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Russia's 'hybrid warfare' against Europe

Submitted by Bill Weinberg on Thu, 12/22/2016 - 05:26

A Dec. 15 CBC report notes claims of a Russian campaign of "hybrid warfare" voiced by several European leaders and intelligence agencies.

In a detailed report released in April [PDF], the European Council on Foreign Relations bluntly warned that Moscow's different intelligence services "conduct active measures aimed at subverting and destabilizing European governments … and attacks on political enemies."

The goal appears to be to weaken politicians Moscow does not like in a bid to end sanctions, sow discord throughout NATO and the EU, to increase distrust of liberal democracies generally and to challenge U.S. influence on the continent.

The head of Germany's domestic intelligence service (BfV), Hans-Georg Maassen, insists Russia has been actively cyber-targeting German infrastructure and institutions for at least eight years....

"We see aggressive and increased cyber-spying and cyber-operations that could potentially endanger German government officials, members of parliament and employees of democratic parties," he said in a statement last week...

It's not all hacking. Russian state media and their friends in social media have kept up a barrage of anti-Merkel propaganda, which has only risen since she supported sanctions against the Kremlin. The attacks include fake news stories often highlighting right-wing political accusations that she has opened up Germany to a flood of migrants and terror attacks.

Last January, Merkel's government accused Russian state TV of trying to raise media hysteria inside Germany after it broadcast an apparently false report saying a 13-year-old girl was raped by Arab immigrants.

It sparked street demonstrations by the far right.

German police denied the attack ever happened, but Russia refused to apologize.

Fake news is now so widespread that German security services are offering regular briefings to expose falsehoods as they arise. And this past fall, alarmed EU leaders started meeting in an attempt to find solutions to Russian political meddling in so many member states.

justdrew » 22 Dec 2016 08:02 wrote:http://boingboing.net/2016/12/21/methbo ... deo-a.html

^ so who thinks only one 'group' is able to assemble a software system like that?

it's not that complicated, and can be used to make real money, as well as significantly influence broad perceptions of popularity.

The online advertising business is totally bogus, except it apparently works, to some extent. For instance, people exist that apparently actually read spam e-mail. Hard to believe, but seemingly true. Serious money is still spent daily on e-mail marketing spam campaigns.

as for the web, click-fraud is probably 50% of all ad exposures, or more.

Next time you see a video with millions of views, remember, those are purchasable. etc

The entire "bigtime" internet is based on semi-automated advertising systems, along therefore with a large part of the jobs in 'the tech sector' (not most, but almost all the 'sexy' jobs)

The entire bottom is ready to fall out of the US economy is my sense, and internet ads are one of the few 'semi functional' aspects of it, if that goes, what else is there? Building fortifications around your town's citadels?

tapitsbo » Thu Dec 22, 2016 9:17 am wrote:Maybe Louise Mensch of Heat Street has super secret software that makes it APPEAR that almost none of her hundred thousand followers are interacting with her (if you're a bot with the right upgrades you can see them all communicating with each other - this is carefully hidden from normies though)

We are all trolls. posted by Richard Seymour

I.
We are all trolls. We are all, as David Cameron used to remind us, in it together. This is one of the great virtues of Whitney Phillips' book on trolls -- it doesn't feed the moralists, and it doesn't try to externalise the evil it describes. The internet, and particularly social media, may have inflamed cultural tendencies that were already in gestation. It may have enabled their condensation in a new and odd subculture, and magnified the consequences -- but we were all trolling before trolling was a thing.


II.
We are all authors. We all write, and we are all published. One of the consequences of email, social media, and instant messaging services, is that we now spend more of our lives writing than we ever have. We are acquiring new literacies at a ferocious rate. We have yet to grasp the full significance of this vast expansion of literacy, this democratisation (and further commodification) of writing.


III.
We are all artists of the self. When you write, you invent yourself. By putting some part of your being into the form of words, you're giving it a corporeal shape that it would not otherwise had. You are not just 'expressing' something that was already there, but creating something new. And you're doing this every day, all the time. The format in which you can do so matters. Rather than keeping diaries, many of us now metabolise our lives online, for a public. Our pets, our dating mishaps, our family lives, our jobs, our accidents, the quiddity of experience is inscribed in a public realm in the heavily stylised format of tweets and posts, with current moods, filters, hashtags, emojis, stickers and the rest affording us a convenient short-hand to make ourselves conformable to our peers. The social media formats in which most of us do most of our writing is so structured as to make petty entrepreneurs out of us. Our writing becomes a form of corporate personality, a sales pitch seeking to attract eyeball attention and 'followers'.


