Why Do People Apologize For Russia?

[JackRiddler]

Russia has the equivalent of a CIA-lifer as president. He's a macho asshole sucking up to the Orthodox church (and banning Jehova's Witnesses), homophobes (gay "propaganda" is illegal and books with LGBT content are censored or wrapped in plastic), racists (to be fair, Putin doesn't seem to be a racist himself, but Russians are pretty damn racist and he has to cater to them. If you're a refugee you can just forget going to Russia, and if you're black you've probably been physically assaulted) and wife-beaters (now legal as long as you're a first time offender and it didn't result in a hospital visit).

He's Trump with a brain and 80% approval ratings (why do you think Trump loves him so much? He's everything Trump wants to be), and that should scare you.

Agreed, on all points and even more you probably know but don't mention, but it doesn't mean the particular narratives advanced about Russian "meddling" hold water. Saddam Hussein was even worse than all this, but still Iraq did not have WMD and did not orchestrate 9/11.

To take the current stories, some political consultant money laundering is criminal and should be punished but does not rise to the level of Russian state information warfare. Plus the next fellow to be hit is almost certainly Tony P, fancy that.

Most of the particular "information warfare" linked to "Russia" is so awesomely laughable. Have you seen the social media ads that are supposed to have us clamoring for Internet censorship? Those relating to the election were repeats of the same workhorse attack memes about Clintons and Obama propagated over decades by FOXNEWS and Drudge and the Christianists and the right-wing blogosphere. This was social engineering?! Looks more like pedestrian retail-level clickbait trying to earn income through ad servers. Anyone with moderate skills can play at that. Yet the hysteria inflates it to the force of a zombie virus - BLM and Sanders support and Wisconsin votes for Trump all being orchestrated by this awesome magic.

Now if there was real meat to the idea that it was the Russian state that orchestrated the DNC/Podesta hauls and handed those to Wikileaks, that would be half-impressive, in that it's an original intervention that wouldn't just have happened anyway. Regardless of whether this intervention really had the impact attributed to it of flipping the election (obviously not).

That idea bogged down long ago, however, yet the "Russiagate" stuff keeps branching out. It lives from cherrypicking anything that can be identified as "Russian" (and attributed to a Russian state influence operation, whether truthfully or not) out of the worldwide shitstorm of foreign/domestic/corporate/laundered money flowing into and out of the United States with potential impact on U.S. politics. A cherrypicking game that can go on infinitely, by the way, but the "Russian" streams are still just a fraction of the overall activity.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIBoGRR8w1Q


Facebook, Google, and Twitter Executives Testify at Senate Hearing on Russia Election Interference


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av0RM3DvhaA

[seemslikeadream]

The Russian hackers targeted US military leaders, NATO officials, defense contractors, intel officers, & politicians (mainly Democrats).




Newly revealed data described as “a master list of individuals whom Russia would like to spy on, embarrass, discredit or silence."

Russia hackers had targets worldwide, beyond US election


WASHINGTON (AP) — The hackers who disrupted the U.S. presidential election had ambitions well beyond Hillary Clinton’s campaign, targeting the emails of Ukrainian officers, Russian opposition figures, U.S. defense contractors and thousands of others of interest to the Kremlin, according to a previously unpublished digital hit list obtained by The Associated Press.

The list provides the most detailed forensic evidence yet of the close alignment between the hackers and the Russian government, exposing an operation that stretched back years and tried to break into the inboxes of 4,700 Gmail users across the globe — from the pope’s representative in Kiev to the punk band Pussy Riot in Moscow.

“It’s a wish list of who you’d want to target to further Russian interests,” said Keir Giles, director of the Conflict Studies Research Center in Cambridge, England, and one of five outside experts who reviewed the AP’s findings. He said the data was “a master list of individuals whom Russia would like to spy on, embarrass, discredit or silence.”

The AP findings draw on a database of 19,000 malicious links collected by cybersecurity firm Secureworks, dozens of rogue emails, and interviews with more than 100 hacking targets.


The Associated Press has obtained thousands of links for emails sent last year by Fancy Bear hackers. AP’s analysis is the first detailed public report of how the hacks were conducted. They point overwhelmingly to Russian government involvement. (Nov. 2)

Secureworks stumbled upon the data after a hacking group known as Fancy Bear accidentally exposed part of its phishing operation to the internet. The list revealed a direct line between the hackers and the leaks that rocked the presidential contest in its final stages, most notably the private emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

The issue of who hacked the Democrats is back in the national spotlight following the revelation Monday that a Donald Trump campaign official, George Papadopoulos, was briefed early last year that the Russians had “dirt” on Clinton, including “thousands of emails.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the notion that Russia interfered “unfounded.” But the list examined by AP provides powerful evidence that the Kremlin did just that.

“This is the Kremlin and the general staff,” said Andras Racz, a specialist in Russian security policy at Pazmany Peter Catholic University in Hungary, as he examined the data.

“I have no doubts.”

___

THE NEW EVIDENCE

Secureworks’ list covers the period between March 2015 and May 2016. Most of the identified targets were in the United States, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia and Syria.

In the United States, which was Russia’s Cold War rival, Fancy Bear tried to pry open at least 573 inboxes belonging to those in the top echelons of the country’s diplomatic and security services: then-Secretary of State John Kerry, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, then-NATO Supreme Commander, U.S. Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, and one of his predecessors, U.S. Army Gen. Wesley Clark.

The list skewed toward workers for defense contractors such as Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin or senior intelligence figures, prominent Russia watchers and — especially — Democrats. More than 130 party workers, campaign staffers and supporters of the party were targeted, including Podesta and other members of Clinton’s inner circle.

The AP also found a handful of Republican targets.


This combination of photos shows from left, punk band Pussy Riot member Maria Alekhina, anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny and oil tycoon-turned-Kremlin foe Mikhail Khodorkovsky. All three were among Russian targets of the hacking group Fancy Bear. (AP Photo)

Podesta, Powell, Breedlove and more than a dozen Democratic targets besides Podesta would soon find their private correspondence dumped to the web. The AP has determined that all had been targeted by Fancy Bear, most of them three to seven months before the leaks.

“They got two years of email,” Powell recently told AP. He said that while he couldn’t know for sure who was responsible, “I always suspected some Russian connection.”

In Ukraine, which is fighting a grinding war against Russia-backed separatists, Fancy Bear attempted to break into at least 545 accounts, including those of President Petro Poroshenko and his son Alexei, half a dozen current and former ministers such as Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and as many as two dozen current and former lawmakers.

The list includes Serhiy Leshchenko, an opposition parliamentarian who helped uncover the off-the-books payments allegedly made to Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort — whose indictment was unsealed Monday in Washington.

In Russia, Fancy Bear focused on government opponents and dozens of journalists. Among the targets were oil tycoon-turned-Kremlin foe Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent a decade in prison and now lives in exile, and Pussy Riot’s Maria Alekhina. Along with them were 100 more civil society figures, including anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny and his lieutenants.

“Everything on this list fits,” said Vasily Gatov, a Russian media analyst who was himself among the targets. He said Russian authorities would have been particularly interested in Navalny, one of the few opposition leaders with a national following.

Many of the targets have little in common except that they would have been crossing the Kremlin’s radar: an environmental activist in the remote Russian port city of Murmansk; a small political magazine in Armenia; the Vatican’s representative in Kiev; an adult education organization in Kazakhstan.

“It’s simply hard to see how any other country would be particularly interested in their activities,” said Michael Kofman, an expert on Russian military affairs at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington. He was also on the list.

“If you’re not Russia,” he said, “hacking these people is a colossal waste of time.”

___

WORKING 9 TO 6 MOSCOW TIME

Allegations that Fancy Bear works for Russia aren’t new. But raw data has been hard to come by.

Researchers have been documenting the group’s activities for more than a decade and many have accused it of being an extension of Russia’s intelligence services. The “Fancy Bear” nickname is a none-too-subtle reference to Russia’s national symbol.

