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by JackRiddler » Sun May 13, 2018 12:41 am
by seemslikeadream » Fri Jun 01, 2018 1:15 pm
HERE’S THE EMAIL RUSSIAN HACKERS USED TO TRY TO BREAK INTO STATE VOTING SYSTEMS
Sam Biddle
June 1 2018, 11:20 a.m.
JUST DAYS BEFORE the 2016 presidential election, hackers identified by the National Security Agency as working for Russia attempted to breach American voting systems. Among their specific targets were the computers of state voting officials, which they had hoped to compromise with malware-laden emails, according to an intelligence report published previously by The Intercept.
Now we know what those emails looked like.
An image of the malicious email, provided to The Intercept in response to a public records request in North Carolina, reveals precisely how hackers, who the NSA believed were working for Russian military intelligence, impersonated a Florida-based e-voting vendor and attempted to trick its customers into opening malware-packed Microsoft Word files.
The screenshot, shown below, confirms NSA reporting that the email purported to originate from the vendor, Tallahassee-based VR Systems, but was sent from a Gmail account, which could have easily tricked less scrupulous users. “Emails from VR Systems will never come from an ‘@gmail.com’ email address” the company warned in a November 1, 2016 security alert, which included the reproduction of the GRU email.
The specific Gmail address shown in the message, vrelections@gmail.com, matches an address cited in the NSA report as having been created by Russian government hackers, although in the NSA report the address was rendered with a period, as “vr.elections@gmail.com.” The timing of VR Systems’ security alert is also in line with the NSA’s reporting, which indicated that the email attack occurred on either October 31 or November 1 of 2016. The original classified NSA document contained intelligence assessments, but omitted any raw signals intelligence used to form those assessments.
In addition to having arrived from a Gmail account, rather than an actual VR Systems address, the attacker also appears to have slipped up and used the British spelling of “modernized” in the email’s body. But to a state election official reading quickly in the frantic period before a presidential election, without an eye open for the hallmarks of a phishing attack and accustomed to such emails from VR, the message could have had disastrous and completely unexpected consequences. North Carolina experienced a variety of widely-reported software glitches on Election Day in 2016.
Jake Williams, founder of the cybersecurity firm Rendition Infosec and a former NSA hacker, told The Intercept that there appeared to be “nothing very sophisticated” about the email attack, which he said is ironically part of the playbook of a “more advanced” attacker. A visually simple message would have helped the attackers “blend into the noise,” said Williams.
There appeared to be “nothing very sophisticated” about the email attack, which he said is ironically part of the playbook of a “more advanced” attacker.
As indicated in the NSA report, the attached Word documents, posing as documentation for VR Systems software, would have invisibly downloaded a malware package that could have provided the attacker with remote control over a target’s computer. The report further indicated that the malware-spiked documents actually did contain legitimate “detailed instruction on how to configure EViD [voting] software on Microsoft Windows machines,” suggesting that if a state elections official had opened the attachments, they might not have had immediate cause for concern.
Williams said the use of “.docm” file extensions on the Word documents should have been “very suspicious” on its own, as using such an extension allows code in the file to run automatically. He also said the use of recycled malware “increases the chance of detection a little, but also decreases the chance of correct attribution a lot.”
Williams also noted that VR Systems claimed in their email security alert that they didn’t know the “potential impact” of opening these attachments, even as it was warning customers against doing so. “Why not?” Williams wonders. “Did they follow up with customers after they found out what the impact was, or did they just drop it?”
VR Systems COO Ben Martin told The Intercept that following the attack, the company “hired a leading threat intelligence firm, which conducted a byte-by-byte analysis of our systems and found no indications that that our system had been breached as a result of this spear phishing attack.” As of today, however, the company said that “the impact of clicking on the attachment is unknown to VR Systems.” Martin continued:
When a customer alerted us to an obviously fraudulent email purporting to come from VR Systems, we immediately notified our customers by email and advised them not to click on the attachment. Most election officials have security systems in place that would have flagged the email before it even reached the intended recipient. After we notified our customers of the potential threat, most told us that their spam filter caught the email or that they had never received it. We are only aware of a small number of our customers who actually received the fraudulent email and of those, none of them notified us that they clicked on the attachment or were compromised as a result.
Still, Martin noted that VR isn’t aware of every recipient of the malware message, which would make an accounting of its impact difficult, if not impossible.
The company provided voter registration and poll book software to eight states in 2016. Its November 1 alert about an email threat was later provided to an elections official named Michael Dickerson in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina and forwarded to The Intercept by the county in response to its public records request.
Mecklenburg includes Charlotte, North Carolina’s largest city, but it was Durham that became a flash point for electronic voting glitches in 2016, which led the state Board of Elections to extend voting time in eight Durham County precincts on election night. The NSA report concluded that it was “unknown” whether Russian military intelligence “was able to successfully compromise any of the entities targeted as part of [its] campaign,” and no known intelligence has linked the North Carolina glitches to Russian hacking, although the New York Times reported in September that neither federal agencies, nor those in states reportedly targeted by the hackers, had done much to investigate the issue. In May, the Senate Intelligence Committee reported that in a “small number” of states, hackers broke into election computers and could change registration data, but not votes.
https://theintercept.com/2018/06/01/ele ... ems-email/
New internet accounts are Russian ops designed to sway U.S. voters, experts say
By Tim Johnson tjohnson@mcclatchydc.comWashington
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Russian President Vladimir Putin, seen in this April 10 photo in Moscow, denies his government influenced the 2016 U.S. election in favor of President Donald Trump. U.S. intelligence agencies say Russia conducted many covert influence operations to sway the vote.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, seen in this April 10 photo in Moscow, denies his government influenced the 2016 U.S. election in favor of President Donald Trump. U.S. intelligence agencies say Russia conducted many covert influence operations to sway the vote. Alexei Nikolsky, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
A new Russian influence operation has surfaced that mirrors some of the activity of an internet firm that the FBI says was deeply involved in efforts to sway the 2016 U.S. elections, a cybersecurity firm says.
A website called usareally.com appeared on the internet May 17 and called on Americans to rally in front of the White House June 14 to celebrate President Donald Trump’s birthday, which is also Flag Day.
FireEye, a Milpitas, Calif., cybersecurity company, said Thursday that USA Really is a Russian-operated website that carries content designed to foment racial division, harden feelings over immigration, gun control and police brutality, and undermine social cohesion.
The website’s operators once worked out of the same office building in St. Petersburg, Russia, where the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency had its headquarters, said Lee Foster, manager of information operations analysis for FireEye iSIGHT Intelligence.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team indicted 13 Russians, the Internet Research Agency and two other Russian entities Feb. 16, charging them with operating a “troll factory” to sow discord in the United States and influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
The indictment says the Russians posted divisive and politically charged content on U.S. social media, including false stories, and posed as U.S. activists as part of a broad campaign “to interfere with the elections and political processes.” Twelve of the indicted Russians worked for the Internet Research Agency.
“We’re not saying it (USA Really) is the Internet Research Agency but there are a number of indicators that suggest it is,” Foster said.
The U.S. intelligence community has concluded that Russia launched similar campaigns to disrupt the 2016 presidential campaign and sway it in Trump's favor. Mueller is investigating whether the Trump campaign was involved with those efforts. Trump has repeatedly and sharply denied such allegations, calling Mueller's investigation a "witch hunt."
The new website’s banner declares in English: “America will wake up on June 14th!” It carries a drawing of the White House and a fluttering U.S. flag as a backdrop.
Foster said the site has over 100 articles and they are posting an average of nine articles a day.
Russians involved in the website work for the Federal News Agency, which is known by its Russian acronym FAN and closely follows the Kremlin line on international issues. Ownership of the agency is not publicly known.
The new website may be part of a pending broader campaign, Foster said.
“There are a bunch of other domains as well that play on USA Really that we are monitoring that haven’t launched,” he said.
But so far, he said, Russians haven’t been pushing the website and its stories using robotic networks, or botnets, to promote them on social media, and they may be holding back. The House intelligence committee recently released thousands of Facebook posts that they said were Russian creations.
“They may also be contemplating what risks are involved if we were able to positively ID Russia trying to influence the 2018 mid-terms. To what extent does that undermine denials about 2016 activity? I’m sure that’s something that’s playing around in their minds as well,” Foster said.
Foster spoke along with other FireEye researchers at the end of the Fifth Annual Government Forum on Cyber Threat Intelligence, which the company partly sponsored.
Russian hackers and internet operatives have meddled in elections in eastern and western Europe, often with the purpose of discouraging voters rather than swaying the vote, said John Hultquist, director of intelligence analysis at FireEye iSIGHT.
“It’s not always easy to change an outcome (of an election) but they can delegitimize the process and create doubt,” Hultquist said.
The USA Really website contains a mix of articles taken from U.S. sources or carrying a USA Really credit and written in poor English. One article suggested that Louisiana should secede. Louisiana’s economy would still place it 45th out of 211 countries around the world, it said.
Another article said rabid squirrels were terrorizing Florida. One headline suggested that the U.S. government is preparing for World War III.
“New bloodshed in Wisconsin. Thousands of victims,” read the headline of one article that was actually about a mosquito invasion.
A posting from May 25 said the “USA Really” campaign officially starts on June 14 with the slogan, “USA as it is.”
“We invite all Americans - all who cares(sic) about the country - to celebrate this. Come up to the White House on June 14th at 2:00 p.m. to congratulate America,” it said.
A short YouTube video posted April 17, purportedly from the Federal News Agency, said USA Really “will focus on promoting information and problems that are hushed up by major American publications controlled by the U.S. political elite.”
USA Really has created a Facebook page and a Twitter account. As of Thursday night, it had 284 followers.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation- ... 99529.html
by seemslikeadream » Tue Aug 21, 2018 10:58 am
Microsoft says it has found a Russian operation targeting U.S. political institutions
Elizabeth DwoskinSAN FRANCISCO —
, Silicon Valley reporter
August 21 at 8:05 AM
A group affiliated with the Russian government created phony versions of six websites — including some related to public policy and to the U.S. Senate — with the apparent goal of hacking into the computers of people who were tricked into visiting, according to Microsoft, which said Monday night that it discovered and disabled the fake sites.
The effort by the notorious APT28 hacking group, which has been publicly linked to a Russian intelligence agency and actively interfered in the 2016 presidential election, underscores the aggressive role that Russian operatives are playing ahead of the midterm elections in the United States. U.S. officials have repeatedly warned that the November vote is a major focus for interference efforts. Microsoft said the sites were created over the past several months and that the company was able to catch them early, as they were being set up. It did not go into more specifics.
Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, which is responsible for the company’s response to email phishing schemes, took the lead role in finding and disabling the sites, and the company is launching an effort to provide expanded cybersecurity protection for campaigns and election agencies that use Microsoft products.
Among those targeted were the Hudson Institute, a conservative Washington think tank active in investigations of corruption in Russia, and the International Republican Institute (IRI), a nonprofit group that promotes democracy worldwide. Three other fake sites were crafted to appear as though they were affiliated with the Senate, and one nonpolitical site spoofed Microsoft’s own online products.
The Senate did not immediately respond to requests for comment late Monday.
Microsoft said Monday that it had found no evidence that the fake sites it recently discovered were used in attacks, but fake sites can carry malware that automatically loads onto the computers of unsuspecting visitors. Hackers often send out deceptive “spear-phishing” emails to trick people into visiting sites that appear to be authentic but in fact allow the attackers to penetrate and gain control of computers that log on, allowing the theft of emails, documents, contact lists and other information.
“This apparent spear-phishing attempt against the International Republican Institute and other organizations is consistent with the campaign of meddling that the Kremlin has waged against organizations that support democracy and human rights,” said Daniel Twining, IRI’s president, who blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin. “It is clearly designed to sow confusion, conflict and fear among those who criticize Mr. Putin’s authoritarian regime.”
The move by Microsoft is the latest effort by Silicon Valley to address Russian threats to the coming election more aggressively than the technology industry did in 2016, when many woke up to the seriousness and sophistication of disinformation efforts only after Americans had voted. Companies and U.S. officials have vowed to work together more closely this year. Facebook recently disclosed that the company took down 32 fake accounts and pages that were tied to the Internet Research Agency, a Russian disinformation operation active before and after the 2016 election.
Asked about Microsoft’s allegations Tuesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, “We don’t know what hackers they are talking about.”
Peskov told reporters, “We don’t understand what they mean and what the evidence is, what the conclusions are based on.”
After discovering the sites recently, Microsoft said, it sought to obtain a court order to transfer the domain names to its own servers, a legal tactic that the company’s security division has used a dozen times since 2016 to disable 84 websites created by APT28, which also is sometimes called Strontium or Fancy Bear. APT28, a unit under the Russian military intelligence agency GRU, specializes in information warfare or hacking and disinformation operations. “APT” refers to “advanced persistent threat” in cybersecurity circles.
The court order, executed last week in a federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia, effectively allowed Microsoft to shut down the sites and to research them more fully. Microsoft has used the legal tactic to go after botnets, or malicious networks of automated accounts, since at least 2010.
The cases have been brought under trademark infringement after a federal judge agreed that the group, which Microsoft calls Strontium, poses an “advanced persistent threat” and would continue its attacks.
Microsoft President Brad Smith said in an interview that the company had been tracking the Russian-government-backed group for two years but had decided to speak publicly about the company’s efforts for the first time because of a growing sense of urgency and an uptick in Russian activity ahead of the midterms.
“You can’t really bring people together in a democratic society unless we share information about what’s going on,” Smith told The Washington Post. “When there are facts that are clear as day, for those of us who operate inside companies, increasingly we feel it’s an imperative for us to share this more broadly with the public.”
He said that the technology industry was seeking to become more transparent with the public. The company previously had announced that two political candidates had been subjected to spear-phishing attacks.
Installing malicious software on phony websites is a popular method for hacking into computers and resembles the tactic used in the attack on John Podesta, the campaign chairman for Hillary Clinton, who received a fake security-warning email that linked to a phony site created by Russians. His stolen emails were released publicly in the final weeks of the presidential election campaign and caused embarrassment for their blunt assessments of various matters. Cybersecurity researchers have blamed the hack of Podesta’s email on APT28.
Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III in July indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers, accusing them of hacking the Democratic National Committee, also in 2016.
Microsoft did not explicitly blame the Russian intelligence agency for the attack announced Monday but it did cite Russia’s government and named APT28 and its pseudonyms, Strontium and Fancy Bear.
The Hudson Institute said that it, like many Washington institutions, had been the subject of previous cyberattacks. David Tell, the group’s director of public affairs, said the Hudson Institute’s Kleptocracy Initiative, which frequently reports on corruption in Russia, may have made the conservative think tank a target. Tell also noted that Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats, speaking at the Hudson Institute in July, called Russia “the most aggressive foreign” actor in seeking to divide Americans, which could have drawn the attention of APT28.
“This kind of stuff does happen. It’s happened to us before,” Tell said. “It doesn’t surprise me that bad actors in nondemocratic states would want to mess with us.”
The phony websites, which were registered with major web-hosting companies, were at my-iri.org, hudsonorg-my-sharepoint.com, senate.group, adfs-senate.services, adfs-senate.email and office365-onedrive.com, according to Microsoft. Their discovery underscores the central role that American tech companies, which frequently have been criticized for hosting Russian disinformation on their platforms, can play in ferreting it out.
Eric Rosenbach, former Pentagon chief of staff and now co-director of Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, applauded Microsoft for quickly announcing its discoveries. He said companies sometimes can act in ways that governmental agencies cannot because of legal and ethical restrictions.
“The tech sector needs to play a role in protecting elections and protecting campaigns,” Rosenbach said. “The tech sector will have visibility on some of these things that the [National Security Agency] never could and never should.”
Microsoft also said Monday it was launching an initiative to provide enhanced cybersecurity protections free to candidates and campaign offices at the federal, state and local levels that use its Office 365 software, as well as think tanks and political organizations that the company believes are under attack.
“For many decades, people in democratic societies saw these as fundamentally tools that were more likely to bring information to people living in authoritarian countries, and we didn’t really worry about these kinds of technologies causing risks to a democratic society,” Smith said. “What we’re seeing now, with email and voting systems and social media, is [the technologies] creating an asymmetric risk for democratic societies.”
Timberg reported from Washington. Natalia Abbakumova in Moscow and Ellen Nakashima in Washington contributed to this report.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business ... a5931ddc20
Russian hackers just got caught targeting two U.S. conservative think tanks
Microsoft said Tuesday it had stopped a fresh Russian attack that targeted two U.S. conservative think tanks critical of Moscow.
Yet experts warn that companies such as Microsoft are playing “whack-a-mole” with the ongoing Russian threat, part of Moscow’s effort to undermine trust in U.S. institutions ahead of the midterm elections in November.
Microsoft said it had identified fake websites purporting to be from two conservative think tanks — the International Republican Institute and the Hudson Institute — and taken them offline last week.
Both groups have taken a strong stance in opposition to Russia in recent months, calling for sanctions against Moscow, exposing its human rights abuses and decrying oligarchs.
