Hackers vow to release trove of emails from influential UAE ambassador to US. Groups email is registered in Russia
http://www.thedailybeast.com/hackers...sadors-emails#
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Hackers vow to release trove of emails from influential UAE ambassador to US. Groups email is registered in Russia
http://www.thedailybeast.com/hackers...sadors-emails#
I have been posting enough around the use if Russian and US proTrump bots, botnets, Russian and US proTrump disinformation and propaganda and how they are tied together.....
Finally someone from inside the bot world steps up and calls it what it is an information war being driven straight at Americans by both proTrump supporters and Russian trolls...and actually IMHO deliberateyl coordinated....
This is a long read but worth it as it goes into good detail and supports his argument with screen shots to back up what he is saying....
As someone who has a cybersecurity company which is deeply involved in identifying Russian botnetworks both criminal and state sponsored..what this article describes is both factual and highly accurate....and depicts what is really going on with an estimated 15M bots that claim to be ALL Trump "Followers".....
https://www.pastemagazine.com/articl...google-to.html
How the Trump-Russia Data Machine Games Google to Fool Americans
By Roger Sollenberger June 1, 2017
Quote:
A year ago I was part of a digital marketing team at a tech company. We were maybe the fifth largest company in our particular industry, which was drones. But we knew how to game Google, and our site was maxed out. We did our research and geared the content for the major keywords that we knew people used most frequently when they were shopping for drones or researching drones or looking for drone video. We knew our audience: their buying habits, their interests, ages, geography, etc., and soon our Google results were up there with a company that was literally an order of magnitude bigger than we were. A few months later, we were beating them at Google.
Our sales reflected this nearly immediately, but perhaps more importantly, we were perceived as being much bigger and more influential than we actually were. It was unfair and fair at the same time. It’s just how that game is played, everywhere.
But then the giants wised up, poured a ton of people and money into it and squashed us.
Thing is, it doesn’t take all that much to do what we did. Ask any digital marketer. You just need a little experience and a whole lot of time and money. I’m not going to get into the weeds of SEO (search engine optimization). But I am going to say something that sounds completely insane, and warn you that we’re in the middle of something we’ve never experienced in America: a full-on psychological war. And Google, of all places, is a main battlefield.
I’m going to show you one specific weapon in this war that’s being used against you and me and the United States right now: Google. There are other information weapons, such as bots and fake news sites, but other stories have those pretty well covered. But before we get started, though, two things to keep in mind:
First, most of us don’t even know we’re in this war yet. You don’t know when you’ve been wounded, when you’ve been killed. And that’s the whole point: You’re not supposed to.
Second, the attacks in this war aren’t aimed at your enemies. You attack your own side.
Independence Is Division
First: Why this is important. Why this is a war.
Google, whether you’re aware of it or not, is a total slaughterhouse. Trump’s data team (he’s reportedly set up a “war room” to combat the Russia story) has weaponized information, and for about a year now has been slaying American brains: Trump supporters’ brains. It started with the election, then died down, but now it’s coming back, vengeful and desperate.
As a result, we’re at a pivotal point not just in the life of our democracy, but in how we think, read, and make choices. Selective information is being presented to us in a way that encourages selective reading and offers psychological and social rewards for, to put it bluntly, being stupid and submissive and spreading stupid to submit others.
This is, of course, about the truth, and about the cognitive and emotional vulnerabilities of Americans. This is nothing new for propagandists. What’s different now is that this propaganda is being gamed by professionals in a massive, orchestrated data campaign at a volume, pace, and consistency that not only muddies the truth, but completely eclipses the truth. Destroys the very notion of truth.
I can describe it in no other terms but a war.
The truth about the truth is that we believe because we want to, because our ability to think independently is a point of pride for Americans. The people behind the curtain are telling us the same story we tell ourselves about ourselves. But this is also a vulnerability: Independence is in its purist form a kind of division. If you exploit it the right way, you can turn a democracy against itself. If I think about this for too long I grow terrified and want to take everyone’s computer away. But it might be too late.