IV.
The internet is a rigged lottery. If our accounts are indeed set up like enterprises competing for eyeball attention, then going viral or 'trending' is like winning the lottery. And in principle, anyone can win. The potential audience for your writing literally is the entire internet. In practice, of course, the lottery is mostly won by well-placed media corporations and public relations firms dominating the terrain. Even if we do win, however, it can be the worst thing that happens. While most of us dream of going viral with that one insightful tweet or post, few of us are equipped to maximise any opportunities that arise from positive publicity, or to cope with the costs of negative publicity. We may be treated as if we're small enterprises, but since we are not corporations with public relations budgets, we are vastly under-resourced to handle the attention we may potentially receive.

Putin’s TV takes the piss out of Farage: that’s the thanks you get for grovelling

Farage’s grovelling to Putin merely gets him having the piss taken on Putin’s TV channel; Trump beware:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fApI27u0tnI

American Dream » Sat Mar 04, 2017 11:53 pm wrote:

Putin’s TV takes the piss out of Farage: that’s the thanks you get for grovelling

Farage’s grovelling to Putin merely gets him having the piss taken on Putin’s TV channel; Trump beware:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fApI27u0tnI

https://shirazsocialist.wordpress.com/2 ... rovelling/

Nigel Farage is 'person of interest' in FBI investigation into Trump and Russia


Donald Trump with Nigel Farage during a campaign rally in Jackson, Mississippi, in August last year.


Nigel Farage is a “person of interest” in the US counter-intelligence investigation that is looking into possible collusion between the Kremlin and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, the Guardian has been told.

Sources with knowledge of the investigation said the former Ukip leader had raised the interest of FBI investigators because of his relationships with individuals connected to both the Trump campaign and Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder whom Farage visited in March.

He’s right in the middle of these relationships. He turns up over and over again
WikiLeaks published troves of hacked emails last year that damaged Hillary Clinton’s campaign and is suspected of having cooperated with Russia through third parties, according to recent congressional testimony by the former CIA director John Brennan, who also said the adamant denials of collusion by Assange and Russia were disingenuous.

Farage has not been accused of wrongdoing and is not a suspect or a target of the US investigation. But being a person of interest means investigators believe he may have information about the acts that are under investigation and he may therefore be subject to their scrutiny.

Sources who spoke to the Guardian said it was Farage’s proximity to people at the heart of the investigation that was being examined as an element in their broader inquiry into how Russia may have worked with Trump campaign officials to influence the US election.

“One of the things the intelligence investigators have been looking at is points of contact and persons involved,” one source said. “If you triangulate Russia, WikiLeaks, Assange and Trump associates the person who comes up with the most hits is Nigel Farage.

“He’s right in the middle of these relationships. He turns up over and over again. There’s a lot of attention being paid to him.”

The source mentioned Farage’s links with Roger Stone, Trump’s long-time political adviser who has admitted being in contact with Guccifer 2.0, a hacker whom US intelligence agencies believe to be a Kremlin agent.


Roger Stone in his office in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.


Farage’s spokesman said he had never worked with Russian officials, and described the Guardian’s questions about Farage’s activities as “verging on the hysterical”.

“Nigel has never been to Russia, let alone worked with their authorities,” the spokesman said. But he did not respond to questions about whether Farage was aware of the FBI inquiry; had hired a lawyer in connection to the matter; or when Farage first met Trump.

The spokesman also declined to comment on whether Farage had received compensation from the Russian state-backed media group RT for his media appearances. RT, which has featured Farage about three times over the last 18 months, also declined to comment, citing confidentiality.

Searching for proof of Amy


If social media networks like Twitter are the equivalent of roads on which hybrid warfare is conducted, then what is their responsibility?

She has 144,000 Twitter followers and tweets about 26 times a day.

Her name is “Amy,” according to her Twitter bio, and she is solidly pro-Trump. She tweets a lot of negative comments about Muslims. And Democrats. She also tweets in support of the NRA and other politically conservative causes. And last year, The New York Times quoted “Amy” in a piece about Trump’s female supporters.

