hack/ Troll / cyber-war
might need sep category for pro vs amateur/ activist/ hacktivist
11/17 new cat troll thug alt rt to distinguish from russian hackers
some early important TP guy was making the rounds training activists (in the style of early Rove/Atwater)
one technique is to trash any liberal book listed on amazon, cf American Thinker (stinker, image ez to parody) on Oreskes
see AI Bot
Fake News
see twitterbot
see cybersecurity
===
an 9 24
On Friday, September 27, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced federal charges against three members of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp in connection with a cyber attack against members of GOP nominee Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign.
DOJ prosecutors allege, in now-unsealed documents, that defendants Masoud Jalili, Seyyed Ali Aghamiri and Yasar Balaghi were part of a "wide-ranging hacking campaign that used spearphishing and social engineering techniques to target and compromise the accounts of current and former U.S. government officials, members of the media, nongovernmental organizations, and individuals associated with U.S. political campaigns."
The charges include, among others, wire fraud, identity theft, and conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist organization.
READ MORE:**Here are 5 ways Trump would make the economy 'weaker' if elected to 2nd term: top economist**
The indictment is inspiring a lot of discussion on X, formerly Twitter.
Politico's Kyle Cheney listed "people/organizations" who "the hacking operation successfully compromised" — to which U.S. News & World Report's Olivier Knox responded, "there but for the grace of God and all that but the former US national security folks yikes."
Cheney also explained, "The Iranian operation got debate prep material, info on Trump's potential VPs and contacts with an official of another (suspended) GOP presidential campaign." And the Politico reporter tweeted descriptions of "the Trump campaign-related victims of the hacking/phishing operation."
CNN's Edward-Isaac Dovere, meanwhile, tweeted, "among the people who inadvertently let hackers into their email accounts: a former homeland security advisor to a president, a former senior official at the CIA, a former deputy director of the CIA."
READ MORE:[Harris visits border to talk immigration policy and target Trump
John Bresnahan, co-founder of Punchbowl News, posted, "CIA officials!"
The Democratic group Blue Georgia said of the people described in DOC documents, "Curious which one is Roger Stone?"
U.S. Charges Iranians With Hacking Trump Campaign
The indictment highlighted the heightened threat posed by hostile international actors — Iran, Russia and China chief among them — who hope to disrupt the U.S. election.
An individual holding an iPhone takes a photo of former President Trump.
The material stolen from the Trump campaign was sent to journalists at The New York Times and other outlets but was not widely published.Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
By Glenn Thrush and David E. Sanger
Reporting from Washington
Sept. 27, 2024
A federal grand jury in Washington has indicted three members of a cyberespionage unit associated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps for mounting wide-ranging attacks targeting politicians, officials and journalists that led to the hacking of the Trump campaign this summer.
The Iranians unleashed a barrage of malicious emails to a wide array of targets over the past four years, hoping to gain access to email accounts and databases. In 2024, the group, linked to Iranian military intelligence, sharpened its focus to undermine former President Donald J. Trump, whom they regard as their most implacable enemy, according to an indictment unsealed on Friday.
The attacks were “part of Iran’s continuing efforts to stoke discord, erode confidence in the U.S. electoral process and unlawfully acquire information related to former and current U.S. officials,” prosecutors wrote.
The hackers — identified in the indictment as Masoud Jalili, Seeyed Aghamiri and Yasar Balaghi — all live in Iran, making it unlikely they would face justice in an American courtroom. They have been charged with wire fraud, identity theft, providing material support to a terrorist organization and a variety of cybercrimes.
“The defendants’ own words made clear that they were attempting to undermine former President Trump’s campaign in advance of the 2024 U.S. presidential election,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said during a news conference.
The influence campaign described in the indictment suggests that Iran’s cyberskills and ambitions have expanded sharply in recent years, learning from techniques that Russia and China have mastered. It suggests rapid progress over the past 15 years, when Iran created its first “cybercorps,” partly in response to a successful American-Israeli breach into its nuclear production facility at Natanz, destroying hundreds of the country’s nuclear centrifuges.
In the 2016 election, Iran was barely capable of initiating a successful cyberattack, and in 2020, its interventions were clumsy. But by this June, it was able to provide people in President Biden’s camp “final prep” materials from the Trump campaign on the day of the first presidential debate, prosecutors said.
The indictment, while expected, highlighted the heightened threat posed by hostile international actors, using cyberattacks in hopes of disrupting the U.S. election and intimidating domestic dissidents abroad. But those three powers, Iran, Russia and China, partners in many arenas, are pursuing different strategies. Russia has been intervening on Mr. Trump’s behalf, intelligence officials say, while Iran has opposed him. China has not taken a clear side, but has worked to advance its interests more broadly.
From 2020 to May 2024, the three men named in the filing, all experienced hackers, targeted dozens of current and former officials at the White House, National Security Council, Defense Department, C.I.A. and a former U.S. ambassador to Israel — “apparently without success,” according to the 37-page indictment.
They also tried to compromise the account of at least two journalists as well as members of international nongovernmental organizations, think tanks based in Washington, foreign intelligence agencies, human rights groups, officials with Afghanistan’s government and United Nations personnel, mostly without success.
Iran’s mission to the United Nations has repeatedly denied the accusations. “The Iranian government neither possesses nor harbors any intent or motive to interfere in the United States presidential election,” it said in a statement last month when U.S. intelligence officials publicly accused Iran of hacking the Trump campaign.
The indictment did not identify the Trump campaign officials whose accounts had been hacked, but one person targeted was Susie Wiles, a senior adviser to the former president, according to someone familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose details intended to be private.
Iran was able to infiltrate the Trump campaign after gaining access to the email accounts of a longtime political adviser, Roger J. Stone, in a type of breach that allows a hacker to infiltrate a circle of people by impersonating someone they communicate regularly with.
The material, stolen in what the government called a “hack-and-leak” operation, was sent to journalists at The New York Times and other outlets but was not widely published. The Times, and other news organizations, concluded that its publication was likely to serve the interests of the attackers. Even then, Iran was the lead suspect.
Iran’s hostility to Mr. Trump also includes an apparent effort to kill him, U.S. officials have said. Intelligence agencies have been tracking a potential Iranian assassination plot against Mr. Trump, and in August, the Justice Department charged a Pakistani man who had recently visited Iran with trying to hire a hit man to assassinate political figures, including the former president.
The hackers were motivated, in part, out of a desire to avenge the killing of Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of Iran in January 2020 in a drone attack approved by Mr. Trump. They also blame Mr. Trump for reimposing economic sanctions on Iran after he pulled out of the 2015 nuclear agreement, in which Iran agreed to give up 97 percent of its nuclear fuel and vastly reduce its capabilities to make more.
Soon after, the Iranian hackers began creating false online personas as a precursor to launching spear-phishing attacks, including targeting the spouse of a Supreme Court justice and prominent conservatives.
But Iran’s efforts intensified drastically this year, with a push to infiltrate Mr. Trump’s inner circle, obtain compromising internal communications and leak them to the news media and Democrats. The indictment documents detail those efforts, from May to August, starting with the successful attempt to engage Mr. Stone, followed by the steps the hackers took to gain access to email accounts of people in his trusted circle.
On June 27 — hours before President Biden’s fumbling debate performance against Mr. Trump, which ultimately led to his decision to drop out of the presidential race — the Iranians, using a false identity, reached out to people in Mr. Biden’s camp to offer up the stolen materials.
“I’m going to be pass some materials along to you that will be useful in defeating” Mr. Trump, one of the hackers wrote in an email that included the pilfered information in its body. “Read and be strong and ready or tonight.”
The Iranians seemed to be following the election so closely, they offered punditry, opining that the debate was Mr. Biden’s “last chance” — and accurately predicting that he would have to step aside if he foundered.
Mr. Garland would not comment on the Biden campaign’s subsequent actions, other than to say that it did not respond to the hackers, and that both the Harris and Trump campaigns have cooperated fully with the F.B.I.’s investigation.
“We’re not aware of any material being sent directly to the campaign — a few individuals were targeted on their personal emails with what looked like a spam or phishing attempt,” said Morgan Finkelstein, a spokeswoman for the Harris campaign.
In July, the Iranians began sending stolen vetting materials about Mr. Trump’s running mate JD Vance to reporters, and continued to extract internal communications from Trump-related accounts as recently as Aug. 12, according to the indictment.
“Let’s be clear what we’re talking about — attempts by a hostile foreign government to steal campaign information from one presidential candidate, and shop it around to that candidate’s opponent and the media,” Christopher A. Wray, the director of the F.B.I., said in a statement.
In coordination with the indictment, the State Department offered a reward of up to $10 million for information on the hackers, while the Treasury Department issued sanctions against the men.
Hours after the indictment was unsealed, prosecutors in Washington also charged a naturalized U.S. citizen from Iran, who once worked for as a private contractor with the Federal Aviation Administration, with acting as an illegal foreign agent.
