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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
This article
goes into a bit more depth, but here's part of the introduction:
Putin’s use of asymmetric tools—low-cost, often deniable tools where Russia has an advantage that can counter U.S. conventional military superiority—to weaken democracy is in part a means for a declining Russia to level the playing field by weakening others and gaining relative power. The Kremlin understands that sowing chaos and exploiting divisions undermines democratic institutions in the United States and in Europe. Some Russian journalists believe the Kremlin’s efforts to directly attack American democracy were further motivated by the release of the Panama Papers and revelations regarding Putin’s illicit wealth. Discrediting democracy abroad also allows Putin to make the case at home that democracy is a flawed and chaotic system, thus strengthening his grip on power.
The “active measures” that Moscow is deploying in the United States are not new. The Soviet Union used similar tactics against the United States and its European allies during the Cold War. Putin has recommissioned these tactics and, crucially, he has weaponized new technological tools—tools intended by their creators to serve as empowering forces—to supercharge the attack on democratic institutions. Furthermore, whereas during the Cold War the Kremlin had an interest in maintaining stability, today a weakened Russia is mainly interested in tearing down others around it, making it, in some ways, more dangerous than it was then. In April 2015, Lilia Shevtsova wrote in the Journal of Democracy that “unlike in Soviet times, there is no ideology on offer. Instead, the Kremlin and its minions are working ‘to sow confusion via conspiracy theories’ and to spread disinformation with a view to eroding journalistic integrity . . . ”
RE: Russia and BLM: I haven't seen examples of this in person, so take it with a grain of salt, but I've seen suggestions that some of the tactics opened up by boosting BLM or creating fake social justice blogs on Tumblr or so on is that they can post relatively reasonable stuff for a few months, garner a veneer of realism, and then start posting about how white children should be executed, and the alt-right gain a "legitimate" example of someone calling for that, as ammunition.
It's been fun.![]()
Not sure of that specific Deliberately Bad Example thing, but I do recall reading an article about one bot account that had a fake African American persona that initially posted your typical everyday fluff things as well as pro-BLM sentiments (like posting about various police shooting cases), but then went on to post anti-Hillary/pro-Bernie stuff before later "becoming" a Trump supporter.
edited 17th Apr '18 6:04:00 PM by Hodor2
I suspect that the goal of just accounts is twofold, not just giving the alt-right a ‘legitimate’ example to hate but also to try and radicalise real life BLM members.
It’s very much a kitchen sink approach, if you can think of a possible chaos outcome the Russians could be angling for they probably are angling for it.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranTrump Requests Extension to File 2017 Taxes
On Tuesday, President Trump did not even file his taxes.
White House officials said Mr. Trump, who has steadfastly refused to make any of his previous tax returns public, requested a six-month extension because of the complexity of preparing his 2017 returns. He plans to file by mid-October, officials said.
The announcement came on a day that the president and his allies used to remind people about Mr. Trump’s sweeping tax cuts that will lead to savings for many people when the next Tax Day rolls around in April 2019....
....Many people file for more time to prepare their returns; I.R.S. officials said they expected as many as 15 million to do so this year. But the president’s decision to seek an extension broke with years of tradition established by his predecessors and once again underscored the fact that Mr. Trump’s tax returns remain a state secret.
Mr. Trump filed last year for a similar extension of his 2016 taxes as he and his accountants faced the task of preparing a tax return for the first time as president.
But the president’s tax experts had more than a year to get ready for his 2017 tax returns. White House officials did not explain why Mr. Trump’s accountants would need an additional six months.
I really really hope Mueller already has Trump's tax Returns, because if there's anyone who could get access to them, he could.
edited 17th Apr '18 7:36:11 PM by megaeliz
And it probably isn't something that's just embarrassing, Trump can tank little scandals like no other. No, it has to be something illegal, or really, really scandalous and damning.
