US Counterterrorism Official Says US Is 'The Angel Of Death' And Should Be Target Killing ISIS Tweeters

from the winning-hearts-and-minds dept

A few weeks ago there was a fair bit of controversy after a US drone-strike killed an ISIS "hacker" who was, among other things, popular on Twitter. While US officials tried to paint him as a much bigger deal behind the scenes, some are now admitting that he was just noisy online. ABC News is reporting on the supposed internal debate among US counterterrorism officials concerning how to best deal with ISIS Twitter users. Some are arguing that these guys are small time annoyances, while others are arguing that we should just straight up kill ISIS tweeters. This next quote is fairly incredible.

“We are the angel of death. This war is a propaganda war too. Why only limit it to military leaders? Should we be ignoring the propagandists that speak English and are tech savvy who know how to reach westerners?” a senior counter-terrorism official knowledgeable about the counter-ISIS strategy told ABC News. “I don't see why you would want to curtail either targeting strategy. This is also a war of ideas.”

And if you're running a propaganda war, do you really think the best strategy is to kill people for speaking their minds? That doesn't convince anyone to change the way they're thinking. It just radicalizes more people. Having US officials state "we are the angel of death" doesn't project anything other than pure bloodlust among US officials. It suggests a war where at least some US officials think the way to deal with ISIS is to stoop to their level -- by mindlessly killing people we don't agree with and assuming it's "fair game" so long as they've mouthed off online.

As for Junaid Hussain, the guy killed in that drone strike, the report confirms what we'd heard from a bunch of people: despite what US officials put out in the news about his death, the reality was he was just a guy with a Twitter account who was loud:

“Junaid Hussain was a Twitter noisemaker and a hack hacker. He wasn't a first disseminator on anything important, as far as I can tell. Nothing at all in his profile leads me to think he'd be close to the inner circle of leadership,” said “ISIS: The State of Terror” author J.M. Berger, who tracks jihadists online.

In the article, those defending killing ISIS tweeters claim that it makes sense because they believe that it somehow stops the recruitment of English-speaking individuals into ISIS:

“So the English-speaking ISIS guy that is removed, in a drone strike for example, could equal a thousand potential fighters who never self-radicalize and leave home,” said Anderson, who was a top aide and advisor to the current and former Secretaries of Defense.

Except there's an implicit assumption in there: that these Twitter accounts are successfully recruiting members of ISIS by the thousands. As we've pointed out before, the evidence suggests that, while the internet may play a part in radicalizing some individuals, it's likely a fairly small part. Your local (in person) social network is a much, much bigger factor, and almost no one is simply becoming radicalized because they started to follow an ISIS person online.

Either way, it's difficult to see how deciding to just start killing off people for being mouthy online is going to convince anyone who hates the US that they're somehow on the wrong track. It seems like it will only confirm their preheld opinions. But, you know, the "angel of death" apparently doesn't give a shit:

“Shoot your mouth off all you want. Eventually we are going to kill you,” the senior counter-terrorism official said.

I can't see how that makes us any safer. It seems like quite the opposite is likely.

Filed Under: counterterrorism, drones, extrajudicial killing, isis, propaganda, targets, tweets

Ex-Kremlin Hired 'Troll' Wins One Ruble In Damages From Putin's Internet Propaganda Factory

from the propagandist-whac-a-mole dept

As we've been exploring, whistleblowers have been exposing Putin and the Kremlin's use of "troll factories" to fill the internet with propaganda. The efforts run amazingly deep, with employees paid 40,000 to 50,000 rubles ($800 to $1,000) a month to create proxied, viable fake personas -- specifically tasked with pumping the internet full of toxic disinformation 24 hours a day. One of these employees, Lyudmila Savchuk, spent two months employed by the operation and was so disgusted that she quit, launched an anti-propaganda social activist campaign, and decided to sue the Russian government.

Amazingly enough Lyudmila Savchuk is not only still alive, but she has won her case. A Russian court has awarded Savchuk symbolic damages of one ruble, her requested damage amount after suing the disinformation barn for non-payment of wages and for failing to give workers proper contracts:

"I am very happy with this victory. I achieved my aim, which was to bring the internet trolls out of the shade," said Savchuk, 34. The Kremlin has claimed that it has no links to the operations of the Agency for Internet Studies. Authorities in Russia have intensified a propaganda campaign as the crisis over Ukraine has sent tensions with the west soaring to their highest level since the cold war.

So yes, Savchuk managed to bring a small portion of one of Putin's companies involved in propaganda (Agency for Internet Studies, or Internet Research) out of the shadows briefly. But the Russian government continues to deny they've any connection to the operation, and the company itself continues to operate unfettered, as do the myriad other similar companies the Kremlin employs to pollute the global discourse mud puddle.