In the wake of the 2016 election, U.S. intelligence agencies publicly endorsed the consensus view, saying what American spooks had long alleged privately: Fancy Bear is a creature of the Kremlin.


But the U.S. intelligence community provided little proof, and even media-friendly cybersecurity companies typically publish only summaries of their data.

That makes the Secureworks’ database a key piece of public evidence — all the more remarkable because it’s the result of a careless mistake.

Secureworks effectively stumbled across it when a researcher began working backward from a server tied to one of Fancy Bear’s signature pieces of malicious software.

He found a hyperactive Bitly account Fancy Bear was using to sneak thousands of malicious links past Google’s spam filter. Because Fancy Bear forgot to set the account to private, Secureworks spent the next few months hovering over the group’s shoulder, quietly copying down the details of the thousands of emails it was targeting.

The AP obtained the data recently, boiling it down to 4,700 individual email addresses, and then connecting roughly half to account holders. The AP validated the list by running it against a sample of phishing emails obtained from people targeted and comparing it to similar rosters gathered independently by other cybersecurity companies, such as Tokyo-based Trend Micro and the Slovakian firm ESET .

The Secureworks data allowed reporters to determine that more than 95 percent of the malicious links were generated during Moscow office hours — between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. Monday to Friday.

The AP’s findings also track with a report that first brought Fancy Bear to the attention of American voters. In 2016, a cybersecurity company known as CrowdStrike said the Democratic National Committee had been compromised by Russian hackers, including Fancy Bear.

Secureworks’ roster shows Fancy Bear making aggressive attempts to hack into DNC technical staffers’ emails in early April 2016 — exactly when CrowdStrike says the hackers broke in.

And the raw data enabled the AP to speak directly to the people who were targeted, many of whom pointed the finger at the Kremlin.

“We have no doubts about who is behind these attacks,” said Artem Torchinskiy, a project coordinator with Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund who was targeted three times in 2015. “I am sure these are hackers controlled by Russian secret services.”

___

THE MYTH OF THE 400-POUND MAN

Even if only a small fraction of the 4,700 Gmail accounts targeted by Fancy Bear were hacked successfully, the data drawn from them could run into terabytes — easily rivaling the biggest known leaks in journalistic history.

For the hackers to have made sense of that mountain of messages — in English, Ukrainian, Russian, Georgian, Arabic and many other languages — they would have needed a substantial team of analysts and translators. Merely identifying and sorting the targets took six AP reporters eight weeks of work.

The AP’s effort offers “a little feel for how much labor went into this,” said Thomas Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

He said the investigation should put to rest any theories like the one then-candidate Donald Trump floated last year that the hacks could be the work of “someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.”

“The notion that it’s just a lone hacker somewhere is utterly absurd,” Rid said.

___

Donn reported from Plymouth, Massachusetts. Myers reported from Chicago. Chad Day, Desmond Butler and Ted Bridis in Washington, Frank Bajak in Houston, Lori Hinnant in Paris, Maggie Michael in Cairo and Erika Kinetz in Shanghai contributed to this report. Novaya Gazeta reporters Nikolay Voroshilov, Yana Surinskaya and Roman Anin in Moscow also contributed.

____
https://apnews.com/3bca5267d4544508bb523fa0db462cb2

A Russian Facebook page organized a protest in Texas. A different Russian page launched the counter-protest.


Newly released Facebook ads revealed Wednesday show that two Russian-linked Facebook groups organized opposing protests last year at the same time outside an Islamic center in Houston.


BY CLAIRE ALLBRIGHT NOV. 1, 2017
Screenshots released by federal lawmakers of Russian-linked Facebook pages promoting anti-Muslim and pro-Muslim rallies on the same day in 2016 in Houston.


Federal lawmakers on Wednesday released samples of 3,000 Facebook ads purchased by Russian operatives during the 2016 presidential campaign. The ads conveyed the wide range of influence Russian-linked groups tried to enact on Americans – but one set of ads in particular hit close to home.

Last year, two Russian Facebook pages organized dueling rallies in front of the Islamic Da’wah Center of Houston, according to information released by U.S. Sen. Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican.

Heart of Texas, a Russian-controlled Facebook group that promoted Texas secession, leaned into an image of the state as a land of guns and barbecue and amassed hundreds of thousands of followers. One of their ads on Facebook announced a noon rally on May 21, 2016 to “Stop Islamification of Texas.”

A separate Russian-sponsored group, United Muslims of America, advertised a “Save Islamic Knowledge” rally for the same place and time.


On that day, protesters organized by the two groups showed up on Travis Street in downtown Houston, a scene that appeared on its face to be a protest and a counterprotest. Interactions between the two groups eventually escalated into confrontation and verbal attacks.

Burr, the committee's chairman, unveiled the ads at a hearing Wednesday morning and said Russians managed to pit Texans against each other for the bargain price of $200.

"You commented yesterday that your company's goal is bringing people together. In this case, people were brought together to foment conflict, and Facebook enabled that event to happen," Burr said to Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch.

"I would say that Facebook has failed their goal," Burr added. "From a computer in St. Petersburg, Russia, these operators can create and promote events anywhere in the United States in attempt to tear apart our society."

Stretch told the Senate Intelligence Committee that ads such as these were most likely directed at different audiences.

Both the U.S. House and U.S. Senate Intelligence committees met with representatives from Google, Facebook and Twitter at the Capitol Wednesday.


In a press conference following the House hearing, the top Democrat on the committee, Adam Schiff of California, said lawmakers hope to make all of the Russian-bought Facebook ads available to the public in the next few weeks.

“People really need to see just how cynical this campaign really was and how this operation directed by a former KGB operative who is now the president of Russia was designed to tap into these really provocative and divisive issues here in the United States,” Schiff said.

Going forward, Schiff said Congress will consider new regulations of political advertisements. He said the question is how they will adapt these oversight measures to social media platforms.

U.S. Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Midland, is currently leading the House Intelligence Committee's investigation into election meddling by Russia.

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How Russians Hacked The Democrats’ Emails

By RAPHAEL SATTER, Jeff Donn and CHAD DAY Published NOVEMBER 3, 2017 1:49 PM

WASHINGTON (AP) — It was just before noon in Moscow on March 10, 2016, when the first volley of malicious messages hit the Hillary Clinton campaign.

The first 29 phishing emails were almost all misfires. Addressed to people who worked for Clinton during her first presidential run, the messages bounced back untouched.

Except one.

Within nine days, some of the campaign’s most consequential secrets would be in the hackers’ hands, part of a massive operation aimed at vacuuming up millions of messages from thousands of inboxes across the world.

ADVERTISING

An Associated Press investigation into the digital break-ins that disrupted the U.S. presidential contest has sketched out an anatomy of the hack that led to months of damaging disclosures about the Democratic Party’s nominee. It wasn’t just a few aides that the hackers went after; it was an all-out blitz across the Democratic Party. They tried to compromise Clinton’s inner circle and more than 130 party employees, supporters and contractors.

While U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia was behind the email thefts, the AP drew on forensic data to report Thursday that the hackers known as Fancy Bear were closely aligned with the interests of the Russian government.

The AP’s reconstruction— based on a database of 19,000 malicious links recently shared by cybersecurity firm Secureworks — shows how the hackers worked their way around the Clinton campaign’s top-of-the-line digital security to steal chairman John Podesta’s emails in March 2016.

It also helps explain how a Russian-linked intermediary could boast to a Trump policy adviser, a month later, that the Kremlin had “thousands of emails” worth of dirt on Clinton.

____

PHISHING FOR VICTIMS

The rogue messages that first flew across the internet March 10 were dressed up to look like they came from Google, the company that provided the Clinton campaign’s email infrastructure. The messages urged users to boost their security or change their passwords while in fact steering them toward decoy websites designed to collect their credentials.

