New Report Details Massive Mysterious Influence Campaign On Twitter

from the something's-happening dept

Over the weekend, the group Guardians.ai released a fascinating report detailing what appears to be a massive influence campaign taking shape on Twitter. By way of disclosure, one of the three key authors of the report, Brett Horvath, is also one of the key people behind the election simulation game that we helped create and run, though I have nothing to do with this new report. The report is fascinating, and if you don't feel like reading the whole thing, Bloomberg also has a write up.

The key to the report is that they have identified some truly fascinating patterns that they've spotted among a cluster of users on Twitter, who, at the very least appear to be acting in a manner that suggests some attempt to influence others. I should note that unlike other such reports that jump to conclusions, the authors of this report are very, very, very clear that they're not saying these are "bots." Nor are they saying these are Russian trolls. Nor are they saying that a single source is controlling them. Nor are they saying that everyone engaged in the activity they spotted is officially part of whatever is happening. They note it is entirely possible that some very real people are a part of what's happening and might not even know it.

However, what they uncovered does appear strange and notable. It certainly looks like coordinated behavior, at least in part, and it appears to be designed to boost certain messages. The report specifically looks at statements on Twitter about voter fraud using the hashtag #voterfraud, but it appears that this "network" is targeting much more than that. What made the report's authors take notice is that in analyzing instances of the use of the tag #voterfraud, they noticed that it appeared to have a "heartbeat." That is, it would spike up and down on a semi-regular basis, based on nothing in particular. There wasn't a specific news hook why this entire network would suddenly talk about #voterfraud, and they wouldn't talk about it all the time. But... every month or so there would suddenly be a spike.

From there, they started digging into the accounts involved in this particular activity. And they found a very noticeable pattern:

We wanted to know how these accounts were coming onto Twitter and gaining mentions at such a high velocity — what was leading accounts to gain influence, so quickly? So we took a sample set of accounts from a group of suspicious Voter Fraud accounts and started looking at their activity day-by-day, starting at day one. What we began to notice is a pattern for how the influence machine might be working, and how coordination could be happening.

Here's the consistent network pattern we saw:

• User signs up for an account.
• User starts replying to multiple accounts—some known verified Twitter users and many other accounts that are also on our list of actors, or that fit a similar profile.
• The replies tend to contain: text, memes, hashtags, and @mentions of other accounts, building on common themes.
• At some point the pattern shifts from being all replies to original tweets. Those original tweets contain the same types of content as their replies do.
• It appears that this pattern cycles and repeats when the next batch of new accounts come online. The next batch starts replying to the existing, newly influential accounts, and carry on with the same sequence of events for gaining influence.

The report highlights this pattern with a few example accounts, though the full study looked at (and continues to look at) many, many more. What you see over and over again are Twitter feeds of people who seem to do little other than constantly tweet pro-Trump memes and disinformation, and yet magically get thousands and tens of thousands of retweets, often coming out of nowhere. Here's one example:

The gray line at the bottom is the number of tweets. The black line is the number of mentions from others. Notice how it goes from nothing to around 10,000 in no time? Sometimes the accounts are more or less dormant for a while, before suddenly becoming massively popular for no clear reason at all:

Again, as the report makes clear, these aren't necessarily bots (though, they may be). They aren't necessarily even aware that they're a part of something. But the patterns seen over and over and over and over again are uncanny. And it certainly provides strong circumstantial evidence of some sort of influence operation -- and it's one that appears to continue to grow and grow.

As the report notes:

We don’t know why this activity is occurring, or who is behind it. However, the best we can do is look at the data around what’s actually happening. What we've discovered along the way is that there are overlapping patterns of behavior, demonstrating some form of coordination.

We think it's possible that some of these accounts don't realize that they're coordinating or part of a larger influence network. For example, one of these sample accounts might genuinely care about Voter Fraud. A bad actor, coordinating large numbers of accounts could find this person’s tweets useful, then amplify those tweets through thousands of @mentions and replies.

By focusing on the hard data around coordination, we can better understand how public conservations are being distorted and how it affects society. Whatever your views are on Voter Fraud, these accounts and the accounts that amplify them are rapidly accelerating their activity in the lead-up to Election Day.

Similarly, of course, it's not clear that this is actually having any impact on anyone's views. But it's at least worth looking at what happens when there is what appears to be massively coordinated activity, mostly focused around spreading disinformation regarding the election and more. The full methodology of the report is available on the site, as are the names of 200 of the accounts studied.

What's fascinating, of course, is the sheer size of what's happening, and the level of coordination necessary to make it happen. Twitter's response to the report (as noted in the Bloomberg article) is pretty much what you'd expect Twitter to say:

“While we prohibit coordinated malicious behavior, and enforce accordingly, we’ve also seen real people who share the same views organize using Twitter,” the company’s statement said. “This report effectively captures what often happens when hot button issues gain attention and traction in active groups.”

Indeed, that's part of what's so tricky here. Could this kind of thing happen organically? Well, certainly much of it can. Lots of people who share the same views on any particular subject often will see surges in conversations around those topics, including lots of retweets, mentions and replies. But the pattern here definitely looks different. When these things happen organically, they tend to have a fairly different rhythm, either a lot more sustained, or the spikes are much more spread out and explainable (e.g., there was some news event that tied to the topic). Similarly, it is hard to see how so many pseudononymous people, who no one else really knows, magically all jump up to thousands or tens of thousands of mentions with no clear explanation for their sudden and sustained fame.