In other news, Nikki Haley and the White House appear to be clashing over Russian sanctions, and how Trump's 180 on the subject was resolved by putting the blame on her for getting ahead of things.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/17/politics/nikki-haley-russia-sanctions/index.html
Concerning the tax stuff...I wouldn't be too surprised if it turns out it's a matter of incompetence. Trump does have a knack for hiring incompetent assholes. With this administration, it's always a bit of a challenge figuring out whether something is happening due to a) malice, b) incompetence, c) some mix of both. One of the things that makes Trump so much worse than a lot of past shitty Presidents is that he's got malice and incompetence in abundance.
edited 17th Apr '18 8:22:42 PM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprisedI’m still not convinced that Trump isn’t just dodging ti becuse he’d have to admit that he’s not as rich as he says he is.
Also October you say, so we might get the tax returns just before the midterms? Sounds good to me.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranDid he write this tweet you think?
This one definitely wasn't though.
too many big words.
edited 17th Apr '18 8:44:22 PM by megaeliz
While it's true when Haley is fired we will likely find her replacement to be worse, considering some of the stuff she's said and done at the UN (not to mention when she was governor of South Carolina), I can't bring myself to feel very sorry for her.
On the Russia/BLM thing: I forget where I read it, but aside from the example already given of the fake sites making awful claims to give the alt-right something to point at in justification (and maybe radicalizing real BLM members), I remember there being an article back when a lot of the fake news on Facebook was first revealed which stated that one of the things Russians did was not just create fake pages/sites, but actual fake groups. There was a BLM one, and also one about Texas patriotism (I want to say it may have supported succession but I'm not sure). And the thing was, some of these pages/sites actually convinced enough people they were real that they were able to sponsor actual rallies and meetings.
Again, this has nothing to do with them actually supporting the movements or their goals, just creating more chaos (and in this case, helping to expand membership and add legitimacy). But it does show they were doing a bit more than just making sites and pages or pushing hashtags via bots.
edited 17th Apr '18 8:53:17 PM by Ingonyama
This is a New York Times journalist from 2015
St. Mary Parish is home to many processing plants for chemicals and natural gas, and keeping track of dangerous accidents at those plants is Arthur’s job. But he hadn’t heard of any chemical release that morning. In fact, he hadn’t even heard of Columbia Chemical. St. Mary Parish had a Columbian Chemicals plant, which made carbon black, a petroleum product used in rubber and plastics. But he’d heard nothing from them that morning, either. Soon, two other residents called and reported the same text message. Arthur was worried: Had one of his employees sent out an alert without telling him?
If Arthur had checked Twitter, he might have become much more worried. Hundreds of Twitter accounts were documenting a disaster right down the road. “A powerful explosion heard from miles away happened at a chemical plant in Centerville, Louisiana #Columbian Chemicals,” a man named Jon Merritt tweeted. The #Columbian Chemicals hashtag was full of eyewitness accounts of the horror in Centerville. @Ann Russela shared an image of flames engulfing the plant. @Ksarah 12 posted a video of surveillance footage from a local gas station, capturing the flash of the explosion. Others shared a video in which thick black smoke rose in the distance.
Dozens of journalists, media outlets and politicians, from Louisiana to New York City, found their Twitter accounts inundated with messages about the disaster. “Heather, I’m sure that the explosion at the #Columbian Chemicals is really dangerous. Louisiana is really screwed now,” a user named @Eric Tra PPP tweeted at the New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter Heather Nolan. Another posted a screenshot of CNN’s home page, showing that the story had already made national news. ISIS had claimed credit for the attack, according to one You Tube video; in it, a man showed his TV screen, tuned to an Arabic news channel, on which masked ISIS fighters delivered a speech next to looping footage of an explosion. A woman named Anna Mc Claren (@zpokodon9) tweeted at Karl Rove: “Karl, Is this really ISIS who is responsible for #Columbian Chemicals? Tell @Obama that we should bomb Iraq!” But anyone who took the trouble to check CNN.com would have found no news of a spectacular Sept. 11 attack by ISIS. It was all fake: the screenshot, the videos, the photographs.
