg’s take on Russia’s inability to supply its new “Armata” tanks to its troops).

In October 2016, Illia Ponomarenko, then a self-described inexperienced journalist working at Ukraine’s twin publications Gazeta.ua and the “Kraina” magazine, decided to interview Jewberg via email on the topic of war between Ukraine and Russia in the Donbas. As Ponomarenko shared with us as part of this investigation, Jewberg was perceived as a trusted source in Ukrainian media. Ponomarenko described why, in October 2016, it was reasonable to take Jewberg seriously as a source: he had a detailed biography with no apparent contradictions, multiple photographs of himself and stories that appeared credible, a steady stream of interesting posts on Ukraine-Russia conflict, and a number of personal connections with well-known Russia-focused experts. In other words, as Ponomarenko explained, “everything our audience was most interested in”.

Ponomarenko admitted that he later, after the interview, came to doubt Jewberg’s identity. Still, Ponomarenko said, he considers the interview a “good salvo in the information war against Russia.” With his editors’ approval, Ponomarenko conducted an interview with Jewberg via email and published an article on this interaction on October 4, 2016 on Gazeta.ua.
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This interview with Jewberg, introduced as “Senior Russian Analyst at US Department of Defense” in the article, touched on the range of topics, from the conditions for the U.S. to provide lethal weapons to Ukraine, to the Pentagon’s official take on the events in Ukraine’s east. The topic of a potential war between NATO and Russia headlined the Gazeta.ua article: “In a war against NATO Russia will surrender in 10 days” – the same quotation that gave Jewberg his explosive break into the Ukrainian media landscape in 2015 with the Obozrevatel article.

Jewberg acknowledged the Gazeta.ua interview on his Facebook profile on October 6, 2016:

“I don’t speak Ukrainian yet, but hope that the translation of my interview in Russian was correct.”

There was no doubt in his interview with Ponomarenko that David Jewberg was speaking on behalf of the Pentagon. Though some of his statements were more outrageous than what you would find from most Pentagon officials—especially the “10 days” quotation–Jewberg presented a digest of what was at the time a mainstream, consensus Western take on events in Ukraine and on Russia. A survey of some of these run-of-the-mill positions, though in some cases perhaps overly optimistic in favor of Ukraine, were:

On providing U.S. weapons to Ukraine: “Ukraine needs to develop mechanisms to control the use of lethal weapons from the US.”
On military reform: “Ukraine should invest into fostering professionalism on all levels of the military.”
On the unintended consequences of Russia’s aggression: “By invading Ukraine, Putin only strengthened NATO’s influence in Europe, destroyed his own economy and isolated Russia.”
On Putin’s strategy: “Don’t expect progress on Minsk accords. Putin waits for the new Administration in the US.”
On the future of Crimea: “Crimea will return to Ukraine on its own, once Ukraine is prosperous.”
While Jewberg’s opinions were fairly vanilla in much of the interview, it was his headline-grabbing take on a 10-day war between NATO and Russia that caught attention of numerous media outlets in Ukraine and later Russia. Ironically, this explosive statement should have been seen as anything but, as it was recycled from his year-old Facebook post covered by Obozrevatel.

This interview garnered success with clicks, leading Gazeta.ua to issue several pieces based on the interview with Jewberg over the following days. For example, a piece published on October 6th (”Pentagon’s officer commented on the future of the occupied Donbass”) focused on Jewberg’s statements regarding the future of occupied sections of eastern Ukraine. Another article published on the same day (“NATO’s war with Russian will last no more than 20 days – Pentagon analyst says”) focused exclusively on the NATO-Russia war scenario.

Ponomarenko’s interview led to a new spike in interest towards David Jewberg’s page, specifically due to the apparently official take from a “Pentagon official” on the quick outcome of a potential NATO-Russia war. On October 13, 2016, TSN.ua (the web site of Ukraine’s top TV network) ran its own story titled “NATO-Russia war: How it it will happen.” This was published under TSN.ua’s blog section, attributed to “David Jewberg Senior Russia Analyst of the United States Department of Defense,” who now had his own author page on the website. This TSN blog was adapted from Jewberg’s Facebook post (“My original text was changed a little bit, a part of it was left out, but the essence is there”, as Jewberg wrote on the day of the TSN blog publication).

The Gazeta.ua interview and TSN blog post led to a new wave of Ukrainian media attention in October 2016, including:

UNIAN (a major Ukrainian information agency) ran two pieces on Jewberg: “A Russia-NATO war: Pentagon Analyst predicts how it can look like and how it will end” and “Pentagon weighs in on the possible scenario of events in Donbass, Putin’s perspectives”.
Focus.ua published “Pentagon gave its prediction of the future of Donbass”.
The hugely popular Segodnya.ua daily published “Pentagon gives valuable advice to Ukraine’s armed forces” and “Pentagon explains Russia’s aggressive international posturing” on the same day.
Ukraine’s highly popular television channel ICTV also quoted Jewberg in news items on its website, including “Russia’s Defeat in the Donbass: The Pentagon gave details” and “The US speaks on Kremlin’s expectations”.
As is clear in these headlines, the story was not just that a popular Facebook figure was giving interesting opinions about Russia, but that an actual Pentagon official was giving an interview as a person who can speak on behalf of the U.S. Department of Defense.

