Russian Info, Cyber and Disinformation (Catch all till 2017)

[kaur]

Outlaw mentioned this Ukraineatwar post in parallel thread.

http://ukraineatwar.blogspot.be/2014...adams.html?m=1

This connection was mentioned among others in February.

http://anton-shekhovtsov.blogspot.co...-anti.html?m=1

[kaur]

Russia and the Menace of Unreality
How Vladimir Putin is revolutionizing information warfare
PETER POMERANTSEVSEP 9 2014

“If previous authoritarian regimes were three parts violence and one part propaganda,” argues Igor Yakovenko, a professor of journalism at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, “this one is virtually all propaganda and relatively little violence. Putin only needs to make a few arrests—and then amplify the message through his total control of television.”

The point of this new propaganda is not to persuade anyone, but to keep the viewer hooked and distracted—to disrupt Western narratives rather than provide a counternarrative. It is the perfect genre for conspiracy theories, which are all over Russian TV. When the Kremlin and its affiliated media outlets spat out outlandish stories about the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine in July—reports that characterized the crash as everything from an assault by Ukrainian fighter jets following U.S. instructions, to an attempted NATO attack on Putin’s private jet—they were trying not so much to convince viewers of any one version of events, but rather to leave them confused, paranoid, and passive—living in a Kremlin-controlled virtual reality that can no longer be mediated or debated by any appeal to ‘truth.’

Like its domestic equivalents, RT also focuses on conspiracy theories—from 9/11 truthers to the hidden Zionist hand in Syria’s civil war. Western critics often snigger at these claims, but the coverage has a receptive audience. In a recent paper, “The Conspiratorial Mindset in the Age of Transition,” which examined conspiracy theories in France, Hungary, and Slovakia, a team of researchers from leading European think tanks reported that supporters of far-right parties tend to be more likely than supporters of other parties to believe in conspiracies. And right-wing nationalist parties, which are often allied ideologically and financially with the Kremlin, are rising. In Hungary, Jobbik is now the second-largest political party. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Front recently won 25 percent of the vote in elections for the European parliament.

http://www.theatlantic.com/internati...fare/379880/2/

[kaur]

Analysis of Russia's Information Campaign Against Ukraine.

The report analyses Russia's information campaign against Ukraine, covering the period from the 3rd Eastern Partnership. Summit in Vilnius (28-29 November

https://nllp.jallc.nato.int/IKS/Shar...%20Ukraine.pdf

[kaur]

Russia’s Information Warfare Strategy: Can the Nation Cope in Future Conflicts?

Timothy Thomas

Published online: 10 Mar 2014

This article discusses new developments in Russia’s information and cyber warfare concepts. It updates information based on old paradigms and introduces several new developments that are influencing the current paradigm. It examines the potential shape of Russia’s cyber strategy and offers a prediction as to how they might ‘cyber cope’ in future conflict.

Free access.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/...5#.VE5ReCLF8jI

[kaur]

Russian authorities have labeled their Ukrainian opponents with fascist label. It seems that this is old trick. What a publishing house grade rumour mill! Today there are huge "force multipliers" internet and television that cover globe.

A reliable source of the Polish friends [Polish intelligence], an American entrepreneur and owner of a number of firms closely connected to the petroleum circles of the South, reported in late November that the real instigators of this criminal deed were three leading oil magnates from the South of the USA -- Richardson, Murchison and Hunt, all owners of major petroleum reserves in the southern states who have long been connected to pro-fascist and racist organizations in the South.

http://www.jfk-online.com/mitrokhin.html

[kaur]

Deja vu rhetoric in Hungary and Ukraine almost 60 years later?

ON EACH OF the three occasions when the Red Army intervened to restore pro-Soviet orthodoxy in a wayward Communist state-Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Afghanistan in 1979-the KGB played a prominent part in what was euphemistically termed the process of "normalization." When the Hungarian uprising began in October 1956 with mass demonstrations calling for free elections and the withdrawal of Soviet troops, the KGB chairman, General Ivan Aleksandrovich Serov, flew to Budapest to take personal charge of KGB operations. At an emergency meeting of security and police officers in the interior ministry, Serov denounced their reluctance to fire on the demonstrators: "The fascists and imperialists are bringing out their shock troops into the streets of Budapest, and yet there are still comrades in your country's armed forces who hesitate to use arms!" Sandor Kopacsi, the Budapest chief of police, who was soon to side with the freedom fighters, replied scornfully:

Evidently the comrade adviser from Moscow has not yet had time to inform himself of the situation in our country. We need to tell him that these are not "fascists" or other "imperialists" who are organizing the demonstration; they come from the universities, the handpicked sons and daughters of peasants and workers, the fine flower of our country's intelligentsia which is demanding its rights…7

Like Eastern Europe 1960. and Bolotnaja protest meeting in Moscow 2012 and Arab spring, color revolutions in CIS?