In St. Mary Parish, Duval Arthur quickly made a few calls and found that none of his employees had sent the alert. He called Columbian Chemicals, which reported no problems at the plant. Roughly two hours after the first text message was sent, the company put out a news release, explaining that reports of an explosion were false. When I called Arthur a few months later, he dismissed the incident as a tasteless prank, timed to the anniversary of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “Personally I think it’s just a real sad, sick sense of humor,” he told me. “It was just someone who just liked scaring the daylights out of people.” Authorities, he said, had tried to trace the numbers that the text messages had come from, but with no luck. (The F.B.I. told me the investigation was still open.)
The Columbian Chemicals hoax was not some simple prank by a bored sadist. It was a highly coordinated disinformation campaign, involving dozens of fake accounts that posted hundreds of tweets for hours, targeting a list of figures precisely chosen to generate maximum attention. The perpetrators didn’t just doctor screenshots from CNN; they also created fully functional clones of the websites of Louisiana TV stations and newspapers. The You Tube video of the man watching TV had been tailor-made for the project. A Wikipedia page was even created for the Columbian Chemicals disaster, which cited the fake You Tube video. As the virtual assault unfolded, it was complemented by text messages to actual residents in St. Mary Parish. It must have taken a team of programmers and content producers to pull off.
And the hoax was just one in a wave of similar attacks during the second half of last year. On Dec. 13, two months after a handful of Ebola cases in the United States touched off a minor media panic, many of the same Twitter accounts used to spread the Columbian Chemicals hoax began to post about an outbreak of Ebola in Atlanta. The campaign followed the same pattern of fake news reports and videos, this time under the hashtag #Ebola In Atlanta, which briefly trended in Atlanta. Again, the attention to detail was remarkable, suggesting a tremendous amount of effort. A You Tube video showed a team of hazmat-suited medical workers transporting a victim from the airport. Beyoncé’s recent single “7/11” played in the background, an apparent attempt to establish the video’s contemporaneity. A truck in the parking lot sported the logo of the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
On the same day as the Ebola hoax, a totally different group of accounts began spreading a rumor that an unarmed black woman had been shot to death by police. They all used the hashtag #shockingmurderinatlanta. Here again, the hoax seemed designed to piggyback on real public anxiety; that summer and fall were marked by protests over the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. In this case, a blurry video purports to show the shooting, as an onlooker narrates. Watching it, I thought I recognized the voice — it sounded the same as the man watching TV in the Columbian Chemicals video, the one in which ISIS supposedly claims responsibility. The accent was unmistakable, if unplaceable, and in both videos he was making a very strained attempt to sound American. Somehow the result was vaguely Australian.
Who was behind all of this? When I stumbled on it last fall, I had an idea. I was already investigating a shadowy organization in St. Petersburg, Russia, that spreads false information on the Internet. It has gone by a few names, but I will refer to it by its best known: the Internet Research Agency. The agency had become known for employing hundreds of Russians to post pro-Kremlin propaganda online under fake identities, including on Twitter, in order to create the illusion of a massive army of supporters; it has often been called a “troll farm.” The more I investigated this group, the more links I discovered between it and the hoaxes. In April, I went to St. Petersburg to learn more about the agency and its brand of information warfare, which it has aggressively deployed against political opponents at home, Russia’s perceived enemies abroad and, more recently, me.
This puzzled my dining companion, a former agency employee named Ludmila Savchuk. She shook her head as she lifted the heavy floral curtain to take another look. It was a traditional Russian restaurant, with a dining room done up like a parlor from the early 1900s, complete with bentwood chairs and a vintage globe that showed Alaska as part of Russia. Savchuk’s 5-year-old son sat next to her, slurping down a bowl of ukha, a traditional fish soup. For two and a half months, Savchuk told me, she had worked 12-hour shifts in the building, always beginning at 9 a.m. and finishing at 9 p.m., at which point she and her co-workers would eagerly stream out the door at once. “At 9 p.m. sharp, there should be a crowd of people walking outside the building,” she said. “Nine p.m. sharp.” One Russian newspaper put the number of employees at 400, with a budget of at least 20 million rubles (roughly $400,000) a month. During her time in the organization, there were many departments, creating content for every popular social network: Live Journal, which remains popular in Russia; V Kontakte, Russia’s homegrown version of Facebook; Facebook; Twitter; Instagram; and the comment sections of Russian news outlets. One employee estimated the operation filled 40 rooms.