One of the first people targeted was Rahul Sreenivasan, who had worked as a Clinton organizer in Texas in 2008 — his first paid job in politics. Sreenivasan, now a legislative staffer in Austin, was dumbfounded when told by the AP that hackers had tried to break into rsreenivasan@hillaryclinton.com. He said the address had been dead for nearly a decade.

“They probably crawled the internet for this stuff,” he said.

Almost everyone else targeted in the initial wave was, like Sreenivasan, a 2008 staffer whose defunct email address had somehow lingered online.

But one email made its way to the account of another staffer who’d worked for Clinton in 2008 and joined again in 2016, the AP found. It’s possible the hackers broke in and stole her contacts; the data shows the phishing links sent to her were clicked several times.

Secureworks’ data reveals when phishing links were created and indicates whether they were clicked. But it doesn’t show whether people entered their passwords.

Within hours of a second volley emailed March 11, the hackers hit pay dirt. All of a sudden, they were sending links aimed at senior Clinton officials’ nonpublic 2016 addresses, including those belonging to longtime Clinton aide Robert Russo and campaign chairman John Podesta.

The Clinton campaign was no easy target; several former employees said the organization put particular stress on digital safety.

Work emails were protected by two-factor authentication, a technique that uses a second passcode to keep accounts secure. Most messages were deleted after 30 days and staff went through phishing drills. Security awareness even followed the campaigners into the bathroom, where someone put a picture of a toothbrush under the words: “You shouldn’t share your passwords either.”

Two-factor authentication may have slowed the hackers, but it didn’t stop them. After repeated attempts to break into various staffers’ hillaryclinton.com accounts, the hackers turned to the personal Gmail addresses. It was there on March 19 that they targeted top Clinton lieutenants — including campaign manager Robby Mook, senior adviser Jake Sullivan and political fixer Philippe Reines.

A malicious link was generated for Podesta at 11:28 a.m. Moscow time, the AP found. Documents subsequently published by WikiLeaks show that the rogue email arrived in his inbox six minutes later. The link was clicked twice.

Podesta’s messages — at least 50,000 of them — were in the hackers’ hands.

___

A SERIOUS BREACH

Though the heart of the campaign was now compromised, the hacking efforts continued. Three new volleys of malicious messages were generated on the 22nd, 23rd and 25th of March, targeting communications director Jennifer Palmieri and Clinton confidante Huma Abedin, among others.

The torrent of phishing emails caught the attention of the FBI, which had spent the previous six months urging the Democratic National Committee in Washington to raise its shield against suspected Russian hacking. In late March, FBI agents paid a visit to Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters, where they were received warily, given the agency’s investigation into the candidate’s use of a private email server while secretary of state.

The phishing messages also caught the attention of Secureworks, a subsidiary of Dell Technologies, which had been following Fancy Bear, whom Secureworks codenamed Iron Twilight.

Fancy Bear had made a critical mistake.

It fumbled a setting in the Bitly link-shortening service that it was using to sneak its emails past Google’s spam filter. The blunder exposed whom they were targeting.

It was late March when Secureworks discovered the hackers were going after Democrats.

“As soon as we started seeing some of those hillaryclinton.com email addresses coming through, the DNC email addresses, we realized it’s going to be an interesting twist to this,” said Rafe Pilling, a senior security researcher with Secureworks.

By early April Fancy Bear was getting increasingly aggressive, the AP found. More than 60 bogus emails were prepared for Clinton campaign and DNC staffers on April 6 alone, and the hackers began hunting for Democrats beyond New York and Washington, targeting the digital communications director for Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf and a deputy director in the office of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

The group’s hackers seemed particularly interested in Democratic officials working on voter registration issues: Pratt Wiley, the DNC’s then-director of voter protection, had been targeted as far back as October 2015 and the hackers tried to pry open his inbox as many as 15 times over six months.

Employees at several organizations connected to the Democrats were targeted, including the Clinton Foundation, the Center for American Progress, technology provider NGP VAN, campaign strategy firm 270 Strategies, and partisan news outlet Shareblue Media.

As the hacking intensified, other elements swung into place. On April 12, 2016, someone paid $37 worth of bitcoin to the Romanian web hosting company THCServers.com, to reserve a website called Electionleaks.com, according to transaction records obtained by AP. A botched registration meant the site never got off the ground, but the records show THC received a nearly identical payment a week later to create DCLeaks.com.

By the second half of April, the DNC’s senior leadership was beginning to realize something was amiss. One DNC consultant, Alexandra Chalupa, received an April 20 warning from Yahoo saying her account was under threat from state-sponsored hackers, according to a screengrab she circulated among colleagues.

The Trump campaign had gotten a whiff of Clinton email hacking, too. According to recently unsealed court documents, former Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos said that it was at an April 26 meeting at a London hotel that he was told by a professor closely connected to the Russian government that the Kremlin had obtained compromising information about Clinton.

“They have dirt on her,” Papadopoulos said he was told. “They have thousands of emails.”

A few days later, Amy Dacey, then the DNC chief executive, got an urgent call.

There’d been a serious breach at the DNC.

___

‘DON’T EVEN TALK TO YOUR DOG ABOUT IT’

It was 4 p.m. on Friday June 10 when some 100 staffers filed into the Democratic National Committee’s main conference room for a mandatory, all-hands meeting.

“What I am about to tell you cannot leave this room,” DNC chief operating officer Lindsey Reynolds told the assembled crowd, according to two people there at the time.

Everyone needed to turn in their laptops immediately; there would be no last-minute emails; no downloading documents and no exceptions. Reynolds insisted on total secrecy.

“Don’t even talk to your dog about it,” she was quoted as saying.

Reynolds didn’t return messages seeking comment.

Two days later, as the cybersecurity firm that was brought in to clean out the DNC’s computers finished its work, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told a British Sunday television show that emails related to Clinton were “pending publication.”

“WikiLeaks has a very good year ahead,” he said.

On Tuesday, June 14, the Democrats went public with the allegation that their computers had been compromised by Russian state-backed hackers, including Fancy Bear.

Shortly after noon the next day, William Bastone, the editor-in-chief of investigative news site The Smoking Gun, got an email bearing a small cache of documents marked “CONFIDENTIAL.”

“Hi,” the message said. “This is Guccifer 2.0 and this is me who hacked Democratic National Committee.”

___

‘CAN IT INFLUENCE THE ELECTION?’

Guccifer 2.0 acted as a kind of master of ceremonies during a summer of leaks, proclaiming that the DNC’s stolen documents were in WikiLeaks’ hands, publishing a selection of the material himself and constantly chatting up journalists over Twitter in a bid to keep the story in the press.

He appeared particularly excited to hear on June 24 that his leaks had sparked a lawsuit against the DNC by disgruntled supporters of Clinton rival Bernie Sanders.

“Can it influence the election in any how?” he asked a journalist with Russia’s Sputnik News, in uneven English.

Later that month Guccifer 2.0 began directing reporters to the newly launched DCLeaks site, which was also dribbling out stolen material on Democrats. When WikiLeaks joined the fray on July 22 with its own disclosures the leaks metastasized into a crisis, triggering intraparty feuding that forced the resignation of the DNC’s chairwoman and drew angry protests at the Democratic National Convention.

Guccifer 2.0, WikiLeaks and DCLeaks ultimately published more than 150,000 emails stolen from more than a dozen Democrats, according to an AP count.

The AP has since found that each of one of those Democrats had previously been targeted by Fancy Bear, either at their personal Gmail addresses or via the DNC, something a finding established by running targets’ emails against the Secureworks’ list.

All three leak-branded sites have distanced themselves from Moscow. DCLeaks claimed to be run by American hacktivists. WikiLeaks said Russia wasn’t its source. Guccifer 2.0 claimed to be Romanian.

But there were signs of dishonesty from the start. The first document Guccifer 2.0 published on June 15 came not from the DNC as advertised but from Podesta’s inbox, according to a former DNC official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.

The official said the word “CONFIDENTIAL” was not in the original document.