But this is also why Twitter is put in an impossible position if it's expected to spot all of this. Even with so much evidence, it's still possible that what Guardians.ai spotted was organically formed. It may seem unlikely, but how can you tell? And you can bet that there are some with less than virtuous intent, who are actively figuring out ways to increasingly make all of this activity look organic. Expecting that Twitter, or any company, can always magically determine what is and what is not "authentic" behavior online, is an impossible task. And the very fact that it might sweep up some perfectly innocuous accounts in the process also makes it troubling to expect that the platform should be in charge of sorting out who's who and who's real in these kinds of situations. But, then again, if these kinds of disinformation campaigns truly are having an impact on influencing the public, that too should be a concern. Either way, as the report highlights, there is still much work to be done in analyzing how social networks are being used to influence the public.

Filed Under: bots, campaigns, coordination, influence, politics, social media
Companies: twitter

Georgia's Brian Kemp And The No Good, Very Bad Claim That Democrats Were Hacking Voter Registration System

from the can-we-not? dept

Okay, let's start with this. Can we all agree -- no matter what your party, ideological, or candidate preference -- that in any election where you are up for one of the offices, that you shouldn't be the one in charge of safeguarding the integrity of the election? This seems like a fairly basic point concerning democracy, that if you're a candidate for office, you should recuse yourself from anything involving election integrity. However, that's not the way things work around here, apparently. In at least three key elections this year, current secretaries of state, who are in charge of election integrity, are running for higher office while being in charge of counting their own votes. It just so happens that this year all three of those cases involve Republicans (and all three of those Republicans have a long and fairly detailed history of voter suppression tactics), but the issue applies equally to Democrats who might be in the same position. No one who is in charge of election integrity should ever be in the position of running for office at the same time.

But let's focus in on just one of the three individuals in that situation this year: Republican Brian Kemp, Georgia's Secretary of State, who is in a very heated campaign to be Governor of Georgia, campaigning against Democrat Stacey Abrams. As you may know, our stated policy on Techdirt is that we tend not to name the party affiliation of any politician, unless it truly matters to the story. That's because in this age of red team/blue team insanity, many people determine what they agree or disagree with depending on the color of the uniform. However, in this story, the party affiliations matter, not for which one is which (we could have posted an identical story with the party's changed), but because the dispute here clearly involves partisan politics.

As you may have heard, on Sunday, just two days before the election, Kemp (who's been getting hit with a bunch of bad headlines around his failed attempts at voter suppression in that state) announced that he had opened an investigation into an alleged "failed attempt to hack the state's voter registration system" by the Democratic Party of Georgia. Most of the headlines about this correctly noted that Kemp's office provided basically zero details to support this claim. Indeed, the entire announcement was two very short paragraphs long:

After a failed attempt to hack the state's voter registration system, the Secretary of State's office opened an investigation into the Democratic Party of Georgia on the evening of Saturday, November 3, 2018. Federal partners, including the Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation, were immediately alerted.

"While we cannot comment on the specifics of an ongoing investigation, I can confirm that the Democratic Party of Georgia is under investigation for possible cyber crimes," said Candice Broce, Press Secretary. "We can also confirm that no personal data was breached and our system remains secure."

Before we dig into what appears to have happened, it's time to take a little jump back in time. You see, back in 2016, Georgia Secretary of State Kemp also raised the alarm about what he claimed was an attempt by the US Department of Homeland Security to "breach" his office's firewall. Kemp sent an angry letter to then DHS boss Jeh Johnson, insisting that this was a sneaky attempt by DHS to do penetration testing and test the security of Georgia's election systems without permission.

Except... none of that was accurate. Six months later, the investigation revealed that Kemp misinterpreted someone from DHS checking an openly accessible database on the Secretary of State's site to check firearms licenses.

An earlier, internal DHS investigation into the reported incident showed that the "attempt to penetrate the Georgia Secretary of State's firewall" was actually residual traffic from a Federal Law Enforcement Training Center employee checking the Georgia firearms license database. That employee said he was doing due diligence on private security contractors for the facility.

That traffic, the first report determined, was caused by the employee cutting and pasting data from the database to Microsoft Excel, which sent light traffic to the Georgia server while parsing the data. That traffic would have been in no way abnormal.

The DHS inspector general, which operates independently from the DHS chain of command, conducted a second investigation. It validated the first report's results

That report further noted that "the DHS internet addresses that contacted the Georgia systems could not be used to attack those systems in the way Kemp described."

And, as you'll see, this article is already so long that we won't bother with more other than a link to another story about how Kemp has been credibly accused of destroying evidence in a still ongoing lawsuit about whether or not Georgia's voting system was hacked.

So, Kemp already has some credibility problems with "crying wolf" about supposed hacks of his computer systems before. And those should only increase given what appears to have lead to yesterday's claim of an "investigation." The small, but respected investigative journalism site WhoWhatWhy has a fairly detailed look at what happened and it looks really, really bad for Kemp. You see, on Saturday, the Democratic Party of Georgia had discovered massive vulnerabilities in the voter registration system overseen by Kemp, and had passed those details on to security experts... and then someone passed them along to WhoWhatWhy.

Just before noon on Saturday, a third party provided WhoWhatWhy with an email and document, sent from the Democratic Party of Georgia to election security experts, that highlights “massive” vulnerabilities within the state’s My Voter Page and its online voter registration system.

According to the document, it would not be difficult for almost anyone with minimal computer expertise to access millions of people’s private information and potentially make changes to their voter registration — including canceling it.

The publication spoke to a bunch of security experts, who all noted (correctly) that actually testing the vulnerabilities would be illegal, but...

...several logged onto the My Voter Page to look at the code used to build the site — something any Georgian voter could do with a little instruction — and confirmed the voter registration system’s vulnerabilities.

They all agreed with the assessment that the data of voters could easily be accessed and changed.

“For such an easy and low hanging vulnerability to exist, it gives me zero confidence in the capabilities of the system administrator, software developer, and the data custodian,” Kris Constable, who runs a privacy law and data security consulting firm, told WhoWhatWhy. “They should not be trusted with personally identifiable information again. They have showed incompetence in proper privacy-protecting data custodian capabilities.”