Every day at the Internet Research Agency was essentially the same, Savchuk told me. The first thing employees did upon arriving at their desks was to switch on an Internet proxy service, which hid their I.P. addresses from the places they posted; those digital addresses can sometimes be used to reveal the real identity of the poster. Savchuk would be given a list of the opinions she was responsible for promulgating that day. Workers received a constant stream of “technical tasks” — point-by-point exegeses of the themes they were to address, all pegged to the latest news. Ukraine was always a major topic, because of the civil war there between Russian-backed separatists and the Ukrainian Army; Savchuk and her co-workers would post comments that disparaged the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, and highlighted Ukrainian Army atrocities. Russian domestic affairs were also a major topic. Last year, after a financial crisis hit Russia and the ruble collapsed, the professional trolls left optimistic posts about the pace of recovery. Savchuk also says that in March, after the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was murdered, she and her entire team were moved to the department that left comments on the websites of Russian news outlets and ordered to suggest that the opposition itself had set up the murder.
Savchuk told me she shared an office with about a half-dozen teammates. It was smaller than most, because she worked in the elite Special Projects department. While other workers churned out blandly pro-Kremlin comments, her department created appealing online characters who were supposed to stand out from the horde. Savchuk posed as three of these creations, running a blog for each one on Live Journal. One alter ego was a fortuneteller named Cantadora. The spirit world offered Cantadora insight into relationships, weight loss, feng shui — and, occasionally, geopolitics. Energies she discerned in the universe invariably showed that its arc bent toward Russia. She foretold glory for Vladimir Putin, defeat for Barack Obama and Petro Poroshenko. The point was to weave propaganda seamlessly into what appeared to be the nonpolitical musings of an everyday person.
In fact, she was a troll. The word “troll” was popularized in the early 1990s to denounce the people who derailed conversation on Usenet discussion lists with interminable flame wars, or spammed chat rooms with streams of disgusting photos, choking users with a cloud of filth. As the Internet has grown, the problem posed by trolls has grown more salient even as their tactics have remained remarkably constant. Today an ISIS supporter might adopt a pseudonym to harass a critical journalist on Twitter, or a right-wing agitator in the United States might smear demonstrations against police brutality by posing as a thieving, violent protester. Any major conflict is accompanied by a raging online battle between trolls on both sides.
As Savchuk and other former employees describe it, the Internet Research Agency had industrialized the art of trolling. Management was obsessed with statistics — page views, number of posts, a blog’s place on Live Journal’s traffic charts — and team leaders compelled hard work through a system of bonuses and fines. “It was a very strong corporate feeling,” Savchuk says. Her schedule gave her two 12-hour days in a row, followed by two days off. Over those two shifts she had to meet a quota of five political posts, 10 nonpolitical posts and 150 to 200 comments on other workers’ posts. The grueling schedule wore her down. She began to feel queasy, she said, posting vitriol about opposition leaders of whom she had no actual opinion, or writing nasty words about Ukrainians when some of her closest acquaintances, including her own ex-husband, were Ukrainian.
Employees were mostly in their 20s but were drawn from a broad cross-section of Russian society. It seemed as if the agency’s task was so large that it would hire almost anyone who responded to the many ads it posted on job boards, no matter how undereducated or politically ignorant they were. Posts teemed with logical and grammatical errors. “They were so stupid,” says Marat Burkhardt, who worked for two months in the department of forums, posting 135 comments a day on little-read message boards about remote Russian towns. “You see these people with a lot of tattoos. They’re so cool, like they’re from New York; very hip clothing, very hip tattoos, like they’re from Williamsburg. But they are stupid.” In office conversation, they used gay slurs to refer to Petro Poroshenko and called Barack Obama a monkey. Management tried to rectify their ignorance with grammar classes. Others had “politology” classes to outline the proper Russian point of view on current events.