Guccifer 2.0 had airbrushed it to catch reporters’ attention.

___

‘PLEASE GOD, DON’T LET IT BE ME’

To hear the defeated candidate tell it, there’s no doubt the leaks helped swing the election.

“Even if Russian interference made only a marginal difference,” Clinton told an audience at a recent speech at Stanford University, “this election was won at the margins, in the Electoral College.”

It’s clear Clinton’s campaign was profoundly destabilized by the sudden exposures that regularly radiated from every hacked inbox. It wasn’t just her arch-sounding speeches to Wall Street executives or the exposure of political machinations but also the brutal stripping of so many staffers’ privacy.

“It felt like your friend had just been robbed, but it wasn’t just one friend, it was all your friends at the same time by the same criminal,” said Jesse Ferguson, a former Clinton spokesman.

An atmosphere of dread settled over the Democrats as the disclosures continued.

One staffer described walking through the DNC’s office in Washington to find employees scrolling through articles about Putin and Russia. Another said she began looking over her shoulder when returning from Clinton headquarters in Brooklyn after sundown. Some feared they were being watched; a car break-in, a strange woman found lurking in a backyard late at night and even a snake spotted on the grounds of the DNC all fed an undercurrent of fear.

Even those who hadn’t worked at Democratic organizations for years were anxious. Brent Kimmel, a former technologist at the DNC, remembers watching the leaks stream out and thinking: “Please God, don’t let it be me.”

___

‘MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN’

On Oct. 7, it was Podesta.

The day began badly, with Hillary Clinton’s phone buzzing with crank messages after its number was exposed in a leak from the day before. The number had to be changed immediately; a former campaign official said that Abedin, Clinton’s confidante, had to call staffers one at a time with Clinton’s new contact information because no one dared put it in an email.

The same afternoon, just as the American electorate was digesting a lewd audio tape of Trump boasting about sexually assaulting women, WikiLeaks began publishing the emails stolen from Podesta.

The publications sparked a media stampede as they were doled out one batch at a time, with many news organizations tasking reporters with scrolling through the thousands of emails being released in tranches. At the AP alone, as many as 30 journalists were assigned, at various times, to go through the material.

Guccifer 2.0 told one reporter he was thrilled that WikiLeaks had finally followed through.

“Together with Assange we’ll make america great again,” he wrote.

___

Donn reported from Plymouth, Massachusetts. Desmond Butler, Ted Bridis, Julie Pace and Ken Thomas in Washington, Justin Myers in Chicago, Frank Bajak in Houston, Lori Hinnant in Paris, Maggie Michael in Cairo, Erika Kinetz in Shanghai and Vadim Ghirda in Bucharest, Romania contributed to this report.

___

Editor’s Note: Satter’s father, David Satter, is an author and Russia specialist who has been critical of the Russian government. Several of his emails were published last year by hackers and his address is on Secureworks’ list.

Nineteen thousand lines of raw data associated with the theft of Hillary Clinton campaign emails shows how the hackers dodged strict security measures to pull it off.

Minute-by-minute logs gathered by cybersecurity company Secureworks and recently shared with The Associated Press tell the tale. It took the hackers just over a week of work to zero in on and penetrate the personal Gmail account of campaign chairman John Podesta.

One outside expert who reviewed the data said it showed how even the well-defended Clinton campaign fell prey to phishing, a basic cyberespionage technique which uses bogus emails to harvest passwords
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/how-r ... ats-emails

Russia-linked hacker edited DNC email to call it 'confidential': report
BY MAX GREENWOOD - 11/03/17 02:17 PM EDT 254
2,860


Russia-linked hacker edited DNC email to call it 'confidential': report
© Greg Nash
The Russia-linked hacker behind a massive breach at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) altered a stolen email by labeling it "confidential," a move intended to draw attention from the news media, The Associated Press reported Friday.

The email in question was the first document published by the hacker Guccifer 2.0 in June 2016. Billed as coming from the DNC, the email was actually stolen from John Podesta, the former chairman of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

That email was marked "confidential." But a former DNC official told the AP that the label was added to the message only after it was stolen.

The email was just one of at least 50,000 stolen from Podesta's inbox by hackers believed to be tied to the Russian government. Guccifer 2.0 and the websites WikiLeaks and DCLeaks published more than 150,000 messages stolen from more than a dozen Democrats.

Clinton, who was widely projected to win in the months before Election Day, ultimately fell short to President Trump. She has since argued that the email leaks, as well as former FBI Director James Comey's announcement a week before the election that the agency had renewed its investigation into her handling of classified material, contributed to her loss.

Trump has repeatedly blasted the notion that Russia-backed hackers influenced the outcome of the election and has also denied allegations that members of his campaign team coordinated with Russian officials and representatives.

On Monday, George Papadopoulos, a former foreign policy adviser for Trump's campaign, pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about his contacts with a professor with ties to the Kremlin. During an April 2016 meeting with the professor, he was reportedly told that the Russians had gathered dirt on Clinton.
http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity ... nts-report

JENNA ABRAMS, ALT-RIGHT HERO ON TWITTER, WAS REALLY A RUSSIAN TROLL WHO TRICKED REPUBLICANS AND CELEBRITIES
BY SUMMER MEZA ON 11/3/17 AT 12:44 PM

A popular Twitter account known for strong alt-right opinions was, it turns out, never really run by a young American woman as it claimed. Congressional investigators have confirmed that Twitter user Jenna Abrams was in fact a creation of a Russian “troll farm.”

The story was originally published Thursday by The Daily Beast, which describes the account as one of the dozens of Russian-backed social media accounts run from St. Petersburg. The account gained traction after tweeting about a nude Kim Kardashian photo, then pivoted into divisive comments on segregation, Donald Trump, and immigration. Her viral tweets, which went out to nearly 70,000 followers, pushed Kremlin-funded opinions that far-right users jumped to defend.

Twitter is amping up its rules to prevent harassment and violence on the app
The Twitter logo is displayed on a banner outside the New York Stock Exchange on November 7, 2013, in New York City.
ANDREW BURTON/GETTY IMAGES


Abrams’ inflammatory posts were included in news stories across the web, bringing her quotable talking points onto mainstream news sites like the New York Times, CNN and local Fox affiliates, as well as sites like Breitbart and InfoWars. Her tweets were just controversial enough to pick up attention, but not so out of the ordinary that followers suspected the account could be fake.

For example, in April of last year, Abrams’ tweet baited readers into a debate on slavery.

“To those people, who hate the Confederate flag. Did you know that the flag and the war wasn’t about slavery, it was all about money,” read the tweet.

It wasn’t just alt-right followers who were fooled by the account. Several public figures engaged with Abrams, like former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who retweeted her just three days before the 2016 election. Entertainer Roseanne Barr responded to one of her tweets, and even Michael McFaul, former U.S. ambassador to Russia debated Abrams on multiple occasions.

The account was particularly convincing due to the thoroughly crafted online presence. In addition to the Twitter account, Abrams had a personal website, a Medium account, a GoFundMe page and a Gmail account.

In the months leading up to the 2016 election, the accounts pushed Abrams’ political opinions even harder than before. The now-deleted Medium account posted an essay titled “Why do we need to get back to segregation.”

“Humanity has gone full circle. Never mind how many activists of any color died to get rid of segregation, and fought for inclusion, black people want it back. 100% free people made their choice, and their choice is segregation,” read the post.

Abrams’ perspectives were elevated by angry readers who retweeted her Medium posts and daily thoughts in order to disprove them, and by the followers who loved her supposedly no-nonsense conservative style.

The account has been deleted, along with dozens of other accounts associated with the Russian troll farm.
http://www.newsweek.com/jenna-abrams-fa ... unt-700801

[seemslikeadream]

Russian Athletes To Compete Under Olympic Flag At 2018 Games, In Doping Punishment

December 5, 201712:55 PM ET
BILL CHAPPELL

The International Olympic Committee is expected to punish Russia on Tuesday for a state-run doping program. The decision comes months before the next Winter Olympics, which begin in PyeongChang, South Korea, in February.
Ahn Young-joon/AP
The International Olympic Committee has suspended the Russian Olympic Committee "with immediate effect," over Russia's system of state-supported cheating by its athletes who used performance-enhancing drugs.