From the reporting, it appears that the vulnerability is the kind of mistake that was common on the web two decades ago, that once you've logged in you can access anyone else's content just by changing the URL. Basically anyone with any degree of knowledge of online security learned to block such a vulnerability at least a decade or more ago. It is astounding that such a vulnerability might still exist online, let alone on something as vital and key to democracy as a state election system.

It appears that this is the basis of Kemp's new investigation. The Democratic Party had discovered just how poorly Kemp's own team had built its online voter registration system, and his response is to blame the messenger. Of course, we see this kind of thing all the time in writing about vulnerabilities reporting, and we've always pointed out how ridiculous it is. But here, it's been taken to a new level, because beyond the usual dynamic, here we have the Republican running for Governor overseeing the insecure voting registration system, and it's the opposing candidate's party who discovered the vulnerability. This is beyond "blame the messenger." It's "blame the messenger who not only showed my own incompetence, but is also running against me for my shot at the big time."

A later story on WhoWhatWhy details that it wasn't the Democratic Party who had discovered the vulnerability in the first place, but rather someone else, who then contacted a lawyer for someone already suing Kemp over weaknesses in Georgia's election system:

A man who claims to be a Georgia resident said he stumbled upon files in his My Voter Page on the secretary of state’s website. He realized the files were accessible. That man then reached out to one of Cross’s clients, who then put the source and Cross in touch on Friday.

The next morning, Cross called John Salter, a lawyer who represents Kemp and the secretary of state’s office. Cross also notified the FBI.

As noted above, WhoWhatWhy reached out to multiple security experts who all confirmed the vulnerability -- and apparently all five of them noted that actually testing the vulnerability would be illegal. But all five of them were able to just look at the code on the site and confirm the vulnerability was real and could be used to alter voter information in the rolls, which is an especially big deal considering that one of Kemp's voter suppression methods was to insist that if any tiny bit of your information did not match what was in the rollbook, you couldn't vote.

The report further notes that the security researchers approached by WhoWhatWhy reached out to both US intelligence officials and the Coalition for Good Government, who also reached out to Kemp's own lawyers to alert him to the problems in the system:

Bruce Brown, a lawyer for the group, then reached out to Kemp’s attorneys to alert them of the problem. At 7:03 PM Saturday night, he emailed John Salter and Roy Barnes, former governor of Georgia, in their capacities as counsel to Secretary of State Kemp, to notify them of the serious potential cyber vulnerability in the registration files that had been discovered without any hacking at all, and that national intelligence officials had already been notified.

[....]

“What is particularly outrageous about this, is that I gave this information in confidence to Kemp’s lawyers so that something could be done about it without exposing the vulnerability to the public,” Brown told WhoWhatWhy. “Putting his own political agenda over the security of the election, Kemp is ignoring his responsibility to the people of Georgia.”

You really should read the entire WhoWhatWhy article (or, actually, both of the ones I've linked to here) because it goes into much more detail than I've described here, and all of it is mind-bogglingly stupid. Just to give you a taste, the report details not just one, but multiple vulnerabilities, including this:

In the code of the website — which anybody can access using their internet browser — there is a series of numbers that represent voters in a county. By changing a number in the web browser’s interface and then changing the county, it appears that anybody could download every single Georgia voter’s personally identifiable information and possibly modify voter data en masse.

In addition, voter history, absentee voting, and early voting data are all public record on the secretary of state’s website. If a bad actor wanted to target a certain voting group, all of the information needed is available for download.

“It’s so juvenile from an information security perspective that it’s crazy this is part of a live system,” Constable said.

Oh, and then there's this: while Kemp's office insist what they are misleadingly calling a hack from the Democratic Party "failed," according to the various security experts WhoWhatWhy spoke to, there didn't appear to be any logging, meaning there wouldn't necessarily be a way to see if anyone had actually changed the information. It goes on and on like this.

And, rather than admitting a fuck up of colossal proportions for a voting system, Kemp is claiming the Democratic Party of Georgia hacked the election system. Again, no matter who you support as a candidate, can we at least all agree that something is rotten in the state of Georgia when it comes to how they manage their election systems?

Filed Under: brian kemp, democratic party, election systems, georgia, hacking, politics, stacey abrams, voter suppression, vulnerabilities

Why The Whole Freaking World Knows That Rep. Jeff Fortenberry Hates Being Called Fartenberry

from the don't-threaten-people dept

I have to admit that before yesterday, I'd never even heard of US Representative Jeff Fortenberry from Nebraska's 1st Congressional District (even though I visited his district while he was in office). However, boy am I hearing an awful lot about Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, and the one thing I will now always associate with Rep. Jeff Fortenberry is that he and his staff are so offended that anyone might call him "Fartenberry" that they'll ignore the 1st Amendment of the Constitution and threaten a professor for the grievous offense of liking a Facebook post with an image of a defaced campaign sign changing his name.

No, really.

This story has a bit of everything. It starts with this, however. A Nebraska blog, Seeing Red Nebraska, posted the following to its Facebook page a couple weeks ago:

If, somehow, you cannot see that, it's a campaign sign for Rep. Jeff Fortenberry that has been somewhat crudely "altered" such that Fortenberry's face now has two giant googly eyes, his name has been changed to "Fartenberry" by adding a line to the "o" in his last name, and whatever the third item in the following list really is, was changed to: "Strong Families; Strong Communities; Strong ODOR."

A bit sophomoric, but, hey it happens.

What happened next, however... You see, University of Nebraska-Lincoln political science professor Ari Kohen "liked" that post on Facebook. And, apparently, Rep. Jeff Fortenberry's staff decided to scan through all the likes on that post, and decided that Kohen couldn't possibly get away with liking such a thing. So, Fortenberry's Chief of Staff, Dr. William "Reyn" Reynolds Archer III decided to call Kohen and chew him out and threaten him over the "like." Archer left a voicemail for Kohen, who was away at a conference. When Kohen didn't call him back quickly enough, Archer then emailed Kohen's department supervisor, Kohen's dean, and the chancellor of the university to complain about Kohen liking the image.