Though it was not until after the Prague Spring of 1968 that the Red Army intervened again to enforce Soviet ideological orthodoxy, Moscow showed growing anxiety during the 1960s at increasing Western influence within the Soviet Bloc. The KGB reported that the West was engaged in wide-ranging "subversive activity in the political and ideological sphere against the socialist countries… seeking to persuade the population of the superiority of the Western way of life." The "subversion" took many forms: broadcasting, propagandist publications, information distributed by Western embassies, East-West cultural and scientific exchanges, tourism and letterwriting. In the Centre's view, Western radio stations such as the BBC World Service and Radio Liberty threatened to cause "immense harm" by broadcasting propaganda designed to weaken the fraternal ties between the Soviet Union and the socialist states of eastern Europe.10 What most worried the KGB was that "the broadcasts were popular with the intelligentsia and young people."

"The West's subversive activities," complained one KGB report, were "harming the cause of Socialist construction" throughout the Soviet Bloc, encouraging nationalist tendencies in the states of eastern Europe and damaging their ties with the Soviet Union. The greatest harm was being done among the intelligentsia and young people. The KGB noted "an unhealthy tendency" among writers towards "ideological co-existence" with the West and a growing belief that literature was no business of the Party. Students showed a worrying tendency to set up independent non-Party organizations for "free discussion on the model of English clubs." One undated KGB report picked out two subversive texts currently attracting "growing interest:" The New Class by the heretical Yugoslav Communist Milovan Djilas, and the works of the late nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.14

It is easy to see why Djilas's devastating expose of the Soviet (Russian? by kaur)system as a co-optive oligarchy run by a privileged Party (United Russia party? by kaur)nomenklatura should have been seen as so subversive. In 1963 the twenty-year-old Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovsky was sent to psychiatric hospital for possessing a copy of it. Even for KGB officers The New Class was seen as a potentially dangerous text. When General Oleg Kalugin finally read the book in the KGB library in 1981, twenty-four years after its publication in the West, he found himself secretly agreeing with it.15 Why Nietzsche should have been mentioned in the same breath as Djilas is more puzzling. His call for a "revaluation of all values" so that the life force of the strongest should not be hampered by the weak, though bearing some relation to the actual practice of Stalinism, was ideological anathema. But the works of Nietzsche, unlike those of Djilas, were scarcely likely to subvert the youth of the Soviet Bloc. The author of the KGB report probably knew no more about the great German philosopher than that he was a well-known enemy of Marxism.

[kaur]

Homefront seems to be under control by Kremlin.

Most Russians believe that the country's state-run news agencies have provided objective coverage of the events unfolding during the Ukraine conflict, a poll by the Levada Center revealed Wednesday.

Fifty-nine percent of respondents to the poll, conducted between Oct. 24 and 27, said they disagreed with the notion often expressed by Western critics that Russian media is distorting the facts on the Ukraine crisis.

Another 13 percent of respondents said they agreed with the statement that Russia is conducting an information war against Ukraine — but that it is justified. Eleven percent said Russian media was guilty of biased media reporting and that it was "harmful and dangerous."

Most respondents also said they noticed an information war being waged against Russia as a result of the conflict, with 54 percent of respondents citing Ukraine as the ringleader of the information war and 55 percent the U.S.

Influencing international audience needs additional effort.

Russia is rapidly expanding its global propaganda empire, and while some of its mouth pieces and media outlets are broadly recognized as closely tied to or owned by the Kremlin, others continue to escape the world’s attention, passing themselves off as independent projects. In the most recent major example, on November 10, the director of the Kremlin-backed international media corporation RT (formerly Russia Today), Dmitry Kisilev, announced the launch of a new “brand” connected to the RT parent company—a gigantic news agency to be named “Sputnik” (Vedomosti, November 10). According to Kisilev, the project includes a main website, Sputniknews.com, with more than 800 hours of daily programming in 30 languages, covering over 130 cities in 34 countries. Kisilev says these numbers will increase in 2015 by 30 new “multimedia hubs,” each hosting radio stations, news bureaus, press-centers and employing 30 to 70 staffers. And in addition to the three languages RT itself already broadcasts in—English, Spanish and Arabic—on December 1, the media outlet plans to launch a Chinese-language service as well. It is noteworthy that the online IP address for Sputniknews.com points to Moscow’s Federal State Unitary Enterprise Russian Agency of International Information (ip-tracker.org, accessed November 12)—the official name of the large, state-owned Russian news agency RIA Novosti, which is set for liquidation this year.

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/article/511047.html

http://www.jamestown.org/programs/ed...b#.VGRh4oikqrU