“It was a viral hit,” Ponomarenko told this investigation about his interview success. “Nobody in the media community could either confirm or deny that Jewberg was a fake. But he was widely read. I felt like I was letting the Genie out of the bottle, not unlike the Russian propaganda”.

Kirillova, the Russian émigré to America, had the same idea about Jewberg’s veracity to Ukrainian media, saying that “Ukraine’s media couldn’t imagine that someone would be able to pose as a Pentagon official for so long without either being an actual official, or being stopped.”

“David Jewberg” was growing increasingly visible with his volatile statements, but with this newfound popularity also came a response.

The Kremlin takes notice

Brash to the point of being offensive and in equal parts anti-Putin and patriotic to America, David Jewberg was just the kind of an American many in the Russian opposition craved. His statements also pleased Ukrainian online crowds eager for an insider perspective affirming the belief that America and its military minds were firmly on its side in its ongoing war with Russia and its proxies. However, these same traits that endeared “Jewberg” to Putin’s foes, in the fall of 2016 turned out to be in high demand for Russian media looking for confirmations to the image of the warmongering, Russophobic Pentagon long promulgated by the Kremlin anti-American propaganda.

An example of how Jewberg’s comments to Ukrainian media were perceived by Russian journalists and their readers at the same time as they were published in Ukraine can be seen in a Regnum.ru article (“Pentagon speaks up on NATO’s war against Russia – it will be a war of a rifle against a laser gun”), in which Jewberg is presented as a “U.S. Department of Defense Analyst” with no expressed doubts about Jewberg’s identity or potentially false credentials.

However, the Russian Ministry of Defense’s media outlet, TV Zvezda, did raise some doubts about Jewberg’s identity in its article “Pentagon plans to obliterate Russian Federation in 20 days and let NATO govern it”, saying that “It remains unknown whether Jewberg is in fact a Pentagon official.”

Perhaps the most impactful piece of Jewberg coverage in Russian media came from an op-ed in Russia’s state news service, RIA Novosti, by Vladimir Bychkov. In an article titled ““The US prepares a new Operation Barbarossa” against Russia?” that garnered nearly a half-million views, the editorialist compared the war scenario laid out by Jewberg in his Gazeta.ua interview with Hitler’s attack on the Soviet union in 1941. Bychkov raised mild reservations about Jewberg’s identity (“Senior analyst… But who know what kind of analyst and who he works for…), but still gave an impassioned response to his claims that Russia would fall to NATO in weeks.

The next day, Bychkov published a follow-up piece in RIA Novosti titled “Jewberg and Barbarossa”. Necessary clarifications for no particular reason”. Bychkov said he became aware that Jewberg’s identity could be a fake multiplied by Ukraine’s media, but mentioned that it did not matter to him personally, since “the statement that Jewberg (or “Jewberg” – whatever) produced, if we are to trust Ukrainian media – is a quintessence of what is currently being openly and publicly discussed in the US”.

Russia’s highly popular Komsomolskaya Pravda also ran a piece on Jewberg’s statements to Ukrainian media, titled “America will conquer Russia in 20 days? Oh really!” by Viktor Baranets, a well-known Russian military analyst and retired colonel/spokesperson for the Russian military. In his op-ed, Baranets took aim at both David Jewberg’s (““we’re dealing with an untrustworthy individual that poses as someone he is not”) and Ukrainian media’s (calling Gazeta.ua “a dumpster for anti-Russian rumors”) credibility, but stopped shy of declaring David Jewberg a fake.

As seen in this selection of coverage in Russian media, Kseniya Kirillova believes that the Russian media managed to effectively instrumentalize “David Jewberg” to their own ends:

“Russian propaganda was benefiting [from Jewberg’s aggressive statements]. While on Facebook he was debating Russian propagandists in front of a relatively small audience to a small net positive effect, the damage his statements were doing, once trumped up by major media, was way bigger. Russian propagandists, at a considerably high lever, were using his statements to accuse America of aggression toward Russia and to justify Russia’s own aggressive posturing.”

Jewberg’s “resignation”

Through the election season of 2016, David Jewberg continued to maintain his large Facebook presence and share his “insider expertise” with his readers. Prior to his heights of media exposure in Ukraine and Russia in the fall of 2016, he had made it clear that he was no fan of Donald Trump. For example, in July 2016, Jewberg equated the prospect of Trump winning to a “cataclysmic event” comparable to “an inter-racial war” and “nuclear explosion”.

The day after Trump’s electoral victory, the “Pentagon official” issued a statement on Facebook that he was retiring from Pentagon in protest, netting over a thousand likes on the social network.