Again, let's just be clear what'a happening here (and it's going to get crazier). Someone else made some additions to the sign. Someone else took a photo. Someone else posted it to Facebook. The sole thing that Kohen did was click the "like" button because he found it amusing. And Fortenberry's chief of staff emailed Kohen's boss, Kohen's boss's boss and Kohen's boss's boss's boss to complain.

Kohen then called Archer back, and they ended up talking for 53 whole minutes, though the key 7 minutes gives you a good taste of what went down.

Amusingly, if you listen to the full call, it starts out with Archer specifically saying: "Look, I want to just be really clear that we support First Amendment." Then, he follows that up by saying this nonsense: "I think the thing that we're concerned about is liking vandalism which is against the law." The call goes on and just gets more and more insane (yes, dear readers, I listened to the whole 53 minutes for you). At one point, Archer tries to point to Jerry Seinfeld's comments on college students as evidence that... um... something.

Humor has changed a lot over the last five years. What we thought was funny... and even Seinfeld is saying it's really difficult to be a comedian nowadays because things are misunderstood in the context of humor. Yes you can have a laugh about potty humor or about googly eyes, but the point is you're also secondarily liking and validating vandalism without... in a way that you may not have intended, but is a direct validation of vandalism.

The call goes on and on like this, with there being two main complaints, both of which are bullshit:

1. This is an endorsement of vandalism (and even potentially "violence") and...
2. Some others had highlighted Kohen's "like" and were using the fact that Kohen is a professor at UNL to further promote this image.

From there, Archer "threatens" to "put this out there":

And frankly we have a 1st amendment opportunity to put you out there in front of everybody and put it clearly as "why is a professor liking vandalism?" We can do that publicly. Would you like that? That's our 1st Amendment right too?

Kohen, who certainly seems to have a much better grasp of the optics here, points out to Archer how that might backfire:

Kohen: I think it'd be a terrible idea for you, if I'm being perfectly honest.

Archer: No. How so?

Kohen: Because the [disbelieving laugh] optics of this are terrible Reyn.

Archer then complains that he was calling to "come to an accommodation" and is frustrated that it seems "that is not possible with you." To which Kohen rightly asks (incredulously) what possible "accommodation" he would think is necessary or appropriate. To which Archer, hilariously replies:

For you to understand the optics of this, and you don't...

About those optics. Since this went public late yesterday, tons of publications have picked up this story. Here's a snapshot from Google News:

Now, perhaps I'm no communications expert, but I don't see any of those articles calling out Kohen for daring to "like" a silly sign defacement. They all seem to be reflecting pretty negatively on Fortenberry and his chief of staff.

Speaking of his chief of staff, Archer seems to have a bit of a history of being controversial himself. The first President Bush appointed him as the head of "Family Planning" at the Department of Health and Human Services, leading to a bunch of complaints about his lack of qualifications for the job:

"He has no credibility in the family planning community," said Judith M. DeSarno, executive director of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association (NFPRHA), which represents clinics funded by Title X. "He is well-meaning, but he confuses empathy with the idea that he has to protect people from themselves." NFPRHA disinvited Archer to its last conference because so many of his views were "anathema" to its members, DeSarno said. Archer said he remains ready to work with them.

"I have nothing in common with the man, and no respect for him based on his political attitude," said Joan Hinneberry, who administers the Title X program in Colorado. "I have real problems with someone who accepts tax dollars to run a program he's basically trying to destroy."

"I advise people never to talk to him alone, because he twists what you say and uses it against you," said Betsy Render, executive director of the Wyoming Reproductive Health Council. "We have lots of problems in family planning, and the only thing he wanted to talk about {during a visit} was abortion."

Later, the younger Bush, George W., appointed Archer to be the Texas commissioner of health, where he made quite a bit of news for what was described as "nutty (and possibly racist) comments" that eventually resulted in Archer resigning in controversy. Indeed, when Fortenberry hired Archer in 2016, he had to defend the hiring over those comments. Some of those comments came from (wait for it...) a tape recorded conversation made by a woman who worked for Archer which was described as "a rambling, mostly one-sided conversation," in which Archer makes repeated nonsensical references to his employee's race, and talks about lynchings and privilege.

Anyway, back to the call. Kohen continues to ask why this conversation is even happening, and Archer keeps falsely stating that Kohen was supporting vandalism, and then makes various references to other professors getting negative publicity over their political views, with Kohen accurately pointing out that those were all very different situations. At that point, things get super bizarre again, as Archer references the widely debunked theory of "broken windows policing" as the reason he's calling. This makes absolutely no sense at all.

Archer: We all live in an ecosystem in which all these things hold together. Are you familiar with Felton Earls in broken windows at Harvard.

*pause*

Kohen: Uh... no, I'm not.

Archer: So you don't know anything about broken windows as a theory?

Kohen: (incredulous) The broken windows theory of policing?!?

Archer: Well, it's the idea that if you leave broken windows, it means you're going to let the festering of other things happen. You can't leave broken windows in a community without allowing the community to continue to believe it's appropriate to break windows and do other things. That's the point.

The conversation keeps going around in circles, and then Kohen correctly notes what this is: a violation of the First Amendment, in which a government official is clearly threatening and putting pressure on a constituent over his protected expression:

The suggestion seems to be that professors should watch what they say, whether they're in the classroom, or not in the classroom, professors should watch what they say. And one of the big concerns, as you know, with the First Amendment, is that chilling effect that this kind of discussion that we're having right now can have on speech.

Archer then responds in a way that suggests he has... a very, very confused understanding of the 1st Amendment.