The only problem is, I’m not convinced Amy exists.

As a longtime political strategist, my bullshit detector is on high alert for “astroturfing” or fake grassroots support. I discovered Amy while looking into people with especially loud voices online, mostly on Twitter. I was trying to wrap my head around people like Amy: Are they real? What are their real stories? And why are they ceaselessly tweeting all of this shit?

Amy’s current Twitter bio says she’s a psychotherapist, a relationship counselor and fixer, and she fights for the wrongfully incarcerated — oh, and animals. She is also a vegan. It’s an ideological theme park map of sorts.

I’m sure some vegans like to shoot, but if I imagine a Venn diagram of NRA members and vegans, I feel like the intersection is maybe a sliver.

I searched online for Amy. I burned the midnight oil scouring for proof, but just about all I could find were tweets or links referring to her in Twitter. Roads leading back to tweets. Little else.

I uploaded her profile picture into a Google image search. Maybe it will match a therapist profile on some review site, I thought. You know, every professional has a public presence these days. I only found one match: a Pinterest profile photo that looked similarly blurry.

Then, I searched every state psychology licensing board, from Alabama to Wyoming, and no one with her name turned up. Maybe there’s an innocent explanation, maybe the databases aren’t perfect, maybe she uses her married name, perhaps I am missing something. But I don’t think so. Because I also ran her profile into an algorithm created by data scientists, and the program suspects “Amy” is a bot account, too.

In my recent columns, I’ve addressed the proliferation of fake news and trolling operations, including Russian state-sponsored “troll farms,” where people are paid to impersonate Americans, spread misinformation and sow dissent, both to advance Trump’s agenda and to chip away at the foundation of our democracy. There are people who manage multiple fake accounts, and some accounts programmed to tweet as if they are actual people. Many of them promote alt-right “news” and the latest propaganda aligned with whatever Trump is pushing on any given day (or hour). And they retweet and like each other’s posts so that as much as half of what is out there in the presidential political Twitterverse at any given time could actually be pretend people holding up mirrors to each other.

Putin’s Trolls Used the Texas Church Massacre to Sow More Chaos

How the Kremlin keeps exploiting Twitter to attack America.

DENISE CLIFTON

Jenna Abrams, Russia’s Clown Troll Princess, Duped the Mainstream Media and the World

Roseanne Barr and Michael McFaul argued with her on Twitter. BuzzFeed and The New York Times cited her tweets. But Jenna Abrams was the fictional creation of a Russian troll farm.

Sean Hannity Is Now a Favorite Weapon of Russian Trolls Attacking America

Kremlin propagandists are piling on the Fox News war against the Mueller investigation.



The 600 Kremlin-linked live Twitter accounts that Hamilton 68 monitors are separate from the 2,752 accounts Twitter revealed last fall that were operated before the 2016 presidential election by the Russian Internet Research Agency. Last Friday, Twitter updated that number to 3,814 IRA-linked accounts—plus more than 50,000 automated bot accounts linked to the Russian government. Twitter says it is sending emails to 677,000 users to notify them that they interacted with the Russian accounts.

Shep Smith: There is no longer any question, "Russia attacked the United States ... in support of Donald Trump"

SHEPARD SMITH (HOST): If there was ever any question, even a single question, there is no more. Russia attacked the United States of America. A coordinated government sponsored campaign to undermine America's democracy, eventually in support of Donald Trump and against Hillary Clinton. I'm Shepard Smith in New York. A brand new indictment indicates the Russians elaborate online operations convinced us Americans to attend political rallies that the Russians organized. The Russians set up websites and Facebook pages and Twitter accounts pretending to be Americans. And duped us into following them and friending them and retweeting them. The Russians infiltrated our system, manipulated us on behalf of Vladimir Putin and they did it online and in person on our soil. Russians came to swing states in the United States, pretending to be Americans and tried to convince us Americans that they're part of the system. Not working against it. And the Russians, say this indictment, posed as Americans and communicated with unwitting people associated with the Trump campaign to try to coordinate political activities.

[...]

The Russian investigation is the opposite of a hoax.

The Internet Research Agency: behind the shadowy network that meddled in the 2016 Elections

February 21, 2018 Alexander Reid Ross


The strategy: managed nationalism and hybrid warfare

A clue as to the strategy of the Internet Research Agency can be found among the leading members under indictment. Around the time their employee Anna Bogacheva allegedly visited the U.S. in 2014 to gather intelligence, she registered a PR firm called IT Debugger with Mikhail Potepkin, a former leader of the violent, far-right youth brigade, Nashi.

