Report Shows U.S. Citizens Helped Coordinate Online Disinformation Assault From Macedonia
from the disinformation-nation dept
You'll recall that even back in 2014 a lot was being made about Putin's troll factories, or the oodles of hired underlings paid by the Russian leader to fill the internet with bile and disinformation twenty-four hours a day. Much of what we originally learned about these disinformation shops came from Russian whistleblowers like Lyudmila Savchuk. Savchuk spent two months employed by the operation and was so disgusted that she quit, launched an anti-propaganda social activist campaign, and successfully sued the Russian government for one Ruble in a bid to expose the effort.
Over the last few years we learned that these online propaganda efforts were much larger and sophisticated that originally believed. Reports as early as 2015 had already highlighted how these also extended well beyond just routine shitposting and clever memes and into the real world; like the time Russia went so far as to open a museum in Manhattan to try and spin its "annexation" of Crimea.
Many tried to downplay the impact and scope of these efforts in the following years, insisting that no real damage could come from a bunch of marginally-competent Russians with broken english shitposting on the internet (a narrative that doesn't quite gel with the DOJ indictment or the whistleblower accounts that have emerged since, showing the efforts were notably more nuanced and sophisticated than initial 2014 and 2015 reporting suggested).
This week, a new report from Buzzfeed made it clear that 2016's disinformation wave wasn't just constrained to a few warehouses in St. Petersberg. Back in 2016, reports emerged suggesting that some entrepreneurial "teens in the Balkans" had been part of a broad effort to spread disinformation in support of Trump ahead of the 2016 election. The stories at the time identified more than 100 pro-Trump websites being run from a single town in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. At the time, these efforts were largely brushed aside as the result of local teens eager to cash in on Facebook monetization of garbage information:
"The young Macedonians who run these sites say they don't care about Donald Trump. They are responding to straightforward economic incentives: As Facebook regularly reveals in earnings reports, a US Facebook user is worth about four times a user outside the US. The fraction-of-a-penny-per-click of US display advertising — a declining market for American publishers — goes a long way in Veles."
But an investigation by Buzzfeed has since uncovered a notably more industrialized propaganda effort, aided, in part, by Americans:
"But after reviewing social media posts, government records, domain registry information, and archived versions of fake news sites, as well as interviewing key players, BuzzFeed News, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, and the Investigative Reporting Lab Macedonia can now reveal that Veles’ political news industry was not started spontaneously by apolitical teens.
Rather, it was launched by a well-known Macedonian media attorney, Trajche Arsov — who worked closely with two high-profile American partners for at least six months during a period that overlapped with Election Day.
The report states that Arsov, in turn, was working with Americans like Paris Wade, who is currently running for office in Arizona. It also notes that at least one member of Russia's Internet Research Agency indicted by Robert Mueller was in Macedonia three months before the first web domain for the country’s US-focused disinformation site was registered. And while there's no hard, public evidence yet linking Russia to the effort, the report heavily implied that American and European investigators are pretty clearly headed that general direction:
"Reporters did not find any evidence connecting the Russian, Anna Bogacheva, to the Veles sites. Arsov denies any links to Russia. But now Macedonian security agencies are cooperating with law enforcement in the United States and at least two Western European countries to probe possible links between Russians, US citizens, and the pro-Trump “fake news” websites, two senior Macedonian officials said.
A senior FBI agent familiar with the Macedonia case confirmed that the bureau is assisting with the investigations. The agent said that information determined to be of interest to Mueller is being shared with his office, but declined to comment further."
Granted that's not to say that much of the motivation wasn't just simple profit for folks like Arsov, who proclaimed that duping Americans into consuming bullshit was profitable -- at least until Facebook started weeding out garbage. But the story also makes it clear that Arsov was pretty cagey about his relationship with allies in the States, and quotes former FBI agents like Clint Watts, who suspect that much of the initial funding and analytics know how may have originated with people like Anna Bogacheva, who was among the 13 Russian nationals indicted by the Mueller probe back in February:
"According to the indictment, Bogacheva at one point oversaw the “data analysis group” for the agency’s US operation. Along with another agency employee, Bogacheva allegedly traveled around the United States for about three weeks in June 2014, gathering information for an intelligence report that was shared with her superior at the agency.
Exactly a year later, she arrived in Macedonia."