Case in point: as Russia waits for the report on what caused the crash of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over the Ukraine last year (investigators believe the downing missile was Russian made, and the report is expected to show it was fired from territory held by pro-Russian rebels), a rather ham-fisted attempt to blame the CIA for the crash has been circulating online ahead of the report's release:

"A Russian newspaper posted an audiotape on its website that purports to reveal two US spies plotting to bring down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine last year. One hitch: The conversations are so stilted and oddly worded that they have been widely dismissed by native English speakers as obviously fake. "If you wanted to believe the CIA is responsible for downing MH17, now you've got the 'proof,'" the self-exiled Russian online newspaper Meduza headlined its report pointing out the awkward language used by the purported spies.

The recording itself certainly sounds as if two sad actors are simply reading from a poorly-translated English script:Of course any Russian internet propagandist worth their salt will probably conclude that this ham-fisted attempt to frame the CIA was cleverly devised by the CIA itself as a sort of reverse head fake (and since the CIA has done numerous stranger things, many might even believe it). Either way, the point stands: while Savchuk may have bravely succeeded in winning one small battle against Putin's propaganda army, it's only the tiniest of dents in what's now a well-established Russian internet disinformation apparatus.

Filed Under: internet trolls, lyudmila savchuk, propaganda, russia, russian trolls

Yeah, Russia Probably Forged A Weapons Cache Supposedly From The US Using A Video Game To Model The Weapons

from the fake-it-til-you-make-it dept

Video games are starting to get realistic. Like, crazy realistic. Between what graphics look like on the latest hardware to the unbelievable committment to authenticity many of the latest games have, it's starting to get hard to tell game footage apart from video footage. So hard, in fact, that it appears the pro-Russian groups had an "oopsie!" moment while trying to accuse America of arming Ukrainian rebels with Stinger missiles.

A video from Ukrainian pro-Russian separatists...shows the rebels storming an underground compound and dusting off a wooden case with a "US army" inscription, where a the MANPADS Stinger 92 surface-to-air missile is stored.

Here's a screenshot from the video, showing the Stinger missile in question.
Notice anything strange? Unless you're familiar with American military equipment, you might have missed the lettering at the bottom of the device that reads "TRACKING RAINER." You probably also aren't aware that the actual American Stinger missiles have that same lettering, except that it's supposed to read "TRACKING TRAINER" instead. Between that and several other translation errors in the video, the general consensus is that the whole thing was cooked up by pro-Russians trying to make it look like America is sending weapons to the Ukraine (which we still might be) by creating mockups of the weapons and passing them off as the real thing. The next obvious question is what caused the pro-Russian groups to make the translation mistake on the Stinger missile in their video and what they used as a basis to model their mockup after? The answer is, of course, video games.

The most significant mistake is found in the inscription on the Stinger weapon itself, which reads "tracking rainer" instead of "tracking trainer". Video games blogger Anton Logvinov noted on his website that the same typo occurs in the EA first-person shooter game Battlefield 3, leading him to believe that the Stinger 'discovered' in Lugansk is likely fake.

Russian propaganda: so good it very nearly fooled a video game blogger! We will, as always, welcome our friends from the Putin internet propaganda brigade in our comments section.

Filed Under: battlefield 3, propaganda, russia, stinger missiles, ukraine, video games, weapons cache

Russia's Internet Propaganda Farm Is Being Dragged To Court For Labor Violations

from the these-are-not-the-droids-you're-looking-for dept

While propaganda is everywhere, we've been exploring lately how Putin's Russia has been taking Internet disinformation to an entirely new level. Numerous whistleblowers and media reports have spent the last year or so unearthing Russian Internet propaganda factories, where armies of sockpuppets get paid 40,000 to 50,000 rubles ($800 to $1,000) a month to create proxied, viable, fake personas -- specifically tasked with pumping the internet full of toxic disinformation twenty-four hours a day.

Unlike some similar campaigns by the U.S. Russia originally didn't try very hard to hide these operations' existence, but that's already changing. As numerous writers have discovered (myself included), even pointing out that these operations exist will grab you a heaping helping of anonymous troll scorn. If you still haven't perused it, this recent New York Times Magazine breakdown of Russia's troll armies is essential reading.

In light of Putin's not-so-gentle treatment of critics, the bravery some of the program's whistleblowers continues to be impressive. Lyudmila Savchuk worked at the Russian Internet bile factory for two months, ultimately leaving after finding the work morally repugnant. She's since been leaking a treasure trove of information about the program, including clandestine videos showing some of the program employees at work. She's also spearheading a lawsuit against The Agency for Internet Studies, which was finally dragged into court this week after missing the first court hearing.