Yet the exact point of their work was left unclear to them. The handful of employees I spoke with did not even know the name of the company’s chief executive. They had signed a nondisclosure agreement but no official contract. Salaries were surprisingly high for the work; Savchuk’s was 41,000 rubles a month ($777), or as much as a tenured university professor earns. “I can’t say they clearly explain to you what your purpose there is,” Savchuk says. “But they created such an atmosphere that people would understand they were doing something important and secretive and very highly paid. And that they won’t be able to find a job like this anywhere else.”
The emails indicated that the Internet Research Agency had begun to troll in English. One document outlined a project called “World Translation”; the problem, it explained, was that the foreign Internet was biased four to one against Russia, and the project aimed to change the ratio. Another email contained a spreadsheet that listed some of the troll accounts the agency was using on the English-language web. After Buzz Feed reported on the leak, I used the spreadsheet to start mapping the network of accounts on Facebook and Twitter, trying to draw connections.
One account was called “I Am Ass.” Ass had a Twitter account, an Instagram account, multiple Facebook accounts and his own website. In his avatars, Ass was depicted as a pair of cartoon buttocks with an ugly, smirking face. He filled his social-media presences with links to news articles, along with his own commentary. Ass had a puerile sense of humor and only a rudimentary grasp of the English language. He also really hated Barack Obama. Ass denounced Obama in posts strewn with all-caps rants and scatological puns. One characteristic post linked to a news article about an ISIS massacre in Iraq, which Ass shared on Facebook with the comment: “I’m scared and farting! ISIS is a monster awakened by Obama when he unleashed this disastrous Iraq war!”
Despite his unpleasant disposition, Ass had a half-dozen or so fans who regularly liked and commented on his posts. These fans shared some unusual characteristics. Their Facebook accounts had all been created in the summer of 2014. They all appeared to be well-dressed young men and women who lived in large American cities, yet they seemed to have no real-life friends. Instead, they spent their free time leaving anti-Obama comments on the Facebook posts of American media outlets like CNN, Politico and Fox News. Their main Facebook interactions, especially those of the women, appeared to be with strangers who commented on their physical appearance. The women were all very attractive — so attractive, indeed, that a search revealed that some of their profile photos had been stolen from models and actors. It became clear that the vast majority of Ass’s fans were not real people. They were also trolls.
I friended as many of the trolls on Facebook as I could and began to observe their ways. Most of the content they shared was drawn from a network of other pages that, like Ass’s, were clearly meant to produce entertaining and shareable social-media content. There was the patriotic Spread Your Wings, which described itself as “a community for everyone whose heart is with America.” Spread Your Wings posted photos of American flags and memes about how great it was to be an American, but the patriotism rang hollow once you tried to parse the frequent criticisms of Obama, an incoherent mishmash of liberal and conservative attacks that no actual American would espouse. There was also Art Gone Conscious, which posted bad art and then tenuously connected it to Obama’s policy failures, and the self-explanatory Celebrities Against Obama. The posts churned out every day by this network of pages were commented on and shared by the same group of trolls, a virtual Potemkin village of disaffected Americans.
After following the accounts for a few weeks, I saw a strange notification on Facebook. One account, which claimed to be a woman from Seattle named Polly Turner, RSV Ped to a real-life event. It was a talk in New York City to commemorate the opening of an art exhibit called Material Evidence. I was vaguely aware of Material Evidence, thanks to eye-catching advertisements that had appeared in subway stations and on the sides of buses throughout New York City: a black-and-white photo of masked men in camouflage, overlaid with the slogan “Syria, Ukraine … Who’s Next?” Material Evidence’s website described it as a traveling exhibition that would reveal “the full truth” about the civil war in Syria, as well as about 2014’s Euromaidan revolution in Ukraine, through a combination of “unique footage, artefacts, video.” I clicked on the Material Evidence talk and saw that a number of other trolls had been invited, including my old friend I Am Ass.