Developed along with several other youth brigades linked to the Kremlin during a short period between 2004 and 2005, Nashi formed part of what then-First Deputy Chief of the Presidential Administration Vladislav Surkov called “managed nationalism.” Concerned about a possible “Color Revolution” in Russia, Surkov hoped to simulate an opposition movement and keep the public under the Kremlin’s control.

“Managed nationalism” and Surkov’s analysis of “network structures” paved the way for a strategy penned in 2013 by Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff of the Armed Forces of Russia. Now known as the Gerasimov Doctrine, The New York Times called it “RT, Sputnik, and Russia’s new theory of war.” In Gerasimov’s words, “The focus of applied methods of conflict has altered in the direction of the broad use of political, economic, informational, humanitarian, and other nonmilitary measures—applied in coordination with the protest potential of the population.”

By the time Hillary Clinton received the official nomination of her party, strategy papers produced by the Kremlin-linked think tank Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (RISS) had specifically called on the Kremlin to dedicate such “applied methods” to “a propaganda campaign on social media and Russian state-backed global news outlets to encourage U.S. voters to elect a president who would take a softer line toward Russia than the administration of then-President Barack Obama,” according to Reuters.

“An Elite Club”

Longtime political operator in the Russian far-right, Aleksander Dugin, has worked for most of the past three decades to develop syncretic, left-right cooperation among anti-liberal opposition groups throughout the world. His influence on, and involvement in, “managed nationalism” and the Gerasimov Doctrine is consistent with his agency in the network that influenced the 2016 elections.

Shortly after Gerasimov published his doctrine, Dugin's efforts came to a head. He sent his associate Georgiy Gavrish a memo listing a number of pro-Russia political leaders on the European far right and left. Intent on making Moscow the “New Rome” of a spiritual empire of federated ethnostates from Dublin to Vladivastok and stretching south to the Indian Ocean, Dugin’s main aspiration lay in consolidating support networks for the Kremlin and developing ideological unity for his "Eurasianist" geopolitics.

Dugin’s efforts produced a “think tank” called Katehon with influential board members including a senior member of Putin’s Yedinaya Rossiya party and Leonid Reshetnikov, then the leader of the RISS. Reshetnikov is infamous for complaining in February 2016 that WWII was “orchestrated” by “the upper crust of the Anglo-Saxon elite” and is believed by officials to have sponsored a coup attempt that October to prevent Montenegro from joining NATO.

Another member of Katehon’s board, Lyndon LaRouche associate Sergei Glazyev, co-founded the far-right Rodina (Motherland) Party with Dugin, which in 2014 to 2015 led conferences and coordinating groups including members of the racist “alt-right” and the U.S. left that helped prepare the networks Dugin sought.

At the helm of Katehon’s board sits Dugin’s associate Konstantin Malofeev. Known as the “Orthodox Oligarch” for his far-right political positions and proximity to the Russian Orthodox Church, Malofeev was sanctioned by the U.S. for allegedly bankrolling the pro-Russia separatists in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea where Wagner Company operated. Aleksandr Borodai, the first prime minister of the Donetsk Republic, and Igor Strelkov, its first minister of defense, served as Malofeev’s former PR man and security chief, respectively.

The U.S. connection

Many of the crucial connections between the Katehon network and the Western far-right can be found through their mutual commitments to the anti-LGBQT hate group, World Congress of Families. When Stephen Bannon delivered a speech on the merits of Dugin and fascist occultist Julius Evola in June 2014 to high-level members of the World Congress of Families in the Vatican, he effectively endorsed the guiding “Eurasianist” spirit behind Katehon.

Bannon’s speech came in the middle of a four-year period during which Robert Mercer paid him to work for an anti-Clinton group. Also the primary funder of Breitbart News, Mercer was a member of the secretive Council for National Policy (CNP), which supported Trump staunchly during the 2016 elections and is heavily involved in the World Congress of Families.

The CNP has a long history of bridging U.S. and Russian far-right interests, dating back to when its founder Paul Weyrich and executive committee member Robert Kriebel helped launch the career of pro-Russia lobbyist Edward Lozansky — a man who would take a leading role in feeding the troll armies of the far right nearly 30 years later.