The company's specifically being sued for underpayment and a number of labor violations, since it unsurprisingly wasn't keen on providing employees with traditionally-necessary paperwork. Amusingly, a representative for "The Agency" hoped to settle with Savchuk, but she's apparently having none of it:

"The agency is now seeking to avoid public scrutiny by offering to compensate her. Yekaterina Nazarova, defending, told the Petrogradsky district court judge the agency was ready to settle with Savchuk, who had asked for a symbolic sum of 10,000 roubles (£118). Nazarova offered to wire the sum to Savchuk’s account, then quickly left the court without speaking to the press.

Savchuk said: “I am very pleased, they pretended they don’t exist at all and now they have come out of the shadows for the first time – we saw their representative. But I will feel that I won only after the troll factory closes completely."

The problem is that the operation Savchuk's trying to shut down operates under a spiderweb of various companies with an endless variety of names across numerous different industries (including construction) -- all of which are protected by the Russian government. As such, it's going to be a Sisyphean and dangerous game of legal whac-a-mole; one you'd hope Savchuk survives.

Filed Under: internet, internet trolls, labor violations, lyudmila savchuk, propaganda, russia, trolls, vladimir putin

Reporter Who Wrote Sunday Times 'Snowden' Propaganda Admits That He's Just Writing What UK Gov't Told Him

from the journalism! dept

So we've already written about the massive problems with the Sunday Times' big report claiming that the Russians and Chinese had "cracked" the encryption on the Snowden files (or possibly just been handed those files by Snowden) and that he had "blood on his hands" even though no one has come to any harm. It also argued that David Miranda was detained after he got documents from Snowden in Moscow, despite the fact that he was neither in Moscow, nor had met Snowden (a claim the article quietly deleted). That same report also claimed that UK intelligence agency MI6 had to remove "agents" from Moscow because of this leak, despite the fact that they're not called "agents" and there's no evidence of any actual risk. So far, the only official response from News Corp. the publisher of The Sunday Times (through a variety of subsidiaries) was to try to censor the criticism of the story with a DMCA takedown request.

Either way, one of the journalists who wrote the story, Tom Harper, gave an interview to CNN which is quite incredible to watch. Harper just keeps repeating that he doesn't know what's actually true, and that he was just saying what the government told him -- more or less admitting that his role here was not as a reporter, but as a propagandist or a stenographer. Here's the key snippet: If you can't see or hear that, it's Harper saying "we just publish what we believe to be the position of the British government." This is a claim that he repeats throughout the interview, pleading ignorance to anything factual about the story. In short, his argument is that he heard these allegations through a "well placed source" within the UK government and he sought to corroborate the claim... by asking another source in the UK government who said "that's true!" and Harper ran with it.

Some more highlights. CNN's George Howell kicks it off by asking how UK officials could possibly know that the Chinese and Russians got access to the files, and Harper immediately resorts to the "hey, I just write down what they tell me!" defense:

Um... well... I don't know the answer to that, George. Um.... All we know is that... um... this is effectively the official position of the British government. Um.... we picked up on it... um... a while ago. And we've been working on it and trying to stand it up through multiple sources. And when we approached the British government late last week with our evidence, they confirmed, effectively, what you read today in the Sunday Times.

Again: government official tells them stuff, and they confirm with another government official -- and that's the story. Note that he says he showed the UK government "evidence" yet there is no evidence in the article itself. Just quotes and speculation. He goes on, trying to downplay the entire point of journalism, which should be to ferret out the truth. But, to Thomas Harper, if you question his report, you should be asking the government about it, not him. That's not his job.

It's obviously allegation at the moment, from our point of view. And it's really for the British government to defend it.

So, you publish an explosive story based on anonymous quotes and already proven falsehoods, and then you refuse to defend it, saying that it's the government's job to do so? Do you even know what a journalist is supposed to be doing, Harper?

Howell digs deeper, questioning how the UK government even knows which files Snowden took -- and questioning if the UK government has been able to decipher that as well. Harper, again, pushes it aside, saying he has no idea and they avoided such tricky questions altogether:

Again, that's not something we're clear on. So, we don't go into that level of detail in the story.

It's then that he makes the "we just publish what we believe to be the position of the British government" claim. Howell then points to one of the many contradictions in the story: the idea that Russia/China hacked into the Snowden files... and the claim that they were just handed over. And again, Harper pleads ignorance. He's just the stenographer:

Again, sorry to just repeat myself, George, but we don't know, so we haven't written that in the paper. Um... you know, it could be either. It could be another scenario.