Beyond the Bots: Trump’s Twitter Toupee
The past few days, we’ve seen some good reporting about the surge of Trump bots on social media. (Bots are automated, non-human accounts.) And though he didn’t, as some people have claimed, net five million new Twitter followers in three days (though he did gain three million in May), nearly half of his followers, a full 49 percent, aren’t real people.
That’s right: Trump is being followed by 15 million robots.
The Washington Post just ran a pretty cowardly piece about Trump’s bot following. They titled it “Something Fishy Is Going on with Trump’s Twitter Account,” but didn’t say why this fishiness mattered in the first place. Who really cares if his followers are fake? So what if he wears a Twitter toupee? (A Twoupee, if you will.) We’re used to that from Trump.
Here’s where WaPo wouldn’t, for some reason, go: those bots aren’t just digital codpieces. They’re attack vectors for weaponized information. What does that mean?
Misinfotainment
When we think about the Russian attacks during the election, most of us probably think of the DNC hacks, Podesta, and the steady drips from WikiLeaks of that stolen information. If you hate Hillary Clinton, I’m sure that at some point in the past nine months you’ve said something like, “Well, who cares how that information got out there, it’s the truth!”
I won’t argue. Instead, I’d like to point out that’s not the whole story. According not just to me and FAKE NEWS! reports, but to the declassified U.S. intelligence report on Russian subversion in the 2016 election, the attacks included weaponizing false information (what “fake news” really is: stuff that’s entirely made up; pure fiction) and creating real-seeming sites to host this fake news. So no, the whole hacking effort was not just publishing “the truth” about Clinton. Much of it was publishing fake news. Or, perhaps more dangerously, misleading news.
This brings us to Google today. A couple weeks ago I saw an insane person on my Facebook feed screaming about how Obama had leaked classified information about the Bin Laden raid that got people killed. What the ####? I’d never heard anything about this, and the raid was six years ago, and this guy was a total right-wing crackpot, which is the trifecta for guaranteeing at least fifteen full minutes of bat#### conspiracy theory misinfotainment. So I duly Googled “obama classified information bin laden.” If you do that right now, here’s what you get.
WHAAAAAT?! Obama’s mouth killed people! Media is libturd hypocrites!
Let’s ignore the criminal level of stupidity for a minute. Look instead at the dates on those articles. May 16 and 17 of this year. This year. The Bin Laden raid, again, was six ####ing years ago. What’s happening here? Why are all these different white nationalist news sites suddenly writing about this together? Why did they start doing it on May 16? Why do those articles even exist?
Well, on May 15, you might remember, The Washington Post broke this little gem: President Trump shared top secret intel with the Russian Foreign Minister and Russian Ambassador. In the Oval Office. In front of Russian state media.
Whoops-a-daisy!
The right-wing bull#### factory lurched to life. These outlets launched a broad “what about?” attack, a coordinated attack, on Obama and the left. That bull#### story about Obama’s “dangerous” classified “leak” suddenly broke throughout the right-wing media sphere. Some of these articles are even cut-and-paste jobs. There’s no effort here, just content. Tons of content, made quickly, made together, all spewing the same lies, but optimized.
And when I googled the search term the night of May 31, as I’m writing this, it’s even worse. The Washington Post, which had a page two hit on May 29, is now at the bottom of page four.
Continue.....
See? You’d either miss this caveat altogether, or you’d forget about it or write it off as meaningless or some kind of error. It’s so small, after all. This is completely forgivable: It’s a human vulnerability. I exhibit it. Everyone does. We want to be right. We trust our brains. We believe in ourselves, in our capacity to execute sound, independent judgment. But this is the very thing that’s being strategically exploited on a truly massive scale. This is a scheme to generate an overwhelming amount of misinformation, not just to combat a more nuanced truth, but to marginalize the truth, to weaken it, to BURY it underneath your own misplaced convictions about yourself.
We’re being flattered into stupidity. Here’s how it works.
How The SEOsage Is Made
First: Create content that subtly masks the truth.