And while there's again no hard ties between Russia and the Macedonia efforts yet, the report makes it clear that multi-country law enforcement inquiries are in their very "early stages" as they try to unravel the scope of the disinformation assault. Meanwhile, if there's one thing that has been made clear since this wave of propaganda was first unearthed, it's that this entire affair keeps getting larger, weirder, and more complicated, in stark contrast to those intent on framing it as some meaningless trolling by a handful of innocuous, ineffective and hapless shitposters.
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Filed Under: anna bogacheva, election trolling, fake news, macedonia, paris wade, politics, russia, trajche arsov, troll factory
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Glass houses....
Nethanyu jumps right to mind as the most recent meddling of ours that was exposed.
But "we THINK Russia paid Macedonians to shitpost on facebook" is "news"? We've made heros and heroines out of the foreign "leaders" that WE influenced to do similar.
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That, however, does not that what you say is correct, or even relevant.
"I gave up trying to educate Techdirt's authors on this subject"
Because they rejected your reasonably sourced evidence when you presented it, or because you were trying to "educate" them without truly holding the educated position?
"Facts that don't support the narrative are not appreciated here."
They are if you don't act like a dick and provide real evidence for your claims? I'm yet to see it. Lots of name-calling and demands that you're right because you say so, but no actual discussions or evidence.
Would you like to try those things?
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This wouldn't completely eliminate Russian hacking, but it'd make it much more difficult and expensive. Turn them into North Korea.
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I'm not sure this is going to end in the result you want.
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Re: Facts
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Recently, stories about cutting off sex workers through SESTA/FOSTA has just pushed the activity into the dark and pushed more people into dangerous situations.
There was also the story about how shutting down Backpage has significantly hurt law enforcement's ability to arrest pimps because their greatest source has gone dark, again, putting sex workers in danger.
These sorts of "moral" arguments that result in people going dark tend to result in everyone being worse off.
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It can't be hidden or pushed underground by cutting off their internet, because doing that makes it impossible for them to do what they do.
Nor can they just move illegals into other countries and keep it up... much of what they do is done by *volume*. 120 people in a big room with rows of computers.
Cutting those off from the internet solves this problem.
If there's a computer on the network with malware that's spewing out malicious traffic you don't whine "but we can't unplug it, it'll just make it madder!". That's nonsense.
Of course, the United States couldn't do this unilaterally. But it looks like Europe might be getting fed up with the shit too.
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Re: Glass houses....
I've got to wonder if anyone cheering this on has even the vaguest clue of how WE operate to influence elections in other countries.
Exactly. This country is such a fucking hypocritical shithole that it isn't even funny.
We should go on an apology tour because of how much we suck.
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Cutting them off would just move all their operations to be launched from other countries.
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While creating thousands of new problems and destroying the lives of millions who had nothing to do with the activity you're trying to stop... but may be happy to take part in a little retribution.
"If there's a computer on the network with malware that's spewing out malicious traffic you don't whine "but we can't unplug it, it'll just make it madder!". That's nonsense"
No, but you can say "don't unplug the router and kick the entire subnet from the network and damn the consequences" either. You come up with ways to mitigate the problems caused by the malware while trying to keep the legitimate traffic stable.
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Doing so would punish the 99% of Russians who are decent people, because a few with political power wish to attack the USA.
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And if the recent NRA mole is any indication, they keep a sizeable portion of their operation on US soil already. Shutting down Russia would have zero effect.
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So your complaint here is that it would be too horrible that innocent Russians wouldn't be able to post to Facebook, even if that stops the attacks?
> No, but you can say "don't unplug the router and kick the entire subnet
If the entire subnet is infected, you do exactly this. You don't just sit around waiting for the problem to somehow go away.
You amputate the gangrene, and you quarantine the plague.
Then, maybe in a few years after things have settled down and the last vestiges of the KGB nonsense policy have been annihilated, you offer to hook them back up. Or maybe not.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Shutoff
These activities aren't performed by one guy. Or three. Or eight.
It's a room of dozens/hundreds of people. They clock in before their shift. Clock out and go home afterward.
And this does prevent it. It prevents the mass production propaganda very well. The Russians can indeed send a few out to use the internet in other countries, but I doubt that very many of them are going to let the Russians set up shop and do this shit on their own soil, especially if it's already been demonstrated just what the penalty is for that.
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Definitions
-name even one specific piece of information diseminated in some blog that was disinformation. Just one example.