Then there were the pictures from the Ukrainian revolution, which focused almost exclusively on the Right Sector, a small group of violent, right-wing, anti-Russian protesters with a fondness for black balaclavas. Russian authorities have seized upon Right Sector to paint the entire revolution, backed by a huge swath of Ukrainian society, as orchestrated by neo-fascist thugs. The show’s decision to juxtapose the rebellions in Syria and Ukraine was never clearly explained, perhaps because the only connection possible was that both targeted leaders supported by Russia.
On the floor in front of many of the photos sat the actual items that appeared in them, displayed under glass cases. How, exactly, did organizers procure the very same battered motorcycle helmet that a Ukrainian protester wore in a photo while brawling with riot police? Who had fronted the money to purchase a mangled white van, supposedly used by Syrian rebels in a botched suicide bombing, and transport it to New York City? Few answers were forthcoming from Benjamin Hiller, the Berlin-based German-American photojournalist who was put forth as the curator of Material Evidence. He sat at a table in the front of the gallery, a heavyset bearded man dressed entirely in black. He told me that the show had been organized by an independent collective of European, Russian and Syrian war photographers who were fed up with the one-sided view of conflicts presented by Western media. He said they simply wanted to show the “other side.” Hiller claimed that the funds to rent the space, take out the ads, transport the material and create a $40,000 grant advertised on the Material Evidence website had been raised through “crowdfunding.” (Hiller has since left the organization and says that because of the show’s “misinformations” and “nonjournalistic approach,” he “does not want to be affiliated anymore with the project.”)
When I got home, I searched Twitter for signs of a campaign. Sure enough, dozens of accounts had been spamming rave reviews under the hashtag #Material Evidence. I clicked on one, a young woman in aviator sunglasses calling herself Zoe Foreman. (I later discovered her avatar had been stolen.) Most of her tweets were unremarkable song lyrics and inspirational quotes. But on Sept. 11 of last year, she spent hours spamming politicians and journalists about a horrific chemical plant explosion in St. Mary Parish, La. The source field on Twitter showed that the tweets Zoe Foreman — and the majority of other trolls — sent about #Columbian Chemicals were posted using a tool called Masss Post, which is associated with a nonworking page on the domain Add 1.ru. According to online records, Add 1.ru was originally registered in January 2009 by Mikhail Burchik, whose email address remained connected to the domain until 2012. Documents leaked by Anonymous International listed a Mikhail Burchik as the executive director of the Internet Research Agency.
I wonder how many GOP members of Congress used Cambridge Analytica, or took money from....questionable sources?
edited 17th Apr '18 9:20:57 PM by megaeliz
McConnell: I won't put legislation to protect Mueller on the Senate floor.
Using the same logic that Ryan did when he said basically the same thing as it applies to the House.
Stephen Colbert's full interview with James Comey
Quite a good watch, and Stephen shows his chops again as a good interviewer.
Hitokiri in the streets, daishouri in the sheets.What made Russia more vulnerable to turning into a dictatorship than the US is currently, to the degree where Putin's in the position to squish opposition brazenly and has such high approval ratings? What stops Trump from going Buzz Windrip on us?
![]()
Among other things, the fact that Russia's institutions were relatively weak in the aftermath of the USSR collapsing. The system was ripe for exploitation by oligarchs. Also, voter apathy. A lot of Russians don't seem to really care much about politics. History has made them pretty cynical about their leaders.
As has been pointed out in the past, the USA's institutions are pretty resilient. The system is intentionally designed to be relatively idiot proof. But Trump is weakening them little by little via not hiring people, lowering budgets, nominating awful and/or unqualified people to take up important positions, etc.
edited 17th Apr '18 11:35:43 PM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprisedYou can make a very strong argument that Russia has never been anything but a dictatorship from it's inception all those centuries ago.
The USSR's organization reeks of Tsarism in how power ultimately rested in the hands of strong individuals and their personal circles of loyal military officers and their men.
edited 18th Apr '18 12:11:30 AM by LeGarcon
Oh really when?

It's taken ten years to extend a fence over a hill?