Second: Shape that content into something people will share.
Third: Make it identical, and make a ton of it.
Fourth: Flood the internet with that content.
Fifth: Flood the internet with that content.
Six: Flood the ####ing internet with that content.
Continued......
Imagine fake tweets from fake people, with fake likes to make you think an opinion in your circle is mainstream ...
http://bit.ly/2pORice
Cybersleuths Say Convoy Movements Show Link To MH17 Plane Crash https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-mh17.../28529566.html …
CNN Exclusive: US suspects Russian hackers planted fake news behind Qatar crisis
By Evan Perez and Shimon Prokupecz, CNN
Updated 0021 GMT (0821 HKT) June 7, 2017
From a very respected retired NSA CI top agent....
This goes WAY beyond mere RIS Active Measures -- this is really a crazy, scary story of where we are in 2017.
.@nytimes explains how Russian propaganda spread from a parody website to Fox News, using research from @DFRLab ↓
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...opaganda.html#
"After The New York Times asked about the article, it was deleted from the http://FoxNews.com# website."
Russian Fake News:
Russian state TV illustrates "Coalition airstrike in #Syria" with Saudi airstrike in #Yemen.
NATO Officials Say #Russia/n #FakeNews Seeks to Undermine Alliance
https://www.voanews.com/a/nato-offic.../3729410.html#
Fascinating @washingtonpost piece investigating inter-state cyber conflict in the Gulf via twitter bot armies
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/....79435b70d8d6#
The Hack that Caused a Crisis in the Middle East Was Easy
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...s-easy#…
http://www.realcleardefense.com/arti...on_110282.htmlQuote:
Russia, however, has a history of operating with a more complete inclusion of elements of political power and influence as well as Operational Art that ties combined arms to campaign objectives.# It is so important to Russian doctrine, they have used and continue to use the term, Maskirovka—the art of deception—to elevate the complete set of actions and conditions that fall short of war that enables battlefield victories to be decided before tanks and infantry close in battle.# It is Maskirovka, and the complementary technological changes to the character of warfare now and in the future, that make Russia the significant resurging threat to regional stability, NATO, and the U.S.#
Two Swedish Neo-Nazis charged over refugee home blast 'received military training in Russia' shortly before act.
https://www.thelocal.se/20170609/got...ing-in-russia#
NOW this is where the social media analysis starts to get extremely interesting....this social media analyst is doing some private work that equals what some top IT firms are doing...well actually not doing....and Twitter refuses to engage in this tzpe of public research on how twitter is being gamed for Russian info warfare
This contains data going back to the beginning of /r/The_Donald, total of 2,526,692 comments from 80,708 threads.
(It's still just a slice of the full content, but that would have taken weeks to download.)
It'll be a while before I have all of it, but this graph does a decent job of highlighting the major topics of discussion the last 3 months.
The vocabulary of /r/The_Donald users has changed over time - alt-right jargon has increased in frequency, for example.
This figure shows overall activity. It's what you'd expect - 24/7, but substantially lower activity when people in the USA are asleep.
The time pattern is similar if we only include posts that contain the word "Hillary".
I looked at the timing patterns for other popular terms (in over 9000 posts in my dataset = "popular"). Here's "wall".
"Russia", "globalist", "Trump", and "cuck" show a similar pattern. Nothing special.
So do "Podesta" and "WikiLeaks". Oh, wait. I lied. Something's different here.
Here's all nine plots side by side for comparison. "WikiLeaks" and "Podesta" show an odd burst of morning activity which the others lack.
Here is the theory let me see if it holds....
Timing. Wikileaks links are being placed on /r/The_Donald at the beginning of the US work day for folks to read while slacking off at work.
I kind of wanted to find another suspicious thing, so I started looking at the users linking Wikileaks and I found another suspicious thing.
Meet "Bad_Harambe", although you probably don't want to. They posted this gem a few months back:
B_H (+others) later buried the link with a flurry of spam. Would take a while for anyone manually reading their post history to find
NOTE...this is a deliberate attempt to mask their conversations and a mark of those that know how to avoid surveillance....