Russian athletes can compete in the upcoming 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChange, South Korea, the IOC said on Tuesday — but the athletes will have to pass scrutiny, and they will compete under the title "Olympic Athlete from Russia (OAR)."


"They will compete with a uniform bearing this name and under the Olympic Flag," the IOC said. "The Olympic Anthem will be played in any ceremony."

IOC President Thomas Bach is pronouncing Russia's fate at a news conference that was scheduled for 1:30 p.m. ET. You can watch it live on YouTube.

The decision by the IOC's executive board follows last year's McLaren Report from the World Anti-Doping Agency, which confirmed that Russia's Olympics program had engaged in an "institutional conspiracy" to beat the system that included using a "mouse hole" to swap out athletes' drug-tainted samples for clean ones. The investigation was led by Canadian law professor Richard McLaren.

Russian officials have refused to acknowledge the scope and depth of the findings about the country's Olympic teams, saying that the problems were limited to individual athletes. Russian President Vladimir Putin has called the doping charges against Russia "a dangerous return to this policy of letting politics interfere with sport."

Released in two phases, the McLaren Report concluded that Russia's scheme involved more than 1,000 Russian athletes — and that it also included plans both for manipulating doping controls and for covering up the system.

Ahead of the IOC's decision, NPR's Lucian Kim visited Moscow's famous Gorky Park to hear what Russians are making of the claims against their country in some of its most revered sports.

Speaking to Yekaterina Nogerova, whose 6-year-old daughter was skating out on the ice, Lucian says that she says a decision against Russia would be a "catastrophe" for her. Nogerova also said she's upset that the consequences will likely punish athletes and fans, but not people in the government.

In releasing the McLaren report, WADA recommended that the IOC ban all Russian athletes and government officials from the 2016 Summer Olympics held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Both McLaren and WADA acknowledged that they lack the authority to punish Russia's athletes.

Instead of issuing a blanket ban on Russia from competing in Rio, the IOC left it to the individual sports' governing bodies to decide who got to compete. By the time the report came out, nearly all Russian track and field athletes had been banned by the International Association of Athletics Federations.

To investigate the claims against Russia, the Olympics' governing body has been relying on two groups. A broad investigation is being led by the Inquiry Commission chaired by Samuel Schmid, a former President of Switzerland. Individual cases are being looked at by the Disciplinary Commission, chaired by Denis Oswald, a Swiss lawyer and former IOC executive board member.

Russia's move into wholesale Olympic cheating is often traced to 2010, when the country's athletes fell well short of expectations by winning only 15 medals at the Vancouver Winter Olympics — a bad omen as the country prepared to host the 2014 games in Sochi. Investigators say Russian officials went to elaborate means to ensure a better showing — and it worked, as Russia's athletes more than doubled their medal count by winning 33 medals (13 of them gold), the most of any country.

But athletes' blood and urine samples have been subjected to more analysis since the Sochi games, and in recent weeks, the IOC has been slicing into Russia's medal count, disqualifying athletes from the Russian biathlon, bobsleigh, and cross-country skiing teams who were found to have broken anti-doping Rules.

As of last week, Russia had fallen far behind the U.S. and other countries on the Sochi results list. The American team now leads the way with the 28 medals it won in 2014, with Norway second — and that's without the redistribution of medals that were taken away from Russian athletes.

The IOC has also been declaring sanctioned athletes to be ineligible for future Olympics as it strips them of their victories — an approach that has promised to reshape the field for the upcoming 2018 PyeongChang games in South Korea.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way ... ead-doping

How the Kremlin Tried to Pose as American News Sites on Twitter
Twitter has suspended dozens of accounts masquerading as U.S. news sources that had more than 500,000 followers.
By Selina Wang
December 5, 2017, 5:00 AM CST Updated on December 5, 2017, 12:15 PM CST


Twitter Closes Kremlin-Backed Accounts

The Kremlin-backed Russian Internet Research Agency operated dozens of Twitter accounts masquerading as local American news sources that collectively garnered more than half-a-million followers. More than 100 news outlets also published stories containing those handles in the run-up to the election, and some of them were even tweeted by a top presidential aide. These news imposter accounts, which are part of the 2,752 now-suspended accounts that Twitter Inc. has publicly disclosed to be tied to the IRA, show how the Russian group sought to build local communities of followers to disseminate messages.

Many of the news imposter accounts amassed their following by tweeting headlines from real news sites, while others sought to represent certain communities. They targeted a diverse set of regions across the political spectrum, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco and Boston. Several of the accounts were impersonating local news outlets in swing states, like @TodayPittsburgh, @TodayMiami and @TodayCincinnati.

There were about 40 news imposter accounts out of the 2,752 Twitter accounts that the company identified as being tied to the IRA. Twitter has deactivated all of those accounts and removed any data on the accounts from third-party sources. Information on the details of the accounts was gathered from Meltwater, a data intelligence firm that monitors social media. Details on the contents of the tweets are from Facebook posts that were synced with the users’ Twitter accounts. Some of the followers of the accounts could be bots, and the same bots or users could have followed multiple imposter accounts.

Twitter did not verify any of the 2,752 accounts, according to a company spokeswoman. Twitter says it's taking steps to stop malicious actors on its platform.

"We take seriously reports that the power of our service was misused by a foreign actor for the purpose of influencing the U.S. presidential election and undermining public faith in the democratic process," the company said in an emailed statement. "Twitter believes that any activity of that kind—regardless of magnitude—is intolerable, and we agree that we must do better to prevent it."

Weslie Viddaurri is one of the people who followed one of these fake news accounts, @TodayNYCity. He had no idea it was linked to the Russian-based troll farm. The account had more than 60,000 followers and claimed to be "New York City's local news on Twitter. Breaking news, sports, events and international news." Many of the account's tweets linked to breaking news stories from legitimate local news sites, like the New York Daily News and the New York Times.

Viddaurri signed up for Twitter three years go. He lives in the small town of Spavinaw, Oklahoma, where he's a machinist at a company that makes airplanes. He used to check Twitter almost every day to read the news, until he decided to quit last month (though he didn't delete his account). Twitter recently revealed that more than 36,000 Russian-linked accounts generated about 1.4 million automated, election-related Tweets. Viddaurri says the recent revelations have turned him away from Twitter.

"I assumed that there was more real people and real stuff on social media than there really is. It's just so fake. It has been disheartening. I wish Twitter had been more vigilant on vetting people that become members," said Viddaurri, who is 50. "I don't trust Twitter news anymore."

Viddaurri followed almost 4,500 Twitter accounts. He followed news sites, public figures and politicians on all sides of the political spectrum. Bloomberg LP is developing a global breaking news network for the Twitter service.

Lawmakers berated social media companies for taking too long to recognize the seriousness of manipulation. People tied to the Russian government used Facebook, Google and Twitter to spread content crafted to sow social discord in America. By operating fake news accounts targeted toward certain regions, the IRA was able to amass followers in specific populations and push messages to them.

@BlackNewsOutlet, one of the fake accounts, had more than 40,000 followers and had a description of "Freedom is never given; it is won. #BlackLivesMatter." Tweets from this account frequently posted news about social unrest or headlines to incite anger. A retweeted post from @BlackNewsOutlet on Oct. 19, 2016 read: "How many more black lives needed to change the rotten police systems?"

The accounts amassed influential followers. Sebastian Gorka, a former deputy assistant to President Donald Trump, had retweeted several posts from @tpartynews, one of the Kremlin-linked accounts that had more than 20,000 followers. At the end of 2016 Gorka retweeted a post from @tpartynews that read: “The era of the pajama boy is over January 20th and the alpha males are back.” The post refers to one of Gorka’s catchphrases. “Pajama Boy” refers to a meme that advocated for the legislative agenda of Barack Obama. Trump was inaugurated on Jan. 20.