The International Republican Institute, which promotes democracy around the world, also boasts staunch critics of President Donald Trump among its members, including Sen. John McCain and Mitt Romney, as well as H.R. McMaster, the national security adviser Trump fired in March.
Microsoft also took offline two websites designed to mimic those used by Senate staff.
Microsoft said all websites were taken offline before they could trap anyone, and linked the fake sites to a hacking group it identifies as Strontium, but is also known as Fancy Bear or APT 28 — a group strongly linked to Russia’s foreign military intelligence unit, known as the GRU, and believed to have hacked the DNC in 2016.
“Despite last week’s steps, we are concerned by the continued activity targeting these and other sites and directed toward elected officials, politicians, political groups and think tanks across the political spectrum in the United States,” Brad Smith, Microsoft president and chief legal officer, said in a blog post.
The targeting of think tanks whose views do not line up with those of the Kremlin is nothing new.
Following the 2016 election it was discovered that hackers had spoofed the websites of multiple institutions, including the Council on Foreign Relations, the Eurasia Group, the Center for a New American Security, Transparency International, and the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
The latest revelation shows that despite the high-profile nature of the disinformation campaigns conducted ahead of the 2016 election, technology companies, campaigns and organizations are still struggling to deal with the Russian threat.
“We are in a situation of asynchronous warfare,” Andy Norton, director of threat intelligence at Lastline, told VICE News. “Foreign powers are using the cyber theater to undermine confidence in political and economic models. However, we perpetually underestimate the risk and the impact a cyber intrusion has, not only on the victim, but in the broader level of confidence in systems in general.”
Ahead of November’s vote, the U.S. has already suffered a number of attacks linked to Russia.
Microsoft revealed last month it had stopped attacks on three different campaigns originating in Moscow, while Facebook said it had removed fake accounts fueling division among Americans. Though the social network stopped short of linking the pages to Russia, researchers subsequently showed links to the notorious Internet research Agency.
READ: The Russian hacked Hillary Clinton and the DNC on the very day Trump asked them to
Russia has repeatedly denied it was involved in any campaign to undermine U.S. elections — something Trump appeared to accept when he met President Vladimir Putin in July.
Microsoft has launched an initiative called AccountGuard aimed at protecting politicians, their campaigns and organizations involved in the upcoming elections. It aims to provide early notification of attacks, continuing education and early access to the latest security tools.
But experts are skeptical about how effective this will be.
“Microsoft is playing whack-a-mole here,” Thomas Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University, told the New York Times. ”These sites are easy to register and bring back up, and so they will keep doing so.”
Cover image: Hands typing on a computer keyboard on February 06, 2018 in Berlin, Germany. (Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images)
https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/594 ... -microsoft
by seemslikeadream » Wed Aug 22, 2018 12:51 pm
AUGUST 21, 2018 | WHOWHATWHY STAFF
WE GOT HIT BY A RUSSIAN SPAMBOT ATTACK — HERE’S WHAT THEY TARGETED
Donald Trump, Taj Mahal
Donald Trump superimposed over the Taj Mahal. Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from (Trump The Movie)
WhoWhatWhy was recently hit by a major spambot attack that we have traced back to a network operating from Russia. The fact that they went after us is not particularly surprising — that comes with the territory of covering politics in the US these days. What was very interesting, however, was the specific story targeted.
The Russians did not go after anything we published recently but rather a documentary on Donald Trump that was suppressed in the 1990s and that we published in its entirety in 2016.
We don’t know why, but if this is something the Russians want to interfere with, then there is obviously only one thing we can do: Run the entire thing again.
So below you will find brief summaries of the different parts (we had to split the documentary into 12 segments). We urge you to watch them all and come away with a better understanding of the US president. And if you think that you’ve stumbled upon something that attracted the interest of the Russians and that we might have missed, please get in touch with us.
Even if you watched this documentary when we first made it public, we guarantee that it is worth your doing so again now. The way it ends, in light of what Trump has been doing, is even more ominous than it was when the documentary was made or when we first ran it.
“The only end to this road is the ultimate madness,” Graydon Carter, the editor of SPY Magazine, said a quarter century ago.
Carter predicted back then that Trump might end up “living alone in an apartment complex in Panama and growing his fingernails long and storing urine in mason jars. It’s that or taking over the world — one or the other.”
Trump has been in office for a year and a half now and we still don’t know.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VX53maHeqlE
Suppressed Documentary Part 1: The Documentary on Donald Trump He Tried to Suppress
Donald Trump likes to portray himself as a winner. But in this never-before-aired documentary, we see a much more flawed and even tragic figure, whose failures and operating practices warrant close scrutiny (note: there’s a slight technical glitch in this particular segment where the video cuts off abruptly at the very end).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp56vMexDDU
Suppressed Documentary Part 2: Trump’s Escape Across the River
Donald Trump not only inherited millions from his father — he learned that getting sued was just part of doing business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyFwbeYwiCo
Suppressed Documentary Part 3: Trump Rides His Dad’s Coattails Into Manhattan
In New York, political connections are key. Thanks to his father, Donald Trump knew the right people — and he rode those connections all the way to the top. Along with his shrewd business sense, they helped him soar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vr1Oo03Nppk
Suppressed Documentary Part 4: Trump Builds Himself a Monument
The Donald built Trump Tower with a winning strategy: Get somebody else to finance it, work your connections, and get help from taxpayers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDN6C33ZWiY
Suppressed Documentary Part 5: Birth of a Bully
After Trump buys an occupied apartment building in the early 1980s, he has only one problem: the tenants. They stand up to his attempt to bully them — and hand The Donald his first big loss.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIuS4wSLE58
Suppressed Documentary Part 6: Trump’s Foray Into Football Falls Flat
Having amassed a fortune and established himself in Manhattan, Trump wanted to conquer the world of sports in the mid-80s. But his attempt to get an NFL franchise failed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoDnlour8_c
Suppressed Documentary Part 7: Trump Documentary — The First Marriage
As with everything else in Trump’s life, only the best would do — and that’s why the young couple enhanced the resume of Trump’s first wife, Ivana.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCkBJvw8xdA
Suppressed Documentary Part 8: Trump Flubs Florida
Donald Trump’s huge error in a Florida business deal raises the question: Beyond his skill at getting attention, how good is he with the actual art of checking out deals — or policies — before going ahead with them?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1REf1AX8lIo
Suppressed Documentary Part 9: What Kind of Man Is Donald Trump Off Camera?
A man who worked closely with Trump said he saw him treat people horribly, and that Trump subjected his own family to “extraordinary verbal assaults.” How he treated three loyal employees after their death may be even more telling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=-pTL8EjgnnU
Suppressed Documentary Part 10: Trumpopoly — Playing With House Money and Still Losing
Donald Trump likes to play by his own rules, even if that means bending those of society. And for those who dare defy him, he’s got a lawsuit waiting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI0p25CpT2g
Suppressed Documentary Part 11: Trump Dreams Big and Comes Up Short
When Donald Trump bought a plot of land on Manhattan’s West Side, he had a grandiose vision of constructing the world’s tallest building. But a celebrity-led coalition of New Yorkers stood up to him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eme1FJojR0
Suppressed Documentary Part 12 — It’s All or Nothing for Trump
Trump exists in a world of extremes — there is winning and then there is everything else. And 25 years ago a prescient journalist offered a chilling vision of how it all might end.
https://whowhatwhy.org/2018/08/21/we-go ... -targeted/
by 2012 Countdown » Wed Aug 22, 2018 2:52 pm
by Grizzly » Tue Aug 28, 2018 4:35 pm
by seemslikeadream » Wed Aug 29, 2018 1:27 pm
Secret Finding: 60 Russian Payments "To Finance Election Campaign Of 2016"
The FBI is scrutinizing more than 60 money transfers sent by the Russian Foreign Ministry to its embassies across the globe, most of them bearing a note that said the money was to be used “to finance election campaign of 2016.” A spokesperson for the Russian government said the money paid for overseas voting in its parliamentary election.
Jason LeopoldNovember 14, 2017, at 8:44 p.m.
Posted on November 14, 2017, at 1:09 p.m. ET
BuzzFeed News
On Aug. 3 of last year, just as the US presidential election was entering its final, heated phase, the Russian Foreign Ministry sent nearly $30,000 to its embassy in Washington. The wire transfer, which came from a Kremlin-backed Russian bank, landed in one of the embassy’s Citibank accounts and contained a remarkable memo line: “to finance election campaign of 2016.”
That wire transfer is one of more than 60 now being scrutinized by the FBI and other federal agencies investigating Russian involvement in the US election. The transactions, which moved through Citibank accounts and totaled more than $380,000, each came from the Russian Foreign Ministry and most contained a memo line referencing the financing of the 2016 election.
The money wound up at Russian embassies in almost 60 countries from Afghanistan to Nigeria between Aug. 3 and Sept. 20, 2016. It is not clear how the funds were used. At least one transaction that came into the US originated with VTB Bank, a financial institution that is majority-owned by the Kremlin.
Got a tip? You can email tips@buzzfeed.com. To learn how to reach us securely, go to tips.buzzfeed.com.
Before publication of this article, BuzzFeed News sought comment from both the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Russian embassy in Washington. Neither responded. Hours after the story was published, both entities issued statements on social media denouncing the story. The Foreign Ministry noted that it had previously announced that it would have 364 polling stations in 145 countries in order for Russians living overseas to cast ballots in a parliamentary election held Sept. 18.
The Russian embassy added, "this attempt to artificially draw Russia and the Embassy to the internal US disagreements has failed in the most shameful manner."
The US Treasury Department placed VTB Bank under sanctions in 2014, following Russia’s annexation of Crimea. The sanctions prohibit VTB Bank from raising capital or accepting loans from American individuals or companies. A wire transfer to the embassy’s US bank account is permitted, however, and Citibank has not been accused of any wrongdoing.
In a statement, Citibank spokesperson Jennifer Lowney wrote that the financial institution is "diligent" in reporting suspicious transfers but that "given the confidential nature of these reports, we do not comment on or confirm any particular report or transaction."
After discovering the $30,000 transfer to the embassy in Washington, Citibank launched a review of other transfers by the Russian Foreign Ministry. It unearthed dozens of other transactions with similar memo lines. Compliance officers in Citibank’s Global Intelligence Unit flagged them as suspicious, noting that it was unable to determine the financial, business, or legal purpose of the transactions.
Much as checks include a memo line, wire transfers often include a note that states what the money is for. The note on this set of transfers did not indicate what election the money was to be used for, or even the country. Seven nations had federal elections during the span when the funds were sent — including the Duma, Russia’s lower house of Parliament.
The FBI was first made aware of the suspicious transactions two months ago. Two FBI sources said that FBI legal attaches in other countries are now investigating whether the money may have been used for the US presidential election and, if so, how.
A VTB spokesperson said in a statement: "VTB strictly conducts its operations in full compliance with applicable rules and regulations. The U.S. banks also monitor and abide by all the restrictions imposed by the (Office of Foreign Assets Control)."
This past January, the United States’ Office of Director of National Intelligence, in a “high-confidence” assessment, concluded that Vladimir Putin personally signed off on an influence campaign to help Donald Trump win the presidency. Now, the FBI, a special counsel, and three congressional committees are conducting investigations. The committees have formally requested a wide range of banking and financial records on numerous individuals and businesses with ties to Russia from the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN for short.
Specifically, the Senate Intelligence Committee committee asked FinCEN for “any actions” the agency took to support law enforcement or intelligence inquiries about these individuals and businesses, any documents it sent to the FBI, and any requests for information it sent to banks. A separate letter sent to the Treasury Department by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations sought information on the sanctioned bank.
These requests led to the discovery of the wire transfers. Two congressional sources said the Senate Intelligence Committee is unaware of the transactions. Spokespeople for the committees would not comment.
All financial institutions are required to tell FinCEN about any transactions they deem suspicious. Such “suspicious activity reports” do not necessarily prove or even indicate wrongdoing. Federal law also requires financial institutions to file reports on any cash transactions of more than $10,000 in a single day, even if those transactions are legitimate. Banks must also file the reports whenever they suspect money laundering or other financial crimes.
Following the congressional requests, Citibank turned over a range of financial documents. The material includes more than 650 suspicious transactions between November 2013 and March 2017 totaling about $2.9 million. That money was sent to four Russian accounts operating in the US: the embassy; the Office of Defense, Military, Air and Naval Attaches; and Russian cultural centers in Washington and New York City.
Most of these wire transfers were not related to the election, sources say, but are the subject of FBI scrutiny for their possible ties to Russian corruption and money laundering.
The FBI and congressional investigators are now inspecting each of those transactions.
One FBI special agent said the transfers are critical for the bureau and lawmakers investigating Russia’s interference in last year’s presidential election. He said even if there is a logical explanation for the suspicious wire transactions the FBI has to investigate what the money was used for.
“We had an election and the intelligence community concluded Russia interfered in it,” said the FBI agent. “How could we not investigate a suspicious financial transaction that contained a memo that said, ‘finance election campaign 2016?’ Given the climate and what was in that memo line it would be very irresponsible for us not to investigate. It’s a good lead.”
UPDATE
This post was updated to include statements from the Russian embassy and the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ja ... e-election
This Is How Russian Propaganda Actually Works In The 21st Century
Skype logs and other documents obtained by BuzzFeed News offer a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the Kremlin’s propaganda machine.
Posted on August 29, 2018, at 8:01 a.m. ET
TALLINN, Estonia — The Russian government discreetly funded a group of seemingly independent news websites in Eastern Europe to pump out stories dictated to them by the Kremlin, BuzzFeed News and its reporting partners can reveal.
Russian state media created secret companies in order to bankroll websites in the Baltic states — a key battleground between Russia and the West — and elsewhere in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
The scheme has only come to light through Skype chats and documents obtained by BuzzFeed News, Estonian newspaper Postimees, and investigative journalism outlet Re:Baltica via freedom of information laws, as part of a criminal probe into the individual who was Moscow’s man on the ground in Estonia.
The Skype logs and other files, obtained from computers seized by investigators, reveal the secrets and obfuscating tactics used by Russia as it tries to influence public opinion and push Kremlin talking points.
“In other words — information warfare.”
The websites presented themselves as independent news outlets, but in fact, editorial lines were dictated directly by Moscow.
Raul Rebane, a leading strategic communications expert in Estonia, said that this scheme and others like it are “systemic information-related activities on foreign territory. In other words — information warfare.”
He said that Russian propaganda networks in the Baltics had been operating for years but had become more intense recently.
“The pressure to turn [Estonia] from facing the West to facing the East has grown.”
Long before Russian interference in the 2016 US election became one of the biggest stories in the world, and Kremlin disinformation campaigns became a household issue, Moscow faced accusations of trying to influence public opinion in the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, which are all members of NATO.
The revelations about the websites in the Baltic states provide a rare and detailed inside look into how such disinformation campaigns work, and the lengths to which Moscow is willing to go to obscure its involvement in such schemes.
In the Baltics, Russia directly borders the European Union, and NATO has a big military presence, but perhaps most importantly the region is home to hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians, mostly in Estonia and Latvia.
When Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014, he did so under the pretext of protecting the interests of “Russian speakers.” So in the Baltic states, Russian propaganda is a real and present fear, and explains why attempts by Moscow to influence public opinion are treated so seriously.
The records and Skype logs obtained offer an opportunity to see what it looks like when the curtain is pulled back on the inner workings of the Kremlin’s propaganda machine, on this occasion targeted at Russian speakers in the Baltics.
In early October 2014, Aleksandr Kornilov — a member of the Coordination Council of Russian Compatriots in Estonia, an organization known by its Russian acronym, KSORS that appears to be dealing with minority rights, such as Russian-language education, but is seen by Estonia’s counterintelligence agency as a tool of the Kremlin’s foreign policy — gave an interview to a news website in Lithuania called Delfi.lt, about the launch of three new websites in the Baltics, all called Baltnews.
Kornilov told the interviewer that the websites, being launched separately in Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, would be independent portals steering clear of politics.
“The portal will be entertaining; you will not be rivals,” he told the reporter. “The concept — a normal, entertaining, nonpolitical portal.”
But the reality was very different. In fact, the websites were funded and directed from Moscow, by one of Russia’s largest state media agencies.
In a Skype chat obtained by BuzzFeed News and its reporting partners, Kornilov is ordered by an employee of Rossiya Segodnya — which runs the website and news agency Sputnik and the news agency RIA Novosti, and is closely connected to RT (formerly known as Russia Today) — to comply with a list of approved topics to cover.
“I have a task. Every day you need to report on three of the five topics that we will suggest.”
“San, reply please,” Aleksandr Svyazin demanded of Kornilov in June 2015, using a shortened version of his first name.
“Aleksandr, show up please!” he says later, growing impatient.
“Here,” Kornilov finally responds.
“San, hello! I have a task,” Svyazin says. “Every day you need to report on three of the five topics that we will suggest.”
After receiving the first list of topics, Kornilov replies in one word in Russian, “понятно” — “understood.”
The Skype logs suggest that Svyazin was Kornilov’s main point of contact throughout the scheme, as they sent each other thousands of messages over a two-year period and spoke with each other regularly concerning editorial matters for the website.