NOTICE Twitter feature that allows one to tell if one is being monitored....Twitter does not tell you about this feature does it????
"Quit Snooping through my comment history"
NOW the analysis shifts gears....
I took a brief look at what major news sites are being linked to from /r/The_Donald, because it's a Tuesday in June 6.2.2017
The top five in the dataset I'm using were Breitbart, CNN, Fox News, RT (Russia Today), and Washington Post.
Here's a chart showing the relative share of these five sites. RT(dot)com is the largest, beating out Breitbart by a decent margin.
Volume by week going back to the inception of /r/The_Donald. RT has consistently been the top news source there all along.
BEGS the question....Why is RT and Brietbart so correlated?
SO on this particular day in June 6.2.2017 69.8% of all twitter media comments, fake news etc was being driven by just two media sources
AND that is not the mark of an ongoing "active measures influence operation" being driven by Russia?????
NOTE....our research on the automated bot networks under control of Russia sources ties nicely into this research and confirms exactly what he is alluding to....Russian influence operations driven straight into the heart of the US using alt right blogsites and alt right twitter accounts...
Anyone doing such statistical analysis of the Alinskyites' AgitProp?
We are watching this one and several others right now but analysis will be awhile due to volumes involved.....also research on the tie into Russian botnets are coming as well....
WHAT can be said for the so called from the right Alinskyites is the following and it is rather straight forward....they do not have the sheer volume of automated bots nor the support of outside the US so called leftist bot networks. Does Putin play the left...yes he does just as he does the US right....but the US left does not appear to be completely following what comes out of Russia but the right does....
We also do not see those sites having a tendency to accept Russian troll bot conspiracy myths as does the alt right.....
What is far more interesting is to track the origination of what Bannon stated "I am a Leninist and want to destroy the US establishment"...now go back and check where that thinking arose.....
Google David Horowitz and you will get about 15-20 pages of his right wing writings since 1990.....
Try to find any of his 1960/70s Marxist writings ...and then ask the core question how is it that a to his core Marixist coverts to become the leading ideologue for the "alt right" and his disciples are in the WH...Bannon and Miller???
That is far more interesting as suddenly the "language of the "left" becomes the language of the "ultra right"....
BTW..the amount of sheer volumes of money supporting alt right and ultra right groups and social media sites BY FAR outclasses anything on the left side of the US spectrum...that is a simple fact of life and it raises the question...where does all of the money come from????
Interesting listing ......
Alinskyites work to steer popular dissatisfactions in the direction of their leftist goals.
Radical-In-Chief
Though commonsense pragmatism unfettered by ideology is their public theme, Alinskyites use polarization as a tactic.
Radical-In-Chief
Many working-class young people will respond to socialist appeals, said Ackerman, “unless, of course, we deny our existence to them, the apparent strategy of closet socialist Alinskyites.”
Radical-In-Chief
Read “Rules for Radicals”. this is a typical Alinskyites tactic.
The Volokh Conspiracy » Grassroots Activism For Me, But Not For#Thee
The Alinskyites are all traitors and should be prosecuted for treason immediately!
The Volokh Conspiracy » A Torture Prosecutor After#All?
What the Alinskyites want is to make it universal national health care.
The Volokh Conspiracy » Serious Health Care Reform Proposal:
To see Alinskyites, radical intellectuals, and Woodstock yuppies lecturing fellow Americans on the virtue of civility is tiresome but unsurprising.
The American Spectator
Perhaps the greatest source of optimism for the Alinskyites is that they believe the collectivist transformations they have inflicted will never be reversed, and that the coming electoral consequence will be temporary.
Latest Articles
Many of Breitbart's biggest supporters insist that the Right needs to out-Alinsky the Alinskyites.
The Corner on National Review Online
In other words, saying we need to fight like Alinskyites out of some principle almost certainly guarantees that we will lose sight of what we're supposed to be fighting for.