I mean, it could be that the great fairyland dragon from the 6th dimension dreamed up the Snowden documents and then gave them to Russia and China. Who the fuck knows? I'm just a reporter, man. Why would you ask me for evidence or facts? I'm just rewriting what some government guys told me!

Howell then points out that his story is just the British government's claims, and then asks about the MI6 "agents" that were supposedly moved, and again, Harper pleads ignorance:

Um.... Again, I'm afraid to disappoint you, we don't know. There was a suggestion, um, that some of them may have been under threat. Um. Er. Um. But... the um... statement from senior Downing Street sources suggests that no one has come to any harm, which is obviously a positive thing from the point of view of the West.

Huh. So now he's the spokesperson for "The West?" Fascinating.

Again, Howell, somewhat nicely, points out that Harper is doing nothing more than stenography: "So, essentially, you're reporting what the government is saying, but as far as the evidence to substantiate it, you're not able to comment or to explain that at this point." And, Harper basically agrees.

No. We... we picked up on the story a while back, from an extremely well placed source in the Home Office, um... and then... um... carried on trying to substantiate what was going on through various sources in various agencies throughout Britain. And then finally presented the um... um... story, to the government, and they effectively confirmed what you read in today's Sunday Times.

In short: one government official told them this, and they asked other government officials, who all had a personal interest in having the answer be "yes" and after enough government officials all agreed on the same talking point, good boy Tom Harper wrote it all down and presented it as fact.

A few times in the interview Harper makes the accurate and reasonable point that when you're dealing with the intelligence community, getting evidence is often quite difficult. That's absolutely true. But then there's a way of presenting that kind of story and it's not the way Harper did so. When you have a story like this, where many of the details seem highly questionable, you don't just talk to government officials, but you try to reach out to other sources who can further the story. But Harper admits that they had no interest in doing this -- they were just presenting the government's side of the story. Even that can be done in a journalistic manner, in which case the article should not present itself as presenting factual information, as it does, but the idle speculation of government officials who won't put their names or positions behind what they're saying.

Harper concludes the interview by saying that it's very difficult to say things with "certainty" when reporting on national intelligence issues -- but if that's the case, why did the Sunday Times report present its findings with exactly that kind of certainty? Wouldn't the reasonable thing to do be to highlight the questionable claims and to detail what was known and what was no actually known? But that's not how Harper and the Sunday Times did it at all. And now he's trying to pass off the blame, saying that it's the UK government who needs to defend the "journalism" that he supposedly did. Given that he's admitting he just scribbled down and republished their thoughts, perhaps that's true concerning defending the facts of the story. However, it does seem quite reasonable to ask Harper to defend what sort of journalism he's actually doing.

Filed Under: ed snowden, fact checking, journalism, propaganda, tom harper, uk government
Companies: news corp., sunday times

The Pulitzer Prize In Bullshit FUD Reporting Goes To... The Sunday Times For Its 'Snowden Expose'

from the journalism! dept

Let's start with this. Soon after Daniel Ellsberg was revealed as the source behind the Pentagon Papers, White House officials started spreading rumors that Ellsberg was actually a Soviet spy and that he'd passed on important secrets to the Russians: None of it was true, but it was part of a concerted effort by administration officials to smear Ellsberg as a "Soviet spy" and a "traitor" when all he really did was blow the whistle on things by sharing documents with reporters.

Does that sound familiar? Over the weekend, a big story supposedly broke in the UK's the Sunday Times, citing anonymous UK officials arguing that the Russians and Chinese got access to all the Snowden documents and it had created all sorts of issues, including forcing the UK to remove undercover "agents" from Russia. That story is behind a paywall, but plenty of people have made the text available if you'd like to read the whole thing.

There are all sorts of problems with the report that make it not just difficult to take seriously, but which actually raise a lot more questions about what kind of "reporting" the Sunday Times actually does. It's also worth noting that this particular story comes out just about a week or so after Jason Leopold revealed some of the details of the secret plan to discredit Snowden that was hatched in DC. Even so, the journalism here is beyond shoddy, getting key facts flat out incorrect, allowing key sources to remain anonymous for no reason, and not appearing to raise any questions about the significant holes in the story.

Snowden has made it clear for well over a year that once he gave the documents to the original journalists, he got rid of them and no longer had them -- so he wouldn't even be able to give them to anyone else, even if they wanted them. Yet, the article insists that the Russians got them, and originally included a claim that supposedly ties the documents to Snowden in Moscow:

It is not clear whether Russia and China stole Snowden’s data, or whether he voluntarily handed over his secret documents in order to remain at liberty in Hong Kong and Moscow.

David Miranda, the boyfriend of the Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, was seized at Heathrow in 2013 in possession of 58,000 “highly classified” intelligence documents after visiting Snowden in Moscow.