The man, Abouzar Rahmati, 42, who lives in Washington’s Virginia suburbs, is accused of providing Iranian intelligence officials with nonpublic details about the U.S. solar industry, along with information about airport radar systems and control towers.
Iranian intelligence officials appear to have been interested in “new ideas” that could be appropriated to improve Iran’s domestic infrastructure, according to the filing.
Maggie Haberman and Adam Goldman contributed reporting.
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons. More about Glenn Thrush
David E. Sanger covers the Biden administration and national security. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written several books on challenges to American national security. More about David E. Sanger
See more on: 2024 Elections: News, Polls and Analysis, Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (Quds Force), U.S. Justice Department, Roger Stone, Donald Trump
U.S. Charges Iranians With Hacking Trump Campaign
The indictment highlighted the heightened threat posed by hostile international actors — Iran, Russia and China chief among them — who hope to disrupt the U.S. election.
Listen to this article · 9:04 min Learn more
Share full article
An individual holding an iPhone takes a photo of former President Trump.
The material stolen from the Trump campaign was sent to journalists at The New York Times and other outlets but was not widely published.Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
Glenn ThrushDavid E. Sanger
By Glenn Thrush and David E. Sanger
Reporting from Washington
Sept. 27, 2024
A federal grand jury in Washington has indicted three members of a cyberespionage unit associated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps for mounting wide-ranging attacks targeting politicians, officials and journalists that led to the hacking of the Trump campaign this summer.
The Iranians unleashed a barrage of malicious emails to a wide array of targets over the past four years, hoping to gain access to email accounts and databases. In 2024, the group, linked to Iranian military intelligence, sharpened its focus to undermine former President Donald J. Trump, whom they regard as their most implacable enemy, according to an indictment unsealed on Friday.
The attacks were “part of Iran’s continuing efforts to stoke discord, erode confidence in the U.S. electoral process and unlawfully acquire information related to former and current U.S. officials,” prosecutors wrote.
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons. More about Glenn Thrush
David E. Sanger covers the Biden administration and national security. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written several books on challenges to American national security. More about David E. Sanger
===
origin in hacker culture:
https://www.inverse.com/gaming/pwned-meaning-definition-origins-video-games-internet-hackers
COINED
HOW “PWNED” WENT FROM HACKER SLANG TO THE INTERNET’S FAVORITE TAUNT
If you use the internet, you’ve probably been pwned before.
DANNY PAEZ
3.17.2020
SMACK TALK IS AN INESCAPABLE PART OF ANY KIND OF COMPETITIVE ACTIVITY. WHETHER YOU’RE PLAYING PICK-UP BASKETBALL OR SQUADDING UP IN CALL OF DUTY: WARZONE, THERE WILL MOST LIKELY BE SOMEONE TRYING TO GET UNDER YOUR SKIN BY CALLING YOU A NOOB OR WORSE.
But for a long time, the specific type of trash talk used in gamer communities pretty much stayed there. Then, massively popular games like League of Legends and Fortnite made online gaming into a mainstream hundred-billion-dollar industry, dragging those gamer terms into the spotlight, and there’s no word that better embodies how geeky jargon has made it into the mainstream better than “Pwned.”
The gamer slang is a misspelling of “owned” that has come to mean a person being totally and completely dominated by an opponent in any situation. If your trivia team loses by double digits, then you’ve been pwned just as badly as getting zero-to-death comboed in a match of Super Smash Bros.
“'Pwn' is a lot like the sense of 'own,' which means ‘to have power or mastery over (someone),’” the Merriam-Webster dictionary explains. “It has also been used to describe the act of gaining illegal access to something.”
That secondary definition stems from thehacker and programming community that have used the word to describe obtaining unauthorized control of someone else’s computer. It’s a word steeped in internet history, but its origins predate the web and were largely based on misunderstandings and typos that were then adopted as an idiom.
THE ORIGINS OF “PWNED”
The earliest use of the word pwn might come from a game of chess in 1935, decades before the internet was invented.
The match was between Grandmasters Alexander Alekhine and Max Euwe, and rumor has it that Alekhine — who might have had a bit too much to drink — shouted, “I will pawn to your knight” with a heavy Russian accent. Euwe and the spectators present were said to have heard, “Evil pwn you tonight.”
“EVIL PWN YOU TONIGHT.”
There aren’t any audio or written records of this outburst and there’s some evidence that it was a myth. (Chess grandmaster and author Raymond Dennis Keene posted a thread on the Chess Games forum where he claims Euwe told him that Alekhine was sober during their infamous game.) Keene also never mentioned anything about Alekhine's alleged smack talk, which leads me to believe this is more folklore than reality.
But chess would eventually turn pwn into a word used by early programmers.
PWNING AT PROGRAMMING
The advent of digital computing in the 1950s resulted in a generation of programmers who attempted to create a machine that could play chess.
Computer science students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the 1960s turned developing the best chess-play program into a friendly competition. A definition on Urban Dictionary claims that these students would call themselves “kings” and others “pawns” when their program bested a competing one.
At this point, pwn allegedly meant to demote or dethrone someone, but the slang was quickly picked up by early computer-users that exchanged messages on FidoNet, a system created in the 1980s for exchanging emails or text on digital bulletin boards. This is where pwn slowly transformed into the insult we know today.
THEN CAME THE HACKERS
By the late ‘80s, only 8.2 households in the U.S. owned a computer, according to the Census Bureau, but many of these users were probably familiar with “pwn,” especially if they were members of the early hacking community.
Members of this online group published a newsletter titled Phrack World News (or PWN, for short), the earliest record of the word being used online. This was around the same time as the rise of leet (l33t) speak, which is essentially Pig Latin for hackers (h4x0r) that wanted to secretly communicate in public message boards.
Pwn didn't necessarily follow the rules of leetspeak, which is a system of modified spelling that replaces certain letters with numbers. The word was also being used interchangeably with “own” by this time to describe gaining administrative control of someone else’s computer. One famous example was the 1997 defacement of theSpice Girls website, which was hacked for several days that November as a statement against the mainstream adoption of the internet.
The pwned Spice Girls website.2600.com]
This apparent misspelling of the word “own” led many to believe that pwn gained popularity because of a common typo since the letter O and P are right next to each other on English QWERTY keyboards.
PWN’S DEBUT INTO THE MAINSTREAM
Leetspeak and hacker jargon seeped into mainstream internet culture in the late 1990s and early 2000s. That brought slang like n00b and pwn to a new generation of internet users and gamers that used these terms to taunt their opponents after a particularly flashy kill in a first-person shooter or fighting game.
Different spellings, like “pwn3d” began to pop up across the internet, many of which referred to video games but this is around the time when the pwn broke free of its geeky past. One example posted on Urban Dictionary in 2004 uses it as a non-gaming related flex.
Person A: "I spent a long time writing the entire script to Harry Potter.”
Person B: "Yeah, I downloaded it off the internet too."
Person C: "PWN3D!"
That same year a mockumentary web series titled Pure Pwnage was created by a group of Canadian comedians. The series followed the daily life of a self-proclaimed pro gamer. By 2006, hundreds of thousands of people had watched Pure Pwnage on YouTube, cementing its place in video game culture.
Google Trends shows that pwn reached its peak search popularity in mid-2009, which is around the same time that Microsoft warned of a security vulnerability on Windows XP and 2003 that could leave users open to a “browse-and-get-owned” scenario.
Then in 2013, when various web services and sites saw an uptick in personal data breaches, security expert Troy Hunt created the website “Have I Been Pwned?” Anyone can type in an email address into the site to check if their personal data has been compromised in a security breach. As of June 2019, Hunt’s site averaged 150,000 daily visitors, according to a post on his personal blog.
So while pwn might have begun as an obscure programming term, it’s become such a part of internet culture that if you own a PC, console, smartphone, or laptop you’ve probably been PWNED more than once.
COINED is your guide to the language of video games and the people who play them. If you've ever been told to "get rekt" and couldn't tell if it was a compliment or an insult, we're here to explain where terms like that came from, what they mean, and how to use them in everyday conversation.
PREVIOUSLY ON COINED:
How "grinding" came to dominate video game culture
How "camping" became the Call of Duty strategy gamers love to hate
How "Nerf" and "Buff" became the terms gamers can't stop arguing about
How “rekt” went from obscure insult to gaming's trash talk of choice
How “n00b” became the nicest way to be mean online
How “rage quit” became the most relatable gamer emotion
==
==
Proving useful already
On July 10, 2019, one of our BotSlayer systems, focusing on Twitter activity about U.S. politics, flagged suspicious activity for us to investigate. The system noticed the appearance of a large group of tweets, mostly from brand-new Twitter accounts whose names ended with a string of numbers – like @MariaTu34743110. Those are clues that their activity may be generated by a bot.
They were posting and retweeting links to a single YouTube video attacking a financier named Bill Browder, who has been at the center of a dispute between the United States and the Russian Federation. That shared focus is a clue that all the accounts were part of an interconnected system.
