Ludmila Savchuk sounds very brave. I hope that the next time we hear about her, it won't be some news about her body being found in a dumpster.
That said, I'd be curious to know which countries do the same thing on a comparable scale. China is well-known to be one, but there were indications that the NSA/GCHQ were not above this sort of thing either.
This is a private organization and it clearly states its goals. I have doubts about this approach anyway, but still it's very different from a secret army of government-paid propaganda agents the very idea of which is to pretend it's a voice of ordinary citizens.
There's no such information about JIDF and even if there were, it's still a group that clearly states what they are doing, not a covert joint pretending to be an "internet research agency".
There's a saying: "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist". The guys from the Agency are very concerned with this too. They don't exist, you know. These are just perfectly real people that happen to think Putin is not that bad and that Russia just wants to show its side of the story :)
Indications? Sorry, but there is absolutely no question that the NSA/GCHQ and indeed all the others of the Anglo-intelligence sphere have groups just like this operating, daily, to manipulate opinion and influence group dynamics.
No question about it: if your country has an Internet industry, it has government spy agencies involved in the Internet industry.
Spy Agencies - people who give themselves more rights and privileges than the rest of us in general, in fact - are a hidden society within every civilization that ever attempted to defend its right to define itself. Without a spy agency, you'll never quite know if you turned Japanese, for how will you know what a Japanese is, until you've become one?
Alas, this beautiful quandry seems to endear our species to its pitfalls, and we continue to allow classes in our societies to rule and dominate us by extending their privileges.
Were we to be able to turn off the secrecy bit - for all, and not just a few privileged - we may just find that we don't need to keep killing each other over the same things, over and over again, just because we don't really truly understand each other. All secrecy is a degree of none-understanding, held in place with force, to rule you.
So what you're saying is that there are US government-sponsored agencies putting fake people on Internet message boards inventing --- out of whole cloth --- disasters, industrial accidents, and misdeeds of foreign governments?
The US has Operation Earnest Voice, and Britain has JTRIG. Whether they're inventing disasters is another matter.
It's a sad reality that all major state actors have or will get involved in this, but not surprising. Warfare is changing in part due to massively increased connectivity, and the military and policy wonks have been aware of that for at least a decade.
I personally recommend books by David Kilcullen if you're interested.
The Russian propaganda is aimed principally at the Russian people. That's illegal in the US, and technically when the US spreads propaganda overseas they're required to make English-language copies available to the US press.
Then it should be especially easy to cite a source wherein the US sponsored a propaganda outfit that made up fake people who invited events out of whole cloth and posted them to sites for a US audience.
Because that is what this story says is happening in Russia. So much so that when Adrian Chen went to Russia to interview people, the Russian propaganda factory set up him with an interview with a neo-Nazi and then ran stories about Chen's neo-Nazi sympathies. Think about that: a Russian news outlet had a neo-Nazi on the payroll to set Chen up with.
I'm 100% sure that the Nazi is on the payroll of FSB, and the news outlet is also one of their establishments. This kind of a set up is totally their style.
I think about how conditioned to nonsense the Russian society must be for it to seem credible to anyone that an NYT reporter traveled to Russia to network with neo-Nazis. It's a spooky thing to consider.
It is perhaps scary to consider, but a lot of the non-Western world consider the USA to be a land of fascists and nazi's, alas. And there is much that can said about just how "true" this observation may be ..
Well, it is. Or maybe not only that; there's a strong culture of saying the right thing even if you're not that convinced :( But most people will believe it. It's very sad.
The statement that the US has a spotty record with the legality of its covert operations does not logically imply that the US has "sponsored a propaganda outfit that made up fake people who invited events out of whole cloth and posted them to sites for a US audience".
I was pointing out that just because something is illegal in the US won't stop the government if it's so inclined. They'll either find some dubious legal justification (see how the Authorization to Use Military Force has been interpreted), or just do it anyway (I find the legal reasoning supporting PRISM beyond specious; it's risible).
I thought my posts were pretty clear? I think you're mixing me up with the arguments of other posters.
Second: I believe PRISM is what I said it was: a computer system that manages FISA 702 warrants. The link you cite actually backs me up on that.