“Terrible. How can this be??? Are there really that many people ready to give power to Trump? I wrote before, that I’d resign should Trump get elected. I can’t be under this person’s command.”
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A day later, Jewberg wrote that he “submitted a resignation letter” and remarked that “Trump is everything I despised”.

Jewberg’s anti-Trump and Russia-focused blogging did not stop with his “resignation”; however, after Trump’s election, Jewberg dialed down on “insider” takes and stuck to presenting his readers with summaries of U.S. media coverage of Trump’s administration, focusing on the ongoing “Russiagate” issue.

Despite his rise to visibility with over 25,000 Facebook subscribers, extensive exposure in Ukrainian and Russian media, and a public “resignation” after Trump’s election, David Jewberg is not a real person.

As part of our investigation, we contacted both the State Department (where Jewberg supposedly worked while at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow) and the Department of Defense (where he supposedly was employed until late 2016 and is a U.S. Army officer). Both denied ever employing someone by the name of “David Jewberg”. The State Department went as far as to say that the online activity of Jewberg was “fictitious”.
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So how was this Pentagon official created, and why did so many people buy into this mirage?

SECTION TWO: How a Pentagon Official Was Invented

Karmanov draws out the Rapoport connection

In November 2015, a Russian, China-based blogger Ruslan Karmanov published a lengthy, profanity-filled blog titled “The Life and Times of David Jewberg” that ridiculed claims that Jewberg was a legitimate official, marveled at what he saw as the gullibility of Russian opposition figures, and documented his online interactions with “David Jewberg” that took place in the weeks prior to the blog publication.
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“David Jewberg” attempted to convince Karmanov that he was real, though the Russian blogger believed that the “Jewberg” persona was maintained by anti-Putin activist(s), possibly in Ukraine with support from sympathizers in the U.S. To this end, Jewberg tried to prove he was real by sharing photographs of a current issue of the New York Times, Starbucks receipts from Washington, DC, and a firearm with the Jewberg Facebook page in the background, all showing a Post-It note addressed to Karmanov. The Russian blogger, however, remained unconvinced.
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Karmanov’s blog post dedicated to Jewberg (last updated 2017) also provided a screenshot of a warning he received from the aggravated “Pentagon official”.
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The response was sent from major.jewberg@gmail.com, an address that Jewberg has publicly displayed as his own.

In a separate case in December 2015, “Jewberg” publicly demanded (still available online thanks to Jewberg’s follower that shared it to an anti-Putin group) that Karmanov issue a public apology for his blog post (and also that Karmanov “should shove his left hand up his rectum”) or be “punished”.

Jewberg had reasons to be upset, as Karmanov’s blog post about him is still among top results Google returns for searches for “David Jewberg”. However, despite good search engine optimization, the November 2015 blog post did little to abate Jewberg’s prominence, which peaked in the following year.

Who is Dan K. Rapoport?

Karmanov did more than just chronicle a combative “Pentagon official”, he also documented a connection of the “official” to a very real person in Washington: Dan K. Rapoport, a prominent Soviet-born American financier whose family immigrated to the U.S. when he was a child. Rapoport spent years working in Russia until, as he described in a recent interview, he felt that he needed to leave the country due to his support of the domestic opposition.

Rapoport, as Karmanov documented, was actively propping up Jewberg’s credibility online. In particular, Rapoport posted pictures of a man he identified as “David Jewberg” (photos of the same man were featured on Jewberg’s Facebook profile) and referred to him as a personal acquaintance of a number of years.
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To understand why Rapoport could have an interest in the Jewberg persona, it is helpful to know some basic facts about his biography.

Rapoport was born in Riga in 1970, and moved with his parents to Texas in 1978, when his father Vladimir Rapoport, a geotechnic engineer, secured a job in Houston. After being raised in America, Rapoport received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Houston in 1991.

As detailed in numerous accounts, including his own LinkedIn, Rapoport later spent several years as a managing partner with Moscow-based CentreInvest Securities (CiS), where, during a stint running the firm’s New York branch, he completed various cross-border transactions representing Russian companies and international institutional investors.

Per the SEC, from about 2003 until at least November 2007, CI-Moscow and Rapoport directly and indirectly solicited investors in the United States to purchase and sell thinly-traded stocks of Russian companies without registering as broker-dealers, as required by Section 15(a) of the Exchange Act, or meeting requirements for an exemption. The SEC entered a default order against Rapoport for failing to respond to administrative proceedings initiated by the Commission. In 2012, District Court Judge David Sentelle granted Rapoport’s petition for review and vacated the default order, citing the SEC’s failure to consistently apply its own rule. Finally, in 2013, Rapoport submitted an Offer of Settlement to the SEC, which the Commission accepted. Per the settlement, Rapoport was barred from acting as a broker of penny stocks and had to pay a fine of $68,402.40 to the United States Treasury.

