Russian Info, Cyber and Disinformation (Jan-June 2017).

[davidbfpo]

From a 2016 post by Outlaw09: From the archives: the Soviet military strategy of maskirovka dates back decades:http://warontherocks.com/2016/05/a-d...ling-red-army/

From AdamG in 2016: Maskirovka’ Is Russian Secret War

Sneaky tactics are an old Russian tradition:

The term is maskirovka, which in Russian literally means “something masked.” Maskirovka has its roots in the word “masquerade,” a synonym for “disguise.” It is a tactic as old as the Trojan horse … and a favorite of the Russian military.

“The Russians embrace maskirovka because it works,” said James Miller, managing editor of The Interpreter, a daily online journal that translates media from the Russian press and blogosphere into English for use by analysts and policymakers.

The staff at The Interpreter has tracked numerous examples of what they say are maskirovka tactics, Miller told War is Boring. What’s more, what they have found aligns with intelligence reports that NATO has released.

Link:https://warisboring.com/maskirovka-i...fb6#.ylwgw6vk8

[AdamG]

From a 2016 post by Outlaw09: From the archives: the Soviet military strategy of maskirovka dates back decades:http://warontherocks.com/2016/05/a-d...ling-red-army/

From AdamG in 2016: Maskirovka’ Is Russian Secret War

Sneaky tactics are an old Russian tradition:
Link:https://warisboring.com/maskirovka-i...fb6#.ylwgw6vk8

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.#

http://www.realcleardefense.com/arti...on_110282.html

[OUTLAW 09]

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#

[OUTLAW 09]

http://www.realcleardefense.com/arti...on_110282.html

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.

[OUTLAW 09]

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.

[OUTLAW 09]

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:

[OUTLAW 09]

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"

[OUTLAW 09]

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...