When contacted on Facebook by BuzzFeed News, Svyazin denied any connection to Sputnik or Baltnews. Svyazin did not respond when presented with a screenshot of a Skype chat — where his Skype avatar is visible — between him and Kornilov. However, in a subsequent Facebook message to a BuzzFeed News reporter, Svyazin referred all queries to the press office of Rossiya Segodnya.
This exchange between Kornilov and Svyazin, one of many revealed by the Skype logs, indicates the lack of independence of the websites, which, as the documents show, formed part of a propaganda operation orchestrated, funded, and managed by Rossiya Segodnya, as it set up outlets that acted as mouthpieces for Moscow in Europe.
Shortly after the Baltnews websites launched in October 2014 — three nearly identical websites hosted in Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania — the Rossiya Segodnya employee Svyazin, a bylined author on various Sputnik websites in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, told Kornilov on Skype to start sending weekly reports about notable upcoming events.
“Aleksandr, we ask you to send information about upcoming events for the following week. Can you do it? Send it on Sunday or Monday,” Svyazin said on Nov. 10.
“Information about what?” Kornilov asked.
“About the main upcoming events in the following week. You know, like ‘on Tuesday the government has a meeting, on Wednesday the government resigns, on Thursday a visit by Obama, on Friday still something else...’” Svyazin said.
“I don’t have such news like the meeting of the government, the collapse of it, or the visit by Obama,” Kornilov replied.
“That was an example,” Svyazin said. “Send what you have.”
By Nov. 19, Svyazin seemed more demanding.
“Aleksandr, a preview of significant events coming up next week is needed urgently. After another hour is already too late,” he wrote.
“I don’t have them,” Kornilov replied.
“But where can I get them from? I need to add them to the calendar by 4 p.m.”
Kornilov did not appear eager to compile the list of forthcoming events. The two continued discussing which events would suit the calendar, but over the following weeks, Svyazin had to repeatedly remind him to fulfill the duty.
On Dec. 18, Svyazin told Kornilov there was another order.
“We have a command to publish five surveys about Europe, conducted by a European company on the order of the Flagship [RIA Novosti]. The published materials need to include thorough comments by experts,” he told Kornilov. “Stay in contact — I will send the material a bit later.”
A day later, Svyazin, again on Skype, said they had decided to push publication forward to that same day.
The first survey Kornilov published said that almost half of people in the UK, France, and Germany wanted the EU to be more independent from the US, the second that most Europeans don’t believe the EU was independent when deciding on sanctions against Russia, and the third that there was a rising concern among European people about the level of the EU’s dependence on the US.
In February, Svyazin sent Kornilov a link to yet another RIA Novosti survey, about Americans having little trust in their police forces. This time, he didn’t even need to say that Kornilov should write his own version for Estonian Baltnews. “Most American people do not regard the police as a guarantee of their safety,” reads the headline published by Baltnews Estonia. Similar stories ran on the same day in the Latvian and Lithuanian versions of Baltnews.
All the surveys are described as being carried out by London-based ICM Research, which is referred to as “a well-known British polling company” in the original RIA Novosti stories. ICM Research, operating now under the name ICM Unlimited, told BuzzFeed News that it has never worked for RIA Novosti but did carry out some polling for Rossiya Segodnya/Sputnik that was published in 2015. “Unfortunately our records do not go back as far as 2015 therefore we cannot confirm whether the surveys [referred to in this story] were conducted by ICM or whether they have been misattributed to us,” said Gregor Jackson, the research director of the company.
In the June 2015 Skype conversation between Kornilov and Svyazin — where Svyazin asks Kornilov to “show up please!” — the Rossiya Segodnya employee mentioned a list of topics that Rossiya Segodnya demanded Baltnews.ee publish stories about.
The first daily list was sent the same day, June 19, and included topics like the widening of sanctions against Russia, asking questions about the possibility of Greece leaving the eurozone, and Putin’s face-to-face meetings at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.
From the beginning of July, some topics in the daily list started to have the Russian word обязательно — mandatory — attached to them in brackets. The mandatory topics were often those that showed tensions inside the EU or US, as well as those covering the conflict in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea.
Other areas of news that had to be covered included Greece not having repaid its debt to the International Monetary Fund, the cutting off of Crimea from Ukraine’s energy network, and a US Navy battleship entering the Black Sea.
Moscow headquarters of Russia’s Rossiya Segodnya, Nov. 12, 2017.
Kirill Kudryavtsev / AFP / Getty Images
Moscow headquarters of Russia’s Rossiya Segodnya, Nov. 12, 2017.
The scheme worked like this: Money was channeled through shell companies outside of Russia, direct editorial orders were delivered via Skype, and the sites reported back the headlines they published, while they also bought clicks and tested buying comments from Russian troll factories to boost numbers.
The story and the true nature of the websites only came to light via a tax evasion and forgery criminal investigation into Kornilov — a 55-year-old Russian citizen described in public reports by Estonia’s counterintelligence agency KAPO as a Russian propagandist — and a freedom of information request in that country. Kornilov wasn’t convicted personally, but the NGO he set up and used in the schemes was, under Estonian law that allows for companies and other bodies to be prosecuted and convicted.
The documents reveal that Rossiya Segodnya set up the Russian-language news sites in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in October 2014 — six months after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and as the war between Russian-backed separatists and Ukraine waged in Eastern Ukraine.
The sites all had the same name — Baltnews — with only different country codes to distinguish their domain names. They were presented as independent media websites for the local Russian-speaking populations of each country. The partner for the project in Estonia was officially an NGO run by Kornilov called Altmedia, which he set up in 2010 to represent Russian speakers in the country.
When approached by BuzzFeed News for comment, Kornilov said that as he doesn’t work for Baltnews anymore, he is not prepared to answer journalists’ questions about the websites. “It’s not interesting for me anymore,” he said. Subsequent attempts to contact him were unsuccessful.
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The first contract Altmedia signed relating to the websites was with a group called Media Capital Holding B.V. — based in the Netherlands and owned through several front companies by Rossiya Segodnya — on Aug. 18, 2014, at which point Altmedia became responsible for “the creation and promotion of media projects in Estonia and the Baltic States.”
According to a tax audit, part of the documents obtained via a freedom of information request, Atlmedia received 91,400 euros (about $107,000) in total in five separate monthly payments, four from Media Capital Holding and one from Barsolina Ventures, a company registered in Cyprus.
At the start of 2015, Altmedia began sending monthly traffic reports, including headlines of the most-read stories, to Barsolina Ventures. The reports, which were not signed, refer to a new contract dated Jan. 1, 2015. As part of the deal, Barsolina Ventures would pay 11,400 euros a month to Altmedia. This arrangement continued into 2016, the most recent year covered by the documents. Based on publicly available data, it appears that Altmedia continued receiving such funding up until spring this year, when Rossiya Segodnya pulled the plug on the operation. BuzzFeed News approached Rossiya Segodnya, RIA Novosti, and their press team for comment in three separate emails, but none were answered.
The next company to enter into an arrangement with Altmedia was SPN Media Solutions DOO Beograd, a company registered in Serbia. Documents from the Serbian business registry reveal that it was created on March 31, 2015, by OOO Media Kapital, another company owned through different intermediaries by Rossiya Segodnya in Russia.
SPN Media Solutions’ address is registered at law firm Stanisic’s office in an upmarket neighborhood in central Belgrade.
According to the company’s own financial reviews, it has no employees. But in the years 2015, 2016, and 2017, its annual turnover was around 3.5 million euros, with all revenue coming from “foreign markets.” According to the Serbian business registry, its managers since the company’s founding have each possessed passports, filed at the registry, that indicate they are Russian citizens.
Tanya Stanisic, a partner of the law firm that helped establish SPN Media and where the company’s address is registered, declined to comment. “Unfortunately, I cannot help you. I am not authorized to talk to you about the business of a client. Also, it is not allowed by the Code of Professional Ethics of Lawyers, starting from the privilege of confidentiality in the relations between the lawyer and the client,” she said in an email sent after BuzzFeed News went to the firm’s office for the third time.
SPN Media Solutions does not just have interest in Estonia. A Ukrainian court order from July obtained by BuzzFeed News quotes the Ukrainian security service (SBU) as saying the same company was secretly financing the Ukrainian branch of RIA Novosti.
The deputy head of the SBU, Viktor Kononenko, said in May that each month the Serbian company was transferring 53,000 euros “of Russian origin” to Ukrainian companies that funneled the money to the Russian state news agency’s branch in the country. Kononenko did not respond when contacted by BuzzFeed News for comment.
Kirill Vyshinsky, the head of RIA Novosti Ukraine, was arrested by the SBU in May, accused of treason and of running an information war against Ukraine for Russia. In the court order obtained by BuzzFeed News, RIA Novosti Ukraine is accused of hosting and distributing 16 anti-Ukraine articles that aimed to divide Ukrainian society, create separatist sentiments, and stir hatred between different ethnicities. Vyshinsky’s lawyer, Andriy Domanskyy, did not reply to an email seeking comment, but Vyshinsky has previously denied the charges.
The Baltnews homepages, Aug. 28.
Screenshots
The Baltnews homepages, Aug. 28.
The documents and Skype chats relating to how the scheme was operated and funded in Estonia relate to only that country, but the versions of Baltnews hosted in Latvia and Lithuania appear to be operated in a similar way — all three websites look identical, they were set up at the same time, and they published similar stories on the same day. Local security services in all three countries consider the websites to be part of the same operation.
In addition, the Latvian branch of Baltnews did file at least one monthly report to Barsolina Ventures, according to the documents obtained by BuzzFeed News.
The financial reports of Baltnews.lv show it had an annual turnover of 100,000 euros, but it displays little to no advertising and had no paid-for subscriptions.
The website’s editor-in-chief, Andrejs Jakovlevs, declined to comment, saying finances were not a matter for editorial staff. He said there was an information-sharing arrangement in place with RIA Novosti, but no money was exchanged, and no one ever told him what to write.
“Their goal is to extend Russia’s influence within Lithuania’s information space, promote anti-western sentiments, and shape public opinion favourable to Kremlin.”
But Latvia’s internal counterintelligence and security service, known by the acronym DP, said that according to its information, Baltnews.lv was financed from Russia using companies in third-party countries.
“The information obtained by [DP] indicates that money received from Russia was the main source of income for Baltnews.lv,” Ēriks Cinkus, deputy head of the DP, told BuzzFeed News.
Meanwhile in Lithuania, the country’s intelligence service, the VSD, identified Baltnews.lt and Sputnik as the channels through which Russia spreads pro-Kremlin messaging in the country.
“Their goal is to extend Russia’s influence within Lithuania’s information space, promote anti-western sentiments, and shape public opinion favourable to Kremlin,” wrote the VSD in its latest annual report.
The report said that in 2017, on the orders of Russia, Baltnews and Sputnik began publishing more articles about the status of the Polish community in Lithuania.
“They sought to incite ethnic confrontation and exacerbate relations between Lithuania and Poland. The publications tried to persuade the audience that Lithuania discriminates [against] the local Polish community or to make an impression that Poland ‘does not waive’ its territorial claims to its neighbours,” the report said.
Up until June 1 this year, the editor-in-chief of Baltnews.lt was Anatoly Ivanov, and financial data from a nonprofit run by him — named Eurasian Media Laboratory — shows he was receiving significant funding from Barsolina Ventures.
According to reports in the Lithuanian business registry, Eurasian Media Laboratory received roughly 500,000 euros in three years. In 2015 and 2016 Barsolina paid 163,200 euros to Eurasian Media Laboratory each year. And in 2017, the Eurasian Media Laboratory reported 185,472 euros’ worth of earnings, with the vast majority of it coming from Barsolina for “internet gateway services.” When contacted by phone by BuzzFeed News, Ivanov did not answer any questions regarding the payments.
“Young man, you probably didn’t hear me. I’m busy — there’s people at my office. You can ask whatever you want to. If you don’t understand me in Russian, I’ll say it in Lithuanian,” Ivanov said, switching from one language to another. “There are people sitting at my office. And I don’t want to waste my time.”
Asked again about the payments in the amount of 500,000 euros, he sighed and gave no further response before hanging up the phone.
“Young man, you probably didn’t hear me. I’m busy — there’s people at my office. You can ask whatever you want to.”
As well as providing the funding, Rossiya Segodnya also appears to have directly coordinated what topics all three Baltnews websites should cover. Not only does Baltnews seem far from the independent entertainment website Kornilov suggested to the Lithuanian news website Delfi, it also appears to have been just one cog in a much larger machine.
On May 25, 2016, Svyazin — probably in error — sent Kornilov a list of topics that appear to show the expected coverage of Kremlin-owned media across the former USSR: the Baltic states, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and the Russian-supported breakaway region of Ossetia in Georgia. Estonia has two separate entries in the list — one for Baltnews and the other for the local edition of Sputnik.
BuzzFeed News compared the list of topics with stories published in these countries that day and found that all but two of the local editions of Sputnik indeed published what was ordered. The Kyrgyzstan Sputnik wrote, as instructed, about local business tycoon Sharshenbek Abdykerimov secretly owning an apartment in the Tower, at the time London’s tallest residential skyscraper.
The Georgian Sputnik wrote, as it was asked, about the dress sense of the country’s female politicians, including plenty of examples and photos. In Moldova, the local Sputnik website was ordered to cover the dependence of the national currency on the Russian ruble, and the price of oil. It carried out the task by publishing a news piece headlined “The Diagnosis of Our Leu: Breaking Free of One Dependency Brings on Another.”
Sometimes, other people based in Russia directed the coverage. On July 20, 2015, a multimedia editor for Rossiya Segodnya demanded news stories on the troop and arms movements of the Eastern Ukrainian separatists. Similar coverage of mandatory topics was ordered regularly in the following months. The orders also came from a woman who introduced herself to Kornilov on Skype as Liana Minasyan and said she was the editor of a multimedia program “planning to deal with the Baltic countries.” Another person involved in directing the coverage in Estonia also appears to have traveled to Estonia to recruit journalists for the local Sputnik.
The Estonian counterintelligence agency KAPO identified Minasyan as the supervisor of the Estonian Sputnik office in 2015. “Rossiya Segodnya has been working to establish an office in Estonia and an Estonian and Russian-language portal for Sputnik since spring 2015,” KAPO revealed in its 2015 review, adding that “Liana Minasyan from Moscow” was among those overseeing the office. Last year Minasyan confirmed to Re:Baltica that she was responsible for all Sputnik websites in the Baltics, but denied being involved with Baltnews.
When approached again by BuzzFeed News for this story, Minasyan said she didn’t work with Baltnews or with the Baltic states at all anymore. “If you want, I will forward your question to my former colleague,” she said, and didn’t reply to follow-up questions.
The records show that Kornilov and Svyazin’s daily Skype sessions continued for months, with the two men sometimes arguing about the weekly and monthly traffic reports Kornilov was asked to file.
In one case, Kornilov says that a draft contract has an error in it — instead of saying “Estonian language” it says “Latvian language,” another indication that similar contracts were signed in each Baltic country.
Their conversations at times went beyond work — sometimes they complained about their bosses and the bureaucracy they were involved in. The records also show that they met several times in Russia.
From the beginning, Kornilov tried to weave an illusion of an independent news site. When the Lithuanian outlet Delfi.lt covered the launch of Baltnews, Kornilov presented himself as the publisher of all three sites. The domains in all three Baltic states were registered to his name at that time, but were soon re-registered to Media Capital Holding B.V. — the company registered in the Netherlands by Rossiya Segodnya proxies.
“The terms are confidential. I am the editor-in-chief and communicate directly with their representative in Estonia. Right?”
Immediately after the news story was published by Delfi, Kornilov held a conversation with Jevgeni Levik, a pro-Russian journalist in Estonia who was working at Baltnews as its first editor-in-chief but was fired by Kornilov shortly before the launch.
“Our official position is such: We are developing an interactive information project together with foreign investors,” Levik said prior to his dismissal, in a Skype chat obtained under freedom of information laws. They also discussed how to react if journalists asked about the sites’ investors.
“Maybe we should give them the name of the company. I am sure many would not decline to know about it. And all contacts? And prepare a business plan,” Kornilov replied, seemingly sarcastically.
Levik said, “If they ask who are the Dutchmen, I will reply that they are private people and it is a private commercial project. The terms are confidential. I am the editor-in-chief and communicate directly with their representative in Estonia. Right?”
“Yes. You should deal only with things in your competence. To be precise, people there are not private, but it is an investment fund,” Kornilov said.
Levik declined to comment when contacted by phone by BuzzFeed News. “It’s a four-year-old history. I was just a journalist,” he said.
He then demanded to be sent the excerpt of the article where he is mentioned ahead of publication. “I am warning you — it’s your duty,” Levik said. “And then I will say if I approve it to be published or not.”
What the Skype chat logs also reveal is that over several years the Estonian Baltnews inflated its website traffic by buying fake unique visitors from various Russian companies that offer such a service. A friend and assistant of Kornilov, Aleksandr Dorofeyev, approached one such company as early as October 2014, the same month Baltnews.ee launched. Dorofeyev didn’t say why he needed to pump up the traffic numbers.