Dan Rapoport heads Rapoport Capital LLC, a venture capital firm specializing in early stage investments. He relocated to Kyiv from Washington, DC in late 2016.
Most recently, Rapoport briefly stepped into the spotlight in the United States in early 2017 when numerous media outlets reported that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner moved into a D.C. mansion that Rapoport previously owned with his family. Rapoport also claimed on numerous occasions to have worked for Romney and Jeb Bush presidential campaigns.
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When contacted, representatives from both the Bush and Romney campaigns responded that they could not confirm that Rapoport had worked on the campaigns. It may be that his self-described role as advisor to the two candidates was not significant enough to be known to other staffers. Will Ritter, who is close with Romney and his campaign, told us in a phone conversation that neither he nor former colleagues remembered Rapoport. A Jeb Bush staffer told us, as seen in the exchange below, that Rapoport was not an employee of the campaign.
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Rapoport and Jewberg coordinate attacks

Karmanov also documented an instance that is still visible on Facebook in which Rapoport apparently threatened D.C. resident Victor Oganjanov. In a reply to an Oganjanov Facebook post, Rapoport wrote that David Jewberg would report Oganjanov’s online behavior to his employer Textron, an American aerospace and defense conglomerate.

Initially, Rapoport was unhappy with Oganjanov’s position regarding an incident with the USS Ross in the Black Sea, where the ship was reportedly buzzed by Russian jets. Oganjanov, in contrast with Rapoport, thought that the ship’s mission in itself was provocative.

The two engaged in a technical debate on Russia’s military technologies compared to those of U.S. Rapoport soon accused Oganjanov of spreading lies and warned that “David Jewberg will write a letter from pentagon to Textron on Monday.”
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Soon in the same thread, Oganjanov posted a series of comments quoting messages, all mentioning Jewberg, that he received from Dan Rapoport.
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One comment cited a text message from Rapoport’s cell (this investigation has confirmed that this number belongs to Rapoport) read:

“… +1 (646) 460-3961: “Good bye job Victor. Good bye America. Hello NSA investigation. Hello FBI interrogation”

Another, citing an email that came from Rapoport’s personal email, (this investigation has confirmed that this address belongs to Rapoport) accused Oganjanov of sharing “extremely radical anti American rants and very pro Putin and pro Russian information”, and suggesting that the company “re-check his clearance level.” The letter, according to Oganjanov’s Facebook comment, was signed by “Major David XXXXXX” [note: redacted by Rapoport when forwarded to Oganjanov] of the “US Army Rangers”.

Oganjanov, who still resides in Washington, confirmed to us, as part of this investigation, that the posts were authentic and he received these messages.

Rapoport’s “friend and brother”

In another instance in May 2015, Rapoport referred to “David Jewberg” as his “friend and brother” during a Facebook spat on Rapoport’s Facebook page.
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When asked whether Rapoport was himself a military expert, Rapoport replied, “I’m actually not, but my friend and brother David Jewberg is. Do read his opinion”.

In numerous posts and correspondences, Dan Rapoport was open about being a point of contact for “David Jewberg”.

In October 2015, Kseniya Kirillova attempted to organize a meeting with the elusive Pentagon official. Jewberg prompted her to discuss the meeting with Dan Rapoport directly via Facebook messenger.

According to screenshots of a conversation between Kseniya Kirillova and Dan Rapoport presented for this investigation by Kirillova, in October 2015 Rapoport told her she had to provide “David Jewberg” with “docs for a background check because of his clearance”.
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After Kirillova expressed reservations about providing documents to someone she had never met in real life, Rapoport provided her with his personal cell and promised to try to get “DJ” to come to the meeting.

In a Facebook exchange with Kirillova provided for this investigation, Rapoport also firmly established that he was cooperating with Jewberg “on issues”.

The darling of the Russian opposition

Rapoport also presented himself as a point of contact for Jewberg to Ilya Ponomarev, a prominent former Russian MP and opposition figure who has resided outside of Russia since 2014. In a 2017 conversation for this investigation, Ponomarev stated that Dan Rapoport, who he considers a personal friend, “was open about having a working relationship with David Jewberg”.

Ilya Ponomarev was one of several major boosters of Jewberg’s credibility. For example, in August 2016, he thanked Jewberg (archive) in a Facebook post for likening him (Ponomarev) to Pericles of Athens, in January 2017 tagged him in a Facebook post on NATO military capability.
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Jewberg used Ponomarev’s endorsement to the fullest by reposting it and adding a lengthy story where he claims that he had met Ponomarev in person while working at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. This claim was endorsed by Ponomarev, who thanked Jewberg for the Facebook post.
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Ponomarev was just one of several Russian opposition figures who apparently believed in or supported the story of the anti-Putin Pentagon official, including the aforementioned figures of Rabinovich, Borovoy, and Sotnik (see previous subsection “Jewberg’s online presence”). However, unlike the other oppositionists, Ponomarev certainly knew that Jewberg was not a real person. When speaking to the researcher of this investigation in 2017, Ponomarev was clear that he was aware that “David Jewberg” was not a person, but an online persona. Ponomarev did not elaborate on who operated this persona, but he stated that this person was a well-known figure in Washington, highly knowledgeable on the matters that were covered under the “David Jewberg” alias, was driven by a legitimate concern with events in Russia, the United States and Ukraine, and attempted to influence ongoing events in these countries.