When we dug deeper, we identified more than 80 likely bots coordinating with each other to try to boost widespread attention to Browder’s alleged wrongdoing using the video on YouTube.
===
https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/russian-propaganda-campaign-helped-trumps-poll-numbers-in-2016-research-analysis/
When former special counsel Robert Mueller spoke publicly on May 29, he made it abundantly clear that Russian government officials made a concerted effort to influence the 2016 presidential election. President Donald Trump and many of his supporters, however, have maintained that Russian propaganda and disinformation efforts had no impact on the election. But a new analysis by University of Tennessee researchers in Knoxville finds that Russian activities did influence public opinion in the U.S. in 2016.
The study addresses social media and the activities of the Internet Research Agency, a Russian company and troll farm based in St. Petersburg, Russia.And according to the study, every 25,000 re-tweets by accounts connected to that company predicted a 1% increase in favor of Trump in opinion polls.
Damian Ruck, lead researcher for the study, wrote, “Our results show that the weeks when Russian trolls were accumulating likes and retweets on Twitter, that activity reliably foreshadowed gains for Trump in the opinion polls.”
Ruck found that “exposure to Russian propaganda may have helped change American minds in favor of Republican candidate Trump.” According to Ruck, “It turns out that the activity of Russian Twitter trolls was a better predictor of Donald Trump’s polling numbers than his own Twitter activity.”
Nonetheless, Ruck asserted that it’s unclear whether or not Russian activity ultimately affected the outcome of the 2016 election. Asked about that possibility, Ruck told NBC News, “The answer is that we still don’t know, but we can’t rule it out.”
===
==
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/how-corporate-media-is-preparing-to-repeat-the-mistakes-it-made-in-2016/
Continuing a firm tradition of admitting no mistakes in the 2016 campaign season, and certainly offering up no apologies for glaring errors that were made, most news organizations have played down the pivotal and almost jovial role they played in marketing Russian hackers who stole Democratic National Committee emails during the last presidential election cycle. The collective shrug comes in the wake of special counsel Robert Mueller’s 448-page report on Russian election interference, which offered up even more details regarding the brazen act of foreign sabotage. It was a campaign dirty-trick operation that only worked because the media so willingly played along as they piled on Hillary Clinton and hyped the stolen DNC emails as hugely important.
With the media’s stubborn insistence that they did nothing wrong in eagerly amplifying the work of Russian hackers, the threat looms for a repeat in 2020—and it’s not just hypothetical. For the third time in three years, House Democrats have tried to get Republicans to support a pledge not to use hacked materials against opponents in 2020. And for the third time in three years, Republicans have refused.
And there’s this:
Vice President Mike Pence refuses to answer if 1) he regrets using hacked emails during the 2016 campaign & 2) if he pledges not to do so in the next presidential campaign. He walked away upon attempted follow-up
...
===
==
see zamel wikistrat:
Wikistrat is essentially a think tank for rent. The firm, which only has a few full-time employees, contracts with foreign policy and national security experts to produce reports for corporate and government clients about specific geopolitical issues. The firm’s analysts also sometimes produce reports that aren’t for clients, according to people close to the firm; the firm then displays those reports on its website to demonstrate the quality of its work, or markets them to potential buyers.
The report The Daily Beast reviewed includes several different conversation threads, like a high-end version of Reddit. It was titled “The Rise of the Cyber Mercenary.”
In a discussion of how a hostile foreign government could weaponize social media against an adversary, one Wikistrat analyst put it this way:
“Cyber-mercenaries are mainly hired by governments as online counter-information and counter-counter-information officers. Disguised as ordinary citizens, these cyber-mercenaries are experts at sensationalizing and distorting political issues in a manner that appeals to common sense. Their objectives are not to convince explicitly, but rather subconsciously, by inserting a seed of doubt that leads to confusion and encourages fact-skepticism. Their ultimate targets are foreign governments, but their attacks are launched on proxy targets, ordinary citizens, chiefly ignorant, vulnerable, and uneducated populaces of a particular nation-state.”
The analyst then noted that entities like “Russia’s ‘Internet Research Group’”—likely a misnomer for the country’s Internet Research Agency, which Mueller indicted in Feb. 2018—already weaponize social media to shape their countries’ domestic politics.
“As a foreign policy tool, misinformation can be used to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt among the population of antagonist countries, therefore furthering the instigator’s own agenda,” the analyst added. “Instead of direct government involvement, using cyber-mercenaries to enact these operations would create a degree of indirection and a veneer of plausible deniability that would make it harder to clearly separate propaganda from facts.”
Another analyst then sounded off on what makes trolling effective.
“[T]hese ‘cyber-trolls’ are trained controversialists: they openly engage in public controversy…People are drawn to the excitement of controversy and these cyber-trolls are experts in sensationalizing a political issue. The objective of cyber-trolls is not to convince explicitly, but rather subconsciously, by inserting a seed of doubt that leads to confusion and encourages fact-skepticism. They are not afraid to use provocative and confrontational language, as it is to their advantage if it leads to an emotional rise in the reader because the reader is then more likely to engage in debate, which in-turn, creates more buzz and attracts a greater audience, increasing the potential number of people exposed to this misinformation campaign.”
The analysis was written after the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency had begun its U.S. election interference campaign, but well before the American public knew about it. In the end the troll factory controlled thousands of fake organizations and personas on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, which it used to push out divisive rhetoric and fake news—overwhelmingly in support of Donald Trump’s candidacy.
In another discussion thread that was part of the Cyber Mercenaries project, analysts scrutinized the possibility of a hostile foreign government targeting the U.S. elections.
...
===
https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/why-cardi-bs-politics-matter-the-rapper-refused-to-be-silenced-and-proved-she-knows-the-best-way-to-neutralize-right-wing-trolls/
==
==
https://www.alternet.org/ny-times-bombshell-russian-trolls-extensively-targeted-black-americans-and-tried-suppress-democratic
==
https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-november-5-2018/
KHJ
hillary asked q in debates based on hacked mat'l, she seemed phoney eg open border about energy in future.
---
Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped ... - Amazon.com
https://www.amazon.com/Cyberwar-Russian-Hackers-Trolls-President/.../1684417228
1.
Cyberwar - Kathleen Hall Jamieson - Oxford University Press
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/cyberwar-9780190915810
1.
Would Trump be president without Russia? Probably not, says Penn ...
www.thedp.com/.../kathleen-hall-jamieson-russia-2016-election-book-upenn-philadel...
1.
Jamieson Discusses 'Cyberwar,' Her Book on Russian Hackers and ...
https://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/jamieson-cyberwar-russian-hackers/
1.
The case that Russia is winning the cyberwar - The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/.../cyberwar-kathleen-hall-jamieson-russia-election-interfer...
1.
:{:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:
How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump | The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/.../10/.../how-russia-helped-to-swing-the-election-for-trump
Oct 1, 2018 - Kathleen Hall Jamieson, of Penn, has done a forensic examination of the ... Politicians may be too timid to explore the subject, but a new book ...
==
The problem: the meme is fake. According to Snopes, the image is actually from a clash between Mexican police and student protestors in Mexico City in 2012, and has nothing to do with migrants. But sharing extremist right-wing content is not a new thing for Thomas, a conservative activist who has made frequent use of social media. Earlier this year, she shared posts attacking the Parkland kids and praising the "#WalkAway" movement, a fake campaign of Russian trolls pretending to be people of color leaving the Democratic Party.
===
AN
What in the universe could be more powerful than the Force? Government cyberwarfare groups’ trolls, as it turns out.
An academic paper published by researcher Morten Bay of the University of Southern California, entitled “Weaponizing the Haters: ‘The Last Jedi’ and the Strategic Politicization of Pop Culture through Social Media Manipulation,” analyzed the pattern of tweets from online trolls that organized an ongoing campaign to polarize public opinion over the 2017 film “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.”
“The study finds evidence of deliberate, organized political influence measures disguised as fan arguments,” Bay writes. “ The likely objective of these measures is increasing media coverage of the fandom conflict, thereby adding to and further propagating a narrative of widespread discord and dysfunction in American society.”[cf chris hedges ANOMIE]
The findings specifically concluded:
“Among the 967 tweets analyzed, 206 expressed a negative sentiment towards the film and its director, which is 21.9% or a little more than one in five fans. This number includes all negative tweets analyzed, i.e. also those who came from the 44 accounts identified as bots, sock puppet accounts and trolls. It also includes 61 users who showed clear political agendas in their tweets against the film. Thus, the number of fans whose tweets are purely motivated by a negative stance towards the film is 101 or 10.5%.
Overall, 50.9% of those tweeting negatively was likely politically motivated or not even human.”
These findings corroborate ongoing suspicions that organized trolls who meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election weren’t trying specifically to elect Trump, but rather to further divide the country by perpetuating politically polarized views and opinions. Perpetuating such divisions can, over time, fracture the social fabric of a country and sow political and cultural discord; while Russia has been prominently singled out as perpetuating this brand of cyberwarfare, the U.S. government actively uses similar cyberwarfare campaigns to meddle in the political affairs of many different sovereign nations, in an attempt to prop up American interests.