-tell anyone with a straigh face how reading a piece with some purported flasehood in it (which, of course, describes accurately most of the articles written in the NYT, the WaPo, and spouted on CNN, MSNBC, and even Fox), could effectively prevent any individual from critical thought processes. There is a sucker born every minute, but you can't fool all the people all of the time. In other words, these articles purporting to show that some meanies somewhere could really change anything in a person's mind by saying something false, they assume that people are stupid zombies.
-and finally, fake news is a dogwhistle for an article with a view, opinion, or even evidenc-filled content that the author or the mainstream does not agree with, and thus considers untrue. In other words, the contents of an article that has been labeled as 'fake' could just as easily be (and often is) just an article expressing a different opnion or view of things.
It is astounding to me that TechDirt would not understand that the entire fake news thing is just an attempt to censor speech.
But again, name even one specific bit of supposed fake disinformation disseminated by some blokes in Macedonia. And then be ready for that specific bit to be argued: What is fake about it? Is it an opinion that is "outside" the mainstream (and that is your sole criterion for calling it fake)? Then would be, how would a person reading the specific article have changed his vote in favor of Trump by reading said "disinformation?"
I doubt that any specifics will ever be put forth for this stuff. It's all nonsense. Even if I read 1,000 articles of so-called "disinformation" it could not possibly have changed my assessment of Ms. Clinton's venality and unsuitability, which came from her own actions and her own statements.
Neither would this so-called disinformation campaign have changed the opinions of anyone else either. It is an insult to the basic intelligence of human beings to believe that they can be so easily led. But again: led to where? Name one specific bit of disinformation and make sure it isn't just a point of view that you disagree with.
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1. It's not a problem (either it's fake, or real but inconsequential). If so, then you can ignore my comments as being a solution to a non-problem.
2. It's crime. If it's a crime, then we can only punish the people responsible (Putin, underlings) and only if we have some sort of trial. But they're Russian nationals not under our jurisdiction and furthermore they're the Russian government. The official government. Governments don't commit crimes, they wage war. And if they're waging war, treating it like a crime just hurts us. They sure as shit don't care about harming Americans who have done nothing to them. If you think of this as a crime, then you're just deluded.
3. It's war. Not a WWII-style "declared" war, but one just the same. And unless you want to surrender, then you have to wage war of your own. The nice thing about this one is we don't have to kill those 99% of the Russians who are innocent. That'd be horrible. We'd just be cutting them off from Facebook and Snapchat. Which if I understand, the Russian government has been steering them away from for awhile now.
If you have another way of looking at this, offer it up.
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Everything comes to a screeching halt. No work can be done. If something urgent happens, they send people home to work from *that* computer...
So something *can* be done, but it's not as easy. Not as much is accomplished.
Propaganda is bandwidth intensive. It's not two people in a cubicle receiving memos directly from Putin. There's an entire support staff. Analysts and team leaders and managers.
So while they could send some Russian off to Macedonia, or even a few, they couldn't do what they do now. It'd all fall apart.
We already have an example of a country nearly completely cut off from the internet... North Korea. They were blamed for that Sony hack a few years ago. Don't know if they did it or not, but it's the sort of thing they could've done.
What they currently can't do, at all, is Russian cyber-meddling of the sort we're seeing now.
Why? Are they all saints that they'd never do such a thing? Are they all primitive rice farmers who can't understand how to do such a thing? Does Juche forbid election-meddling in enemy nations?
They don't have the bandwidth. They're so cut off that the best they can do is a sort of heist. It only takes a few experts and a single low bandwidth internet access, doesn't need to be wide enough to suck down terabytes of social media 24 hours a day.
Macedonia would either prevent this shit themselves, or be cut off the same way. Western technology companies might whine about not being able to sell to/within Russia whatever it is they sell, but no one gives even that much of a shit about Macedonia.
Most of the former Soviet bloc countries are not sympathetic to the Russians. China's not very friendly. We could cut all the fibers at once, put them in the dark. Have webcams monitor the installations 24/7, just to make sure someone's not being bribed to turn a cable or two back on without the whole world going apeshit over it within hours.
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Arizona is not Nevada
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Is it an indictment of US public education to admit that I learned about the origin of the word sabotage from Star Trek IV: The Undiscovered Country rather than in school?
Is it an indictment of myself to admit that it was only about ten minutes ago that I learned that Valeris' etymology lesson wasn't entirely accurate?
Plain URL: https://www.etymonline.com/word/sabotage
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Re: Re: Glass houses....
Nobody wants their neighbors to be their enemies. So you screen who wants that "house" and do what you can to get the "right" neighbors.