I think there are limitations and problems created by both the left and the right around this issue. And I think that there should not be a chilling effect on your right to speak about ideas. But if you tell someone to go blow up a bomb, or you tell somebody to go vandalize, or you validate and say an inference that vandalism is a part of political discourse, by inference, you have to be careful about whether your are constraining yourself in the context of the 1st Amendment, in which... it ends when your fist hits my jaw, as you know.

We all know that this is a very complicated area. And we also know that it's important... It's foundational to this civilization without question. We couldn't survive without it. At the same time, the way we do it, also allows us to continue to do it. To be in this robust conversation with each other. So we're saying, and requesting that you look at your behavior and think about it as being an inference of supporting vandalism, which we don't think is appropriate political discourse.

So, just to be clear, if you're a government official telling someone else that clicking the "like" button (which courts have already said clearly are protected speech under the First Amendment) is "inappropriate public discourse," you are the one violating the First Amendment.

Either way, the call goes on and on and on, around and around for nearly an hour. Frankly, Kohen has the level of patience of a saint as the conversation continues and Archer's argument gets more and more ridiculous, and very carefully considers each and every wacky argument presented by Archer. Incredibly, Kohen tries, multiple times, to end the call, and Archer just keeps wanting it to go on, and pressing Kohen to somehow apologize for clicking the like button. Still, by the end the two end the call on a more friendly note and have a conversation about getting past political differences and improving government -- which is great. But... just the fact that the entire call came about over a like, and it involved a government official (1) complaining to multiple levels of bosses over a university professor and (2) further threatening to publicly shame that professor over his daring decision to "like" a silly joke on Facebook is insane.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, ari kohen, broken windows policing, fartenberry, free speech, jeff fortenberry, likes, politics, reyn archer, streisand effect, william reynolds archer iii

We Brought Our Election Simulation Game To Chicago... And Learned The Chicago Way

from the russians-in-a-dimly-lit-shipping-container dept

You may recall that, back in June, I wrote about a bizarre situation in which an election simulation game, that I helped co-design, called "Machine Learning President," somehow had some of the rules sheets leaked to Rebekah Mercer, from which they were leaked once again to Jane Mayer at the New Yorker, who wrote up an article there, not knowing the provenance of the game. This caused many, many people to assume that the Mercers had somehow made up this game to "relive" the success of the 2016 election. This resulted in a ton of angry headlines and tweets -- including the host of NPR's comedic news-based "game show" Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, Peter Sagal, who alerted his friend, Cards Against Humanity designer, Max Temkin, who tweeted angrily about the game.

The next day, when I wrote up my post explaining what the game really was about -- we had a lot of people reach out to ask if they, too, could play the game. Unfortunately, it's a ton of work to put on, and the crew who designed the game -- lead by Berit Anderson and Brett Horvath from Scout.ai and Guardians.ai, who initially conceived of the game, along with Randy Lubin (who is our partner in our CIA game project), and science fiction writer, Eliot Peper -- are all super busy. However, by far the most aggressive in getting us to play the game were Max Temkin and Peter Sagal.

It finally happened two weeks ago in Chicago, and Charlie Hall at Polygon has a brilliant write-up about how the game went:

Inside a warehouse on Chicago’s North Side, within the thin strip of industrial property between Bucktown and Lincoln Park, Sen. Elizabeth Warren is pandering to a small group of powerful evangelicals. Just a few feet away, near a bowl brimming with 20-sided dice, Vice President Mike Pence is honing his next batch of TV and radio ads. Meanwhile, within a dimly lit shipping container, Russian oligarchs are desperately trying to funnel money to Sen. Kamala Harris through Black Lives Matter.

No, it’s not the fever dream of some political wonk stranded here along the nation’s third coast. It’s a 40-person live-action role-play of the 2020 presidential election. Formally, it’s called a “scenario planning game.” In motion, it’s a vehicle for some of the most engaging political theater that I’ve ever seen.

This was really only the second time we've run the full game (there have been a few playtests of part of the game). The first time was back in San Francisco in February and then this time in Chicago. The San Francisco game was incredible, but the crew that Max and Peter brought out to play in Chicago took it to the next level in terms of truly inhabiting their roles... and learning from the experience:

For Sagal, who every week tells jokes about political figures set against the backdrop of real NPR News stories, Machine Learning President was an educational experience.

“I make my living reading the news,” Sagal said. “All that shit is real, but it’s not important. The important shit we never find out about, and I honestly think this game illustrates that.

“Look at it this way: All of the candidates tonight got to make speeches, and these speeches were important. [...] But what was also interesting was that there was no attempt on anybody’s part to use those speeches to convince anybody of anything. That all happened during the 15-minute rounds. The speech was just about signaling. The speech was not making the deal or convincing anybody to do anything. It was just about delivering on something and positioning yourself to confirm a deal you’ve already made. There was no persuasive aspect to any of the things that any of us said, because the persuading had already been done. Or, as in our case with the Evangelicals, not done.

“What the game teaches you,” Sagal continued, “is that the shit that we get to see, as citizens who watch the speeches and get the emails [...] is nonsense and not important. The stuff that’s really important is happening behind the scenes.”

That may be the best endorsement we've seen of the game yet -- and the article only barely touches on some of the crazy alliances, use of technology, dealmaking, events, and backstabbing that played out over the course of a truly frantic evening. As the article notes, a big part of the point of the game is to get people to better understand how politics and tech and money intersect, and we heard from multiple people who played in Chicago saying they couldn't stop thinking about it after playing (we also had a few veterans of actual political campaigns note that it hit a little too close to home). Chicago has a reputation in politics, and I will say that the folks who showed up to play demonstrated that quite effectively.

Either way, we're still hoping to set up additional events for the game, even though it's quite a bit of work to run, and all of us are pretty swamped with other stuff. However, since people keep asking for it, we're trying to figure out ways to run it perhaps a bit more often.