“I’m thinking to first have a test with 2,000 [pageviews] and if everything is OK then [we’ll make a larger order] for 14,000 rubles [about $200 by today’s exchange rate]. Will these visitors be distributed evenly throughout the day? If I order 100,000 you will share them evenly throughout the month?” he asked under the Skype handle Раскрутка сайтов — Website Promotion.
It seems that the initial test went well, as Baltnews and the Russian web company continued doing business. Dorofeyev was told that 1 million pageviews would cost 10,990 rubles (roughly $160 by today’s exchange rate). The Skype logs indicate that he placed several orders over the next few months. In March 2015, Dorofeyev said that he was looking for a long-term arrangement, with one or two orders every week.
Most of the orders needed to be submitted via email or a designated website, but occasionally Dorofeyev also posted the orders directly on Skype. On Feb. 18, 2016, he asked for 20,000 pageviews spread across five days on four different stories, with a viewing time of between 90 and 120 seconds. One of the stories he wanted to artificially boost the audience for was headlined “NATO’s Help for Estonia Might Not Arrive in Time”; another was about a local far-right politician promising to fight against refugees.
The Skype chats show Dorofeyev did not stop at fake visitors: He also paid for fake comments from a troll factory for specific stories. The price per comment was nine rubles (just $0.13). At first, Dorofeyev ordered a practice run on another propaganda site that Kornilov and he ran privately, Baltija.eu.
“Let’s start with 50 comments from two different people. If everything works out, we can continue working together also on other sites and with a larger number of posts,” Dorofeyev instructed an individual named Artem who offered the troll factory service.
Dorofeyev, the Skype chats show, was interested if the troll factory could use different IPs for the fake comments. The service provider asked why. “We need unique IPs so that the owner would have no reason to think that something murky is going on, but that they are real unique visitors. In general, we need a crowd of people,” Dorofeyev replied.
“It’s a telling vicious circle of producing and financing propaganda, then referring to it as a genuine voice of local Russians.”
Artem, whose surname is not known, said that the company’s policy did not allow it to be involved in publishing comments on other sites. “We have copyright,” he said and directed Dorofeyev to the terms and conditions. But they still agreed to proceed with the test on Baltija.eu.
When approached by BuzzFeed News, Dorofeyev denied buying pageviews and comments. He said he only worked for Baltnews in Estonia as a daily editor: “I wrote and published the news I thought to be important and interesting.” He also rejected the notion that anyone had told him what to write about.
When told about Skype chat logs that show his involvement in artificially boosting traffic numbers, Dorofeyev said that he could also have a ticket to the moon, but “it wouldn’t prove that I actually went on the moon.” He declined to share his email address so the Skype logs he is featured in could be sent to him.
Harrys Puusepp, a superintendent and spokesperson at Estonia’s KAPO agency, told BuzzFeed News that the Baltnews scheme matches the modus operandi of other Kremlin propaganda operations and shows how their covert financial schemes are used to legitimize hostile propaganda.
“It’s a telling vicious circle of producing and financing propaganda, then referring to it as a genuine voice of local Russians, in order to use the distorted public image to support their foreign policy goals at international platforms,” Puusepp said.
Moscow headquarters of Russia’s Rossiya Segodnya state media group, which runs the Sputnik news agency.
Kirill Kudryavtsev / AFP / Getty Images
Moscow headquarters of Russia’s Rossiya Segodnya state media group, which runs the Sputnik news agency.
The documents and Skype logs obtained by BuzzFeed News continue until summer 2016 — the time when the Estonian police seized Kornilov and his associates’ computers as part of the criminal investigation into document forgery. Public data suggests that the financing scheme of Baltnews continued well beyond that date. In 2016, after getting into trouble with Estonian tax authorities and the police, Kornilov changed the NGO he was using to run Baltnews. Instead of Altmedia, he started using a new NGO named Baltnewsmedia.
According to the financial review of Baltnewsmedia, it received 136,800 euros’ worth of donations in 2016. The review doesn’t specify the source of the donations, but they amount to exactly 11,400 euros a month — the sum Barsolina Ventures used to send to Altmedia. In 2017, the donation went up to 155,508 euros.
On June 1 this year, a brief message was posted on all three Baltnews sites, saying that due to a change of publisher, a new editorial team was to be formed. The same day, Kornilov posted a message on Facebook saying his team had ended its association with Baltnews. “Thank you to everyone who was with us for those four years,” he wrote.
Four days later, he reached a plea deal with the Estonian prosecutor’s office. While Kornilov managed to avoid a conviction for tax fraud and forgery of documents, Altmedia, the NGO he founded and used when publishing Baltnews, was convicted — allowing Kornilov to keep a clean record personally, although the court verdict clearly states his role in arranging and running a tax evasion scheme and document forgery.
The Latvian Baltnews website, when contacted via its general email address for comment, directed all questions to the press office of Rossiya Segodnya. Emails sent there remain unanswered.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ho ... s-baltnews
by seemslikeadream » Thu Sep 27, 2018 9:46 am
Fancy Bear, the Russian Election Hackers, Have a Nasty New Weapon
If Putin’s new malware hits you, don’t bother wiping your hard drive. Just throw out your computer.
09.27.18 6:00 AM ET
Russia’s GRU has secretly developed and deployed new malware that’s virtually impossible to eradicate, capable of surviving a complete wipe of a target computer’s hard drive, and allows the Kremlin’s hackers to return again and again.
The malware, uncovered by the European security company ESET, works by rewriting the code flashed into a computer’s UEFI chip, a small slab of silicon on the motherboard that controls the boot and reboot process. Its apparent purpose is to maintain access to a high-value target in the event the operating system gets reinstalled or the hard drive replaced—changes that would normally kick out an intruder.
It’s proof that the hackers known as Fancy Bear “may be even more dangerous than previously thought,” company researchers wrote in a blog post. They’re set to present a paper on the malware at the Blue Hat security conference Thursday.
U.S. intelligence agencies have identified Fancy Bear as two units within Russia’s military intelligence directorate, the GRU, and last July Robert Mueller indicted 12 GRU officers for Fancy Bear’s U.S. election interference hacking.
The advanced malware shows the Kremlin’s continued investment in the hacking operation that staged some of the era’s most notorious intrusions, including the 2016 Democratic National Committee hack. The GRU’s hackers have been active for at least 12 years, breaching NATO, Obama’s White House, a French television station, the World Anti-Doping Agency, countless NGOs, and military and civilian agencies in Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. Last year, they targeted targeted Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, who’s facing a hotly contested 2018 re-election race.
“There’s been no deterrence to Russian hacking,” said former FBI counterterrorism agent Clint Watts, a research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “And as long as there’s no deterrence, they’re not going to stop, and they’re going to get more and more sophisticated.”
As sophisticated as it is, Russia’s new malware works only on PCs with security weaknesses in the existing UEFI configuration. It also isn’t the first code to hide in the UEFI chip. Security researchers have demonstrated the vulnerability with proof-of-concept code in the past, and a 2015 leak showed that commercial spyware manufacturer Hacking Team offered UEFI persistence as an option in one of their products. There’s even evidence that Fancy Bear borrowed snippets of Hacking Team’s code, ESET said.
Last year, a WikiLeaks dump revealed that the CIA used it own malware called “DerStarke” to maintain long-term access to hacked MacOS machines using the same technique.
But until now such an attack has never been spotted in the wild on a victim computer.
The first public whiff of Russia’s new malware emerged last March, when Arbor Networks’ ASERT team reported finding malware designed to look like a component of the theft-recovery app Absolute LoJack.
Absolute LoJack works much like Apple’s Find My iPhone app, allowing laptop owners to attempt to geo-locate a computer after a theft, or to remotely wipe their sensitive files from the missing machine. The hackers copied one piece of the app, a background process that maintains contact with Absolute Software’s server, and changed it to report to Fancy Bear’s command-and-control servers instead.
ESET researchers call the malware LoJax. They suspected they were seeing just one piece of a larger puzzle, and started looking for additional LoJax components in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, where LoJax was popping up on hacked machines alongside better-known Fancy Bear implants like Seduploader, X-Agent, and X-Tunnel.
They found a new component of LoJax designed to access technical details of a computer’s UEFI chip, and surmised that Fancy Bear was moving to the motherboard. Eventually they found the proof in another component called “ReWriter_binary” that actually rewrote vulnerable UEFI chips, replacing the vendor code with Fancy Bear’s code.
Fancy Bear’s UEFI code works as a bodyguard for the the counterfeit LoJack agent. At every reboot, the hacked chip checks to make sure that Windows malware is still present on the hard drive, and if it’s missing, reinstalls it.
The researchers so far have found only one computer with an infected UEFI chip among many with the fake LoJack component, which makes them think the former is only rarely deployed. And by all evidence, the entire project is relatively new.
“The LoJax campaign started at least in early 2017,” said Jean-Ian Boutin, a senior malware researcher at ESET. “ We don’t know exactly when the UEFI rootkit was used for the first time, but our first detection came in early 2018.”
“The GRU is following a developmental model that’s very sophisticated,” said Watts. “They have programmers who seem to be top-notch and they appear to rapidly deploy their cyberweapons not long after they develop them.”
The ESET researchers said the new malware should be taken as a warning. “The LoJax campaign shows that high-value targets are prime candidates for the deployment of rare, even unique threats,” the researchers wrote. “Such targets should always be on the lookout for signs of compromise.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/fancy-bea ... n?ref=home
by seemslikeadream » Fri Oct 26, 2018 4:46 pm
D.C.-Based Russian Media Venture Boasts that Indicted Kremlin Operative Is Its CFO
USA Really, which has pledged to wage an ‘information war,’ claims that Elena Khusyaynova is a top executive.
10.26.18 4:49 AM ET
When federal authorities allege a massive, foreign-government-backed campaign to undermine America’s democratic institutions, the expected reaction from those accused of complicity is to put some distance between themselves and the culprits.
But when Elena Khusyaynova, the alleged financier of a sprawling Russian disinformation effort, was indicted last week, one Russian media outlet rushed to associate itself with the St. Petersburg accountant. USA Really, a conspiratorial website run by a Russian media executive and Kremlin policy adviser, quickly boasted on its website that Khusyaynova was the company’s chief financial officer.
It’s not clear what USA Really hoped to gain through the admission. The site is quick to deny that Russia had any involvement in the 2016 election. But its gleeful association with Khusyaynova suggests that USA Really is not the independent, inquisitive news organization that it claims to be, but rather an adjunct of a deep-pocketed propaganda apparatus that federal prosecutors say amounts to a criminal conspiracy against the United States.
Representatives for the website did not return a request for comment for this piece. But there are ties between the site and Khusyaynova.
In an indictment handed down last week, prosecutors accused Khusyaynova of orchestrating the flows of millions of dollars to various arms of a Russian digital information operation designed to stoke political, cultural, and racial divisions in the United States and Europe. Dubbed Project Lahtka, its goal, prosecutors alleged, was “to undermine faith in our democratic institutions.”
USA Really had a different take, calling the charge a “disgusting, monstrous octopus stretching its arms to choke free speech and independent journalism panicked upon hearing USA Really’s voice of truth.” Within the story was the admission “that Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova is CFO of the USA Really news agency and its parent organization, Federal News Agency. This is her only ‘crime.’”
The Federal News Agency (FAN) was one of a one of a number of entities that federal prosecutors say “employed hundreds of individuals in support” of Project Lahtka, and through which they allege Khusyaynova funneled money that financed social media disinformation campaigns in the U.S.
The FAN is allegedly run by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian catering billionaire commonly known as “Putin’s cook.” Prosecutors claim that three of Progozhin’s catering businesses provided the primary source of funding for Project Lahtka’s U.S. election-meddling campaigns. The Justice Department indicted Prigozhin in February on charges related to Russian election-meddling efforts.
USA Really was not named in that indictment or last week’s one against Khusyaynova. But it has pushed back against both. In an “exclusive” video statement published by the site on Monday, Khusyaynova downplayed her alleged role in Project Lahtka, describing herself merely as “an ordinary Russian accountant.”
USA Really’s website is run by Alexander Malkevich, a Russian media executive and a member of the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation, a private organization established by Russian President Vladimir Putin, through which Malkevich advises the Russian government on media policy. In that capacity, he has recently called for “more [Russian] mass media in order to fight back in the world information war.”
USA Really set up shop this year in a shared office space across the street from the White House. Its headquarters, adorned with a photo of President Donald Trump and a Confederate flag, previously shared the same St. Petersburg building that once housed the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Kremlin propaganda organ responsible for significant disinformation efforts in the U.S., and involved in Project Lahtka.
Malkevich and his website thumb their nose at allegations that they are simply Russian propagandists. “Major U.S. MSM considers all these stories to be ‘fake news’ and ‘Russian state propaganda’ because it didn’t fit with what all the ‘Important People’ from the Hill or Silicon Valley knew to be true,” declared one story written in characteristically broken English.
In June, cybersecurity firm FireEye investigated USA Really and determined it had ties to the IRA, a Kremlin propaganda organ responsible for significant disinformation efforts in the U.S., and involved in Project Lahtka. The Justice Department did not respond to questions about whether its investigation has probed those ties to USA Really.
The site is relatively obscure as a media organization, but its social media reach in the U.S. is significant. Hundreds of USA Really links have populated Reddit’s most popular pro-Trump forum. One August story on the site was shared on Facebook nearly 80,000 times.
Despite some social media success, USA Really and its parent company have borne the brunt of efforts by Facebook and other social media companies to crack down on disinformation on their platforms. USA Really’s Facebook page was shut down early this month, prompting furious and conspiratorial backlash from the site.
USA Really wrote this week that it has retained the law firm Whiteford Taylor & Preston and filed a lawsuit against Facebook in a federal court in California. Federal court records show no record of any such lawsuit being filed. A spokesperson for Whiteford did not respond to numerous requests for comment.
Meanwhile, USA Really’s U.S. government conspiracy theories have only deepened. On Thursday, the site posted screenshots of threats that it claims were leveled against the FAN.
“We’re watching you and know about your low-down work in the agency,” read one alleged threat, which was written by an unidentified sender in Russian to an unidentified recipient. “We don’t like what we see. Stop. You can’t imagine the consequences of your cooperation. You will answer for both the agency’s actions, and your own.”
USA Really somehow concluded that the messages came from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. A USA Really employee called the number that supposedly sent the text messages. In audio of the conversation that it posted on its website, an individual speaking in a heavy accent claims to be a “military adviser to the consulate” but refuses to give his name.
Asked to identify himself, the man says, “I’m not at liberty to tell you that. It’s a state secret.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/dc-based- ... rticles%29
Kremlin operative leads new DC-based news site that claims Russia didn't meddle in 2016 presidential election
In what can only be described as a bizarre admission, a Washington D.C.-based news site boasted that a recently indicted Kremlin operative is one of its top executives, reports The Daily Beast.
According to the report, USA Really, which describes itself as an independent news website, made a point on letting the world know that Elena Khusyaynova is its chief financial officer, thereby linking itself to tehKremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Khusyaynova was indicted last week for trying to meddle in the 2018 midterm elections, with federal prosecutors alleging that she worked on behalf of “Project Lakhta,” an organization attempting to “to sow discord in the U.S. political system.” She is not currently in U.S. custody.
According to the Beast, USA Really’s admission links them to Kremlin-backed new sites like RT and Sputnik, with the Beast clarifying, “It’s not clear what USA Really hoped to gain through the admission. The site is quick to deny that Russia had any involvement in the 2016 election. But its gleeful association with Khusyaynova suggests that USA Really is not the independent, inquisitive news organization that it claims to be, but rather an adjunct of a deep-pocketed propaganda apparatus that federal prosecutors say amounts to a criminal conspiracy against the United States.”
USA Really, which trades in conspiracy theories and sensationalized stories, is run by Russian media executive and Kremlin policy adviser Alexander Malkevich, who was the one to proudly announce the Khusyaynova connection.
https://www.rawstory.com/2018/10/kremli ... -election/
by seemslikeadream » Tue Dec 18, 2018 9:10 am
2012 Countdown » Wed Aug 22, 2018 1:52 pm wrote:Just stopping in to celebrate with SLAD and co....
These treasonous fuckers will be made to pay for their crimes, and to the willing dupes who excuse the treason and rampant criminality, I say fuck you too.
How Instagram Became the Russian IRA's Go-To Social Network
“Instagram was perhaps the most effective platform for the Internet Research Agency,” concludes a new report commissioned by a Senate committee.
Vitaliy Belousov/AP
For Russian misinformation-mongers, 2017 was the year of Instagram. As Facebook and Twitter cracked down on foreign influence campaigns amid media scrutiny, the Kremlin’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) found unprecedented success in shifting its disinformation efforts to the photo-sharing app, according to a new report commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee. On Instagram, the IRA waged memetic warfare against millions of users by creating a robust and sophisticated network of accounts related to key social justice and political issues. These profiles weren’t crude or poorly managed but, rather, part of a well-oiled influence machine designed to weaponize the social clout wielded by power users on Instagram.