Ponomarev described how the popularity of David Jewberg in Ukrainian and Russian media coverage came as a surprise to the persona’s creator. As to the identity of this creator, Ponomarev avoided answering if Dan Rapoport was Jewberg’s “author”, but did say that Rapoport was open about having a “working relationship” with Jewberg. However, another well-known figure would be able to state that Jewberg and Rapoport were indeed the same person.

Satter’s confirmation

In June 2017, Jewberg posted a link to a Voice of America Russian Service interview with well-known American Russia expert David Satter, adding a comment that Satter was his personal friend. Satter was also listed as Dan Rapoport’s friend on Facebook. Almost a year prior in September 2016, Jewberg made a Facebook post about a presentation of Satter’s book at a Washington book store, also calling Satter a personal friend. David Satter himself liked the post on Facebook.
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When Satter was asked via email if Rapoport was in fact “David Jewberg”, Satter confirmed.

“I am aware that David Jewberg is a nom de plume for Dan Rapaport. Dan is a friend of mine and I have no objections to him reprinting the article with the VOA.”

He also clarified that he wasn’t “familiar with the background to the blog.”

While a number of well-known opposition figures and Russia experts were able to say that there was some connection between “Jewberg” and Rapoport, Satter was clear that the Jewberg persona was used by Rapoport.

Jewberg’s online entourage

In reading through the comments on Jewberg’s Facebook profile, a pattern emerges with a regular stream of comments from actual, verifiable individuals in the U.S. who backed up Jewberg’s claims. These people would also post on Jewberg’s Facebook timeline or to related Facebook groups explaining his temporary absences, such as when he was temporarily banned from the social network. In tracing these individuals, they all had someone in common: Dan Rapoport.

An especially curious connection to Jewberg is Ben Anderson, an active-duty Lieutenant-Commander in the U.S. Navy. As clear on LinkedIn and other exchanges, Anderson is a personal friend of Rapoport. Ben Anderson posted in Russian on the “David Jewberg” Facebook profile on January 25, 2016:

“Dear David’s readers. He asked me to let you know that he can’t post or even answer your messages. Yet his email, major.jewberg@gmail.com is fully functional. He’ll be back on Facebook on February 23rd, 2016.”
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The U.S. Navy media office confirmed that the Facebook profile used to leave the message on David Jewberg’s timeline does belong to Ben Anderson, but clarified that Anderson’s comments were not representative of the U.S. Navy. The media office also confirmed that a LinkedIn page in the name of Ben Anderson that featured a glowing endorsement from Dan Rapoport (“I am inspired by Ben, and I hope my kids grow up like him…”) also belonged to him.
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Anderson did not return requests to comment.

In November 2017, a Special Agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service informed this reporter via email that the Service was conducting an inquiry regarding LCDR Ben Anderson concerning “his possibly misrepresenting himself as a DOD [Department of Defense] official.”

Many of the social gatherings that Jewberg “attended” and his most vocal supporters on Facebook are tied to organizations that Rapoport is also a part of, including a local Freemason chapter.

For example, Rapoport tagged “David Jewberg” in a number of Facebook posts from Washington-area Freemason meetings, and Jewberg himself shared a number of posts and photographs of Freemason meetings in Washington, and the jewbergslist.com site featured an article on Freemasonry.

An example of the overlap in social connections between “Jewberg” and Rapoport is with Robb Mitchell, an active-duty U.S. Army Colonel and fellow Freemason. In the photograph below, David Jewberg congratulations “my friend, colleague, and brother” Robb Mitchell for becoming a colonel.
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Jewberg attempted to boost his credibility by frequently referring to a number Rapoport’s friends who openly touted their military credentials, such as Dmitriy Minin and Eric Konovalov. These friends would also post photographs and other content that referred to Jewberg as if he were a real person, such as a March 2016 Facebook post from Eric Konovalov showing a group of soldiers with the text, “Remember this beautiful day, David? We definitely had some fun bro!”
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Many of these individuals who were used to prop up Jewberg as an actual, well-connected person were friends with Rapoport and in his social circles, including being in the same local Freemason chapter. These contacts were all living in or around Washington D.C., but another Rapoport contact was perhaps the most vital in creating false legitimacy to the “Pentagon official”: Steve Ferro, whose face was used to represent Jewberg.
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Steve Ferro, who currently lives in Texas, was a Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity brother of Dan Rapoport when they both attended the University of Houston. The two still interact with one another on Facebook.
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As laid out in the previous section of this investigation, a number of photographs on David Jewberg’s Facebook page were also present on Ferro’s page.