The Russian cyberwarfare campaign that seized on “The Last Jedi” vitriol had a common thread with Russia’s earlier Facebook disinformation campaigns, initiated during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. “Some [trolls] were less focused on politics of party or specific issues and more on identity politics, posting anti-feminist or anti-homosexuality messages, and tweets of a racist nature were also frequent among the accounts in this category,” the study explains.
Not too long after “The Last Jedi” hit the silver screen in December 2017, Kelly Marie Tran, one of the saga’s new breakout stars, suffered an ongoing online harassment crusade that eventually compelled her to terminate her social media accounts. Likewise, racist anti–“Last Jedi” trolls of similar motivation emerged from hiding to throw virtual tantrums on the wiki website FANDOM, defacing Tran’s character’s page with racial slurs.
The abuse wasn’t exclusive to FANDOM’s wiki or Tran’s personal social media pages; vitriol about “The Last Jedi,” mainly complaints that it was overly politically correct and represented a threat to hegemony, pervaded all manner of social media; to this day, there are numerous Twitter accounts with display names like “Star Wars Lives Matter” and "LastJediAwful" devoted entirely to denigrating the movie for the aforementioned sociopolitical reasons. After Tran quit social media, she wrote about how the harassment impacted her in the New York Times.
While Bay’s paper does not specify how many of the government–sponsored troll tweets were directed specifically toward Tran, Bay notes that both the institutional and organic harassment had the same political repercussions.
“Whether the criticism comes from a Russian troll/bot or from a fan who feels increasingly distant from the values presented in the new Star Wars films, the objective of their actions is a political one,” the paper states. “Russian trolls weaponize Star Wars criticism as an instrument of information warfare with the purpose of pushing for political change, while it is weaponized by right-wing fans to forward a conservative agenda and for some it is a pushback against what they perceive as a feminist/social justice onslaught.”
Perhaps it should not be a surprise, the study says, given the political undertone the “Stars Wars” franchise has always had. As the paper continues:
“The Star Wars franchise is an interesting object of study in this regard. Even though it was originally targeted towards cinema-goers who were too young to vote, Star Wars was always double-coded, with layers oriented towards adults, often involving subjective critiques of contemporary politics. Star Wars movies, books, video games, tv shows and comics have consistently attempted to convey left-leaning values. For years, the franchise’s creator, George Lucas, has explained the series’ impetus as partially being a comment on the Vietnam war, which ended just as Lucas started work on the first Star Wars film.”
Sameer Hinduja, co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center and professor of criminology at Florida Atlantic University, told Salon that Russian trolls championing cyber-harassment is troubling.
“I think it is cause for concern because social media platforms would not want a specific side or party to dictate their goals of open, impartial conversation and interaction (because if they allow it indirectly or directly, they alienate a massive swath of their user base),” he told Salon in an email. “Based on our conversations with tech companies, they are aware of the role of bots and are devoting more resources towards attenuating their influence — first in the area of online harassment, and next when it comes to political discourse."
Hinduja said he is “cautiously optimistic” progress will be made in this area.
“Unfortunately, bots are here to stay, bot creators seem to remain one step ahead with their cloaking and replicating efforts, and machine learning is not yet where it needs to be to perfectly identify and quarantine/block malicious automated scripts,” he added.
==
==
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-how-russian-propaganda-trolls-act-differently-online-regular-people
no lnx charts
information warfare becomes more common, agents of various governments are manipulating social media – and therefore people’s thinking, political actions and democracy. Regular people need to know a lot more about what information warriors are doing and how they exert their influence.
One group, a Russian government-sponsored troll farm called the Internet Research Agency, was the subject of a federal indictment issued in February, stemming from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian activities aimed at influencing the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Our recent study of that group’s activities reveals that there are some behaviors that might help identify propaganda-spewing trolls and tell them apart from regular internet users.
Targeted tweeting
We looked at 27,291 tweets posted by 1,024 Twitter accounts controlled by the Internet Research Agency, based on a list released by congressional investigators. We found that these Russian government troll farms were focused on tweeting about specific world events like the Charlottesville protests, specific organizations like ISIS and political topics related to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
That finding fits with other research showing that Internet Research Agency trolls infiltrated and exerted influence in online communities with both left- and right-leaning political views. That helped them muddy the waters on both sides, stirring discord across the political spectrum.
Distinctive behavior
We also found that these troll-farm accounts behaved differently from regular people online. For example, when declaring their locations, they listed a country, but not any particular city in that country. That’s unusual: Most Twitter users tend to be more specific, listing a state or town, as we found when we sampled 1,024 Twitter accounts at random. The most common location designation for Russian troll accounts was “U.S.,” followed by “Moscow,” “St. Petersburg,” and “Russia.”
In addition, the troll accounts were more likely to tweet using Twitter’s own website on a desktop computer – labeled in tweets as “Twitter Web Client.” By contrast, we found regular Twitter users are much more likely to use Twitter’s mobile apps for iPhone or Android, or specialized apps for managing social media, like TweetDeck.
Working many angles
Looking at the Internet Research Agency accounts over 21 months, between January 2016 and September 2017, we found that they frequently reset their online personas by changing account information like their name and description and by mass-deleting past tweets. In this way, the same account – still retaining its followers – could be repurposed to advocate a different position or target a different demographic of users.
For instance, on May 15, 2016, the troll account with the Twitter ID number 4224912857 was calling itself “Pen_Air” with a profile description reading “National American news.” This particular troll account tweeted 326 times, while its followers rose from 1,296 to 4,308 between May 15, 2016, and July 22, 2016.
But as the U.S. presidential elections approached, it changed: On September 8, 2016, the account changed its name to “Blacks4DTrump” and its profile description to “African-Americans stand with Trump to make America Great Again!” Over the next 11 months, it tweeted nearly 600 times – far more often than its previous identity had. This activity no doubt helped increase the account’s follower count to nearly 9,000.
The activity didn’t stop after the election. Around August 18, 2017, the account was repurposed again. Almost all of its previous tweets were deleted – leaving just 35. And its name became “southlonestar2,” with a description as “Proud American and TEXAN patriot! Stop ISLAM and PC. Don’t mess with Texas.”
In all three incarnations the account’s tweets focused on right-wing political topics, using hashtags like #NObama and #NeverHillary and retweeting other troll accounts, like TEN_GOP and tpartynews.
These troll accounts also often tweeted links to posts from Russian government-sponsored organizations purporting to be news.
Fighting trolling
Though our research focused on Twitter, the Internet Research Agency didn’t. It even expanded beyond Facebook: In early 2018, Reddit announced that Russian trolls had likely operated on its site as well. That report highlights the fact that the companies hosting social media and online discussion sites are the best informed about what’s happening on their systems. As a result, in our view, the platforms’ companies should provide technical solutions, analyzing activity and taking action to safeguard users from secret influence campaigns from government agents.
Yet even if the large platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit were somehow able to completely eradicate trolling by professional government agents, there are many smaller communities online that may remain vulnerable. Some of our previous work has shown how ideas that first emerge on fringe sites like 4chan can rapidly make it to mainstream discussions online and in the real world. Russian trolls could take advantage of that tendency to infiltrate these smaller sites, like Gab or Minds, influencing real people who also use those systems – and getting them to spread propaganda and disinformation more widely.
It’s clear to us that technological solutions on their own cannot solve the problem of government-sponsored trolling online. The trolls’ efforts take advantage of weaknesses in society; the only fix for that is for people as individuals and collectively to think more critically about online information, especially before sharing it.The Conversation
Savvas Zannettou, Ph.D. Student in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering and Informatics, Technological University of Cyprus and Jeremy Blackburn, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, University of Alabama at Birmingham
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
===
https://www.alternet.org/dncs-emails-werent-only-hacked-they-were-edited-report
Emails hacked from the Hillary Clinton campaign may not have been as reliable as the anti-Clinton camp would like to believe.
The first document published by hacker Guccifer 2.0 had been tampered with prior to being published, according to the Associated Press. In addition to not coming from the Democratic National Committee as Guccifer had promised it would be (it instead came from the email inbox of John Podesta, former chairman for the Clinton campaign), the document had the word "CONFIDENTIAL" written on it. Yet a former DNC official has said that the word "confidential" was not on the original document, indicating that Guccifer had airbrushed it in to spice it up for journalists.
If one document from the Clinton emails was altered, it stands to reason that others may have been as well. After all, releasing tainted leaks would hardly be a new practice for Russian hackers.
In 2017 researchers at the Citizen Lab group released a study indicating that Russian hackers have a pattern of tampering with documents leaked by its hackers to serve the purposes of its propaganda.
"This report describes an extensive Russia-linked phishing and disinformation campaign,"the authors wrote. "It provides evidence of how documents stolen from a prominent journalist and critic of Russia was tampered with and then 'leaked' to achieve specific propaganda aims. We name this technique 'tainted leaks.'"