During the ensuing court hearing Oliver Robbins, then deputy national security adviser in the Cabinet Office, said that the release of the information “would do serious damage to UK national security, and ultimately put lives at risk”.

Except, that middle paragraph is simply factually incorrect -- as basically any report on the original detention would have made clear. Miranda had been in Berlin with Laura Poitras, and not in Moscow with Snowden. After this rather important factual error was pointed out repeatedly... the Sunday Times simply deleted it with no retraction or correction. Down the memory hole. Well, except if you have the paper copy: Considering that that point is sort of a key string in the narrative of putting the documents in Russia -- the fact that it is flat out false (despite the easy fact checking) should call into question the rest of the story. But there are even more problems with it the deeper you dig. Craig Murray, a former ambassador and diplomat for the UK has written the best explanation saying that the story "is a lie." He highlights five very serious problems with the story, starting with the fact that the terminology is wrong. In the article, the anonymous government official is quoted as follows:

A senior Downing Street source said: “It is the case that Russians and Chinese have information. It has meant agents have had to be moved and that knowledge of how we operate has stopped us getting vital information."

Except, as Murray notes, no actual government source who was familiar with these things would mistake an "agent" for an "officer."

Yet the schoolboy mistake is made of confusing officers and agents. MI6 is staffed by officers. Their informants are agents. In real life, James Bond would not be a secret agent. He would be an MI6 officer. Those whose knowledge comes from fiction frequently confuse the two. Nobody really working with the intelligence services would do so, as the Sunday Times source does. The story is a lie.

He also dismisses the "blood on his hands" money quote given in the article. That line was directed at Snowden -- though, it was almost immediately undercut within the same exact article by someone noting "there is no evidence of anyone being harmed." It's almost as if no one actually bothered to think through the propaganda message. Murray points out that the idea that any officers would be in danger is hogwash. Beyond the fact that the Russian and Chinese don't kill western spies (they just kick them out of the country), there's the simple fact that such info would never be in the documents Snowden had:

Rule No.1 in both the CIA and MI6 is that agents’ identities are never, ever written down, neither their names nor a description that would allow them to be identified.

This same point is further confirmed by Ryan Gallagher, one of the journalists who does have access to the Snowden files and says that there is no such information in them.

This was a surprise to me because I've reviewed the Snowden documents and I've never seen anything in there naming active MI6 agents. Were the agents pulled out as a precautionary measure? Keeping in mind that the UK government does not actually know exactly what Snowden leaked, how do these officials know there were documents in there that implicated MI6 operatives and live operations in the first place?

Murray further notes that the Russians are already pretty sure they know who the UK's spies are (and vice versa) and even if they were revealed in the documents, which he doesn't think is true, there'd be no reason to remove anyone anyway.

The Sunday Times piece further repeats the long repudiated claim that Snowden's cache included 1.7 million documents -- a number that even the NSA now admits was bunk and based solely on the number of documents he "touched," not those Snowden actually took.

Then there's this point, raised by security professor Matthew Green: If the intelligence agencies really believed that Snowden was carrying such damaging documents on his person, why would they strand him in Moscow by pulling his passport? Another potential problem: at one point, the article implies that Snowden may have handed the documents over as part of a "deal" with the Russian or Chinese, but in another part of the article, it discusses how the Russians and Chinese cracked the encryption on the stash. So which is it? Did he hand them over, or were they encrypted?

The whole thing is such a shoddy piece of propaganda that it seems almost hilarious... and would be if actual serious news sites weren't repeating the claims, often with little question. The BBC was quick to put up a piece repeating the claims -- though it has since added a few dissenting viewpoints. Many other UK tabloids have more or less repeated the claims. The only paper that seems to be strongly pushing back is The Guardian (which published the first Snowden revelation and many later ones as well). It has been raising lots of questions about the original reporting, demanding answers from the UK government about the claims and actually willing to call out the report as "low on facts, high on assertions."

Is it possible that others have access to these documents? Sure. Of course, the world itself has seen many of them, thanks to reporters revealing them publicly (something Snowden himself never did).

Still, even back when Snowden was in Hong Kong, intelligence community defenders insisted it meant that China had the documents. And the second he was in Moscow, they insisted that Russia had them too. In this case, it honestly sounds like the naive reporters at the Sunday Times took that "speculation" and wrote an entire story about it, searching for quotes that would confirm the thesis, but not doing any actual journalistic activity. So they got their story, and it's now quite easy to poke it full of very large holes.

Of course the timing on this is even more suspect. It comes out just as a report was published in the UK that slammed some aspects of government surveillance, and it seems noteworthy that right before this, there was a sudden upsurge in ridiculous and slightly unhinged fear mongering about Snowden himself -- none of which comes with any actual evidence, only angry speculation. It's almost as if governments pushing for greater surveillance powers might mount a coordinated propaganda campaign to smear the one guy who has been exposing their bullshit.