Steve Ferro, in a phone call with this reporter on September 18, 2017, denied any knowledge of “David Jewberg”. Ferro did not return an email with detailed questions regarding “David Jewberg” and Ferro’s photos on fake military IDs. However, soon after his contact with this report’s investigator, a number of photographs that were used by David Jewberg were no longer visible on Ferro’s Facebook page.
None of the friends of Rapoport/Jewberg detailed in this section provided comment for this investigation.
The Rapoport nexus

The evidence from this investigation leads us to one obvious question: is Dan Rapoport the creator and author of David Jewberg? David Satter and sources from the Washington-based Free Russia Foundation went on the record to tell us yes, and the evidence supports this statement.

Rapoport has clearly made himself the point of contact for Jewberg and frequently posted about “him” on his Facebook page. Additionally, Rapoport is the one common connection between the face of David Jewberg (Steve Ferro) and the anti-Kremlin opposition figures, & Washington-area professionals who frequently interacted with Jewberg on Facebook. It is difficult to know who among these individuals knew about David Jewberg—for example, Ferro may not have known that Jewberg existed and that his face was being used to represent him, while Satter has stated that Jewberg is a persona used by Rapoport. However, it is evident that the Russian opposition figures and Washington-area individuals who were aware of Jewberg’s “status” were either used to prop up or actively participated in maintaining the credibility of an imagined Pentagon official.

So, is Rapoport actually the author of Jewberg? We will leave it to our readers to decide this question based on the evidence presented. We should also consider the possibility that multiple people—likely including Rapoport—collectively maintained the Jewberg persona.

SECTION 3: Free Russia Foundation

One of the real individuals who posted information to Facebook about Jewberg as if he were a real person is Vlad Burlutskiy, another acquaintance of Rapoport, who was briefly the Greater New York Area coordinator for the Free Russia Foundation, a key US-based Russian opposition group and policy organization. Per sources at the Free Russia Foundation, Burlutskiy is no longer affiliated with the organization and his work there was brief and not extensive.

In 2016, Burlutskiy wrote to an anti-Putin Facebook group, addressing “David’s dear readers” with the exact same message that was written by Ben Anderson:

“Dear David’s readers. He asked me to let you know that he can’t post or even answer your messages. Yet his email, major.jewberg@gmail.com is fully functional. He’ll be back on Facebook on February 23rd, 2016.”
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Jewberg has also acknowledged Burlutskiy on his page, thanking him for a photograph of American soldiers in Estonia.
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In August 2017, after Burlutskiy didn’t return a request for comment on his connection to David Jewberg and Dan Rapoport, we messaged Grigory Frolov, the Development Director of the Free Russia Foundation, and Natalia Arno, the President of the Foundation, with a request for comment regarding “David Jewberg” and Dan Rapoport. These two individuals were messaged due to Burlutskiy’s previous connection with the Free Russia Foundation.

Immediately after a message was sent to one of these officials, the contents of our request were posted onto Jewberg’s Facebook profile. In his Facebook post, “Jewberg” alerted his followers to an investigation into him and published the personal phone number and email address of the researcher who requested information. In the first screenshot below, the text posted by Jewberg and the message sent to Frolov are compared. The messages are identical, except the word “Greg” and the subsequent comma were removed. Bellingcat spoke with both Arno and Frolov, who adamantly denied having any contact with Rapoport about Kuzmenko’s request.
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Natalia Arno, the President of the Free Russia Foundation, spoke to Bellingcat and stated that she was aware that Dan Rapoport operated the David Jewberg account, and that this was an open secret among many in Russian anti-Putin circles in Washington.

Soon after this leak, Jewberg’s social network pages and website were deleted. However, copies of most of these pages—including his Facebook and LinkedIn—were archived and saved. Additionally, a mirror copy of jewbergslist.com exists at https://jewbergslist.4travel.vhost.lt/ (archived here). This website is maintained by Pavel Korchagin, a personal contact of Dan Rapoport.

On August 21, a day after the leak of correspondence with Free Russia Foundation’s Frolov, the investigator working on this case received a threat via Facebook. A message from “Vasily Fedorovtsev”, a Facebook account that features anti-Kremlin statements, scolded the investigator for “spoiling life of David Jewberg” and threatened that the investigator would “get fucked-up and sent back home as a vegetable load” by Jewberg’s “colleagues”.
SECTION 4: Interview with David Jewberg

When this investigation’s researcher reached Dan Rapoport in early summer 2017 for on-the-record comment on his relationship to Jewberg, he obliged, though insisting that the interview was not recorded. During the interview, Rapoport displayed exhaustive knowledge of Jewberg’s online activity and agreed to facilitate further communication with the “Pentagon official”, encouraging communication with Jewberg via his email address, major.jewberg@gmail.com

The author of the emails sent from the Gmail address, signed “LTC David Jewberg Senior Russian Analyst HQDA, G-3/5/7”, claimed that he was in fact “David Jewberg”. A screenshot of his response can be seen below (click for full size):
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The author, however, declined meeting in person or talking over phone. “Jewberg” confirmed the information written by Rapoport about how they knew one another:

“I met Dan in Moscow in 2010, we are friends, also in DC we were members of the same Masonic lodge, Military Lodge 1775.”