“Instagram was perhaps the most effective platform for the Internet Research Agency,” concludes the report, written by cybersecurity firm New Knowledge. The IRA created just 133 Instagram accounts. But a dozen of these attracted more than 100,000 followers, commonly viewed as a threshold to mark an account an “influencer;” approximately 50 surpassed the “micro-influencer” milestone of 10,000 followers. Like many American influencers, the IRA monetized its digital popularity by pushing custom-made merchandise—giving it access to the purchasers’ personally identifying information, and promoting partnerships with brands.
On Instagram, the IRA aggressively targeted black Americans as well as the left and right with a coordinated, multi-level influence campaign powered by networks of related and opposing profiles, which worked in consort to envelop users in a highly controlled ecosystem of the Kremlin’s design. The most successful accounts were focused on black culture, feminism, LGBTQ+ issues, Christianity, veterans, and gun rights, and garnered more than 10 million interactions—likes and comments—each. Others impersonated news outlets and journalists in the hopes of exacerbating distrust in the the actual media among target audiences. The goal, as with much of the Russians’ online activity, was to exacerbate divisions and stoke resentments in the US.
On Instagram, IRA accounts mocked the idea of IRA accounts on Instagram. In the wake of the 2016 election, over 70 posts on Facebook and Instagram targeting right-wing audiences downplayed the existence of Russian interference.
A post by the Kremlin's Internet Research Agency mocking the idea of Russian interference in a post targeted to right-wing audiences.
SSCI
Starting in 2015, the period analyzed by the report, IRA-controlled accounts distributed 116,205 Instagram posts, nearly twice as many as the 61,483 posts on Facebook, which until now have garnered far more attention. The Instagram posts received more than 183 million likes and 4 million comments, generating significantly more interactions from users than comparable Russian operations on Facebook, which collectively received about 76 million engagements. The report also suggests that Facebook, Instagram’s parent company, downplayed the outsized role of the photo sharing platform in Russian efforts to sow division. Instagram’s role was “something that Facebook executives appear to have avoided mentioning in Congressional testimony,” the report says.
TOP ACCOUNTS
These were the 10 most popular IRA accounts on Instagram:
@blackstagram__
@american.veterans
@sincerely_black_
@feminism_tag
@rainbow_nation_us
@_american.made
@afrokingdom_
@army_of_jesus
@mericanfury
@pray4police
Though the IRA’s 133 Instagram accounts were largely created in early to mid 2015—well before most of the group’s Facebook profiles—the platform wasn’t a primary focus for Russian operatives until 2017. As media attention turned to Facebook and Twitter, the report says, the IRA ramped up its presence on Instagram, with post totals more than doubling from roughly 2,600 posts a month in 2016 to almost 6,000 in 2017.
The bulk of the IRA’s disinformation efforts on Instagram served to reinforce cultural divisions by embedding users in a particular in-group, often tied to their race, political beliefs, or gender. The top 10 most popular accounts each targeted a particular audience and collectively garnered over 120 million engagements.
The most popular account, @blackstagram__, had 303,663 followers, generated over 28 million total interactions, and targeted the black community. As of 2017, the account regularly received upwards of 10,000 likes on its posts. The IRA’s other popular Instagram accounts centered around veterans, LGBTQ+ issues, feminism, and hot-button political topics such as police brutality, gun rights, and Christianity. On June 11, 2017, @blackstagram__ posted a meme featuring eight female-presenting legs ranging from pale to dark-skinned with a caption “All the tones are nude! Get over it!” The photo received over 250,000 likes and nearly 7,000 comments, and was originally accompanied by the hashtag-laden text: ““What is your color? @expression_tees @kahmune #blackexcellence #blackpride #blackandproud #blackpower #africanamerican #melanin #ebony #panafrican #blackcommunity #problack #brownskin #unapologeticallyblack #blackgirl #blackgirls #blackwomen #blackwoman”
Disinformation Ecosystems
The majority of the IRA’s most successful accounts targeted the black community, and black cultural issues. The accounts created their own interlinked media ecosystem, across more than a dozen different platforms. One of the smaller Instagram accounts, @blackmattersus, which had nearly 30,000 followers on Instagram and garnered nearly 2 million engagements, also cross-promoted its content on Twitter and Facebook, published nearly 100 videos on YouTube, created two Facebook events and launched related ads on the platform, and ran both a Soundcloud and Tumblr by the name of SKWAD55. Russian operatives used the Black Matters network to both sow division and build community, frequently posting job listings for real Americans to help create content for the website. The Black Matters accounts interacted with and promoted content from the IRA’s dozens of other similar networks of accounts in the black media scene. Black Matters content was also shared by high-profile influencers and groups unassociated with the IRA, such as, Color of Change, Unapologetically Black, and YourAnonNews.
“An individual who followed or liked one of the Black-community-targeted IRA Pages would have been exposed to content from dozens more, as well as carefully curated authentic Black media content that was ideologically or thematically aligned with the Internet Research Agency messaging,” the report reads.
This meme, posted on March 2, 2016 by @army_of_jesus_ received nearly 90,000 likes on Instagram, making it the most-liked Instagram content uploaded by the group before the 2016 election.
SSCI
This intricate network of linked content across a variety of platforms allowed the IRA to grow the audiences of multiple accounts simultaneously by drawing upon the cross-promotional tools built into platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. The integrated nature of the network also served to boost the accounts’ legitimacy among real black Americans.
Once these networks of accounts gained critical mass, they were used to promote narratives that exacerbated tensions between groups and hijack the conversation among target audiences by presenting potential topics of discussion or opinions from a trusted source. One particularly potent example of this tactic identified in the report centers around a real-life human interest story. The IRA heavily promoted the story of an 11-year-old black boy who made national news after inventing a device to prevent hot car deaths. IRA-run Instagram accounts and Facebook pages reframed the story to reinforce racial in-groups: “White people invent tools for killing, this Black child is inventing a tool for saving lives,” read one post. “these are stories of Black children the media don’t want you to see,” read another. Black Matters created an article about the subject on its website, which it claimed had well over 100,000 subscribers.
One of the triptych and 5-panel pieces of art the Internet Research Agency tried to sell to conservatives using its influence networks on Instagram and other platforms.
SSCI
These ecosystems of disinformation also served to promote merchandise, including t-shirts with polarizing or inflammatory statements “designed to spark controversy in the real world,” LGBT-positive sex toys, and patriotic wall art. Much like actual influencers, IRA accounts on Instagram partnered with brands to offer promotions for their products without adequately disclosing their financial relationships. One promo post by IRA account @black4black offered followers a “good discount” from a skincare company in exchange for sharing three of either their posts or posts by Black Matters.
The report notes that while there is no data available regarding the revenue the IRA received from these endeavors, there are two unsettling reasons for the Russians to hawk merch: transaction data and ad targeting. Transactions could have given the IRA access to a wealth of personal data about the purchaser, including their name, address, email, and phone number, and perhaps even payment details—all of which could have been used to further target divisive ads and more IRA content in the future.
https://www.wired.com/story/how-instagr ... l-network/
Russian 2016 Election Influence Tried to Suppress Votes of Bernie Sanders Supporters, African-Americans, Report Finds
By Tim Marcin On 12/17/18 at 10:23 AM
A new report has found that the 2016 election influence campaign carried out by Russia particularly targeted African-American voters, as well as supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders in an effort to suppress the votes of those who'd likely support than Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Citing a report it obtained that was commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee, The New York Times reported that the group that ran the influence campaign—the Internet Research Agency (IRA)—looked to exploit racial divisions and had more of an impact on Instagram than was originally thought.
“The most prolific IRA efforts on Facebook and Instagram specifically targeted black American communities and appear to have been focused on developing black audiences and recruiting black Americans as assets," the New Knowledge report obtained by the Times noted, according to the paper.
The goal was not really to push black voters toward now-President Donald Trump—it was to stop certain people from voting. Wrote the Times on Monday:
"While the right-wing pages promoted Mr. Trump’s candidacy, the left-wing pages scorned Mrs. Clinton while promoting Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. The voter suppression effort was focused particularly on Sanders supporters and African-Americans, urging them to shun Mrs. Clinton in the general election and either vote for Ms. Stein or stay home."
The report noted that some 30 pages created by the Internet Research Agency that targeted African American voters garnered some 1.2 million followers, while 25 pages targeting far-right voters had 1.4 million followers.
A separate report for the Senate from Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and analysis firm Graphika similarly found that the influence campaign from Russia focused on "key interest groups for the purpose of targeting messages," according to The Washington Post on Sunday.
"What is clear is that all of the messaging clearly sought to benefit the Republican Party—and specifically Donald Trump,” the report stated, as reported by the Post. "Trump is mentioned most in campaigns targeting conservatives and right-wing voters, where the messaging encouraged these groups to support his campaign. The main groups that could challenge Trump were then provided messaging that sought to confuse, distract and ultimately discourage members from voting."
russia, 2016, election, bernie sanders, trump Supporters of President Trump jeer at a rally on November 4 in Chattanooga, Tennessee. A new report found that Russia's 2016 influence campaign backed targeted African-Americans and others likely to vote Democrat. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Trump, of course, went on to win the 2016 election—and it's difficult to know how much of an effect these efforts on social media might have had.
The investigation from special counsel Robert Mueller that's looking into Russia's tampering in the 2016 election is ongoing and has resulted in indictments of at least 33 people and three companies.
Despite charges and guilty pleas from members of his campaign, Trump has repeatedly called the special counsel's investigation one big hoax.
"The Russian Witch Hunt Hoax, started as the 'insurance policy' long before I even got elected, is very bad for our Country," Trump tweeted over the weekend, in just one message in a mini-missive against the investigation. "They are Entrapping people for misstatements, lies or unrelated things that took place many years ago. Nothing to do with Collusion. A Democrat Scam!"
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-2016-el ... mp-1261425
Russia's effort to influence the 2016 election targeted African-Americans, report finds
Russia used Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube to help Trump, report says
8:47 am
In this Dec. 11, 2018, photo, President Donald Trump meets with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
WASHINGTON - A report prepared for the Senate that provides the most sweeping analysis yet of Russia's disinformation campaign around the 2016 election found the operation used every major social media platform to deliver words, images and videos tailored to voters' interests to help elect President Donald Trump - and worked even harder to support him while in office.
The report, a draft of which was obtained by The Washington Post, is the first to study the millions of posts provided by major technology firms to the Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Sens. Richard Burr, R-N.C., its chairman, and Mark Warner of Virginia, its ranking Democrat. The bipartisan panel hasn't said if it endorses the findings. It plans to release it publicly along with another study later this week.
The research - by Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project and Graphika, a network analysis firm - offers new details on how Russians working at the Internet Research Agency, which U.S. officials have charged with criminal offenses for meddling in the 2016 campaign, sliced Americans into key interest groups for the purpose of targeting messages. These efforts shifted over time, peaking at key political moments, such as presidential debates or party conventions, the report found.
The data sets used by the researchers were provided by Facebook, Twitter and Google and covered several years up to mid-2017, when the social media companies cracked down on the known Russian accounts. The report, which also analyzed data separately provided to House intelligence committee members, contains no information on more recent political moments, such as November's midterm election.
"What is clear is that all of the messaging clearly sought to benefit the Republican Party--and specifically Donald Trump," the report says. "Trump is mentioned most in campaigns targeting conservatives and right-wing voters, where the messaging encouraged these groups to support his campaign. The main groups that could challenge Trump were then provided messaging that sought to confuse, distract and ultimately discourage members from voting."
Representatives for Burr and Warner declined to comment.
The new report offers the latest evidence that Russian agents sought to help Trump win the White House. Democrats and Republicans on the panel previously studied the U.S. intelligence community's 2017 finding that Moscow aimed to assist Trump, and in July, they said investigators had come to the correct conclusion. Despite their work, some Republicans on Capitol Hill continue to doubt the nature of Russia's meddling in the last presidential election.
The Russians aimed particular energy at activating conservatives on issues such as gun rights and immigration, while sapping the political clout of left-leaning African-American voters by undermining their faith in elections and spreading misleading information about how to vote. Many other groups - Latinos, Muslims, Christians, gay men and women, liberals, southerners, veterans - got at least some attention from Russians operating thousands of social media accounts.
The report also offered some of the first detailed analyses of the role played by YouTube, which belongs to Google, and Instagram in the Russian campaign, as well as anecdotes on how Russians used other social media platforms - Google+, Tumblr and Pinterest - that have gotten relatively little scrutiny. The Russian effort also used email accounts from Yahoo, Microsoft's Hotmail service and Google's Gmail.
The authors, while reliant on data provided by technology companies, also highlighted their "belated and uncoordinated response" to the disinformation campaign and, once it was discovered, criticized the companies for not sharing more with investigators. The authors urged the companies in the future to provide data in "meaningful and constructive" ways.
Facebook, for example, provided the Senate with copies of posts from 81 Facebook "Pages" and information on 76 accounts used to purchase ads but did not share the posts from other user accounts run by the IRA, the report says. Twitter, meanwhile, has made it challenging for outside researchers to collect and analyze data on its platform through its public feed, the researchers said.
Google submitted information in an especially difficult way for the researchers to handle, providing content such as YouTube videos but not the related data that would have allowed a full analysis. The YouTube information was so hard for the researchers to study, they wrote, they instead tracked the links to its videos from other sites in hopes of better understanding YouTube's role in the Russian effort.
Facebook and Google didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. In a statement, Twitter stressed that it had made "significant strides" since the 2016 election to harden its digital defenses, including the release of a repository of the tweets that Russian agents previously sent so researchers can review them.
"Our singular focus is to improve the health of the public conversation on our platform, and protecting the integrity of elections is an important aspect of that mission," the company added.
Facebook, Google and Twitter first disclosed last year that they had identified Russian meddling on their sites. Critics previously said it took too long to come to an understanding of the disinformation campaign, and that Russian strategies have likely shifted since then. The companies have awakened to the threat - Facebook in particular created a "war room" this fall to combat interference around elections - but none have revealed interference around the midterm elections last month on the scale of what happened in 2016.
The report expressed concern about the overall threat social media poses to political discourse within nations and between them, warning that companies once viewed as tools for liberation in the Arab world and elsewhere are now threats to democracy.
"Social media have gone from being the natural infrastructure for sharing collective grievances and coordinating civic engagement to being a computational tool for social control, manipulated by canny political consultants and available to politicians in democracies and dictatorships alike."
Researchers also noted that the data includes evidence of sloppiness by the Russians that could have led to earlier detection, including the use of Russia's currency, the ruble, to buy ads and Russian phone numbers for contact information. The operatives also left behind technical signatures in computerized logs, such as Internet addresses in St. Petersburg, where the IRA was based.
Many of the findings track in general terms work by other researchers and testimony previously provided by the companies to lawmakers investigating the Russian effort. But the fuller data available to the researchers offered new insights on many aspects of the Russian campaign.
The report traces the origins of Russian online influence operations to Russian domestic politics in 2009 and says that ambitions shifted to include U.S. politics as early as 2013 over Twitter. Of the tweets the company provided to the Senate, 57 percent are in Russian, with 36 percent in English and smaller amounts in other languages.
The efforts to manipulate Americans grew sharply in 2014 and every year after, as teams of operatives spread their work across more platforms and accounts, in order to target larger swaths of U.S. voters by geography, political interests, race, religion and other factors. The Russians started with accounts on Twitter, then added YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, before finally bringing Facebook into the mix, the report said.
Facebook was particularly effective at targeting conservatives and African-Americans, the report found. More than 99 percent of all engagement - meaning likes, shares and other reactions - came from 20 "Pages" controlled by the IRA, including "Being Patriotic," "Heart of Texas," "Blacktivist" and "Army of Jesus."
Together the 20 most popular pages generated 39 million likes, 31 million shares, 5.4 million reactions and 3.4 million comments. Company officials told Congress that the Russian campaign reached 126 million people on Facebook and 20 million more on Instagram.
The Russians operated 133 accounts on Instagram, a photo-sharing subsidiary of Facebook, that focused mainly on race, ethnicity or other forms of personal identity. The most successful Instagram posts targeted African American cultural issues and black pride and were not explicitly political.
While the overall intensity of posting across platforms grew year by year - with a particular spike during the six months after Election Day - this growth was particularly pronounced on Instagram, which went from roughly 2,600 posts a month in 2016 to nearly 6,000 in 2017, when the accounts were shut down. Across all three years covered by the report, Russian Instagram posts generated 185 million likes and 4 million user comments.
Even though the researchers struggled to interpret the YouTube data submitted by Google, they were able to track the links from other sites to YouTube - offering a "proxy" for understanding the role play by the video platform.
"The proxy is imperfect," the researchers wrote, "but the IRA's heavy use of links to YouTube videos leaves little doubt of the IRA's interest in leveraging Google's video platform to target and manipulate US audiences."
The use of YouTube, like the other platforms, appears to have grown after Trump's election. Twitter links to YouTube videos grew by 84 percent in the six months after the election, the data showed.