Filed Under: chicago, election, election game, elections, games, machine learning president, max temkin, peter sagal, politics, scenario planning, simulation

AT&T's Top Anti-Net Neutrality Lobbyist In California Doesn't Register As A Lobbyist

from the funny-how-that-works dept

We've noted for years how U.S. lobbying laws and restrictions are essentially hot garbage, and are routinely laughed at by some of the country's largest corporations. The legal DC definition of a lobbyist was beefed up slightly back in 2007, when the Lobbyist Disclosure Act was notably amended by the Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007. Those changes required that if an employee spends more than 20% of their time lobbying, they have to register with the government as a lobbyist, detail their travel with lawmakers, and more fully outline their contributions to politicians and their myriad foundations.

But many lobbyists responded to those changes by just changing their title or calling their lobbying... something else. We've examined, for example, how Comcast's top lobbyist David Cohen shifted his title to "Chief Diversity Officer" in order to skirt around that 20% restriction. Cohen often can frequently be seen holding press junkets heralding Comcast's altruism because it offered some discounted broadband connections to the poor to get its NBC Universal merger approved. But the lion's share of Cohen's time is spent lobbying local lawmakers during these junkets.

Comcast, it's worth noting, gets really mad when you point this out.

State lobbying restrictions, as you might imagine, aren't much better. Another lobbying juggernaut in the telecom space, AT&T, has also found itself under fire for lobbyists who pretend not to be lobbyists. The company's top lobbyist in California, Vice President of Legislative Affairs Bill Devine, has never registered as a lobbyist under California law. Devine has spent a lot of time lately lobbying to kill efforts in California to pass net neutrality law (you know, for freedom!), without adhering to lobbying requirements:

"By not registering as a lobbyist, Devine can take advantage of political influence techniques that registered lobbyists are banned from under California laws. The Political Reform Act of 1974 requires registered lobbyists to disclose their lobbying activity expenses to the state. It also bans them from giving gifts worth more than $10 to state, legislative and agency officials. Under Proposition 34, enacted in 2000, registered lobbyists are also banned from making campaign contributions."

Devine's lobbying lambada was noticed courtesy of an anonymous complaint filed with the California Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC):

"William H. Devine, an AT&T Vice President, unlawfully fails to register as a lobbyist, despite spending the majority of his time in the Capitol Building talking to lawmakers and staff in order to influence legislation. It is an open secret in the Capitol building that Mr. Devine is an undeclared AT&T lobbyist."

"Mr. Devine hides his lobbyist status by setting up meetings under other AT&T employee and lobbyist names,” the complaint alleges. “In particular, Mr. Devine has recently been lobbying legislators on SB 822 and SB 460. On information and belief, Mr. Devine attended numerous meetings with other AT&T lobbyists, employees and grant beneficiaries, including, but not limited to, employees of CalInnovates (paid by AT&T to work against SB 822/SB 460) and a researcher paid by CalInnovate, David Sosa. He may also have accompanied Mark Kleeman, a fellow at University of California – San Diego."

This isn't really complicated. Devine has been paid $117,000 so far this biennial legislative session by AT&T for lobbying-related activities, most notably related to AT&T's lobbying against the state's two net neutrality laws, SB 822 and SB 460. He coordinates routinely with other AT&T lobbyists, and works hand in hand with the various policy groups, think tankers and consultants AT&T uses as proxies for its messaging, including that outfit that was just busted trying to scare grandmothers away from net neutrality via misleading robocalls.

The FPPC has given Devine 14 days to respond to the complaint. But if history is any indication, it's likely no punishment will materialize. Because despite our collective, bipartisan chirping about how grotesque American lobbying and corruption is, these sort of things tend to float in one ear and out the other of the collective American consciousness. It's also kind of hard to improve state and national lobbying rules, when you've got an ocean of lobbyists consultants, think tankers, chief diversity officers, liaisons, and others lobbying courageously striving to keep that from happening.

Filed Under: bill devine, california, lobbying, politics, registration
Companies: at&t

There's A Reason That Misleading Claims Of Bias In Search And Social Media Enjoy Such Traction

from the but-it's-not-a-good-reason dept

President Trump's tweets charging that Google search results are biased, against him and against conservatives, are the loudest and latest version of a growing attack on search engines and social media platforms. It is potent, and it's almost certainly wrong. But it comes at an unfortunate time, just as a more thoughtful and substantive challenge to the impact of Silicon Valley tech companies has finally begun to emerge. If someone were truly concerned about free speech, news, and how platforms subtly reshape public participation, they would be engaging these deeper questions. But these simplistic and ill-informed claims of deliberate political bias are the wrong questions, and they risk undermining and crowding out the right ones. Trump's charges against Google, Twitter, and Facebook reveal a basic misunderstanding of how search and social media work, and they continue to confuse "fake news" with bad news, all in the service of scoring political points. However, even if these companies are not responsible for silencing conservative speech, they may be partly responsible for allowing this charge to gain purchase, by being so secretive for so long about how their algorithms and moderation policies work.

So what do search engines actually do when users access them for information or news? Search engines deliver relevant results, nothing more. That judgment of relevance is based on hundreds of factors: including popularity, topic relevance, and timeliness. Results are fluid and personalized. There's plenty of room in this complex process for overemphasis and oversight, and these are important questions to examine. But serious researchers who actually already study this are careful to take into account the effects of personalization, changes over time, and the powerful feedback effects of users. This is a far cry from looking at your own search results and being troubled by what you see. (Even the author of the report Trump was likely reacting to acknowledges that it was unscientific and disagrees with the suggestion that regulation of search should follow.)