There were both left-leaning and right-leaning accounts. One of them, @redlanews, which had almost 10,000 followers, said its author was “Red Louisiana News”, with a biography that read: “Conservative; Right and proud; Christian. Love my country and will stand against liberals and socialists.” The account tweeted news from outlets like Breitbart and wrote incendiary posts before the election. One of them read: “Hillary Clinton believes in white supremacy. The only racist here it's her Corrupt lying politician #HillarysEmails.” Another tweet from the account in early 2016 tagged Trump in the post: "@realDonaldTrump Ted Cruz will destroy our economy and military might with his plans. The only way to fight islamists is Trump way!” The @MissouriNewsUS account, which had almost 6,000 followers, had a description of one hashtag: #NeverHilary. Another handle, @NewYorkDem, said it was for “New York, uniting Liberals since 1624!"

From the beginning of 2016 until Election Day, Tweets from those accounts were cited by more than 100 news organizations. One month after the election, the Washington Post included an embedded tweet from @ChicagoDailyNew.

The opinionated news accounts like @redlanews and @tpartynews followed a similar strategy to the @Ten_GOP account linked to the IRA, which posed as a group for Tennessee Republicans. It had over 100,000 followers, was retweeted by some of Trump's aides, and posed as a patriotic American. It overtly lauded Trump while attacking Hillary Clinton. This account was a focus of the House Intelligence Committee during the November hearings on social media companies. Representative Jackie Speier, a California Democrat, asked Twitter to give a complete catalog of tweets that came from the pro-Trump @Ten_GOP account.

It's hard for researchers to know why the news imposter accounts were created, since the full history of tweets is gone. Researchers have concluded that many of the IRA-linked accounts were created to sow social discord, by trying to "put left-wing people further to the left and right-wing people further to the right," said Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Research Lab. "It's that attempt to amplify the differences in society."

Researchers say another purpose of the accounts was to establish them as trusted news sources, and then activate them later to spread propaganda and disinformation. Troll factories have taken that approach before. During the escalating tensions between Russia and Ukraine in 2014, Nimmo observed various online forums and platforms linked to Russian troll factories that would ingratiate themselves in the pro-Ukrainian community by posting favorable information. Then after gaining credibility, those sites would shift their tone to write stories that expressed discontent with Ukraine.

In fact, Nimmo says these news imposter accounts may have been created for an operation that never happened. A U.S. intelligence report concluded that the Russian government was expecting Hillary Clinton to win the election and were prepared to call into question the validity of the results. Pro-Kremlin bloggers had prepared a Twitter campaign, #DemocracyRIP on election night in anticipation of her victory, according to the report. These news imposter accounts could have aided those efforts to undermine the election results by promoting certain hashtags and topics like “voter fraud” or “rigged election." By having a network of local news accounts across the country, the Kremlin would be able to distribute propaganda at scale that could galvanize local populations to protest, according to Nimmo. A Russian-linked Facebook group attempted to organize anti-immigrant and anti-Hillary Clinton protests in Texas shortly before the November elections.

The majority of the imposter news accounts were created more than a year before the 2016 U.S. elections. The history of tweets and engagement with real users improves the placement of the account and its posts in Twitter's search results, according to Kris Shaffer, a data scientist doing research for University of Mary Washington and the Data for Democracy. That means that if the account does push major disinformation campaigns, it is less likely to be blocked.


Shaffer's analysis of the accounts found that several of the imposter news accounts also tweeted during the French presidential election. He surfaced about 41 Tweets from accounts including @WorldNewsPoli, @TodayMiami, @DetroitDailyNew, and @ChicagoDailyNew. Most of the posts were retweets of local news articles, but more than a quarter of them included stories from truthfeed.com, a known disinformation site, according to Shaffer. Those stories were mostly attacking Emmanuel Macron, who won the election, and biased toward Marine Le Pen, a far-right politician in France.

After the revelations of Russian influence, Viddaurri said he no longer knows what to believe online. With Twitter out of his regular routine, he only checks Facebook occasionally to stay in touch with friends and family. “Thanks to the whole election of 2016, social media got ruined,” Viddaurri said.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... on-twitter

[DrEvil]

Russia has the equivalent of a CIA-lifer as president. He's a macho asshole sucking up to the Orthodox church (and banning Jehova's Witnesses), homophobes (gay "propaganda" is illegal and books with LGBT content are censored or wrapped in plastic), racists (to be fair, Putin doesn't seem to be a racist himself, but Russians are pretty damn racist and he has to cater to them. If you're a refugee you can just forget going to Russia, and if you're black you've probably been physically assaulted) and wife-beaters (now legal as long as you're a first time offender and it didn't result in a hospital visit).

He's Trump with a brain and 80% approval ratings (why do you think Trump loves him so much? He's everything Trump wants to be), and that should scare you.

Agreed, on all points and even more you probably know but don't mention, but it doesn't mean the particular narratives advanced about Russian "meddling" hold water. Saddam Hussein was even worse than all this, but still Iraq did not have WMD and did not orchestrate 9/11.

To take the current stories, some political consultant money laundering is criminal and should be punished but does not rise to the level of Russian state information warfare. Plus the next fellow to be hit is almost certainly Tony P, fancy that.

Most of the particular "information warfare" linked to "Russia" is so awesomely laughable. Have you seen the social media ads that are supposed to have us clamoring for Internet censorship? Those relating to the election were repeats of the same workhorse attack memes about Clintons and Obama propagated over decades by FOXNEWS and Drudge and the Christianists and the right-wing blogosphere. This was social engineering?! Looks more like pedestrian retail-level clickbait trying to earn income through ad servers. Anyone with moderate skills can play at that. Yet the hysteria inflates it to the force of a zombie virus - BLM and Sanders support and Wisconsin votes for Trump all being orchestrated by this awesome magic.

Now if there was real meat to the idea that it was the Russian state that orchestrated the DNC/Podesta hauls and handed those to Wikileaks, that would be half-impressive, in that it's an original intervention that wouldn't just have happened anyway. Regardless of whether this intervention really had the impact attributed to it of flipping the election (obviously not).

That idea bogged down long ago, however, yet the "Russiagate" stuff keeps branching out. It lives from cherrypicking anything that can be identified as "Russian" (and attributed to a Russian state influence operation, whether truthfully or not) out of the worldwide shitstorm of foreign/domestic/corporate/laundered money flowing into and out of the United States with potential impact on U.S. politics. A cherrypicking game that can go on infinitely, by the way, but the "Russian" streams are still just a fraction of the overall activity.

.

I didn't see this until now, so apologies for the late reply.

I'm still leaning towards the DNC hack being done by Russian actors. It's not just US intelligence claiming so (and anyway - when do all American intelligence agencies ever agree on anything? If the story was cooked across 16 different agencies to claim something that could be construed as an act of war someone would have blown the whistle IMO. They leak like sieves most of the time, and there would be plenty of people not wanting a repeat of Iraq, but with Russia), but most of the infosec companies looking into it too. Either Russian intelligence did it directly, or by proxies for plausible deniability. They hacked it, got called out by Crowdstrike and dumped it as "Guccifer 2.0" to deflect blame.

As for the rest of the information warfare stuff, I agree, anything done by the Russians probably drown in the shitstorm that is American corporate media.

I'm more concerned about the various crap they're pulling in Europe, which is way more blatant (shutting down power grids, funding right wing parties, using access to natural gas for blackmail, stoking divisions between local populations and Russian minorities, etc.).

[American Dream]

The Putin Administration runs on reactionary nationalism, with an emphasis on hatred of queers, feminists, muslims and other ethnic/racial minorities as it backs the far Right internationally. Branding him with the tropes of toxic masculinity does not somehow remove the stink. The very serious problems inherent in Neoliberalism in no way justify raising up Putin as some kind of hero, as those on the the radical right and other allied "anti-imperialists" are wont to do.