The Russians shrewdly worked across platforms as they refined their tactics aimed at particular groups, posting links across accounts and sites to bolster the influence operation's success on each, the report shows.
"Black Matters US" had accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google+, Tumblr and Paypal, according to the researchers. By linking posts across these platforms, the Russian operatives were able to solicit donations, organize real-world protests and rallies and direct online traffic to a website that the Russians also controlled.
The researchers found that when Facebook shut down the page in August 2016, a new one called "BM" soon appeared with more cultural and fewer political posts. It tracked closely to the content on the @blackmatterus Instagram account.
The report found operatives also began buying Google ads to promote the "BlackMatters US" website with provocative messages such as, "Cops kill black kids. Are you sure that your son won't be the next?" The related Twitter account, meanwhile, complained about the suspension of the Facebook page, accusing the tech company of "supporting white supremacy."
https://www.nwherald.com/2018/12/17/rus ... s/aqprsbf/
4 main takeaways from new reports on Russia’s 2016 election interference
One includes Russia’s deliberate targeting of African Americans online.
Alex WardDec 17, 2018, 12:25pm EST
Russian President Vladimir Putin
Mark Thompson/Getty Images
Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 political landscape — and presidential election — was a much wider effort than previously understood.
Two new reports released on Monday, prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee by independent researchers, reveal that Moscow’s intelligence officials reached millions of social media users between 2013 and 2017, in part by exploiting existing political and racial divisions in American society. Vox obtained the two reports before their planned release.
Using data provided by social media companies to the Senate panel, researchers from New Knowledge, Columbia University, and Canfield Research along with others from the University of Oxford and Graphika have for the first time revealed a broad extent of the years-long efforts by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a group of Russian agents that use social media to influence politics.
Special counsel Robert Mueller indicted 13 IRA members in February for interfering in the 2016 presidential election.
Taken together, the reports are bad news for President Donald Trump. They clearly show that Russia aimed to help him win the election and hurt Hillary Clinton, although none of the reports say Russia’s efforts definitively won the White House for Trump or changed any votes.
There’s a lot to unpack in the reports. Here are the four main takeaways.
1) Russia favored Trump over Clinton
The IRA’s content unquestionably favored Trump over his opponent, supporting him as early as the primaries. Pro-Trump content featured mainly on conservative pages and rarely appeared in left-leaning circles.
There are other pieces of evidence. One is that Russia aimed to stop people from voting, and lower turnout historically favors Republican candidates. Another shows that the IRA disparaged Clinton in nearly all of its social media pages on every platform, regardless of whether the page targeted conservatives, liberals, or racial and ethnic groups.
And here’s one of the more shocking revelations: Russia promoted violence in the event of a Trump loss.
In nearly 110 Facebook posts including fake images of election machine error messages or ballots, the IRA targeted conservative users with false information about supposed widespread voter fraud aimed at helping Clinton win. More than 70 of those posts went up the month before the election. They made a variety of false claims, including that states were secretly working to help Clinton win; that militias were organizing to stop the fraud; and that citizens could call a (fake) 1-800 number to report discrepancies.
Posts also aimed to boost Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) — Clinton’s toughest primary challenger — and Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
Put together, it’s now clearer than ever that Russia did what it could to make Trump look good and Clinton look bad throughout the entirety of its online campaign.
2) Russia especially targeted African Americans
“The most prolific IRA efforts on Facebook and Instagram specifically targeted Black American communities and appear to have been focused on developing Black audiences and recruiting Black Americans as assets.”
That’s one of the stunning conclusions from the report by researchers from New Knowledge, Columbia University, and Canfield Research LLC. In other words, Russia deliberately aimed to sow and exploit racial divisions in the United States.
The IRA created domain names such as blackvswhite.info, blackmattersusa.com, and blacktolive.org. It made YouTube channels — such as “Cop Block US” and “Don’t Shoot” — to spread anti-Clinton videos. About 1,060 videos produced by 10 distinct channels discussed Black Lives Matter or violent police actions; 571 of the videos included keywords about the police and their abuses.
Some of the IRA’s work focused on Muslim or Christian culture, Texas culture, and even LGBTQ culture, but no other racial or social group received as much attention from the Russians as black Americans.
“While other distinct ethnic and religious groups were the focus of one or two Facebook Pages or Instagram accounts, the Black community was targeted extensively with dozens; this is why we have elected to assess the messaging directed at Black Americans as a distinct and significant operation,” the report says.
What’s worse, Russia found unwitting Americans to serve as assets who helped spread the IRA’s propaganda. According to the report, that tactic “was substantially more pronounced” on accounts that targeted black social media users.
The report doesn’t explain why the IRA targeted African Americans most of all. One possibility, though, is that black voters skew more Democratic, and the election occurred during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, which sharply divided liberals and conservatives. Targeting Black Americans — and trying to keep them from either voting for Clinton or voting altogether — would serve to help Trump.
3) Russian content focused mainly on political and national security issues, not the election itself
Only 11 percent of the IRA’s social media content was about the election, leading people to engage with it about 246 million times.
A lot of the content had to do with gun rights, veterans issues, patriotism, feminism, and even the movement to have California secede from the US. It’s very likely, though, that the IRA aimed to stoke divisions based on those issues in part to influence the election.
National security issues also featured prominently in the IRA’s content, including the war in Syria — a conflict in which Russia has a huge stake. Instagram and Facebook had 3,000 posts on Syria alone.
“[A]cross all targeted communities,” one report reads, the IRA used “narratives to convey Russian’s state-sanctioned talking points on the Syrian conflict.” Russia even had three channels — which produced 30 videos — about the Syrian civil war and other conflicts in the Middle East.
Syria content was surprisingly consistent among all targeted groups — racial, ethnic, and ideological — “but the nuance was tailored for each group,” the New Knowledge-led report says. The narrative mainly supported Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Russia’s actions in the country, which includes financial and military support for the Assad regime.
4) Russia’s use of social media was wider than we thought
Facebook and Twitter have received the bulk of the attention and blame regarding Russia’s use of their platforms to influence the election. But the two reports show the trolls used multiple websites to disseminate their narratives.
Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, Medium, YouTube, Vine, and Google+, among others, carried IRA propaganda content. But Instagram was by far the most used platform that has largely remained out of the public eye.
The Facebook-owned company saw an estimated 20 million users engage roughly 187 million times with IRA content. (By contrast, Facebook saw 76.5 million engagements that reached about 126 million people.) In fact, Russia moved much of its operations to Instagram in 2017, when most of the world’s attention centered on Facebook and Twitter.
As the report notes, Facebook executives seemingly avoided addressing the extent of Instagram’s use by Russia during open congressional testimony.
https://www.vox.com/world/2018/12/17/18 ... -instagram
Russia social media influence efforts ongoing, report says
Mary Clare Jalonick | APDecember 17 at 4:32 PM
WASHINGTON — Russia’s sweeping political disinformation campaign on U.S. social media was more far-reaching than originally thought, with troll farms working to discourage black voters and “blur the lines between reality and fiction” to help elect Donald Trump in 2016, according to reports released Monday by the Senate intelligence committee.
And the campaign didn’t end with Trump’s ascent to the White House. Troll farms are still working to stoke racial and political passions in America at a time of high political discord.
The two studies are the most comprehensive picture yet of the Russian interference campaigns on American social media. They add to the portrait investigators have been building since 2017 on Russia’s influence — though Trump has equivocated on whether the interference actually happened.
Facebook, Google and Twitter declined to comment on the specifics of the reports.
The reports were compiled by the cybersecurity firm New Knowledge and by the Computational Propaganda Research Project, a study by researchers at the University of Oxford and Graphika, a social media analysis firm.
The Oxford report details how Russians broke down their messages to different groups, including discouraging black voters from going to the polls and stoking anger on the right.
“These campaigns pushed a message that the best way to advance the cause of the African-American community was to boycott the election and focus on other issues instead,” the researchers wrote.
At the same time, “Messaging to conservative and right-wing voters sought to do three things: repeat patriotic and anti-immigrant slogans; elicit outrage with posts about liberal appeasement of ‘others’ at the expense of US citizens, and encourage them to vote for Trump.”
The report from New Knowledge says there are still some live accounts tied to the original Internet Research Agency, which was named in an indictment from special counsel Robert Mueller in February for an expansive social media campaign intended to influence the 2016 presidential election. Some of the accounts have a presence on smaller platforms as the major companies have tried to clean up after the Russian activity was discovered.
“With at least some of the Russian government’s goals achieved in the face of little diplomatic or other pushback, it appears likely that the United States will continue to face Russian interference for the foreseeable future,” the researchers wrote.
The New Knowledge report says that none of the social media companies turned over complete data sets to Congress and some of them “may have misrepresented or evaded” in testimony about the interference by either intentionally or unintentionally downplaying the scope of the problem.
The Senate panel has been investigating Russian interference on social media and beyond for almost two years. Intelligence committee Chairman Richard Burr said in a statement that the data shows how aggressively Russia tried to divide Americans by race, religion and ideology and erode trust in institutions.
“Most troublingly, it shows that these activities have not stopped,” said Burr, a North Carolina Republican.
One major takeaway from both studies is the breadth of Russian interference that appeared on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook and was not frequently mentioned when its parent company testified on Capitol Hill. The study says that as attention was focused on Facebook and Twitter in 2017, the Russians shifted much of their activity to Instagram.
The New Knowledge study says that there were 187 million engagements with users on Instagram, while there were 77 million on Facebook.
“Instagram was a significant front in the IRA’s influence operation, something that Facebook executives appear to have avoided mentioning in congressional testimony,” the researchers wrote. They added that “our assessment is that Instagram is likely to be a key battleground on an ongoing basis.”
The Russian activity went far beyond the three tech companies that provided information, reaching many smaller sites as well. The New Knowledge report details sophisticated attempts to infiltrate internet games, browser extensions and music apps. The Russians even used social media to encourage users of the game Pokemon Go — which was at peak popularity in the months before the 2016 presidential election — to use politically divisive usernames, for example.
The report discusses even more unconventional ways that the Russian accounts attempted to connect with Americans and recruit assets, such as merchandise with certain messages, specific follower requests, job offers and even help lines that could encourage people to unknowingly disclose sensitive information to Russia that could later be used against them.
The Russians’ attempts to influence Americans on social media first became widely public in the fall of 2017. Several months later, Mueller’s indictment laid out a vast, organized Russian effort to sway political opinion. While the social media companies had already detailed some of the efforts, the indictment tied actual people to the operation and named 13 Russians responsible.
Also notable is the study’s finding that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was favorably treated in posts aimed at both left-leaning and right-leaning users. The New Knowledge report says there were a number of posts expressing support for Assange and Wikileaks, including several in October 2016 just before WikiLeaks released hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
The Oxford study notes that peaks in Internet Research Agency advertising and organic activity — or posts, shares and comments by users — often corresponded with important dates on the U.S. calendar, crises and international events.
The researchers from Oxford said that organic postings were much more far reaching than advertisements, despite Facebook’s sole focus on ads when the company first announced it had been compromised in 2017.
Other findings in the studies:
— During the week of the presidential election, posts directed to right-leaning users aimed to generate anger and suspicion and hinted at voter fraud, while posts targeted to African-Americans largely ignored mentions of the election until the last minute.
— Establishment figures of both parties, especially Clinton, were universally panned. Even a tag targeted to feminists criticized Clinton and promoted her primary opponent, independent Bernie Sanders;
— Several posts promoted the Russian agenda in Syria and Syrian President Bashar Assad.
— IRA’s posts focused on the United States started on Twitter as far back as 2013, and eventually evolved into the multi-platform strategy.
— Russian activity on Twitter was less organized around themes like race or partisanship but more driven by local and current events and made use of occasional pop culture references.
— Facebook posts linked to the IRA “reveal a nuanced and deep knowledge of American culture, media, and influencers in each community the IRA targeted.” Certain memes appeared on pages targeted to younger people but not older people. “The IRA was fluent in American trolling culture,” the researchers say.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... 272553e5f1
by seemslikeadream » Thu Dec 20, 2018 3:47 pm
Russian Agents Sought Secret US Treasury Records On Clinton Backers During 2016 Campaign
Whistleblowers said the Americans were exchanging messages with unsecure Gmail accounts set up by their Russian counterparts as the US election heated up.
Posted on December 20, 2018, at 12:49 p.m. ET
US Treasury Department officials used a Gmail back channel with the Russian government as the Kremlin sought sensitive financial information on its enemies in America and across the globe, according to documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News.
The extraordinary unofficial line of communication arose in the final year of the Obama administration — in the midst of what multiple US intelligence agencies have said was a secret campaign by the Kremlin to interfere in the US election. Russian agents ostensibly trying to track ISIS instead pressed their American counterparts for private financial documents on at least two dozen dissidents, academics, private investigators, and American citizens.
Most startlingly, Russia requested sensitive documents on Dirk, Edward, and Daniel Ziff, billionaire investors who had run afoul of the Kremlin. That request was made weeks before a Russian lawyer showed up at Trump Tower offering top campaign aides “dirt” on Hillary Clinton — including her supposed connection to the Ziff brothers.
Russia’s financial crimes agency, whose second-in-command is a former KGB officer and schoolmate of President Vladimir Putin, also asked the Americans for documents on executives from two prominent Jewish groups, the Anti-Defamation League and the National Council of Jewish Women, as well as Kremlin opponents living abroad in London and Kiev.
In an astonishing departure from protocol, documents show that at the same time the requests were being made, Treasury officials were using their government email accounts to send messages back and forth with a network of private Hotmail and Gmail accounts set up by the Russians, rather than communicating through the secure network usually used to exchange information with other countries.
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Analysts at an elite agency within Treasury first warned supervisors in 2016 that the Russians were “manipulating the system” to conduct “fishing expeditions.” And they raised fears that the Treasury’s internal systems could be compromised by viruses contained in emails from the unofficial Russian accounts. But staff continued using the Gmail back channel into 2017, despite repeated internal warnings that Russia could be trawling for sensitive financial records — including Social Security and bank account numbers — to spy on, endanger, or recruit targets in the West.
The Treasury Department refused to tell BuzzFeed News why its officials were communicating with unofficial Gmail accounts at the same time that Russia was sending the suspicious requests, or to say whether it eventually turned over any documents in response. Nor would officials answer any other specific questions about the matter.
In a statement, a spokesperson said: “Treasury does not discuss or comment on confidential communications with foreign governments, including to confirm whether or not they have occurred. We have notified our Office of the Inspector General of these allegations.”
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But documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News reveal that Russia’s attempts to extract information about Western targets triggered alarms inside the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, a powerful unit of the Treasury Department with exclusive access to the most comprehensive and sophisticated financial database in the world.
Officials at FinCEN said they reported the use of the back channel to Treasury’s counterterrorism unit and security office, and requested an investigation. They said it was a breach of protocol and that it exposed the Treasury to potential hackers because the Russian messages contained attachments — a common way for intruders to worm inside an organization’s servers.
“If the attachment had a virus it could infiltrate the server,” a senior FinCEN official told BuzzFeed News. This source said insiders have been concerned that their internal records could have been corrupted.
The FinCEN officials reported the incidents in July and August 2016, and claim that there was no substantive investigation of the matter. These sources said that other senior officials continued to use the back channel even after they were told to stop by the Treasury’s office for security.
They suspected that the Russian agency making the requests, called Rosfinmonitoring, set up by Putin in 2001 to combat money laundering and terrorist financing, was closely tied to Russia’s espionage apparatus.
“They are passing information that may have interest to the Russians for other reasons,” a FinCEN official wrote to colleagues in March 2017. “One has to wonder what the heck is going on here.” This official filed for whistleblower protection and quit last year.
“If you are a Russian government entity and you are communicating with Americans, you have an FSB officer sitting right next to you and that officer is probably sending the email.”
In emails reviewed by BuzzFeed News, FinCEN insiders expressed shock that staff in another Treasury office had agreed to communicate with the Russians outside of normal, secure channels. FinCEN uses an encrypted portal called the Egmont Secure Web to exchange information with more than 160 other countries, including Russia, and to keep sensitive financial data out of the wrong hands.
A former US intelligence official who served in Russia for many years told BuzzFeed News that the use of unsecure accounts is a major red flag for espionage activity.
“Rosfinmonitoring is under the command and control of the FSB,” the former intelligence officer said, referring to Russia’s spy agency. “If you are a Russian government entity and you are communicating with Americans, you have an FSB officer sitting right next to you and that officer is probably sending the email.”
The first chapter in this extraordinary chain of communications began in late 2015, when a unit of the Treasury Department called the Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes entered into an agreement, named the ISIL Project, that called for Russia and the US to share information on financial institutions in the Middle East suspected of supporting ISIS.
According to a senior FinCEN intelligence analyst, Russia’s subsequent actions suggest that was just a cover. “What we were seeing with Russia was the fruition of a long-term strategy to try and compromise Treasury by cultivating civil servants. That’s why we sounded the alarm and reported it.”
It was not the only time that concerns about serious counterintelligence threats were raised at the elite financial intelligence unit during the past two years.