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Confirmed, and also:
down his page linking to his own fake news site, claiming they
shut down his site and caused his staff to lose their jobs when
fact it seems obvious he fired them the moment he was caught
spreading a particularly nasty collection of disinformation.
https://parisfornevada.com/about/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Writers_News
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Re: Re: Re: get the "right" neighbors
Did Arbenz chose United Fruit and the CIA? After Archer-Danial Midlands converted us from 5 pounds to 500 pounds of corn syrup a year, did the Philippines and Nicaragua and El Salvador chose to live on a sugarcane diet?
Quakers bought this house in 1963, i became 'Warden' here in 1988. The house next door has had the same owner since 1970, a small fire in 2001 & vacant ever since (all my female cats slept on the furniture next door for 17 years).
This year the house was gentrified with $50k, and for 3 weeks the new couple renting the place trashes us loudly outside our bathroom window, bought a rottweiler pup, put up web-security cameras in the driveway, bitched us out for parking there (the car was THEIR niece)and THEIR property line will not allow a car through unless we donate 30 inches. Should we?
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Even though he fired his staff in December…
Even though the site is no longer updated it's still online.
How long until he realizes his fake news site is holding
back his polling numbers and finally gives up on it? ;]
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Re: 'I want them to cut his thing off and bury it'
ULA will have nothing to launch their second stage with, Lockheed will have to return their F-22 design, Sea-Launch will have to leave Long Beach and the US-Japan-Canada-EU side of the ISS will be without UBER or LYFT.
First quote from 'Pennies from Heaven' (1981)
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You didn't say "shut them off from Facebook (a useless gesture, as there are many other sites out there they can use). You said "shut them off from the internet". That's a hugely different proposition, with real negative consequences for a huge number of people.
"If the entire subnet is infected, you do exactly this. You don't just sit around waiting for the problem to somehow go away."
Let's just say, I'm glad you're neither my network admin or my doctor if you're going to do such things with a minor infection to a small amount of the area.
"You amputate the gangrene"
But, you're talking about amputating the leg when only the little toe is gangrenous.
"Then, maybe in a few years after things have settled down and the last vestiges of the KGB nonsense policy have been annihilated"
I somehow thing that destroying the Russian economy and initiating huge public support for bringing back the cold war would have the exact opposite of that effect.
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Who can be located anywhere. What do you do when those guys decide to set up the room outside of the Russian borders? Your scorched earth tactic doesn't even cover one of the countries some of them were operating in, FFS!
"I doubt that very many of them are going to"
But some will, and if one of them does, then you've achieved nothing except destroying the lives of millions of innocent people.
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...and banking, and communications, and business access to the outside world, and a huge number of things you clearly haven't thought about. There are massive implications with both social and economic consequences that are extremely negative for the entire region, and ultimately the world if.when they decide to retaliate.
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Work and productivity are lost for the duration of the outage. If the outage goes on long enough, people lose contracts or can't get paid, people get laid off, people get reassigned to places with reliable internet access or the company folds.
" If something urgent happens, they send people home to work from *that* computer...""
But, you're advocating that no computer can work from within that entire country, so nobody can work from any computer. Millions of jobs would be lost.
"Propaganda is bandwidth intensive."
No, it really isn't. Certainly not compared to legitimate work.
"Have webcams monitor the installations 24/7"
How do you do this without internet, dipshit? If you're talking about installing another super secret network, I'm sure Russians would have no problem borrowing that bandwidth for their own purposes, including showing the world how you're affecting their citizens - and they wouldn't have to lie this time!\
You have a very, very limited view of the world, and not one that comes close to reality. You have . no idea of the real consequences of what you demand.
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Re: Definitions
The Brexit bus is one great example, though that (probably) was the product of a home-grown group of liars rather than any specific intervention. But, if you're seriously saying that no misinformation exists, and that people wouldn't change their vote based on petty things, you're not paying attention.
"Even if I read 1,000 articles of so-called "disinformation" it could not possibly have changed my assessment of Ms. Clinton's venality and unsuitability, which came from her own actions and her own statements. "
Good for you, that means you're both intelligent and honest. A lot of other people seemed to hate her for thjngs that were patently untrue, and they had been conditioned to believe all sorts of nonsense over a could of decades.
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1) not a problem
2) a crime
3) a war
Lack of imagination occurs as you age, but seriously - there are no other ways to "look" at this.
Sounds like we had better start another war huh.
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