The authors added, "The report illustrates how the twin strategies of phishing and tainted leaks are sometimes used in combination to infiltrate civil society targets, and to seed mistrust and disinformation. It also illustrates how domestic considerations, specifically concerns about regime security, can motivate espionage operations, particularly those targeting civil society."
==
many link not:
Last week, I sent a string of relatively uncontroversial tweets in the aftermath of the Las Vegas massacre, in which I sought to answer a question about mass shootings in the United States:Why are these crimes almost always carried out by white men? “It’s the white supremacist patriarchy, stupid,” I tweeted, before then diagnosing a sense of double entitlement — as white people and as men — that, when frustrated, can occasionally lead to violent consequences.
My argument was not new, but rather reflects decades of research on how race and gender function in our society. To be both white and male is to be subject to a potent cocktail of entitlement to economic and political power, and to dominate nonwhite and female bodies. When that entitlement is frustrated, it can lead to what the criminologist Mike King calls “aggrieved whiteness,” an ambient furor based on the idea that white Americans have become oppressed victims of politically correct multiculturalism.
[I invited Ann Coulter to speak at UC Berkeley. Here’s why.]
In my view as a researcher and professor of politics, these tweets were neither provocative in tone nor controversial in content. Rather, the insight they provided felt all the more pressing now that President Trump has brought this aggrieved whiteness into daily headlines. As a scholar and teacher, giving context and depth to contemporary debates is an important part of what I do, and it’s a calling I take seriously. But more and more, professors like me are being targeted by a coordinated right-wing campaign to undermine our academic freedom — one that relies on misrepresentation and sometimes outright lying, and often puts us and our students in danger.
This time, the outrage machine geared up as it often does, with a minor conservative media outlet — in this case, the Daily Caller — chopping my tweets up into a misleading mishmash that transformed a nuanced diagnosis of white male frustration into an attack on white people in general. When the Daily Caller posted the article to Facebook, moreover, the intention was clearly to incite: “Absolutely unforgiveable” (sic) read the post, which by now has been shared nearly 2,000 times and commented upon more than 3,000 times.
Hate mail and death threats began to roll in.“I will beat your skull in till there is no tomorrow.” “Soon all you p-----s will get exactly what you deserve.” “Do the world a favor, and kill yourself … I’ll help you find death sooner than later.” One called me a “pig f---er like Obama,” adding homophobic slurs for good measure. Many called me a “cuck” — a favorite racial and sexual insult of the alt-right — while others urged me to move to North Korea or Venezuela. One “love note from a WHITE American” wrongly identified me as a “greasy South American a--hole.”
From there, the contagion was rapid, with Stephen Bannon’s Breitbart News and even Milo Yiannopoulos’s own website running their own cribbed copies of the same story. Then came FrontPage, the Blaze, the College Fix and the campus mercenaries at Turning Point. Soon, the manufactured story had hit the conspiratorial fringes of Infowars and online forums across the right: from “blue lives matter” to those preparing for the inevitable rapture.
[Could everyone please stop melting down about college kids?]
Finally, the story crossed the mainstream-fringe barrier at its most permeable point: Fox News. Fox claimed that not only do I blame Trump for the Las Vegas massacre, but that I even somehow blame the victims. Threatening emails increased to a flood. An invitation to appear on Tucker Carlson’s show arrived in short order, only confirming the insular nature of the machine, which amplifies to a furious roar the same small group of voices. I declined.
I am by no means the first, and will not be the last target of this kind of smear campaign by conservatives aimed at academics. In every case, it is the same right-wing media outlets leading the charge, and campuses are increasingly the target. Universities and colleges have become the perfect target for such crusades: Purportedly hotbeds of multiculturalism, “safe spaces” and political correctness, campuses represent everything the resentful right is afraid of. At the same time that the right-wing media smears professors like myself, decrying our tenure and demanding our heads, they breathlessly chronicle the supposed intolerance of the left when confronted with provocative campus tours by Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, Charles Murray, Ann Coulter and others.
==
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trump-diehard-and-former-milo-yiannopoulos-intern-stabs-father-death-calling-him
A prolific online troll and former intern of Milo Yiannopoulos has been charged with first-degree murder after allegedly stabbing his father to death in his Washington home. According to audio of the incident obtained by the Daily Beast, 33-year-old Lane Davis set upon his father after the latter called him a Nazi. "He’s chasing us around the house,” Davis' mother told a police dispatcher. “He’s mad about something on the internet about leftist pedophiles and he thinks we’re leftist and he’s calling us pedophiles, and I don’t know what-all.”
Davis has entered a plea of not guilty, and his trial is scheduled for January.
The Samish Island native fits a disturbing if increasingly familiar profile. After dropping out of Washington State University in 2004, he developed a following on YouTube peddling conspiracy theories that ran the gamut from 9/11 being an inside job to vaccines causing autism. By 2014, he had become a fixture in Gamergate, a campaign of online harassment of women in the video game industry that included doxxing and death threats. Davis would ultimately renounce his fellow travelers in the movement, but that did not stop him from targeting Joshua Idehen, whose manager, agent and charity he contacted accusing the London musician of pedophilia.
Shortly thereafter, Davis began working for Milo Yiannopoulos, with whom he co-wrote an article accusing the MacArthur Foundation of promoting censorship on social media. Yiannopoulos, who was recently outed for his close collaboration with prominent neo-Nazis and members of the alt-right, has since released the following statement to the Daily Beast:
“Mr. Davis was a volunteer for me for a brief period of time prior to my founding Milo, Inc. I was unhappy with his work and discontinued the relationship. I then experienced his anger firsthand as he threatened me and later went to Buzzfeed making false and inaccurate accusations."
Davis parlayed his short tenure at Breitbart into an unpaid blogging gig at a far-right website called theRalphRetort.com, which features such verticals as "SJW Insanity" and "Campus Crazies," and whose editor, Ethan Ralph, is serving an eight-month sentence in Loudon County, Virginia, for assaulting a police officer. Ralph's wife pledged to remove all of Davis' stories, which he posted under the name Seattle4Truth.
A fervent Trump supporter, Davis had grown increasingly agitated in recent months, so much so that his father had taken to recording his rage-fueled outbursts on his phone. On the day of his arrest, the Daily Beast reports Davis "retweeted posts celebrating the Second Amendment, bemoaning diversity, and spreading conspiracy theories that alleged Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta was involved in a child sex ring and DNC staffer Seth Rich had been murdered."
“He just lives on the internet and he gets really worked up about everything that’s going on," his mother told police. "He needs an intervention of some kind here.”
Minutes later, her husband was bleeding to death on the back porch, and her son had raised his hands in the air, awaiting his arrest.
---
==
early alt rt troll hit:
This potent group of like-minded internet campaigners repeatedly proved their ability to organize and operate extremely effective smear campaigns during the 2016 election. According to an entry on Encyclopedia Dramatica, one of the most notable moments in “The Great Meme War” was the group’s viral portrayal of former presidential candidate Jeb Bush as a weak and sad “stinking turtle-lover with a guacamole fetish.” This characterization of “low energy” Bush cast him as a man unable to withstand what meme creators referred to as “high-energy” Trump. The Encyclopedia Dramatica entry also credited the same organized effort to push “a stream of new and fearsome dank memes,” featuring “Pepe the Frog” after the Anti-Defamation League classified the character as a hate symbol.
==
Watch Part 3 || Joshua Green on How Bannon’s Experience with Video Gamers Gave Rise to the Alt-Right
GOODMAN: We’re talking to Joshua Green. His new book is Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency. You also talk about how Breitbart News went after Fox News to make it more extreme, and the gaming background of Steve Bannon, recognizing that Fox News was for old folks. There was this huge young conservative set that he could bring in.
JOSHUA GREEN: You know, another story in the book—another thing I got asked about a lot as a political reporter was: Where did this idea of the alt-right come from? Who are these people? How did they infect our politics in the way that they had? And Bannon, oddly enough, is a critical figure in the rise of the alt-right, many of whose members, I should just add as a side note, read and admire Julius Evola and his thinking.
But back in 2007, after Bannon had done Hollywood and filmmaking, he wound up, for about a year and a half, as the CEO of a video game company in Hong Kong, which did not actually make video games that you play. It pioneered something called gold farming, which I had never heard of. But what gold farming is, is the process of going into these massive multiplayer games, like World of Warcraft, and winning armor and prizes and gold, which allow you to advance in the game, but then turning around and selling them to people in the real world. So Bannon’s company would hire teams of low-wage Chinese workers to play these games in 24-hour rotating cycles, win all this stuff, and then sell it to wealthier gamers offline, which was considered a serious enough business that Goldman Sachs actually invested money in Bannon’s company.