Six sources told BuzzFeed News that at least two FinCEN analysts were reported to Treasury’s inspector general over suspicions that they might have been working against the interests of the US.
One analyst was a man with close family ties to Ukraine. He was tracking the finances of corrupt foreign officials in a job that requires a security clearance. Four sources said they were told by security officials at the agency that the analyst turned out not to have one. He had applied for clearance during his previous posting at the State Department, they were told, but was denied it because of suspicious contacts with foreigners. The sources said the man also had unusual contacts with his colleagues both before and after he was fired. Shortly after he was escorted out of FinCEN early last year, he showed up outside a coworker’s apartment building late at night and asked questions about investigations and internal Treasury databases. The coworker reported the encounter to supervisors.
The man’s uncleared access to sensitive information was considered such a major national security breach that FinCEN was stripped of its authority to grant security clearances for some time, according to these four sources. FinCEN’s security chief was later placed on administrative leave.
A second employee was suspended after he was caught traveling to other countries without informing his supervisors — something that FinCEN analysts are forbidden to do because of the value their data could have to foreign powers. A Treasury spokesperson declined to answer detailed questions about these matters.
These revelations are the latest evidence of the disarray inside America’s financial intelligence system, which a two-year BuzzFeed News investigation has laid bare.
FinCEN is a critical US law enforcement agency that each day collects and analyzes thousands of bank reports about suspicious financial behavior. Analysts have played a key role in current investigations by the FBI and special counsel Robert Mueller, assisting FBI agents with inquiries into the murky finances of President Donald Trump and his associates.
Yet hundreds of internal records and interviews with more than a dozen insiders — from frontline workers to senior leaders — show an agency in turmoil, torn apart by turf battles, sinking morale, and internal chaos. Officials there say that, as a result, the unit struggles to hold the line against global money launderers, terrorist organizations, and drug cartels, and lies vulnerable to foreign threats.
Critical financial records on some Trump associates and Russian figures, collected by FinCEN analysts, have not been turned over to Congress, despite numerous requests. And more than a dozen FinCEN officials say that a rivalry with another unit of the Treasury Department cost them several crucial hours of work to track suspects’ movements in the immediate aftermath of the 2017 London Bridge terror attack.
The disarray bled into FinCEN’s daily output. One analyst wrote an investigative memo last year that was shared with the FBI, falsely connecting a member of Trump’s inner circle to a notorious Kremlin bagman. BuzzFeed News reviewed that memo and quickly debunked it; a spelling error led the analyst to mistake an unrelated person for the Putin financier.
At least 10 FinCEN employees have filed formal whistleblower complaints about the department. The whistleblowers say they tried multiple times to raise concerns about issues they believed threatened national security, but that they faced retaliation instead of being heeded. Some of FinCEN’s top officials quit in anger. One senior adviser has been arrested and accused of releasing financial records to a journalist.
That adviser, a whistleblower named Natalie Mayflower Edwards, first sounded the alarm in the summer of 2016. She went on to speak with six different congressional committee staffers to air her concerns. In July and August 2018, she met again with staffers of one of the Senate committees investigating Russian interference during the presidential campaign. In those meetings, she told the staffers that FinCEN withheld documents revealing suspicious financial transactions of Trump associates that the committee had requested.
Along with a colleague, Edwards wrote a letter last year to six congressional oversight committees. In it, the analysts included documentary evidence and Edwards wrote, “I have brought forward lawful documented evidential disclosures of violations of law, rule, and regulations, gross mismanagement, gross waste of funds, abuse of authority, and substantial and specific danger to public safety and I have NOT been protected against reprisal.”
Edwards added that she reported the “wrongdoing” to her supervisor, the inspector general, Treasury’s general counsel, Treasury security personnel, and the counterterrorism unit, requesting an internal investigation, as well as alerting the Office of Special Counsel, the federal government agency that deals with whistleblower complaints. Despite her disclosures, she wrote, “I continue to be retaliated against.”
“May Edwards took it on herself to try and protect everyone here as well as national security,” a senior FinCEN official told BuzzFeed News. “Nobody listened to her or some of the other brave whistleblowers who came forward. They’re all now paying a high price.”
Over the past two years, BuzzFeed News reporters have spoken at length to 12 individuals inside FinCEN. These men and women asked for anonymity to draw back the curtain on breakdowns inside the world’s most powerful financial watchdog. They described an agency turned upside down, where failures left them vulnerable to foreign threats, hampered their ability to investigate financial crimes, and ultimately put the public in danger.
A high-risk agreement
The foundations of the Treasury Department’s highly unorthodox relationship with its Russian counterpart were built late 2015, sources and internal documents show.
One of FinCEN’s key jobs is to work with other governments to track illicit money networks and shell companies across the globe. Nearly 160 countries, including Russia, have agreements to share bank information through a secure network.
But Russia chose to work outside that system — and it began by building a relationship with a unit of Treasury called the Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes.
Senior officials from the terror unit had multiple meetings with top officials at Rosfinmonitoring to discuss jointly tracking the financing of ISIS. Among the negotiators was the Russian financial watchdog’s second-in-command, Yuri Korotky. Korotky went to a KGB finishing school the same year that Putin finished his training there, and worked for the KGB’s successor, the FSB, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Yuri Korotky
Rosfinmonitoring / Via Rosfinmonitoring.ru
Yuri Korotky
Rosfinomintoring did not return detailed messages seeking comment.
Korotky and other Russian officials proposed that Rosfinmonitoring trade information directly with the US as part of their joint effort to defeat ISIS. But almost immediately, the Russians reneged on their end of the bargain.
Rosfinmonitoring was slow to share data. It sought ways to work around FinCEN, the Treasury office that had sole access to the data it wanted, and whose analysts were skeptical of sharing information directly with Russia. By the summer, Rosfinmonitoring had made a series of requests about individuals and companies seemingly unconnected to ISIS or jihadi terror.
Among them were Alexander Lebedev, a newspaper publisher and Putin critic based in London. The Russians asked for financial tracking documents on a company tied to the Panama Papers, the multinational investigation that embarrassed the Kremlin by revealing Putin’s financial network. Throughout 2016, Rosfinmonitoring asked for documents on nearly two dozen entities that FinCEN insiders believed were enemies of the Kremlin.
Even more concerning: Documents show senior officials within the Terrorist Financing unit were communicating with Hotmail and Gmail accounts set up by the Russians, rather than using the standard secure channels.
“They sent this to a GMAIL account? Is that normal?”
When she found out, FinCEN’s chief of staff was stunned.
“They sent this to a GMAIL account? Is that normal?” she asked in an email to a half dozen colleagues on Nov. 28, 2016.
The chief of staff was responding to Treasury colleagues who were discussing with Rosfinmonitoring the outlines of their agreement to track terrorism financiers.
“Unfortunately, Rosfin does prefer throwaway gmail accounts as their preferred method to communicate,” a FinCEN intelligence official responded.
In March 2017, this same official wrote to supervisors to warn that Russia was manipulating the system. She said that the Terrorist Financing unit, which set up the collaboration with Russia, wasn’t forthcoming about the extent of its relationship with that country and wouldn’t let FinCEN attend meetings with its representatives.
Jamal El-Hindi speaks at a hearing of the Subcommittee on Terrorism and Illicit Finance.
GOPFinancialServices / YouTube / Via youtube.com
Jamal El-Hindi speaks at a hearing of the Subcommittee on Terrorism and Illicit Finance.
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A power vacuum
Just as the Kremlin started fishing, a new leader took over FinCEN.
Jamal El-Hindi has spent nearly two decades at Treasury. When he was named acting director of FinCEN in June 2016, he assumed control of one of the most important law enforcement bodies in the US.
But during his tenure, FinCEN has withered.
About 70 full-time jobs have gone unfilled, sources said, and El-Hindi canceled popular programs that insiders felt helped them recruit young, talented analysts. Employees grumbled about a laggardly pace inside the building and complained that basic reports once took days to be approved but were now being held in limbo for weeks.
Twelve current and former employees said El-Hindi was notoriously late to meetings. Unlike his predecessors, he did not set yearly priorities, they said. One veteran supervisor said that on El-Hindi’s watch, FinCEN became too cautious and too concerned with the optics of its work rather than the substance.
A slide from the 2017 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey results.
Obtained by BuzzFeed News
A slide from the 2017 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey results.
“El-Hindi’s failure to make decisions is legend at FinCEN,” this official said. “At one point, the previous director had him put together a decision-making seminar in hopes he might learn how to decision-make.” BuzzFeed News sent El-Hindi detailed messages personally and through Treasury, but received no response. The previous director also did not respond to queries.
A new director, Ken Blanco, took over the unit in November 2017.
“Treasury does not comment on personnel actions or matters,” a spokesperson told BuzzFeed News.
By 2017, morale at FinCEN ranked dead last among every unit at the Treasury Department. Frustrated by the dysfunction, seasoned employees started leaving for more lucrative work in the private sector. That’s when officials in a rival department made a lunge for FinCEN’s greatest asset.
Whistleblowers say the US Treasury Department has been consumed by chaos during the past two years.
Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty Images
Turf war
The unit of Treasury that monitors suspicious bank transactions outside the US is called the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, a sister unit of the terror department that had struck the deal with the Russians. Now, by the fall of 2016, the OIA wanted more authority over FinCEN’s vast database of suspicious financial transactions across the globe.
The unit proposed a “realignment” that would have peeled off FinCEN’s authority over the database, some of its employees, and a piece of its budget. FinCEN staffers were aghast. They worried that El-Hindi was too weak to fend off the incursion and that it would hamper the office’s ability to fight financial crime. They also said the move by OIA was illegal, because it would cross the bright line that is supposed to separate intelligence agencies that collect information abroad from those that collect information on US citizens and residents.
OIA’s maneuver led to an open revolt inside FinCEN. More than a dozen workers reported the matter to their supervisors or to Congress. In September, an attorney from OIA got into a heated exchange with a small group of FinCEN employees, according to eight sources and internal documents.
After BuzzFeed News published a report about the allegations last year, Sens. Ron Wyden and Orrin Hatch sent a letter to the Department of Treasury’s inspector general, Eric Thorson, requesting a briefing about the matter.
After months of investigation, Thorson’s office concluded there was no merit to the complaints, which included the allegation that OIA analysts illegally snooped on the banking records of American individuals and companies.
His office noted, however, that OIA has been working for a decade without proper guidelines on how it handles US citizens’ information. The audit report recommended that OIA “as expeditiously as possible” submit its rules to the Department of Justice for approval, which the agency did earlier this year.
El-Hindi wanted his department to “get along” with OIA, these sources said, and did little to stand in that office’s way. In fact, emails show that he instructed his workers not to take their complaints to Congress — which the whistleblowers viewed as a staggering betrayal.
But the FinCEN employees spoke out anyway.
At least 10 filed formal whistleblower paperwork, many for the first time in their government careers. In meetings with six different congressional committees, two of the whistleblowers described a litany of misconduct at Treasury, including Russia’s attempt to gather intelligence on its enemies during the 2016 election. To this day, the committees have done little to address those whistleblowers’ concerns.
Ultimately, FinCEN won out. The realignment failed and the unit retained control over its records. But its battle with OIA wasn’t over.
FinCEN analysts were involved in the search for suspects after terrorist incidents at the Manchester Arena and the London Bridge.
Desperate hours
In May 2017, a bomb exploded at an Ariana Grande concert in northwest England and killed 23 people. The following month, knife-wielding terrorists attacked pedestrians near London Bridge.
Because the US has access to the largest set of financial records in the world, the British turned to the Americans for help. In the first frantic moments following an attack, FinCEN’s financial databases can reveal important information about the killers, others in their network, or whether another plot is imminent.
FinCEN analysts sprang into action, racing to their headquarters in Northern Virginia to begin searching for clues on a Saturday night. But when they arrived, they discovered that everyone on duty had been locked out of the classified networks that they depended upon. They couldn’t open links from the FBI about the suspected terrorists they were supposed to be chasing and they couldn’t trace the suspects’ funding.
That night, two dozen FinCEN employees learned that the digital keys they needed to unlock classified data had expired without warning. The suspects remained on the run in London, but FinCEN was unable to help track them.
The office that administered those security keys was OIA, FinCEN's rival department.
Staffers were furious.
“We have escalated the critical problem to key individuals,” one of the whistleblowers wrote in an email, “and we still DO NOT have the ability to complete our mission or fully protect the American people.”
OIA blamed the FinCEN employees for forgetting to update their permissions. But more than a dozen FinCEN officials said they saw the incident as retaliation for their earlier power struggle. OIA had sent its own staffers an email weeks earlier reminding them to apply for new keys, but had not sent that same email to anyone at FinCEN. OIA officials blamed that oversight on “time” and “resource restraints.”
The divide grew, and made its way to Congress, where Republican Steve Pearce, chair of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism and Illicit Finance, demanded answers. The Treasury Department’s inspector general stepped in again to investigate, and concluded that OIA had done nothing wrong — though he did acknowledge the strained relationship between OIA and FinCEN.
The whistleblowers told BuzzFeed News they have largely given up on seeing anyone at FinCEN, OIA, and TFFC held accountable for the chaos that they say has torn the Treasury apart over the past two years.
“It is very hard to measure the sum total of the damage done,” said one of the whistleblowers, a senior FinCEN official. “We are treading water right now.”●
Tanya Kozyreva, Emma Loop, John Templon, and Azeen Ghorayshi contributed to this story.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/an ... on-backers
by seemslikeadream » Mon Feb 11, 2019 5:45 pm
Russia to disconnect from the internet as part of a planned test
Russia's internet contingency plan gets closer to reality.
By Catalin Cimpanu for Zero Day | February 11, 2019 -- 00:33 GMT (16:33 PST) | Topic: Government
Russian authorities and major internet providers are planning to disconnect the country from the internet as part of a planned experiment, Russian news agency RosBiznesKonsalting (RBK) reported last week.
The reason for the experiment is to gather insight and provide feedback and modifications to a proposed law introduced in the Russian Parliament in December 2018.
A first draft of the law mandated that Russian internet providers should ensure the independence of the Russian internet space (Runet) in the case of foreign aggression to disconnect the country from the rest of the internet.
In addition, Russian telecom firms would also have to install "technical means" to re-route all Russian internet traffic to exchange points approved or managed by Roskomnazor, Russia's telecom watchdog.
Roskomnazor will inspect the traffic to block prohibited content and make sure traffic between Russian users stays inside the country, and is not re-routed uselessly through servers abroad, where it could be intercepted.
A date for the test has not been revealed, but it's supposed to take place before April 1, the deadline for submitting amendments to the law --known as the Digital Economy National Program.
The test disconnect experiment has been agreed on in a session of the Information Security Working Group at the end of January. Natalya Kaspersky, Director of Russian cyber-security firm InfoWatch, and co-founder of Kaspersky Lab, presides over the group, which also includes major Russian telcos such as MegaFon, Beeline, MTS, RosTelecom, and others.
RBK reported that all internet providers agreed with the law's goals, but disagreed with its technical implementation, which they believe will cause major disruptions to Russian internet traffic. The test disconnection would provide ISPs with data about how their networks would react.
Finanz.ru also reported that local internet services Mail.ru and Yandex.ru were also supportive of the test disconnection.
The Russian government has been working on this project for years. In 2017, Russian officials said they plan to route 95 percent of all internet traffic locally by 2020.
Authorities have even built a local backup of the Domain Name System (DNS), which they first tested in 2014, and again in 2018, and which will now be a major component of the Runet when ISPs plan to disconnect the country from the rest of the world.
Russia's response comes as NATO countries announced several times that they were mulling a stronger response to cyber attacks, of which Russia is constantly accused of carrying out.
The proposed law, fully endorsed by President Putin, is expected to pass. Ongoing discussions are in regards to finding the proper technical methods to disconnect Russia from the internet with minimal downtime to consumers and government agencies.
The Russian government has agreed to foot the bill and to cover the costs of ISPs modifying their infrastructure and installing new servers for redirecting traffic towards Roskomnazor's approved exchange point. The end goal is for Russian authorities to implement a web traffic filtering system like China's Great Firewall, but also have a fully working country-wide intranet in case the country needs to disconnect.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/russia-to ... nned-test/
by seemslikeadream » Tue Feb 19, 2019 8:05 am
BAIT-AND-SWITCH
U.S. Intelligence: Russia Tried to Con the World With Bogus Missile
The Russians hyped a cruise missile launch earlier this year. But a briefing by the CIA and a second agency determined that it was essentially a hoax.
Ankit Panda
02.18.19 1:17 AM ET
On Jan. 23, Russian military officials held a press conference showing off what they said was a cruise missile at the center of a years-long arms control controversy between Washington and Moscow.
Except the presentation was essentially a hoax, according to a classified briefing prepared by U.S. intelligence. Neither the missile, nor its launch vehicle, nor the accompanying schematics were what Russia claimed them to be.
The alleged Russian misdirection came just days before the United States announced that it would withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty—the treaty that Russia violated, in the U.S. view.
Center For Public Integrity
Almost nothing Russia showed off to support its claims at that press conference had anything to do with the missile the U.S. is most interested in, according to an assessment briefing put together by the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.