To understand, for instance, the results for "Trump" in Google News, or "Trump news" in Google -- different things, by the way -- we would need to consider some much more likely explanations than deliberate political manipulation: major outlets like CNN may publish a lot more content a lot more often; more users may click on, read, and forward links from these sources; outspoken right-wing sites like Gateway Pundit may have much less trust outside of their devoted base than they imagine; CNN may be much more congruent with centrist political leanings than Trump and conservative critics admit; well-established news sources may already circulate more widely and successfully on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, boosting their rankings on search engines; users may simply be more convinced by these news sources, "voting" for them with their clicks and links in ways that Google picks up on.

In truth, there are important questions to be asked about search engines, social media platforms, and the circulation of news online. There are profound concerns about the economic sustainability of journalism itself when it has to compete on social media platforms. There a profound concerns about the subtle effects of how algorithms work. But the noise that right-wing critics are stirring up is not subtle, it is not helpful, it is not well informed -- and more than that, it is clearly about scoring political points. Those claiming political bias seem wholly uninterested in acknowledging the inquiries already underway.

Charges of left-leaning bias are not new, of course. They come from a very old playbook conservatives have used against newspapers and broadcasters for decades. Unfortunately, Silicon Valley is partly to blame for why it is working so well today. Search engines and social media platforms have been too secretive about how their algorithms work, and too secretive about how content moderation works. In the absence of substantive explanations, users have been left to wonder why search results look the way they do, or why some posts get removed and others don't. This uncertainty breeds suspicion, and that suspicion goes looking for other explanations. This leaves room for trolls, conspiracy mongers, and demagogues to suggest that the platforms are silencing them for their political speech -- conveniently overlooking the fact that they been suspended for making hateful threats, or can't reach the first page of search results because readers trust other sources. And Silicon Valley has bruised their users' trust for so long, that even their genuine explanations sound suspect.

Some of the press coverage, when it's not careful, can inadvertently make the very same easy assumptions that these critics do. Search results, trending lists, and content moderation are not the same thing, they are not managed by the same people, and they are not handled in the same way. Too often, a critic will thread together ill-informed charges against search, one outdated incident regarding trending, and continued uncertainty about moderation practices, and lace them together into a blanket charge of bias. But they are simply different things.

It is unnerving to feel like an apologist for these tech companies. There are real and concerning questions about how search and social media work. I ask some of these questions in my own research, and my field has been thinking about them for years. The ways these companies have addressed, or often failed to address, the public ramifications of search algorithms and moderation policies has been deeply problematic. But these questions of bias distract us from the deeper problems.

It is also disconcerting, just as the public is finally grasping the subtle ways in which search and social media platforms matter, that we are ready to fall back on so simplistic a charge as deliberate political bias. I feel a bit like critics of mainstream news media, who for years have tried to highlight the way contemporary US news organizations are subtly centrist, structurally cautious, founded by commercial imperatives, and under attentive to marginalize voices -- who now have to bracket those critiques and come to the defense of CNN when the President dismisses them as "fake news." Those of us who ask hard questions about search and social media should do so, but we must also steadfastly refused to lump these real concerns in with facile, politically motivated charges of bias that miss the deeper point.

Tarleton Gillespie is the author of Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. He is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and an affiliated associate professor at Cornell University.

Filed Under: bias, hype, politics, search engines, social media, transparency
Companies: facebook, google, twitter

Elected Official Files Business, Trademark Registrations Using Name Of Website That Frequently Criticized Her

from the way-to-represent-your-constituents,-jerkface dept

Lots of government employees and officials would love to shut their critics up. The problem is that most methods they come up with don't work (at best) or are unconstitutional (at worst). That doesn't stop them from trying. The amount of hours expended trying to find ways to silence critics sits well above zero, making these efforts fraudulent as well as potentially unconstitutional.

Never underestimate the creativity of the criticized class, as Tony Webster reports.

Carol Becker, an elected official on the Minneapolis Board of Estimate and Taxation, confirmed Friday night that she was behind an effort to file business and trademark registrations for Wedge LIVE!, the name of a blog that has been critical of her.

Wedge LIVE! is run by John Edwards, who has covered urban planning and related political issues in depth for the last four years. He has gone after Becker a number of times in his reporting and blog posts. He's even attempted to take her job.

In the peak months of former Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges’ 2017 re-election campaign, Becker filed a civil lawsuit against the Mayor, claiming she had violated the City’s charter in the budgetary process. After Becker had claimed victory before any final disposition of the lawsuit, a judge found there was no violation and dismissed the case.

“When she sued the mayor, it felt like a stunt,” Edwards said, “I just felt like she was using her office to take political shots at people. She’s a perfect representation of a certain kind of politics in Minneapolis that I’m not a fan of.”

Edwards decided to run a last-minute write-in campaign against Becker, which he described as being a “half-joke” and doomed from the start. Becker won, but a surprising 1,539 voters wrote Edwards’ name on their ballot.

Becker has gone after Edwards and Wedge LIVE! as well, claiming the site is funded by "realtors" using "dark money." The contentious relationship has escalated in recent months, with the formation of an activist group by Edwards that opposes the policies and zoning changes Becker would like to institute. Edwards also asked readers to comment on proposed plans during the public comment period, leading to Becker receiving negative responses by readers of his site.

All of this has now culminated in an intellectual property war without the knowledge of one of the participants. A public notice of a business registration was spotted by a Wedge LIVE! Fan while reading the analogue version of the local paper. This was passed on to Edwards, who had no idea his site's name was being turned into a business by a subject of his criticism.

In the days after the public comment period ended, Becker went to the Office of the Minnesota Secretary of State and filed business documents—name reservations and certificates of assumed name—for both “Wedge Live” and “WedgeLive,” the name of Edwards’ blog. Becker also filed an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to obtain a trademark on the name “Wedge Live,” stating under penalty of law that she believed she was entitled to use the mark in commerce, that nobody else has the right to use the mark, and that she had a bona fide intention to use it herself.

Becker wants to pretend this is all a coincidence.