Filed Under: china, ed snowden, journalism, leaks, propaganda, reporting, russia, surveillance, uk
Companies: sunday times

Putin's Internet Propaganda War Is Much Bigger And Weirder Than You Think, Now Extending Into The States

from the ministry-of-truth dept

We've been writing lately about how Putin and Russia have shifted their internet propaganda forces into overdrive, employing multiple factories operated by a company named Internet Research, filling the internet with Putin-friendly drivel twenty-four-hours a day. The insight into these efforts has become more and more interesting as whistleblowers have started exposing (and most recently suing over) them the last six months. Contrary to similar efforts in other countries (U.S. included), there's absolutely no subtlety on display here, and the scale is unlike anything the internet has ever seen.

Interestingly, many of the comments to my last piece made some really compelling points regarding what Putin is up to. Here's a small smattering:

"Karl Bode, author of this very article, has most likely unwittingly fallen for an ukrainian-made honey-pot propaganda trap."

"I cant help see this article as another stone in the western propaganda campaign against Putin the last few months, and not really about social media propaganda."

"The story of that Russian propaganda factory that caught Karl Bode's attention (assuming the story is even true and is not itself a counter-propaganda gig similar to 'WMD') seems very amateurish in comparison to the depth and sophistication to the US military's sock-puppetry programs."

"By writing this horse shit, all Techdirt has done is shown that it's writers are easily manipulated. I expect more pro-US, anti-Russia propaganda from them in the future."

Anybody who knows me remotely would find accusations that I'm "pro-US" pretty damn funny given how I've spent most of my career criticizing US government policies. Are these comments ingenious satire? Russian propagandists? Domestic garden-variety home-grown tin-foil hatters? The benefit of propaganda is you just can't tell. But science pretty consistently shows that comments can pretty easily impact discourse, even if what's being posted is relatively unhinged from reality. So to be clear, it's true: I'm a total lackey for western imperialists; a pawn of the NSA and CIA, and as most people know, I make a killing freelancing as a propagandist for AT&T corporation.

Moving on. While there's no doubt the United States has employed similar tactics for years (profitable wars and shitty foreign policy don't sell themselves, you know), that doesn't make the sheer scale of Putin's troll army any less impressive...or real.

The New York Times Magazine has an outstanding exploration of Putin's propaganda efforts and Russia's Internet Research Agency, connecting a series of incredibly well-constructed hoaxes using fake YouTube videos, fake Wikipedia entries, and thousands of Twitter accounts -- many of which were designed to pollute the global discourse pool here in the States. Author Adrian Chen headed to St. Petersburg to track down and talk to whistleblower Lyudmila Savchuk, who goes into greater detail than ever before about the program. Again, there's propaganda, and then there's what Putin's up to, which is a factory-grade internet assault on reality injected with steroids and caffeine:

"As Savchuk and other former employees describe it, the Internet Research Agency had industrialized the art of trolling. Management was obsessed with statistics — page views, number of posts, a blog’s place on LiveJournal’s traffic charts — and team leaders compelled hard work through a system of bonuses and fines. “It was a very strong corporate feeling,” Savchuk says. Her schedule gave her two 12-hour days in a row, followed by two days off. Over those two shifts she had to meet a quota of five political posts, 10 nonpolitical posts and 150 to 200 comments on other workers’ posts. The grueling schedule wore her down. She began to feel queasy, she said, posting vitriol about opposition leaders of whom she had no actual opinion, or writing nasty words about Ukrainians when some of her closest acquaintances, including her own ex-husband, were Ukrainian."

These efforts have become so massive, local journalists claim they have, at least for now, managed to subvert the historical anti-authoritarian and free speech benefits of the internet:

"All of this has contributed to a dawning sense, among the Russian journalists and activists I spoke with, that the Internet is no longer a natural medium for political opposition. “The myth that the Internet is controlled by the opposition is very, very old,” says Leonid Volkov, a liberal politician and campaign manager to Alexei Navalny. “It’s not true since at least three years.” Part of this is simple demographics: The Internet audience has expanded from its early adopters, who were more likely to be well-educated liberal intelligentsia, to the whole of Russia, which overwhelmingly supports Putin. Also, by working every day to spread Kremlin propaganda, the paid trolls have made it impossible for the normal Internet user to separate truth from fiction."