The specific issue of which NSA program is named "PRISM" and which other one isn't isn't especially important, except to the extent that when asked for evidence for an extraordinary claim, you produced evidence for a different claim, and that evidence doesn't even appear to be accurate.
Whoops, it seems I edited my post from out from under you; sorry. You also have my apologies for the earlier good-faith comment.
Sadly, I don't have the hours necessary to debate this, because that's where this is going (legal analysis is something you research and write over days, not on HN), and wasn't even my point (aka, I like keeping my arguments limited in scope, not some meandering train wreck). We'll have to agree to disagree.
Legalized with the enactment of the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012. The reform effectively nullifies the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which was amended in 1985 specifically to prohibit U.S. organizations from using information "to influence public opinion in the United States."[1]
The bill you're referring to is extraordinarily short. Its major section opens:
(a) IN GENERAL.—No funds authorized to be appropriated to the Department of State or the Broadcasting Board of Governors shall be used to influence public opinion in the United States.
Did you know that BBG, to which this act primarily pertains, is also one of the world's primary funding sources for security audits of open-source cryptography? That program is managed under the aegis of Radio Free Asia, and has put top-caliber researchers on virtually every open source cryptosystem you've ever heard of, and of course many you haven't.
Something tells me that NSA and BBG aren't closely coordinating.
Meanwhile, in Russia, which is what this article actually talks about, the country's largest social network was siezed and nationalized by the government.
Personally, and I know everyone won't agree with me on this, but I think we should all stop pretending that what the Russian government is doing is comparable to what the US and UK governments are doing. In the industrialized world, Russia and China are one kind of state controlled media, and everyone else is another. We should stop pretending that Russia and China are OK, or casting a pox on everyone else's houses. You'd rather have German media, or even US media, than Russian. Full stop.
I did not know that about the BBG. That is quite interesting.
I would have to agree that the level of media manipulation done by Russia and China is far beyond that done by the US. I think that's pretty clear. Frankly, I don't think any of it is "OK."
But third-world propaganda doesn't excuse first-world media manipulation either. Or maybe it does. I think it's fair to say that we're squarely in the realm of opinion here.
That RfA does this work quietly makes it all the more impressive to me. We did work for the program in my last couple years at Matasano (I imagine Tom Ritter's NCC Cryptography Practice is continuing it). They paid real money --- specialist cryptography practice money --- and their only terms were "find good bugs". The projects were coordinated with the open source project managers, who got full reports. Some of those open source projects even publicized the results!
I don't think the level of manipulation is any different between Russia and the US. The only difference is the type of manipulation - US spooks need to found a company and use their connections to make influence - e.g. CNN - meaning they're more covert. Russian examples are more overt, because Russian culture simply allows for the embarrassment. Americans would rather not be confronted with the degree to which their government is oppressing them - so they hide it behind corporate entities designed to hide the true influence in the shadows.
If it didn't recognize them as distinct URLs, a significant percentage of links would be rejected as having already been submitted. Http://site.com/article.php?id=1234 and http://site.com/article.php?id=5678 may be two legitimately unique articles.
My point is that it's not exactly rocket science to add an if/case statement in the Submit script that checks whether the URL being submitted is on a list of domains for which the '?' and anything after it should be disregarded.
'Twould also be great if it recognised that www.bbc.co.uk and www.bbc.com are effectively the same site.
"Well paid trolls", hmm... the monthly salary of Savhuk was 37,000 roubles monthly after taxes (by her words) what equals to ~$750. This is not a lot in St. Petersburg.
And there's a lot of trolls around russian web resources (don't know, on salary or not), especially when some politic issues are being discussed. Actually, it is not possible to do a constructive discussion at any russian forum, no matter if this is pro-Russian or pro-West. So, I prefer to not visit any places where political issues are being discussed.
And Operation Earnest Voice wouldn't be targeting US Citizens. Yes I understand they would still end up being part of it, but that isn't the primary goal, it also isn't being used in the same expressly political manner.
I was voted down for pointing out that what Russia does is not exactly unique(except they're not really good at what they do since they're easy to spot)... so here are some links.
Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media
Military's 'sock puppet' software creates fake online identities to spread pro-American propaganda
Reading your links, the known footprint between these governments seems quite different. Russia seems unique in its usage of these media. Faking a chemical disaster in the US, attempting to incite discord by faking a police shooting video, turning their own special LOIC on a NYT reporter...in comparison, the writeups on other nations' efforts (that we know about) leave a lot of room for this to be a false moral equivalence at this point. This NYT story is a pretty big deal in terms of providing evidence to that effect.
Yes, but I wouldn't underestimate their foreign propaganda. It's very obvious in some countries, for example mine (Bulgaria), where trolls affiliated with Russia regularly flood articles with anti-EU and anti-US comments.
I feel like I hear this comment every time the subject comes up. Are there people with stories about anti-Russian British sockpuppets on Vk or whatever? I never hear that story, but maybe it's because I don't spend time on Runet.
I'm pretty sure I can use this article to get funding in DC to make sure there is no troll gap. Being that we're America I'll of course go overboard and use machine learning, big data, and drones.
In the UK: I'd imagine some people from Cheltenham are having tea with some senior civil servants and a couple of dons in an Oxford college somewhere while chatting about the need to keep our end up.
Talking about machine learning... I'm not interested in western-sponsored sockpuppets fighting it out with Russian trolls, but surely a lot of these accounts could be flagged by fraud detection systems?
They're doing a terrible job misinforming about fake terrorist attacks and so on.
However,Western media and forums end up becoming quite biased in their own PC. Different points of views are often ignored or nonexistent(strong herd mentality).
If Russians limited their actions to showing another side of the story, I don't think it'd be a bad thing.
What caught my eye in this article was this phrase:
"Today an ISIS supporter might adopt a pseudonym to harass a critical journalist on Twitter, or a right-wing agitator in the United States might smear demonstrations against police brutality by posing as a thieving, violent protester."
Are there really such "right-wing agitators" out there or it's just a hypothetical case? Any investigations, perhaps? Or is it just a usual political struggle? I noticed that the most favored comment also was against the conservative party.
False flag riot-inciting operations by police are extremely common at protests, at least. And police supremacy is a right-wing tenet, as far as the silly wing analogy goes.
64 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 62.0 ms ] threadThat said, I'd be curious to know which countries do the same thing on a comparable scale. China is well-known to be one, but there were indications that the NSA/GCHQ were not above this sort of thing either.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_America_(airline)
There's a saying: "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist". The guys from the Agency are very concerned with this too. They don't exist, you know. These are just perfectly real people that happen to think Putin is not that bad and that Russia just wants to show its side of the story :)
No question about it: if your country has an Internet industry, it has government spy agencies involved in the Internet industry.
Spy Agencies - people who give themselves more rights and privileges than the rest of us in general, in fact - are a hidden society within every civilization that ever attempted to defend its right to define itself. Without a spy agency, you'll never quite know if you turned Japanese, for how will you know what a Japanese is, until you've become one?
Alas, this beautiful quandry seems to endear our species to its pitfalls, and we continue to allow classes in our societies to rule and dominate us by extending their privileges.
Were we to be able to turn off the secrecy bit - for all, and not just a few privileged - we may just find that we don't need to keep killing each other over the same things, over and over again, just because we don't really truly understand each other. All secrecy is a degree of none-understanding, held in place with force, to rule you.
Can you cite a source?
It's a sad reality that all major state actors have or will get involved in this, but not surprising. Warfare is changing in part due to massively increased connectivity, and the military and policy wonks have been aware of that for at least a decade.
I personally recommend books by David Kilcullen if you're interested.
Because that is what this story says is happening in Russia. So much so that when Adrian Chen went to Russia to interview people, the Russian propaganda factory set up him with an interview with a neo-Nazi and then ran stories about Chen's neo-Nazi sympathies. Think about that: a Russian news outlet had a neo-Nazi on the payroll to set Chen up with.
Edited for clarity.
The statement that the US has a spotty record with the legality of its covert operations does not logically imply that the US has "sponsored a propaganda outfit that made up fake people who invited events out of whole cloth and posted them to sites for a US audience".