Earlier this month, those two U.S. intelligence agencies determined that the cruise missile canisters and launch vehicle the Russian Ministry of Defense publicly showed at the briefing were not related to the missile that the United States has argued since 2014 violates the 1987 treaty, The Daily Beast has learned.
According to two U.S. government sources with knowledge of the American assessment of that Russian press conference, the treaty-violating missile is larger than the canister shown publicly by the Russian Ministry of Defense and uses a separate launch vehicle.
At the press conference, the Russian Ministry of Defense argued that the missile that the United States had said violated the treaty was simply a variant of an existing cruise missile known as the 9M728 with improved guidance. The official Russian claim was that the missile had a range that was actually 10 kilometers shorter than the older missile, due to an expanded electronics section that added mass over the older version.
To support these claims, the Ministry of Defense showed reporters what it claimed were the schematics of the two missiles, too. But the schematic of the 9M729 was not of the actual missile, according to the U.S. assessment. Alongside the schematics, reporters were also shown and allowed to freely film and photograph a cruise missile launch tube and the vehicle meant to carry and launcher the missile. No actual missile was shown publicly, however.
The launch vehicle that was shown, too, was not of a kind that is compatible with the 9M729, a U.S. government source told The Daily Beast.
Beginning in 2014, the U.S. government has publicly alleged that Russia violated the 1987 arms control agreement, which saw the United States and the Soviet Union agree to destroy their existing arsenals of ground-launched cruise and ballistic missiles with ranges between 500 km and 5,500 km and forswear the testing, production, or deployment of such missiles indefinitely.
Beginning in the early 2000s, Russia developed the 9M729, known to the U.S. intelligence community as the SSC-8, which Washington argues violates the treaty. Five years after the Obama administration first alleged that Russia had violated the treaty, the Trump administration announced that it would withdraw from it earlier this month.
“We cannot be the only country in the world unilaterally bound by this treaty, or any other,” President Donald Trump said in a statement released on Feb. 1. “We will move forward with developing our own military response options and will work with NATO and our other allies and partners to deny Russia any military advantage from its unlawful conduct.” Shortly thereafter, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States would withdraw, activating a 180-day withdrawal mechanism provided for by the treaty.
The joint CIA and NGA assessment on Russia’s violation “reiterated that six tests exceeded 500 km,“ one source told The Daily Beast. That meant Russia had demonstrated that its missiles could fly to ranges prohibited by the treaty. The longest test of the six saw the missile fly to a range of 2,070 km. The United States assesses the SSC-8 to be a road-mobile variant of the Kalibr sea-launched cruise missile, with a range capability of 2,000 km when armed with a conventional payload and a 2,350-km range capability in its nuclear variant, a source told The Daily Beast.
The missile was tested at least six times to treaty-violating ranges. In a public statement in November 2018, U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats clarified that Russia had never tested the missile to treaty-violating ranges from a road-mobile launcher. He noted that Russia had by 2015 “completed a comprehensive flight test program consisting of multiple tests of the 9M729 missile from both fixed and mobile launchers.”
Per Coats’ explanation, the treaty does allow Russia and the United States to conduct land-based tests of missiles to the prohibited range, provided that the missile in question is intended to be deployed on an air- or sea-based platform. The Kalibr—the sea-launched cruise missile that the SSC-8 is derived from—was tested in this manner from a fixed launcher.
The SSC-8 too was tested in this way and then moved to a road-mobile launcher, where it was tested to ranges below 500 km, giving it the appearance of being compliant with the treaty. According to a source, the longest-range test of the SSC-8 from a road-mobile launcher was to 350 km. Through various technical means, U.S. intelligence agencies were nonetheless able to determine that Russia had prepared the missile that had been tested to treaty-violating ranges for use on a road-mobile launcher and in the process had violated the treaty.
Russia’s response to the U.S. decision to withdraw from the treaty was reciprocal, with Russian President Vladimir Putin noting that Moscow would “suspend it as well.” Putin also threatened to begin work on new missiles that would cover the range previously prohibited by the treaty. On Feb. 5, Russian Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu confirmed that Moscow would begin development work on a land-based Kalibr missile—the very missile that the U.S. side argues already exists and violated the treaty in the first place.
Russia has not acknowledged U.S. accusations that it had violated the treaty and its January press conference was an attempt to transparently demonstrate that the SSC-8 was compliant with the treaty—except the SSC-8 was not shown. As of February 2019, Russia has four battalions of SSC-8 missiles deployed.
The United States will likely develop conventional ground-launched cruise missiles of its own after the treaty expires. Speaking in Brussels earlier this week, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg noted that the alliance does not "have any intention to deploy new nuclear land-based weapon systems in Europe."
https://www.thedailybeast.com/us-intell ... itter_page
Ex-finance minister Kudrin says detention of top U.S. investor is 'emergency' for Russian economy
FILE PHOTO: Founder of the Baring Vostok private equity group Michael Calvey, who was detained on suspicion of fraud, sits inside a defendants' cage as he attends a court hearing in Moscow, Russia February 15, 2019. REUTERS/Tatyana Makeyeva
MOSCOW (Reuters) - The detention in Russia of Baring Vostok’s U.S. founder Michael Calvey is an emergency for the Russian economy, former finance minister Alexei Kudrin, now head of the Audit Chamber, said on Monday.
“I find this particular situation (to be) an emergency for the economy,” Kudrin tweeted. He said Calvey’s detention shows Russian President Vladimir Putin’s order not to jail people accused of economic crimes was being ignored.
Calvey, a senior partner at Baring Vostok and among Russia’s most prominent foreign investors, was detained on Thursday along with other executives after investigators accused them of embezzling 2.5 billion rubles ($37.76 million).
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russ ... ce=twitter
by chump » Tue Feb 19, 2019 9:36 am
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2019/02/r ... .html#more
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 05, 2019
RIP INF Treaty: Russia’s Victory, America’s Waterloo
On March 1, 2018 the world learned of Russia’s new weapons systems, said to be based on new physical principles. Addressing the Federal Assembly, Putin explained how they came to be: in 2002 the US withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. At the time, the Russians declared that they will be forced to respond, and were basically told “Do whatever you want.”
And so they did, developing new weapons that no anti-ballistic missile system can ever hope to stop. The new Russian weapons include one that is already on combat duty (Kinzhal), one that is being readied for mass production (Avangard) and several that are currently being tested (Poseidon, Burevestnik, Peresvet, Sarmat). Their characteristics, briefly, are as follows:
• Kinzhal: a hypersonic air-launched cruise missile that flies at Mach 10 (7700 miles per hour) and can destroy both ground installations and ships.
• Avangard: a maneuverable hypersonic payload delivery system for intercontinental ballistic missiles that flies at better than Mach 20 (15300 miles per hour). It has a 740-mile range and can carry a nuclear charge of up to 300 kilotons.
• Poseidon: an autonomous nuclear-powered torpedo with unlimited range that can travel at a 3000-foot depth maintaining a little over 100 knots.
• Burevestnik: a nuclear-powered cruise missile that flies at around 270 miles per hour and can stay in the air for 24 hours, giving it a 6000-mile range.
• Peresvet: a mobile laser complex that can blind drones and satellites, knocking out space and aerial reconnaissance systems.
• Sarmat: a new heavy intercontinental missile that can fly arbitrary suborbital courses (such as over the South Pole) and strike arbitrary points anywhere on the planet. Because it does not follow a predictable ballistic trajectory it is impossible to intercept.
The initial Western reaction to this announcement was an eerie silence. A few people tried to convince anyone who would listen that this was all bluff and computer animation, and that these weapons systems did not really exist. (The animation was of rather low quality, one might add, probably because Russian military types couldn’t possibly imagine that slick graphics, such as what the Americans waste their money on, would make Russia any safer.) But eventually the new weapons systems were demonstrated to work and US intelligence services confirmed their existence.
Forced to react, the Americans, with the EU in tow, tried to cause public relations scandals over some unrelated matter. Such attempts are repeated with some frequency. For instance, after the putsch in the Ukraine caused Crimea to go back to Russia there was the avalanche of hysterical bad press about Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, which the Americans had shot down over Ukrainian territory with the help of Ukrainian military.
Similarly, after Putin’s announcement of new weapons systems, there was an eruption of equally breathless hysterics over the alleged “Novichok” poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter. A couple of Russian tourists, if you recall, were accused of poisoning Skripal by smearing some toxic gas on the doorknob of his house some time after he left it never to return. Perhaps such antics made some people feel better, but opposing new, breakthrough weapons systems by generating fake news does not an adequate response make.
Say what you will about the Russian response to the US pulling out of the ABM treaty, but it was adequate. It was made necessary by two well-known facts. First, the US is known for dropping nuclear bombs on other countries (Hiroshima, Nagasaki). It did so not in self-defense but just to send a message to the USSR that resistance would be futile (a dumb move if there ever was one). Second, the US is known to have repeatedly planned to destroy the USSR using a nuclear first strike. It was prevented from carrying it out time and again, first by a shortage of nuclear weapons, then by the development of Soviet nuclear weapons, then by the development of Soviet ICBMs.
Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” was an attempt to develop a system that would shoot down enough Soviet ICBMs to make a nuclear first strike on the USSR winnable. This work was terminated when Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in December, 1987. But then when Bush Jr. pulled out of the ABM treaty in 2002 it was off to the races again. Last year Putin declared that Russia has won: the Americans can now rest assured that if they ever attack Russia the result will be their complete, guaranteed annihilation, and the Russians can rest secure in the knowledge that the US will never dare to attack them.
But that was just the prelude. The real victory happened on February 2, 2019. This day will be remembered as the day when the Russian Federation decisively defeated the United States in the battle for Eurasia—from Lisbon to Vladivostok and from Murmansk to Mumbai.
So, what did the Americans want, and what did they get instead? They wanted to renegotiate the INF treaty, revise some of the terms and expand it to include China. Announcing that the US is suspending the INF treaty, Trump said: “I hope we're able to get everybody in a big, beautiful room and do a new treaty that would be much better…” By “everybody” Trump probably meant the US, China and Russia.
Why the sudden need to include China? Because China has an entire arsenal of intermediate-range weapons with a range of 500-5500 (the ones outlawed by the INF treaty) pointed at American military bases throughout the region—in South Korea, Japan and Guam. The INF treaty made it impossible for the US to develop anything that could be deployed at these bases to point back at China.
Perhaps it was Trump’s attempt to practice his New York real-estate mogul’s “art of the deal” among nuclear superpowers, or perhaps it’s because imperial hubris has rotted the brains of just about everyone in the US establishment, but the plan for renegotiating the INF treaty was about as stupid as can be imagined:
1. Accuse Russia of violating the INF treaty based on no evidence. Ignore Russia’s efforts to demonstrate that the accusation is false.
2. Announce pull-out of the INF treaty.
3. Wait a while, then announce that the INF treaty is important and essential. Condescendingly forgive Russia and offer to sign a new treaty, but demand that it include China.
4. Wait while Russia convinces China that it should do so.
5. Sign the new treaty in Trump’s “big, beautiful room.”
So, how did it actually go? Russia instantly announced that it is also pulling out of the INF treaty. Putin ordered foreign minister Lavrov to abstain from all negotiations with the Americans in this matter. He then ordered defense minister Shoigu to build land-based platforms for Russia’s new air and ship-based missile systems—without increasing the defense budget. Putin added that these new land-based systems will only be deployed in response to the deployment of US-made intermediate-range weapons. Oh, and China announced that it is not interested in any such negotiations. Now Trump can have his “big, beautiful room” all to himself.
Why did this happen? Because of the INF treaty, for a long time Russia has had a giant gaping hole in its arsenal, specifically in the 500-5500 km range. It had air-launched X-101/102s, and eventually developed the Kalibr cruise missile, but it had rather few aircraft and ships—enough for defense, but not enough to guarantee that it could reliably destroy all of NATO. As a matter of Russia’s national security, given the permanently belligerent stance of the US, it was necessary for NATO to know that in case of a military conflict with Russia it will be completely annihilated, and that no air defense system will ever help them avoid that fate.
If you look at a map, you will find that having weapons in the 500-5500 km range fixes this problem rather nicely. Draw a circle with a 5500 km radius around the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad; note that it encompasses every single NATO country, North Africa and Middle East. The IMF treaty was not necessarily a good deal for Russia even when it was first signed (remember, Gorbachev, who signed it, was a traitor) but it became a stupendously bad deal as NATO started to expand east. But Russia couldn’t pull out of it without triggering a confrontation, and it needed time to recover and rearm.
Already in 2004 Putin announced that “Russia needs a breakthrough in order to have a new generation of weapons and technology.” At the time, Americans ignored him, thinking that Russia could fall apart at any moment and that they will be able to enjoy Russian oil, gas, nuclear fuel and other strategic commodities for free forever even as the Russians themselves go extinct. They thought that even if Russia tried to resist, it would be enough to bribe some traitors—like Gorbachev or Yeltsin—and all would be well again.
Fast-forward 15 years, and is that what we have? Russia has rebuilt and rearmed. Its export industries provide for a positive trade balance even in absence of oil and gas exports. It is building three major export pipelines at the same time—to Germany, Turkey and China. It is building nuclear generating capacity around the world and owns a lion’s share of the world’s nuclear industry. The US can no longer keep the lights on without Russian nuclear fuel imports. The US has no new weapons systems with which to counter Russia’s rearmament. Yes, it talks about developing some, but all it has at this point are infinite money sinks and lots of PowerPoint presentations. It no longer has the brains to do the work, or the time, or the money.
Part of Putin’s orders upon pulling out of the INF treaty was to build land-based medium-range hypersonic missiles. That’s a new twist: not only will it be impossible to intercept them, but they will reduce NATO’s remaining time to live, should it ever attack Russia, from minutes to seconds. The new Poseidon nuclear-powered torpedo was mentioned too: even if an attack on Russia succeeds, it will be a Pyrrhic one, since subsequent 100-foot nuclear-triggered tsunamis will wipe clean both coasts of the United States for hundreds of miles inland, effectively reducing the entire country to slightly radioactive wasteland.
Not only has the US lost its ability to attack, it has also lost its ability to threaten. Its main means of projecting force around the world is its navy, and Poseidon reduces it to a useless, slow-moving pile of scrap steel. It would take just a handful of Poseidons quietly shadowing each US aircraft carrier group to zero out the strategic value of the US Navy no matter where in the world it is deployed.
Without the shackles of the INF treaty, Russia will be able to fully neutralize the already obsolete and useless NATO and to absorb all of Europe into its security sphere. European politicians are quite malleable and will soon learn to appreciate the fact that good relations with Russia and China are an asset while any dependence on the US, moving forward, is a huge liability. Many of them already understand which way the wind is blowing.
It won’t be a difficult decision for Europe’s leaders to make. On the one pan of the scale there is the prospect of a peaceful and prosperous Greater Eurasia, from Lisbon to Vladivostok and from Murmansk to Mumbai, safe under Russia’s nuclear umbrella and tied together with China’s One Belt One Road.
On the other pan of the scale there is a certain obscure former colony lost in the wilds of North America, imbued with an unshakeable faith in its own exceptionalism even as it grows ever weaker, more internally conflicted and more chaotic, but still dangerous, though mostly to itself, and run by a bloviating buffoon who can’t tell the difference between a nuclear arms treaty and a real estate deal. It needs to be quietly and peacefully relegated to the outskirts of civilization, and then to the margins of history.
Trump should keep his own company in his “big, beautiful room,” and avoid doing anything anything even more tragically stupid, while saner minds quietly negotiate the terms for an honorable capitulation. The only acceptable exit strategy for the US is to quietly and peacefully surrender its positions around the world, withdraw into its own geographic footprint and refrain from meddling in the affairs of Greater Eurasia.
by Sounder » Thu Feb 21, 2019 8:37 am
Russia’s foreign exchange reserves can now cover all of the debt owed by both the government and domestic businesses, Russian President Vladimir Putin has announced.
“For the first time in history our reserves fully cover foreign debt, including government and commercial sector debt,” Putin said addressing the Federal Assembly in Moscow on Wednesday.
The country’s external debt amounts to $453.7 billion, while its international reserve funds stand at $475 billion as of February 8, 2019, according to infographics presented by the president.
Putin added that money allocated by Russia’s sovereign wealth fund also greatly contributes to the national budget, amounting to more than $1 billion last year.
The Russian president said he wants the national economy to grow more than 3 percent in 2021, with foreign investment in the country set to rise 6-7 percent. To reach such figures, the president set several tasks for the government, such as increased productivity, making Russia attractive to foreign companies, and improving regional infrastructure.
Russia’s external debt has fallen by $64.4 billion or 12.4 percent from the beginning of last year to the lowest level in a decade, the Central Bank of Russia announced in January. Moscow has reduced its foreign debt by $280 billion since mid-2014, when it reached a peak of nearly $733 billion due to the initial impact of Western sanctions.
Meanwhile, Russia’s foreign exchange reserves have been growing for three consecutive years, increasing 8.3 percent to over $468 billion in the beginning of this year.
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