Reached by phone, Becker admitted—proudly so—that she filed the business and trademark documents, paying at least $355 to do so.

“There were no legal entities using that name, and I think it would be an awesome name for a podcast. And so since no one else is actually legally using that name, it seemed like a good thing to do,” Becker said, stating that she intended the podcast to discuss ‘wedge issues’ and to do so ‘live’ instead of attacking others on social media, something she felt Wedge LIVE! Does.

[...]

Becker continued to insist her “Wedge Live” business and trademark registrations were a separate, independent matter from her concerns regarding Wedge LIVE!, the blog. “Two great minds coming up with the same name isn’t a bad thing,” Becker said.

There is a non-zero chance this is true. But it's so small, it's a rounding error. Becker admits it could be viewed as "retaliatory," but says no one would really care if she retaliates against an "illegal business" and "tax fraud." [!!!!]

As for the whole "podcast" claim, Tony Webster notes the trademark registration appears to describe the Wedge LIVE! website and its offerings, rather than refer to anything of a podcasting nature. It also appears Carol Becker may have been instrumental in getting items removed from Wedge LIVE's Teespring store.

This statement, though, is probably the best/worst response Becker gave to Webster.

Becker said she would not have been able to register the names had Edwards registered them first. “If it wasn’t me, it could have been someone who is an asshole,” Becker said, going on to say that she wasn’t out to hurt anyone.

Instead of letting someone else be the asshole, Becker stepped up to be the asshole. Congrats.

Of course, this is also not how trademark law actually works. You don't have to register to hold a common law trademark. You only have to use the name in commerce, meaning it's likely that Edwards could be considered the common law trademark holder over "Wedge Live" and Becker's attempt at registering the same name would almost certainly flop.

The good news is it appears Becker greatly overestimated the public's tolerance for assholery from their elected officials.

As of Monday morning, an outpouring of support for Wedge LIVE! resulted in a 27% increase in Patreon donors for the site, and records at the Office of the Minnesota Secretary of State and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office showed cancellation of the assumed name and trademark filings, but no cancelation of the name reservation was recorded.

This means Wedge LIVE! retains the name… for now. Becker has promised to try again in another six months if Edwards doesn't make a move. But she might have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for a local resident still reading the news in printed form.

Filed Under: carol becker, censorship, john edwards, minneapolis, politics, trademark, wedge live

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.

Filed Under: anna bogacheva, election trolling, fake news, macedonia, paris wade, politics, russia, trajche arsov, troll factory

The Nunes Memo Has Effectively Destroyed Intelligence Oversight

from the WTG dept

The Nunes Memo, capitalized to give it far more gravitas that it actually possesses, was released late last week to mixed reviews. Nunes had built it up to be a mind-blowing damnation of a politically corrupt Federal Bureau of Investigation, more interested in destroying Trump than performing its appointed duties. The memo showed the FBI had relied on questionable evidence from the Steele dossier while securing FISA warrants to surveill former Trump adviser Carter Page. This memo was composed by the House intelligence oversight head -- one who had rarely expressed concern about domestic surveillance prior to investigations of Trump officials.

The memo showed the basis for the warrants may have been thin, but it didn't show it was nonexistent. In fact, the underlying warrants actually did inform the FISA court about the political background of Christopher Steele and his dossier. Nunes didn't know this because Nunes hadn't actually read the warrants. When he was finally apprised of this contradiction, he claimed the FBI disclosure didn't count because the disclosure was contained in a footnote.

The memo's release has had some serious side effects, however. But it will be Congressional oversight taking the damage, rather than the FBI. The memo's release showed the dumping of sensitive, classified info could be motivated by political whims, rather than as the result of a thoughtful, deliberative process. It showed oversight committee members were willing to jeopardize law enforcement sources and methods to score political points -- ironically the same claim Nunes was making about the FBI's motivations.

The damage will also be felt -- indirectly -- by the American public. Intelligence oversight is supposed to protect Americans from surveillance abuses. With this move, Nunes has destroyed its credibility, as Julian Sanchez points out.

It will be hard for anyone who has read the Nunes memo to regard the committee’s output as nonpartisan now. And by crying wolf about intelligence abuses with no serious evidence, Nunes and his enablers have made it far easier for America’s spy agencies to dismiss any future allegations, however meritorious, as yet another self-serving partisan distraction: at best, baseless conspiracy theorizing; at worst, an effort to obstruct legitimate investigations.

And that may not even be the worst of it. As Sanchez notes, the effectiveness of intelligence oversight will be blunted further. It's already mostly ineffective. Now, it may be completely broken.

[T]he committees are ultimately dependent on the intelligence community itself to direct their attention to areas that demand further scrutiny—whether in the form of official briefers, or whistleblowers who approach members with their concerns. Neither type is likely to repose much confidence in a committee that seems so enthusiastic to make a partisan circus of its grave task.

If the end game was to stop whistleblowing and give the nation's surveillance apparatus even more autonomy, well… mission accomplished. What was merely "dysfunctional" (according to the 9/11 Commission) will now be utterly useless.

And in the end, it won't matter to those who went along with Nunes' plan to own the libs (FBI Edition). For most committee members, intelligence oversight is a do-nearly-nothing job with zero political payoff. When things are fixed or further broken, the public is rarely informed. The few times the public is apprised of changes, it's handled obliquely with as many redactions as possible. Home state constituents waiting for their bridge to nowhere / vanity airport aren't going to be pouring funds into the re-election hoppers based on some shadowy, poorly-explained intelligence reforms. Everyone involved -- the overseers and the overseen -- would prefer as little interaction with each other as possible. By showing the House Oversight Committee is not above playing political football with FISA warrants, Nunes has virtually guaranteed the committee will be left alone.

Filed Under: house intelligence committee, infighting, intelligence community, nunes memo, oversight, politics