Deeply connected to the U.S. far-right, Lozansky founded a dubious think tank eventually named the American University in Moscow “on the same floor as the Heritage Foundation.” Through his organizations, Lozansky has hosted conferences and an annual event known as the World Russia Forum. Featuring speakers like Chuck Grassley, Jeff Sessions and Dana Rohrabacher, the World Russia Forum and Lozansky’s Russia House enjoy a high profile inside the Beltway of Washington, DC. However, there is a more obscure side to the Russia Forum and its related American University in Moscow.

Lozansky’s syncretic fellows

Lozansky’s American University in Moscow has become a crucial hub for the cultivation of editors and journalists behind key “fake news” sites propagated by the “Translation Project.” The list of “Fellows” at his institution is a rogues gallery of syncretic pro-Kremlin spin doctors:

Alexander Mercouris, the founding editor of leading pro-Kremlin site, The Duran, which promotes InfoWars, the Western radical right and conspiracy theories.

Patrick Armstrong, who contributed to the short-lived geopolitical cutout, Global Independent Analytics, along with Flores, and was program coordinator at the Lozansky-linked anti-evolution Discovery Institute’s “Real Russia Project.”

Anatoly Karlin, formerly of Da Russophile and currently an antisemitic blogger for the alt-right-associated Unz Review.

Mark Sleboda of the Duginist Centre for Conservative Studies.

Daniel McAdams, head of the Ron Paul Institute.

Gilbert Doctorow, contributor to Russia Insider and Consortium News

Members of RT, Voice of Russia and RISS.

Other pro-Kremlin Fellows listed by Lozansky’s American University in Moscow, Darren Spinck, James Jatras and Anthony Salvia are partners in pro-Kremlin groups like the American Institute in Ukraine and the PR group, Global Strategic Communications Group, which sold its services to Rodina during a period when Rodina’s deputies signed a petition to ban Jews from Russia and the party was proscribed from the Duma elections for virulently racist campaign ads.

Aside from contributing to Global Independent Analytics with Armstrong, Jatras also served as a witness for the defense at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic and is featured on a number of YouTube videos posted by Katehon.

The red-brown creep

Lozansky has a long and extensive relationship with Dugin, hosting him at influential conferences in 2004 and 2005, along with red-brown propagandist Aleksandr Prokhanov, Rodina leader Dmitri Rogozin, and other éminences grises of the U.S. and Russian far-right.

In September 2008, Lozansky joined Dugin for a conference with far-right figures such as fascist creator of the European New Right Alain de Benoist, Duginist Israeli far-right leader Avigdor Eskin and Israel Shamir, a holocaust denying antisemite who would later become the Russian emissary for Wikileaks. Within a few weeks, Dugin and Lozansky appeared together on the TV program “Three Corners” for a discussion on the merits of “soft power.”

“In our world (we are talking about the information space) ideas can also play a bigger role,” Lozansky cautioned, "even more important than guns and missiles.”

A week after the Crimea crisis touched off in April 2014, Lozansky’s heavy frame was hunched over a long conference table across from Dugin in a cramped, stuffy conference room. They were discussing the role of media in the “New Cold War.”

The next September, Lozansky moderated a roundtable discussion at the World Russia Forum to consider a “Proposal to Establish ‘Committee for East - West Accord.’” Co-moderated by American University in Moscow Fellow Gilbert Doctorow, the roundtable featured leading Duginist Andrew Korybko, as well as a number of professors from U.S. and Russian institutions. The U.S. side of the Committee would be spearheaded by professor and contributing editor of The Nation, Stephen F. Cohen, along with an influential board including former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and former ambassadors William vanden Heuvel and Jack Matlock.

That month, Cohen’s associate Doctorow helped editor Charles Bausman create the antisemitic website Russia Insider. Soon after, Doctorow joined alternative journalism site Consortium News, which accepts tax-deductible donations for Russia Insider as a fiscal sponsor. Doctorow and Lozansky went on to write three articles together in the Washington Times. Russia Insider features a contact form to get in touch with Lozansky through their website. However, when Hatewatch wrote to Lozansky using Russia Insider’s contact form, we received no response. Within 24 hours, Lozansky’s website, RussiaHouse.org, mysteriously went dark.