The piece repeats previous claims that Russia's industrial-grade propaganda apparatus has fixed its gaze upon the United States, and while so far some of these efforts on places like Facebook are so ham-fisted as to be comical, some of them are absolutely astounding in their scope and architecture. Like the Facebook group of Russian trolls that encourage followers to visit an art exhibit named "Material Evidence" hosted in Chelsea, New York City. The effort, funded by anonymous overseas donors, claims to show the "other side" of the Ukranian conflict and Syrian civil war not shown by Western media:

"Then there were the pictures from the Ukrainian revolution, which focused almost exclusively on the Right Sector, a small group of violent, right-wing, anti-Russian protesters with a fondness for black balaclavas. Russian authorities have seized upon Right Sector to paint the entire revolution, backed by a huge swath of Ukrainian society, as orchestrated by neo-fascist thugs. The show’s decision to juxtapose the rebellions in Syria and Ukraine was never clearly explained, perhaps because the only connection possible was that both targeted leaders supported by Russia. On the floor in front of many of the photos sat the actual items that appeared in them, displayed under glass cases. How, exactly, did organizers procure the very same battered motorcycle helmet that a Ukrainian protester wore in a photo while brawling with riot police? Who had fronted the money to purchase a mangled white van, supposedly used by Syrian rebels in a botched suicide bombing, and transport it to New York City?

Let that sink in for a second. Armies of fake U.S. Facebook accounts, sending followers to an entirely fake art exhibit in New York, promoted by an army of fake and hijacked Twitter accounts -- all of it tied to Russia's Internet Research Agency. At one point in his documentation efforts, Chen makes contact and meets up with a supposed Internet Research Agency employee and her brother, only to later discover the entire meeting is a staged photo op, later used by "news organizations" tied to Internet Research to discredit Chen as a neo nazi supporter. That story soon ballooned into a series of other Russian news stories accusing Chen of being BFFs with the NSA, CIA, and neo nazis, accompanied with snazzy videos to "prove" it.

So again, yes, most countries engage in propaganda. That's not really being disputed. Most Americans at this point are at least marginally aware of the propaganda used to sell recent wars conducted by the United States -- and the complicit behavior of the media in these efforts to this day stinks up the hallowed halls of most "respected" American news outlets (the same outlets that love to lecture bloggers on what news really is). But what Putin is up to is a propaganda war against the entire internet, and it makes dystopian visions by the likes of Orwell and Terry Gilliam look like Hardy Boy mysteries. Of course none of that matters because I'm clearly a Western imperialist puppy murderer, and this article was funded by the CIA, as commenters below will be sure to illustrate.

Filed Under: adrian chen, comments, propaganda, russia, social media, trolls, vladimir putin
Companies: internet research agency

Alert: North Korea Now Capable Of Using Photoshop To Launch Missiles From Submarines

from the shop-skillz dept

Whenever our friends in Pyongyang decide to troll the planet with one of their hilariously bad propaganda pieces, it always makes me wonder just how serious the North Korean regime is about this whole war thing. I mean, using video game footage and music to threaten 'Merica? C'mon, son. And those photoshopped photo-ops of your human-chicken-dumpling leader just don't inspire much confidence in the country's technological capabilities. But it's when North Korea combines war and fun-bad photoshopping that the real fun begins.

Take the country's recent press brag, for instance, in which North Korea announces that they've managed to launch a missile from a submarine.

Experts, it appears, aren't all that impressed with the photo. That was particularly the case when the state-run Pyongyang press circulated other photos of the launch that were complete with columns of smoke from the missile, columns of smoke conspicuously absent from the initial photo that was circulated above.

As Markus Schiller and Robert Schmucker, of Schmucker Technologie, told Reuters, “Considering the track record of North Korean deceptions, it seems sensible to assume that any North Korean SLBM [submarine-launched ballistic missile] capability is still a very long time in the future, if it will ever surface.”

What the column-less photo lacked in smoke, it made up for with weird, poorly placed ocean smudges. That reddish patch of water you see to the left of the missile? That’s supposed to be the rocket’s reflection.

And, so, sadly, the only thing this launch report from North Korea tells us is that they still haven't gotten photoshop down. Oh well. If they ever did get into an actual shooting war again, I suppose they could always just photoshop themselves into some kind of victory pose. Given how often their progress with weapons technology turns out to be non-progress at photo-bullshitting, such a war is probably a remote possibility. Several of the commenters over at Gawker offered to help them out, of course, though this one is probably my favorite.

Call in Mario Marine!

Filed Under: missiles, north korea, photoshop, propaganda

Senators On Jihad 2.0: We'll Take Down ISIS With 'Fancy Memes'

from the retweet-if-you-think-terrorism-should-be-stopped dept

Al-Qaida has been replaced by ISIS at the focal point of counterterrorism efforts. When legislators talk about fighting terrorism, they talk about taking on ISIS. ISIS, like any other organization out there, has used social media platforms to spread its message. Whether or not its efforts have been more successful than previous like-minded organizations hasn't really been quantified, but for sheer shock value, it has every other terrorist outfit beat.