But what happened was, the gamers—most of the people who played the games considered this cheating, and they got very angry. You know, kids would spend hours and weeks and months absorbed in these games, and didn’t like the fact that there was this shortcut. And so, the gamers themselves organized on message boards. There are special message boards devoted to these multiplayer games. And they organized themselves and said, "Hey, we’re going to put pressure on these video games and make them shut down the practice of gold farming." And they did. And it destroyed—itbankrupted Bannon’s business.
But the lesson he took away from this was that there are millions and millions of young, white—mostly white—men who spend their entire lives in these online alternate realities, and that—
AMY GOODMAN: 4chan.
JOSHUA GREEN: 4chan, exactly, Reddit—and that if they are motived to do so, they could be a very powerful political force: "They bankrupted my company. I want to see if I can channel them into politics." And when Bannon got to Breitbart News, he hired a notorious internet troll named Milo Yiannopoulos to be Breitbart’s tech editor and to essentially entice these legions of angry online gamers into the world of populist right-wing politics. And eventually Bannon was able to turn them on to Trump.
===
see steven miller
When TV news viewers saw Trump adviser Stephen Miller accuse Jim Acosta of harboring a “cosmopolitan bias” during Wednesday’s news conference, they might have wondered whether he was accusing the CNN White House reporter of an excessive fondness for the cocktail made famous on “Sex and the City.” It’s a term that’s seldom been heard in American political discourse. But to supporters of the Miller-Bannon worldview, it was a cause for celebration. Breitbart, where Steve Bannon reigned before becoming Trump’s chief political strategist, trumpeted Miller’s “evisceration” of Acosta and put the term in its headline. So did white nationalist Richard Spencer, who hailed Miller’s dust-up with Acosta as “a triumph.”
Why does it matter? Because it reflects a central premise of one key element of President Donald Trump’s constituency—a premise with a dark past and an unsettling present.
So what is a “cosmopolitan”? It’s a cousin to “elitist,” but with a more sinister undertone. It’s a way of branding people or movements that are unmoored to the traditions and beliefs of a nation, and identify more with like-minded people regardless of their nationality. (In this sense, the revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine might have been an early American cosmopolitan, when he declared: “The world is my country; all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.”). In the eyes of their foes, “cosmopolitans” tend to cluster in the universities, the arts and in urban centers, where familiarity with diversity makes for a high comfort level with “untraditional” ideas and lives.
For a nationalist, these are fighting words. Your country is your country; your fellow citizens are your brethren; and your country’s traditions—religious and otherwise— should be yours. A nation whose people—especially influential people—develop other ties undermine national strength, and must be repudiated.
One reason why “cosmopolitan” is an unnerving term is that it was the key to an attempt by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to purge the culture of dissident voices. In a 1946 speech, he deplored works in which “the positive Soviet hero is derided and inferior before all things foreign and cosmopolitanism that we all fought against from the time of Lenin, characteristic of the political leftovers, is many times applauded.” It was part of a yearslong campaigned aimed at writers, theater critics, scientists and others who were connected with “bourgeois Western influences.” Not so incidentally, many of these “cosmopolitans” were Jewish, and official Soviet propaganda for a time devoted significant energy into “unmasking” the Jewish identities of writers who published under pseudonyms.
What makes this history relevant is that, all across Europe, nationalist political figures are still making the same kinds of arguments—usually but not always stripped of blatant anti-Semitism—to constrict the flow of ideas and the boundaries of free political expression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, for example, has more and more embraced this idea that unpatriotic forces threaten the nation. As Foreign Policy put it in 2014:
“The new theme of Russian politics [is] the conflation of loyalty to the Kremlin with patriotism. It says much that dissidents at home, from journalists failing to toe the official line to protesters on the streets, are castigated either as outright ‘foreign agents’ (every movement, charity, or organization accepting foreign money must register itself as such) or else as unknowing victims and vectors of external contamination — contamination, that is, from the West, whose cosmopolitanism and immorality Putin has come to see as an increasing threat to Russia’s identity.”
That same notion has characterized the politics of the former Soviet bloc. In Hungary, the president of its Parliament has repeatedly denounced his political opponents as “people without a country,” loyal only to values like freedom, contemptuous of tradition and religion. Its prime minister, Viktor Orban, has openly advocated for “illiberal democracy” and launched a campaign against the Jewish financier and philanthropist George Soros. In Poland, the reigning Law and Justice Party sees the nation besieged by dangerous influences. An article last year in World Press succinctly summarized the situation:
“In the party’s propaganda the country is in ruins, its economy robbed blind by international capital, while the foreign ownership of some newspapers and other types of mass media outlets made Poland into a colony, infecting Poles’ minds with rootless cosmopolitanism. … What is at stake is Polish Christian national values that must be protected at all cost, namely the linguistic and religious homogeneity of the country. Only Poles should reside in Poland, and a proper Pole must be a Polish-speaking Catholic.”
In one form or another, such sentiments have been at play in the politics of the Netherlands, Germany, France, and (in less blatant form) in the Brexit vote in Great Britain last year.
And they undergirded much of Trump’s campaign. One of its central premises was that “globalists,” regardless of ideology or party, were undermining American interests—by bringing low-skilled workers to our shores, by building factories in other lands, by letting international financial institutions grow rich while hollowing out American cities and towns.
“We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength and confidence of our country has disappeared over the horizon,” Trump said in his inaugural address. “From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it’s going to be—always—America First.”
To be clear: Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller would angrily wave away any suggestion that they are echoing the sentiments of anti-democratic political movements, much less anti-Semitic dog whistles. But there is no evading the unhappy reality that to label someone a “cosmopolitan” carries with it a clear implication that there is something less patriotic, less loyal … someone who is not a “real American.”
So maybe the next time Miller wants to duel with an obstreperous reporter, he might consider going back to “elitist”—that’s a real homegrown insult.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/03/the-ugly-history-of-stephen-millers-cosmopolitan-epithet-215454
==
troll pack takedown scam
alt-right aides consumed with antisemitism
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/08/gop-advisor-rick-wilson-mcmaster-attacks-being-pushed-by-white-house-alt-right-aides-consumed-with-antisemitism/
Tom Boggioni TOM BOGGIONI
05 AUG 2017 AT 13:53 ET
Appearing on MSNBC on Saturday morning, GOP strategist Rick Wilson said that the attacks on National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster are being coordinated by President Donald Trump advisers with a white nationalist agenda.
Speaking with AM Joy host Joy Reid, Wilson explained that some of Trump’s close aides are not pleased that the president is being reined in former military mean including McMaster and new White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.
==
https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2017/07/19/Pro-Trump-internet-personalities-throw-tantrums-after-ADL-identifies-their-hateful-rhetori/217316
Pro-Trump internet trolls claimed that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was a "terrorist organization" and compared the group to Nazis after ADL identified some of the biggest online personalities of the “alt-right” and “alt-lite” movements and called them out for spreading hateful rhetoric.
The ADL recently published a list of “alt-right” and “alt-lite” figures, identifying key players in both the white supremacist “alt-right” and the fringe right-wing media landscape of media trolls and smear merchants it inspired, which the ADL called the “alt-lite.” It included internet troll and Infowars contributor Mike Cernovich; smear merchant Jack Posobiec, who once received a temporary White House press pass; disgraced Breitbart provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos; The Gateway Pundit’s Lucian Wintrich; and Rebel Media’s Gavin McInnes, using the “alt-lite” banner to describe their prior affiliation and promotion of “alt-right” figures and ideologies. In a Periscope live stream, Cernovich responded to the list’s publication by urging his followers to spread the hashtag “#ADLTerror” on Twitter. Cernovich also called ADL “a terrorist organization” that had “targeted” him and his family for “murder and assassination” by including his name in the list.
Soon after Cernovich launched the hashtag, other alternative media personalities who were also mentioned in the ADL’s list rallied to attack the organization. Posobiec compared ADL’s members to Nazis and claimed the “death list”was being used to target Trump supporters; Wintrich called the ADL a “liberal terrorist organization” whose “only qualifier” to label people a hate group leader was support for Trump; Yiannopoulos accused the ADL of trying to get pro-Trump media figures like himself “hurt or killed by painting targets on our backs”; McInnes threatened to “sue the living shit out of everyone even remotely involved” with the list if he was attacked following its publication.
Allies and supporters of those on the ADL’s list also joined in on the attack. The Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft accused the ADL of publishing “a murder hit list” and stated that his website would take “further action” against the organization if it did not remove Wintrich’s name. Rebel Media’s Laura Loomer decried the ADL’s decision to publish a “hit list,” asking why the organization is “encouraging violent leftists to attack members of the right.” And “Ali,” a rising star among pro-Trump media personalities, also promoted the hashtag. Fans of these personalities created memes and videos and spread them on social media to show their support.
WhileBuzzFeedtechnology reporter Charlie Warzel pointed out that the ADL didn't necessarily provide full evidence of the actions that earned these trolls a spot on the list, the ADL was right to include them based on their habits of engaging in hateful rhetoric and online harassment. The organization correctly identified them for using their platforms to spread vitriol and honestly documented their efforts to sanitize their movement’s prior affiliation with “alt-right” circles and differentiate itself from white nationalism.