[DrEvil]

Or put more simply: the enemy of my enemy is probably still my enemy.

[seemslikeadream]

The "Darth Vader" of Russia: meet Igor Sechin, Putin's right-hand man
Updated by Alec Luhn Feb 8, 2017, 10:47am EST

YEREVAN, ARMENIA - DECEMBER 2: Russian President Vladimir Putin (R) listens to Rosneft's President Igor Sechin during Russian-Armenian talks December 2, 2013 in Yerevan, Armenia. Putin is in a one-day state visit to Armenia. (Photo by Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images) Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images
Late on the night of November 14, Igor Sechin, the CEO of the Russian state oil giant Rosneft, reportedly summoned Economic Development Minister Alexei Ulyukayev to a meeting at the company’s headquarters in a czarist-era building across the river from the Kremlin.

When he arrived, Ulyukayev was handed a large amount of cash in front of Sechin — and then arrested on the spot and charged with soliciting a $2 million bribe. Ulyukayev, who insists that he is innocent, was fired by Russian President Vladimir Putin the day after his arrest.

The unusual sting operation that brought down Ulyukayev, the first sitting government minister to be detained by police since the Stalin era, highlighted the power of Sechin, a shadowy figure who is widely seen as second only to Putin in influence. Russian newspapers reported that Rosneft's head of security — who remains a high-ranking FSB security service official — organized the sting, presumably on Sechin’s orders.

Sechin has been called Putin's “Darth Vader” and the “scariest man on earth” by Russian media, and a leaked US embassy cable described him as the “grey cardinal of the Kremlin.” Now that his friend and business partner Rex Tillerson has become President Donald Trump's secretary of state, Sechin is poised to play an even more important role: as a point man for efforts to improve Russia’s chilly relationship with the US and get Washington to lift its sanctions on the Kremlin.

Sechin’s power — and influence — could soon grow even bigger: Some have speculated that the oil magnate could be considered for prime minister if Putin is elected to another term in 2018.

“Putin will count on Sechin as an agent of influence on Tillerson, as a lobbyist” for better relations between Moscow and Russia, said Stanislav Belkovsky, an analyst formerly connected to the Kremlin.

Belkovsky added that the Russian strongman believes Tillerson, given his oil background, is likely to have a warm view of Sechin, which “can be used” to Moscow’s advantage on sanctions on other issues.

POWER IN RUSSIA DEPENDS ON ACCESS TO PUTIN. THAT’S GREAT FOR SECHIN, ONE OF THE PRESIDENT’S OLDEST AND MOST TRUSTED ALLIES.
Washington’s relationship with Moscow is at a post–Cold War nadir, with the US intelligence community accusing Russia of directly interfering in the presidential election to help Trump. Trump has promised to change that, and has spent months shocking allies and officials around the world by praising Putin as a strong and popular leader and rejecting criticism of his dismal human rights record. The latest effort came Sunday, when Trump told Fox News host Bill O’Reilly that he respects the Russian president and dismissed O’Reilly’s objection that “Putin’s a killer.”

Words are one thing, actions another. Trump has hinted that he’d be willing to lift some of the sanctions the US slapped on Russia after it invaded Eastern Ukraine and annexed Crimea. Vice President Mike Pence suggested on Sunday that the administration could eliminate some sanctions if Russia helps in the fight with ISIS, and Trump has also floated the idea of removing some of the measures if Putin agreed to a nuclear arms reduction deal.

And that’s where Sechin comes in. He stands to gain financially if the measures are lifted because Washington had frozen some of his assets and barred him from visiting the US. That pales in comparison with the boost he would get if Rosneft were able to resuscitate a deal to invest up to $500 billion in developing energy reserves that he’d signed with Tillerson while the diplomat was running Exxon Mobil. (Tillerson opposed the sanctions when they were introduced, and Exxon estimated it has lost as much as $1 billion because of them.) Restarting the project would be an enormous win for Rosneft — and for Sechin’s continued influence in the Kremlin.

Meet the man with the $60 million house and the $100 million yacht
In the already murky world of Kremlin politics, Sechin is an especially enigmatic figure. He tries to keep it that way, suing two independent Russian newspapers last year for reports about a $60 million mansion he's allegedly building outside Moscow and a $100 million yacht his wife allegedly owns. (Rosneft also sued the independent newspaper RBC for reporting that Sechin was trying to limit BP's control on the company board.)

The entire Russian political and financial systems revolve around access to Putin, which is great for Sechin, who is one of the president’s oldest and most trusted allies.

A 56-year-old with graying hair, a hooked nose, a slightly nasal voice, and a near-perpetual frown, he worked his way out of obscurity and poverty in Leningrad to reach the heights of politics and business. Rumored to be a former spy, he is well-connected with the security services and speaks French, Portuguese, and Spanish. He makes as much as $11.6 million a year, but even his critics admit he works nearly nonstop, powered by his favorite drink, orange juice.

ANALYSTS COMPARE SECHIN, CEO OF RUSSIA’S BIGGEST ENERGY COMPANY, TO CARNIVORES AND CROCODILES
Sechin’s main hobby is hunting big game — an important social pastime among politicians and businessmen in Russia — and he reportedly likes to give Rosneft partners sausages made out of animals he’s killed. When journalist Andrei Kolesnikov, known for his access to Putin, finally convinced Sechin after seven years to write a column for his Russian Pioneer magazine, the Rosneft head waxed lyrical about his love for jazz music: “The most important thing in jazz, as in real life, is improvisation.”

A request for an interview with Sechin was not answered, and a Rosneft spokesperson declined to comment for this story.

Analyst Gleb Pavlovsky, who formerly served as an adviser to Putin's administration and knew Sechin personally, said the Rosneft head could be useful as an intermediary between Moscow and Washington and will seek that role so he can “transform himself into a more legitimate figure in the West.” Sechin has already overseen one smaller rapprochement, having forged closer relations between Russia and Latin America in the late 2000s. Sechin met frequently with Hugo Chávez and even gave a speech in Spanish at a commemoration ceremony after the Venezuelan president’s death, calling him a “brilliant politician, one of the founders of the idea of a multipolar world.”

A Putin crony with close ties to America’s new secretary of state
Sechin’s relationship with Tillerson dates back more than a decade. Tillerson first arrived in Russia in 1997 and oversaw the company's project with Rosneft and Indian and Japanese partners to reach hydrocarbons deep below the icy seas off Sakhalin Island, which was delayed for years by low oil prices and legal holdups. Thanks in no small part to his partnership with Sechin, Tillerson has withstood pressure from the state gas company Gazprom, which forced foreign investors out of another Sakhalin venture, and the consortium is now Exxon’s flagship project in Russia, pumping more than 250,000 barrels of oil a day. Exxon and Rosneft have gone on to sign other major deals.

Sechin got to know Tillerson after he became chair of Rosneft in 2004, reportedly coming to admire the Texan’s tough but transparent dealings with partners. In 2015, he even spoke out in support of Exxon in its ongoing legal battle to regain some of the $500 million in taxes it said it had overpaid Russia.

After Exxon and Rosneft signed agreements to explore Siberia and the Arctic in 2011, Tillerson and Sechin were said to have celebrated with caviar in the luxury Manhattan restaurant Per Se. The next year, Putin, Sechin, and Tillerson were filmed toasting another deal with champagne.

Putin awarded the Russian order of friendship to Tillerson in 2013, reportedly at Sechin's request. The two seem to have become not just partners but friends: Sechin said in 2014 that before he was sanctioned, he had been planning “to ride the roads in the United States on motorcycles with Tillerson.”

In a St. Petersburg Economic Forum appearance last June that was interpreted as a sign of support for Rosneft, Tillerson called Sechin “my friend”: “As to the sanctions question, I’ll use the same approach that my friend Mr. Sechin took. That’s a question for government.”