Because images and recordings of its atrocities have spread through the internet with amazing speed and ease, it's tempting to view ISIS as a group of digital natives -- people whose entire life has been filled with some sort of internet outlet for sociable sharing. The group seems to contain much sought after viral power, but that's likely due to its audience spending an increasing amount of time viewing the world through a browser, rather than through nightly news reports and morning papers.

The perception is the truth and a few US senators are seeking to counteract ISIS's viral power by utilizing the same playing fields. This may be a good idea, but it's also providing for some inadvertent hilarity as legislators put two and two together and get Voice of America: Buzzfeed edition.

“There’s an obvious piece of legislation that we need to start working on,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., said during a Homeland Security Committee hearing on “Jihad 2.0“.

“Let’s face it: We invented the Internet. We invented the social network sites. We’ve got Hollywood. We’ve got the capabilities… to blow these guys out of the water from the standpoint of communications.”

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., backed his colleague’s appeal. “Look at their fancy memes compared to what we’re not doing,” Booker said, displaying examples of jihadist online postings.

This doesn't bode well. The average member of America's governing bodies may generally find the use of the adjective "fancy" to still be perfectly normal, but the internet battlefield they're wishing to enter has never combined the words "fancy" and "meme" before. Booker's youth puts him in shouting distance of digital natives, but his clumsy phrasing could not have separated him further from the hearts and minds he's wishing to conquer.

Booker does raise valid points, though. There is some value in deploying counterpropaganda using the same communications channels. He later lamented the "millions" being spent on tools of dubious effectiveness, like Voice of America.

There are ways to deter potential ISIS sympathizers and recruits, but the US is engaged in roughly none of them. A constant military presence that alternated between surges and drone strikes isn't likely to result in fence-sitters opting for the American way. What's worse is the FBI's ongoing Grow Your Own Terrorist!™ program, which has succeeded in saving the world from a collection of "terrorists" whose only criminal act was playing along with undercover agents' suggestions in exchange for the occasional self-esteem boost. As a result of these so-called sting operations, those who could actually use help in dissuading friends or family members from being swayed by ISIS's message are instead keeping their concerns to themselves.

[National security expert Peter Bergen] noted that Muslim families who see a son or daughter radicalizing online are deterred from reporting the matter to the FBI out of fear that he or she will be thrown in jail for more than a decade.

When the purchase of plane tickets to certain nations is construed as "providing material support" for terrorism, there's something wrong with the system.

This isn't meant to be a total and preemptive condemnation of potential US efforts to engage ISIS on the digital battlefield. The problem is that the government is the entity least likely to do this effectively, seeing as it's largely unused to deploying anything with subtlety or agility. That it's calling on Hollywood to help it with its counterterrorism efforts is also a bit concerning, considering it conjures up images of Uncle Sam running a propaganda mill out of a studio backlot. Not only will this do little to sway potential ISIS sympathizers, but it's also apt to turn more citizens against their government, even if they agree that ISIS is a worthwhile target.

Filed Under: cory booker, counterterrorism, isis, memes, propaganda, ron johnson, social media, terrorism

MPAA Strategized On How To 'Tell The Positive Side' Of Internet Censorship

from the incredible dept

Back in December, when the Sony emails first leaked, we wrote a detailed post about the bizarre views of the MPAA on site blocking, in that it was absolutely obsessed with putting site blocking in place while admitting it didn't understand the technical issues. That was based on the reporting done by some reporters who had seen a few of the emails. Now that Wikileaks has released the entire trove, we can discover some more details, like the fact that part of the MPAA's plan was to figure out how to create pro-censorship propaganda. It really is incredible, but that's a bulletpoint in an email from the MPAA's top lawyer, Steven Fabrizio, about part of the strategy at a "site blocking confab" the major studios held last fall:

Outreach to academics, think tanks and other third parties to foster the publication of research papers, white papers and other articles that tell the positive story of site blocking: e.g., it is commonplace around the world and working smoothly; it has not broken the internet; it is not incompatible with DNSSEC; it is effective; legitimate sites/content have not been blocked; etc.

Think about that for a second. The MPAA, which likes to declare itself one of the foremost defenders of free speech, was literally conspiring on how to create propaganda in favor of censorship, pointing to countries that already censor the web as "good examples" to follow. You'd think they would have learned from the time Bono tried to use China's censorship as an example of how to deal with copyright infringement what a ridiculous idea this is.

Filed Under: censorship, mpaa, positive side, propaganda, site blocking
Companies: mpaa