Warzel also correctly noted that these trolls are "more of a media arm than an ideological group of any kind." These individuals do not spread hate in the traditional way that has been the modus operandi of the “alt-right” figures also included in the ADL’s list.Rather than organizing community events and advocating for any specific policies, these figures have built a potent anti-liberal media apparatus that can be -- and often is -- mobilized to harass and smear any chosen target-of-the-day.
Over the past several months, these right-wing media personalities and pro-Trump internet trolls have fueled and engaged in harassment and doxing campaigns against a variety of people. They misquoted pop star Ariana Grande after a terrorist attack at her concert in Manchester, smearing her as “anti-American.” CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski’s family received dozens of threatening phone calls following an article he wrote about the origin of an anti-CNN meme Trump tweeted. And the internet trolls falsely accused popular online satirist Vic Berger of being a part of an online cohort of pedophiles. They were also key proponents of the “Great Meme War” with CNN, during which social media sites were flooded with high volumes of anti-CNN memes and numerous CNN employees were doxed and harassed.
Though these alternative media figures and internet trolls are now rebranding away from the “alt-right” leaders who once inspired them, they still deserve to be on the ADL list and should remain there until they cease using their platforms to incite harassment and encourage extremist rhetoric.
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/dont-look-now-investigators-are-exploring-if-russia-colluded-pro-trump-sites
The spread of Russian-made fake news stories aimed at discrediting Hillary Clinton on social media is emerging as an important line of inquiry in multiple investigations into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
Investigators are looking into whether Trump supporters and far-right websites coordinated with Moscow over the release of fake news, including stories implicating Clinton in murder or paedophilia, or paid to boost those stories on Facebook.
The head of the Trump digital camp, Brad Parscale, has reportedly been summoned to appear before the House intelligence committee looking into Moscow’s interference in the 2016 US election. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee carrying out a parallel inquiry, has said that at least 1,000 “paid internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia” were pumping anti-Clinton fake news into social media sites during the campaign.
Warner said there was evidence that this campaign appeared to be focused on key voters in swing states, raising the question over whether there was coordination with US political operatives in directing the flow of bogus stories.
Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed by the justice department to oversee the investigation into the Russian role in the election, is thought to be looking into all these issues, as well as possible links between Russian fake news factories and far-right sites in the US.
It is a wide-ranging investigation that is examining the unusually large number of contacts between Trump associates and Russian officials during the campaign, as well as the possibility that the Kremlin has personal or financial leverage over members in the Trump camp, including the president himself according to his own remarks on Twitter.
The role of Russian generated fake news is a separate strand which has gained less attention up to now, but the part it played in depressing the Clinton vote in key states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania in the critical last days of the 2016 campaign could have helped change the course of recent American history.
A huge wave of fake news stories originating from eastern Europe began washing over the presidential election months earlier, at the height of the primary campaign. John Mattes, who was helping run the outline campaign for the Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders from San Diego, said it really took off in March 2016.
“In a 30-day period, dozens of full-blown sites appeared overnight, running full level productions posts. It screamed out to me that something strange was going on,” Mattes said. Much of the material was untraceable, but he tracked 40% of the new postings back to eastern Europe.
Four of the Facebook members posting virulent and false stories about Clinton (suggesting, for example, that she had profited personally by arming Islamic State extremists) had the same name, Oliver Mitov. They all had a very small number of Facebook friends, including one which all four had in common. When Mattes tried to friend them and contact them there was no reply.
Many websites producing anti-Clinton fake news were based in Albania and Macedonia. A pro-Sanders Facebook page with nearly 90,000 followers was run by an Albanian IT expert who, when interviewed by the Huffington Post, appeared to speak very little English, although his page consistently published polished English prose.
Mattes, a former Senate investigator, did some digging into the sudden phenomenon of eastern European Sanders enthusiasts. He found that was a spike in activity on the anonymous browsing tool Tor in Macedonia that coincided with the launch of the fake news campaign, which he believes could represent Russian handlers contacting potential east European hosts to help them set up automated websites.
“This is a cost-effective hands-free method with no blowback to you if you are in St Petersburg creating this product,” Mattes said. He argued that if the pro-Sanders websites in east Europe had been primarily motivated by maximising clicks they would have moved on to another viral subject.
“What I found was that 95% of them has gone dark,” he said. “So my question is: what are they hiding and why did they run as soon as the investigation began?”
Mattes believes that the aim of the campaign was to damage Clinton, who Vladimir Putin saw as his arch foe, and then, after the primaries were over, to minimise the number of Sanders voters who switched their support to Clinton in the face-off against Trump.
He was particularly struck by a report on 10 August that formed part of the dossier on the Russian interference campaign compiled by the former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, which quoted an unnamed Trump associate discussing a Russian-driven campaign to alienate Sanders supporters from Clinton.
“He was writing in real time about things I was seeing happening in August, but I couldn’t articulate until September,” he said. Because the Sanders online campaign was so open, democratic and relatively unregulated, Mattes says he now realises: “We basically set ourselves up to be victims of an international cyberwarfare campaign. We were pawns in this but very effective pawns.”
Clint Watts, a former FBI counter-terrorism expert, said that a Russia-driven influence campaign also became apparent in the Republican primaries.
He told the Senate intelligence committee the campaign “may have helped sink the hopes of candidates more hostile to Russian interests long before the field narrowed”.
He saw the same pattern that Mattes had observed, of seemingly independent operators across Europe suddenly starting to propagate similar messages consistent with messaging from Moscow.
“What you have to look at now is how were these sites financed and you have look at their ownership. How did they get the funds to get started?” said Watts, now a senior fellow at the Centre For Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University.
He has also found a high degree of apparent coordination in the dissemination of fake news between official Russian propaganda outlets and “alt-right” sites in the US.
“They synchronise so quickly it looks as if they know when a particularly story was going to come out,” he added. “And they all parrot the Kremlin narrative.”
==
==
The U.S. intelligence community has long since concluded Russia meddled in the 2016 election, and it was reported shortly after the 2016 presidential election that a GOP superPAC linked to Paul Ryan used illegally hacked material to attack Democratic House candidates. But a bombshell report published on Thursday confirms that Republican political operatives were working with the Russian government to hurt Hillary Clinton and Democrats during the election — the first direct evidence of so-called collusion.
The Wall Street Journal reported that hacked information was posted on a blog run by Aaron Nevins, the political operative, and then passed along to top Trump adviser Roger Stone during the campaign. The Republican operative in Florida received a trove of Democratic documents from the allegedly Kremlin-linked hacker, Guccifer 2.0. For months, both Congress and the FBI have been scrutinizing evidence that associates of Trump may have colluded with Russia during the campaign.
Nevins confirmed to the Journal that he told hacker Guccifer 2.0 to “feel free to send any Florida based information” after learning that the hacker had tapped into Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) computers last summer. From the DCCC, Guccifer 2.0 released internal assessments of Democratic congressional candidates, known as “self-opposition research,” to GOP operatives using social media. Nevins told the Journal that, after receiving the stolen documents from the hacker, he “realized it was a lot more than even Guccifer knew that he had.” The stolen DCCC documents also contained sensitive information on voters in key Florida districts, breaking down how many people were considered dependable Democratic voters, undecided Democrats, Republican voters and the like. Nevins made a war analogy, describing the data he received to Guccifer 2.0 as akin to a “map to where all the troops are deployed.”
After Nevins published some of the material on the blog HelloFLA.com, using his own pseudonym, Guccifer 2.0 sent a link of the information to close Trump associate Roger Stone — who is currently under federal investigation for potential collusion with Russia.
“I just threw an arrow in the dark,” Nevins, who set up a Dropbox account for Guccifer 2.0 to transfer data, told the Journal. “If your interests align,” the operative concluded, “never shut any doors in politics.”
Stone told the Journal that while he did receive a link to Nevins’s blog from Guccifer 2.0, he didn’t share the stolen data published on the blog with anyone.
In addition to receiving hacked information about Democratic races in Florida, Nevins also received internal details about congressional districts in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia. The Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC with close ties to House Speaker Paul Ryan, eventually used the material that was stolen by hackers in attack ads against several Democrats.
Anthony Bustamante, a Republican campaign consultant for Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL), told the Journal that he used the stolen information to plan ad buys and better target a mailer effort: “I did adjust some voting targets based on some data I saw from the leaks.”
Republicans ignored Democrats’ pleas not to use the hacked material for political gain.
After Guccifer 2.0 targeted the chair of the DCCC, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi sent a letter to Paul Ryan arguing that “the NRCC’s use of documents stolen by the Russians plays right into the hands of one of the United States’ most dangerous adversaries,” and if the National Republican Campaign Committee continued using the materials, the GOP “will be complicit in aiding the Russian government in its effort to influence American elections.” Ryan never responded.