“Jewberg” was happy to talk about his goals (“the blog is targeted for the deceived residents of Russia. i have been adding friends since day one primarily from anti american and pro-putin groups. they are the ones than need to know the truth”.) but avoided confirming whether his claims regarding military service and employment history were true.

“Jewberg” confirmed that the various photographed identification cards in the name of “David Jewberg”, including a driver’s license, Social Security card, and a Pentagon identification card, were in fact his.

When pressed for a meeting in person Jewberg responded “i have nothing to gain by meeting and everything to lose. i hope you understand my reluctance”

Jewberg also didn’t answer questions on Dan Rapoport’s involvement. Rapoport later denied that he was “David Jewberg” when asked to comment on this allegation: “I think someone is playing a joke on you. David is not Dan and Dan is not David… who ever told you otherwise is lying”. In the autumn of 2017, after the Free Russia Foundation leak, Rapoport was approached again by this investigation to discuss many of the materials that have been detailed here. Rapoport accused the researcher of this investigation of working for the FSB [Russian security services].
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SECTION 5: Why?

It is clear that in 2015, a fictitious persona named “David Jewberg” was invented to publish analysis on Russia and Ukraine from an insider’s perspective, in this case from the Pentagon. It is also clear that Dan Rapoport and his social circles are at the nexus of the materials surrounding the Jewberg persona, including the face used to depict him and Jewberg’s “friends” in the Washington area. However, what is not clear is why persona was invented with a ridiculous last name, using the face of a man in Texas.

Even more puzzling is why the creator(s) of Jewberg would escalate in proving his existence, rather than fold, as was done in 2017 after being confronted with this investigation. For example, the various identification cards photographed by “Jewberg” are almost certainly fabricated, as they show a completely different man (Steve Ferro) with a different name. We reached out to multiple legal experts, including Richard Raysman, a New York-based lawyer and legal scholar, and Eugene Volokh, a Law Professor at UCLA, to assess the legality of impersonating a Pentagon official and creating fake identification to represent him. Raysman and Volokh both pointed out that impersonating a federal employee and creating fabricated federal identification cards is in violation of 18 U.S.C § 912 (more information on this legal offense can be found on the Justice Department’s website). “Jewberg” shared photographs of what appear to be false identification cards, and “Jewberg” and Rapoport appear to have sent threatening messages to those who crossed them online, as seen in the accounts of Karmanov and Oganjanov.

So, why would you both create a fake Pentagon official and possibly break U.S. law when trying to defend the invented persona? We cannot clearly answer this question, and instead have attempted to provide a comprehensive account of the rise and fall of “David Jewberg” and the men who were consistently close to his online activity. We showed preliminary drafts of this investigation to a number of experts on Russia, intelligence and disinformation in order to elicit their reactions on the curious case of David Jewberg.

Glenn Carle, 23-year veteran of the CIA and former deputy officer on the National Intelligence Council, thought that the “Jewberg” saga could only have been done by a “fool.” If Jewberg was actually ran by an anti-Russian figure, he called it a “crap initiative” and thought it was more likely to be a Russian disinformation campaign than an actual anti-Russian operation.

Lyudmila Savchuk-Borisova, a Russian journalist who made international headlines in suing the so-called Petersburg Troll Factory, investigating troll factories, thought that the Jewberg persona appeared to be a collaborative effort that resembled the shoddy work from the Petersburg Troll Factory.

“’Jewberg’ resembles propagandist fake accounts that a troll factory in Russia would create. A whole group of people would work on something like this. Still propagandist efforts, regardless of who runs them, tend to look alike. ‘Jewberg’ is not necessarily a Russian project. On the other hand, a recent report in Russia pointed out that some anti-Russia foreign ‘experts’ invited on Russian TV as token representatives of the West are often actually paid to serve as virtual Punching bags for local anchors to ridicule.”

Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Surreal Heart of the New Russia and senior visiting fellow at the London School of Economics, thought that the whole Jewberg affair seemed to be a “surreal prank”.

“What struck me first is that the whole thing could be a surreal prank, an extravagant individual undertaking. It’s not how you imagine secret services work. But then again considering that It spanned such a long period of time it could be a case of Freelance work, where someone (a freelancer) ventures out on his own kick-starts a certain project and later pitches an already running operation to a potential buyer. Things aren’t necessarily always linear – as in there’s a side that orders everything, and an executor. I think we are seeing more and more of that thing and it becomes increasingly accessible. Again this case appears to be a weird Propaganda campaign meant for RIA Novosti.”

Judging by the reactions of these three experts, perhaps the real question to ask is not why Jewberg was created, but how so many Ukrainian media outlets were able to take him seriously, including Dialog.ua, who published over a dozen articles about the “Pentagon official” through 2017.