I was pointing out that just because something is illegal in the US won't stop the government if it's so inclined. They'll either find some dubious legal justification (see how the Authorization to Use Military Force has been interpreted), or just do it anyway (I find the legal reasoning supporting PRISM beyond specious; it's risible).
I thought my posts were pretty clear? I think you're mixing me up with the arguments of other posters.
(unless that's what you mean by "manages FISA court orders", in which case... I'm somewhat establishment militarist, but wow)
The specific issue of which NSA program is named "PRISM" and which other one isn't isn't especially important, except to the extent that when asked for evidence for an extraordinary claim, you produced evidence for a different claim, and that evidence doesn't even appear to be accurate.
Sadly, I don't have the hours necessary to debate this, because that's where this is going (legal analysis is something you research and write over days, not on HN), and wasn't even my point (aka, I like keeping my arguments limited in scope, not some meandering train wreck). We'll have to agree to disagree.
WAS illegal in the US.*
Legalized with the enactment of the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012. The reform effectively nullifies the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which was amended in 1985 specifically to prohibit U.S. organizations from using information "to influence public opinion in the United States."[1]
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/us-domestic-propaganda-offici...
(a) IN GENERAL.—No funds authorized to be appropriated to the Department of State or the Broadcasting Board of Governors shall be used to influence public opinion in the United States.
Did you know that BBG, to which this act primarily pertains, is also one of the world's primary funding sources for security audits of open-source cryptography? That program is managed under the aegis of Radio Free Asia, and has put top-caliber researchers on virtually every open source cryptosystem you've ever heard of, and of course many you haven't.
Something tells me that NSA and BBG aren't closely coordinating.
Meanwhile, in Russia, which is what this article actually talks about, the country's largest social network was siezed and nationalized by the government.
Personally, and I know everyone won't agree with me on this, but I think we should all stop pretending that what the Russian government is doing is comparable to what the US and UK governments are doing. In the industrialized world, Russia and China are one kind of state controlled media, and everyone else is another. We should stop pretending that Russia and China are OK, or casting a pox on everyone else's houses. You'd rather have German media, or even US media, than Russian. Full stop.
I would have to agree that the level of media manipulation done by Russia and China is far beyond that done by the US. I think that's pretty clear. Frankly, I don't think any of it is "OK."
But third-world propaganda doesn't excuse first-world media manipulation either. Or maybe it does. I think it's fair to say that we're squarely in the realm of opinion here.
Edited for clarity.
They are not, in fact, even if you observe getting the same outcome from using both.
My point is that it's not exactly rocket science to add an if/case statement in the Submit script that checks whether the URL being submitted is on a list of domains for which the '?' and anything after it should be disregarded.
'Twould also be great if it recognised that www.bbc.co.uk and www.bbc.com are effectively the same site.
Also the problem isn't so bad to invest the non-trivial amount of time in it to fix it.
And there's a lot of trolls around russian web resources (don't know, on salary or not), especially when some politic issues are being discussed. Actually, it is not possible to do a constructive discussion at any russian forum, no matter if this is pro-Russian or pro-West. So, I prefer to not visit any places where political issues are being discussed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Voice
Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media Military's 'sock puppet' software creates fake online identities to spread pro-American propaganda
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-ope...
Israel to pay students to defend it online http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/08/14/israel-s...
HACKING ONLINE POLLS AND OTHER WAYS BRITISH SPIES SEEK TO CONTROL THE INTERNET https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/14/manipulating-o...
[edit] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-sponsored_Internet_sockpu...
And so it goes...
However,Western media and forums end up becoming quite biased in their own PC. Different points of views are often ignored or nonexistent(strong herd mentality).
If Russians limited their actions to showing another side of the story, I don't think it'd be a bad thing.
"Today an ISIS supporter might adopt a pseudonym to harass a critical journalist on Twitter, or a right-wing agitator in the United States might smear demonstrations against police brutality by posing as a thieving, violent protester."
Are there really such "right-wing agitators" out there or it's just a hypothetical case? Any investigations, perhaps? Or is it just a usual political struggle? I noticed that the most favored comment also was against the conservative party.