For his part, Trump has repeatedly denied any coordination with Russian officials. The Kremlin has also rejected any connection to Guccifer 2.0. But both the Department of Homeland Security and Director of National Intelligence believe Guccifer 2.0 is tied to Russian military intelligence.
Sophia Tesfaye is the Deputy Politics Editor at Salon.
===
http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/313108-declassified-report-putin-ordered-election-interference-to-help
Declassified report: Putin ordered election interference to help Trump
BY KATIE BO WILLIAMS - 01/06/17 03:59 PM EST 16,308
Declassified report: Putin ordered election interference to help Trump
Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a widespread influence campaign intended to help elect Donald Trump, the intelligence community said in a declassified report released Friday afternoon.
:{
}:
“Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump,” the report reads.
:{
}:
“We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.”
The bombshell document details the intelligence community's findings but provides little in the way of forensic evidence backing up its assessment, citing the need to protect sources and methods.
“While the conclusions in the report are all reflected in the classified assessment, the declassified report does not and cannot include the full supporting information, including specific intelligence and sources and methods,” the report reads.
The document is made up of publicly available information, painting a portrait of Moscow as making a shrewd decision to back a candidate it saw as friendlier to its interests.
According to the document, Putin “most likely” wanted to discredit Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, because “he has publicly blamed her since 2011 for inciting mass protests against his regime in late 2011 and early 2012, and because he holds a grudge for comments he almost certainly saw as disparaging him.”
But the former KGB agent saw Trump as having “Russia-friendly positions on Syria and Ukraine” and approved of his stated policy to work with Russia.
Moscow also reportedly saw the election of Trump as “a way to achieve an international counterterrorism coalition” against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
Officials note that Putin publicly contrasted the president-elect’s approach to Russia with Clinton’s “aggressive rhetoric” — but the report offers no previously unknown information.
There is some level of minor disagreement among intelligence agencies as to the strength of its judgment that Russia intended to help Trump.
The CIA and FBI have high confidence in the judgment, while the National Security Agency has moderate confidence, the report acknowledges.
:{
}:
The report — devoid of a “smoking gun” — is unlikely to silence skeptics who are unconvinced that the intelligence community can prove Russia’s motivations.
Trump has repeatedly refused to accept the community's conclusions and has treated its assessment as an attack on the legitimacy of his presidency.
The president-elect has instead focused on the intelligence community's long-public assessment that no physical voting machines were impacted by the Russian campaign.
After receiving a briefing from senior intelligence officials earlier on Friday, Trump issued a statement claiming that the hacks had “absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.”
:{
}:
:{
}:
Prominent Republicans echoed the approach following the release of the report.
“We must also be clear that there is no evidence that there was any interference in the voting or balloting process,” House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said in a statement.
“We cannot allow partisans to exploit this report in an attempt to delegitimize the president-elect’s victory. Donald Trump won this election fair and square because he heard the voices of Americans who felt forgotten.”
Russian intelligence did obtain access to multiple state and local electoral boards, according to the report, but the Department of Homeland Security assessed that none of the systems the hackers targeted or compromised were involved in vote tallying.
Democrats immediately pushed back on the assertion that the campaign had no impact on the election.
“It is one thing to say that there was no tampering with vote tallying — which is true — it is another thing to say that the daily dumping of documents disparaging to Secretary Clinton that was made possible by Russian cyber operations had no effect on the campaigns,” said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
“Whether [Russia] had a decisive impact on the outcome will never be known and was certainly not the subject of the intelligence community's analysis, but that they were of great consequence is undeniable."
The Russian campaign involved more than just hacking. According to the report, it also included propaganda campaigns in the media and a “troll campaign” on social media.
Russian state-run outlets Sputnik and RT both amped up campaigns to delegitimize the Clinton campaign, including English-language videos like one headlined “Clinton and ISIS Funded with the Same Money,” and promoted the idea that WikiLeaks had an email that would “put Clinton in Prison.”
“In August, Kremlin-linked political analysts suggested avenging negative Western reports on Putin by airing segments devoted to Secretary Clinton’s alleged health problems,” said the report, which describes Clinton’s health as a focal point of the campaign.
Russia’s “Internet Research Agency,” a paid army of social media “trolls,” also got in on the act. Accounts once devoted to supporting Russian annexation of the Ukraine flipped to support Trump.
According to officials and lawmakers who have seen both, the report is identical to the classified version of the document prepared for President Obama.
The so-called Gang of Eight — House and Senate leaders and the heads of the two Intelligence committees — reviewed the complete document earlier on Friday.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Friday morning lamented that more of the document would not be made public, perhaps hinting at frustration that the Obama administration hasn’t done more to silence doubters.
“I would hope that we could get more," she said Friday morning. "I know we have to respect sources and methods. But I think that even Congress has the right to know more than they want to disclose to Congress, beyond the Gang of Eight."
"So this will be interesting in terms of what the disclosure is, of this report," she added. "But suffice to say, it's stunning in its conclusions, and you'll see some of it."
==
http://www.alternet.org/culture/trolling-marketing-strategy-milo-playbook
Ryan Holiday, the media strategist behind Tucker Max's supremely sexist (but well known by fans and haters alike) I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell has written a playbook on trolling, titled Trust Me, I'm Lying—and so-called alt-right leaders have found his book useful.
In an article for The Observer on Tuesday, Holiday explains the way a marketing campaign based on trolling works. The more outrageous and offensive the product, ideology or personality, the more of a duty high-road, moral media has to cover it and call it out. But conversely, all that free publicity helps to amplify the troll's reach to find more of the otherwise tiny audience that would buy such atrocious ideas—an audience that previously was difficult and costly to target.
Holiday uses the example of Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, who has said and done plenty of offensive things:
"Let’s say 9 out of 10 people who hear something Milo says will find it repulsive and juvenile. Because of that response rate, it’s going to be hard for someone like Milo to market himself through traditional channels. His potential audience is too spread out, and doesn’t have that much in common. He can’t advertise, he can’t find them one by one. It’s just not going to scale.
"But let’s say he can acquire massive amounts of negative publicity by pissing off people in the media? Well now all of a sudden someone is absorbing the cost of this inefficient form of marketing for him. If a CNN story reaches 100,000 people, that’s 90,000 people all patting themselves on the back for how smart and decent they are. They’re just missing the fact that the 10,000 new people that just heard about Milo for the first time. The same goes for when you angrily share on Facebook some godawful thing one of these people has said. The vast majority of your friends rush to agree, but your younger cousin has a dark switch in his brain go on for the first time."
What's interesting about Holiday's argument isn't just the dilemma about whether or not to give free publicity to people making money off hate (be it misogyny, racism, xenophobia, or homophobia), but also the proposed solutions.
The media's first choice—not to cover the perpetration of hate—doesn't appeal to Holiday (he thinks it could set a standard of letting horrible things go unnoticed). Here's how Holiday explains the media's catch-22 when faced with a troll's marketing strategy, again using Milo Yiannopoulos as an example:
"This approach requires a certain shamelessness but it is effective because it puts the dominant group into the horns of a dilemma: Ignore them and let them do something offensive or object and give them the attention they need to survive and thrive? It’s why for Milo, there is no such thing as bad publicity right now. He’s maneuvered his brand with ruthless, bulletproof perfection."
The media's second option, which Holiday supports, is essentially to give trolls a chance (ick) to embarrass themselves and prove themselves either unqualified, unknowledgeable, or just not committed enough to promote the horrible things they're promoting.
"Organize all you want, get as many people as you can to show up at their events, but don’t try to shut them down," Holiday advises. "Regain the moral high ground by saying that you absolutely respect their right to free speech."
Frankly, it seems like a bad idea to give a platform to people with a history of infringing on the rights of others. But Holiday goes on:
"And then, actually listen and talk to them. To me, the most effective retorts against the alt-right were when Trevor Noah had Tomi Lahren on his show and when Elle Reeve profiled Richard Spencer for Vice. Both came off looking mostly like jokes. Tomi Lahren showed her age. Richard Spencer revealed his movement to be mostly a collection of a few thousand sad dorks."
I repeat, this troll-takedown seems dangerous. There must be a third way, perhaps one that's not as feasible or effective in a landscape where attention is short and subtlety is often wasted. Here are two compromise options: 1) make public mention of the terrible thing, but give the hate less attention than the context spinning its falsehood or wrongness, and prioritize more valuable news; or 2) let the troll speak, but make sure it's with a battle-ready interviewer and that it's simultaneously fact-checked. The latter presents a challenge, as Bill Moyers learned, when he described his disappointment that CNN let Kellyanne Conway on air a few days after banning her. Even when an interviewer is skilled at cutting down hateful language or lies, a dedicated troll can spew more incendiary comments than are possible to expose as fast and effectively as they are spouted.
Another key point Holiday brings to the table is that as much as we worry about normalizing trolls when they're repeatedly successful, it's not in the troll's interest to be normalized because then they lose the spotlight and aren't famous for being outrageous anymore.....
===