In 2015 and 2016, at the heights of Russia’s propaganda operation against Ukraine and the West, many wondered what measures could be taken to counter disinformation efforts. Some answers came in so-called “anti-disinformation centers,” such as EU vs. Disinformation and StopFake. Others looked to increase the standards of independent investigative reporting to reduce the allure of disinformation and so-called “fake news”, as seen in a number of grants from Western nations to Ukrainian news outlets, such as Hromadske. At Bellingcat, we have sought to provide a combination of pedagogical resources to know how to verify information, along with transparent, open source investigations that open up the research process to our readers.

There is much debate about the efficacy of these types of initiatives; however, all can likely agree that the creation of a fictitious anti-Kremlin Pentagon official is not a productive method of countering disinformation.
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/america ... a-analyst/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Apr 17, 2018 6:27 pm


Pussy Riot

our @all_mary stays in the police department for the 2nd night in a row - for throwing paper planes (in support of @telegram ) to FSB.



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Anna Nemtsova


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Anna Nemtsova Retweeted Мария Алехина
These women (Maria Alyokhina, Pussy Riot second left) were detained and spent last night in jail for throwing paper airplanes at Federal Security Service building in protest against Telegram ban.Anna Nemtsova added,
Мария Алехина


@all_mary
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Нас оставляют в ОВД Мещанское на ночь за то, что мы запускали самолётики в ФСБ.

13 человек. Всем 20.2.
доброй ночи
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https://twitter.com/all_mary/status/985973577701838849



Russia's state censor blocks hundreds of thousands of IP addresses owned by Amazon and Google
Vladislav Zdolnikov12:16, 16 april 2018
Russia’s federal censor has reportedly ordered the country’s ISPs to start blocking hundreds of thousands of Amazon IP addresses. On Monday evening, according to Anti-Corruption Foundation activist Vladislav Zdolnikov, Roskomnadzor added four “subnet masks” to its “out-load list,” which specifies the domains and websites Russian Internet providers are required to block.

The first three subnets “encrypt” 131,000 different IP addresses each, and the fourth subnet contains another 262,00 IP addresses, meaning that the Russian government has effectively banned more than 655,000 IP addresses owned by the company Amazon.

According to an unofficial copy of Roskomnadzor’s Internet blacklist, the hundreds of thousands of Amazon IP addresses (plus some owned by Google and Telegram) are prohibited because of a decision by the Attorney General’s Office that is technically unrelated to the April 13 court ruling in Moscow that allowed the government to start blocking Telegram.

Update: Roskomnadzor added another subnet containing 131,070 IP addresses.
Update 2: Roskomnadzor has confirmed that it is blocking hundreds of thousands of IP addresses hosted by Amazon that are being used to circumvent the blocking of Telegram. By Monday evening, the total number of these IP addresses exceeded 800,000.
Update 3: Roskomnadzor has also added the subnet 35.192.0.0/12, which contains more than one million Google IP addresses.
This isn’t the first time Roskomnadzor has added lots of Amazon IP addresses to its Internet blacklist. Earlier this month, Amazon even asked Zello to stop using its servers to circumvent Russia’s ban on the service. Zello responded by moving to servers operated by Google.
According to the human rights group Rokomsvoboda, the Russian authorities banned a total of 106,000 IP addresses before the crackdown on Telegram. More than 11,000 of those addresses belonged to Amazon.
https://meduza.io/en/news/2018/04/16/ru ... -by-amazon


Russian Malicious Cyber Activity
Original release date: April 16, 2018


The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the United Kingdom’s (UK) National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) released a joint Technical Alert (TA) about malicious cyber activity carried out by the Russian Government. The U.S. Government refers to malicious cyber activity by the Russian government as GRIZZLY STEPPE.
NCCIC encourages users and administrators to review the GRIZZLY STEPPE - Russian Malicious Cyber Activity page, which links to TA18-106A - Russian State-Sponsored Cyber Actors Targeting Network Infrastructure Devices, for more information.
https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/current-ac ... r-Activity
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Don’t forget that.
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Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

Postby liminalOyster » Tue Apr 17, 2018 6:44 pm

Do people here mostly believe Pussy Riot are free agents fully independent of state or corporate sponsorship? I've never made up my mind on it but there are days I very much doubt it. And I find the disjunct between Russian "artists" openly "meddling" in our election and the more sanctimonious claims of Russiagate, at bare minimum, very intriguing.

sidenote:

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"It's not rocket surgery." - Elvis
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Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Apr 17, 2018 6:48 pm

sanctimonious claims of Russiagate


what would those be

Russian "artists" openly "meddling" in our election


could you give me examples of those?
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
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Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

Postby Jerky » Wed Apr 18, 2018 4:35 am

I think Pussy Riot is pretty much a home-grown affair, as their tactics would be frowned upon by most Westerners if they were more widely known.

They are legit feminists in extremis and boy howdy are they ever familiar with the tactics of their situationist precursors.

They are simultaneously too sophisticated in their critique and too "base" in their performances, in my opinion, to be the product of such staid environs as the post-millennial CIA.

I'd wager they're legit.

YOPJ
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