PUTIN, SECHIN AND TILLERSON HAVE BEEN FILMED TOASTING AN ENERGY DEAL WITH CHAMPAGNE
But Sechin is not one to let friendship get in the way if a conflict arises. His reputation is that of a ruthless insider who holds only three things to be sacred: his loyalty to Putin, Rosneft's ravenous expansion, and his no-holds-barred struggle against political and business rivals. Many of these are liberals like Ulyukayev or Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who oppose his vision of an economy dominated by huge state corporations. Sechin won his most recent clash with the two men, buying the oil company Bashneft in a deal Medvedev had opposed. (Ulyukayev was accused in November of seeking a bribe to back this deal, which he also was initially against.)

“Business leaders who have dealt with Sechin say he has one particular idiosyncrasy: he immediately manages to get criminal proceedings started against any potential partner as a backup, as well as to facilitate the negotiating process,” wrote journalist Mikhail Zygar in his seminal book All the Kremlin's Men.

A rapid rise, fueled by ruthlessness and hard work
Sechin was born into a blue-collar family in Leningrad in 1960. Although his parents worked at a metallurgical factory, Sechin studied at a school that specialized in French and managed to get into a university in Leningrad, where he studied Portuguese and Spanish. According to classmate Larisa Volodimerova, the skinny young man wasn't exceptional but studied hard to escape the poverty he lived in with his twin sister and divorced mother.

“He was interested in money and a career for money from the beginning to exit this nightmare,” she said, remembering there wasn't much food when she came over to their apartment.

After graduating with a higher degree in economics in 1984, Sechin served as a Soviet military translator in the conflicts in Angola and Mozambique. (Former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul said Sechin told him he had worked for Soviet intelligence in Africa.) According to another classmate, Nikolai Konyushkov, Sechin always liked military discipline and was a platoon commander when the students underwent combat training outside the city. He recalled how his friend once daringly climbed from a neighbor's apartment into a third-story window to let Konyushkov into his apartment when he forgot his keys after one such training.

“He could have served in more or less peaceful places, in the capital, but Igor Ivanovich chose hot spots,” Konyushkov said. “He didn't fear military service; he liked it.”

After his return, Sechin went to work in Leningrad city hall, where he met Putin. By 1991, the future president was chair of the city’s public relations committee, and Sechin became his head secretary, taking down visitors' contacts in a black leather binder. Acquaintances often remark on Sechin's absolute loyalty to Putin: Pavlovsky called him the leader’s “angry guard dog.” A recently rediscovered 1996 video interview shows Sechin faithfully following Putin through the airport metal detector, duffel bag and briefcase in hand.

When then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin appointed Putin acting president in 1999, Sechin became the deputy head of his administration, waiting for Putin at the elevator every morning and at the airport after every foreign trip.

His control over Putin's schedule as well as what papers made it to the president's desk increased his clout — and his willingness to mercilessly go after his rivals.

Sechin’s first major target was Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was discussing the sale of a blocking stake in his Yukos oil company to Chevron Texaco or Exxon. According to Belkovsky, Sechin presented Putin with a report the analyst had written warning that Khodorkovsky planned to seize power, and he’s believed to have overseen the subsequent legal attacks on the oligarch. Khodorkovsky was soon imprisoned on charges of tax fraud, and Yukos was broken up. Sechin's prize was chairmanship of Rosneft, which became the largest oil company in Russia after absorbing the main components of Yukos.

In subsequent years, Sechin would outmaneuver or outlast many other rivals, often with similarly underhanded tactics. Russian media linked him to the sudden arrest of Vladimir Yevtushenkov — who had reportedly rejected Sechin’s offer to buy his Bashneft oil company — in connection with an investigation into its privatization more than a decade earlier. Bashneft was seized by the state and sold to Rosneft two years later.

Bob Dudley, who was CEO of the British-Russian joint oil venture TNK-BP, claimed in a leaked US Embassy cable that Sechin was in “direct cooperation” with his partners turned enemies in their attempts to force him out. Dudley later fled Russia — after reportedly surviving a poisoning attempt — and a few years later, Rosneft ended up taking over TNK-BP.

Sechin also served as deputy prime minister from 2008 to 2012, and he is secretary of Putin’s energy development commission.

Yet even his critics have to admit Sechin fulfilled his task of turning a marginal oil company into the country's state champion, combining a legendary work ethic with the zeal of a Jesuit priest. Zygar described him as a “cyborg” who can go days without sleeping and terrorizes underlings with his deceptively soft voice. According to Pavlovsky, he was the hardest-working official in the Kremlin and “read all the papers,” once catching a loophole no one else had spotted in a tax accord with the popular offshore business destination of Cyprus.

At the same time, Rosneft has taken on huge debts in its aggressive expansion and is having to invest far more to keep production up in its declining west Siberian fields. According to Vladimir Milov, an opposition activist and former deputy energy minister who worked with Sechin, he is not a good businessman or manager but rather an “overseer in a labor camp, someone who can intimidate.” He said Sechin is driven by an all-consuming desire to increase his oil empire. (Rosneft has of late made large investments abroad in countries like India and Venezuela.)

“It's not a comprehensive strategy, but rather the spontaneous action of a carnivore, of a crocodile,” Milov said. “He sees something and attacks, but there's no strategy … and the problem of falling production in west Siberia isn't being solved.”

Nonetheless, Sechin's position at the helm of Rosneft and influence over the Russian energy industry seems for now beyond reproach after he delivered much-needed cash to the country's coffers through an $11 billion Rosneft privatization deal late last year, the largest foreign investment since the 2014 sanctions. (The full identities of the buyers remain unknown, raising questions of where the money is actually coming from.) Milov claimed that Ulyukayev's downfall came because he had insisted the Rosneft deal be done with greater government oversight than Sechin wanted.

Now Tillerson’s appointment could allow Sechin to extend his clout once again. “At the very least, his influence on foreign policy will be increased, because he has a history of communicating with American oilmen” like Tillerson and secretary of energy pick Rick Perry, said Evgeny Minchenko, a Kremlin-connected analyst known for his “Politburo 2.0” reports on the ruling elite.

Some analysts have even speculated Sechin could become prime minister if Putin runs and wins another term, a virtual certainty given the strongman’s popularity and lack of any real rivals.

Still, Minchenko warned that although the Rosneft head “has increased his influence and done so pretty dramatically,” there are “no one-way processes” in the Kremlin.

“Even if someone gets stronger,” he warned, “he can be thrown off soon.”
http://www.vox.com/world/2017/2/8/14539 ... te-kremlin

Ex-Minister in Corruption Case Warns Kremlin Elite They Could Be Next

More stories by Irina ReznikDecember 7, 2017, 9:47 AM CST
By
Irina Reznik
and
Jake Rudnitsky
Ulyukayev hits out at Rosneft head Sechin over bribery charge

He faces 10 years in highest-profile prosecution of Putin era

Russia’s former Economy Minister Alexei Ulyukayev, the highest-level official charged with corruption under President Vladimir Putin’s rule, warned the Kremlin elite that any one of them could be next in the dock.

“It was said a long time ago: send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee,” Ulyukayev said in a closing statement Thursday at his trial in Moscow, where he’s accused of taking a $2 million bribe. “It can toll for any one of you. It’s become very easy: a bag, a basket, a grainy video, three clicks, and it’s ready.”

Ulyukayev claims he was set up by the powerful head of Rosneft PJSC, Igor Sechin, who masterminded a sting operation that led to his arrest. Sechin repeatedly refused to obey court orders to give testimony in person, citing his work schedule, adding to the intrigue around a trial that’s split the Kremlin elite. The case has offered a rare glimpse into the different factions jockeying for position as Putin seeks a fourth term in March elections.

Sechin “vanished like the synergies from the privatization of Rosneft,” and “only the smell of sulfur in the air was left,” Ulyukayev said, in a reference to The Master and Margarita, the classic Russian novel by Mikhail Bulgakov in which the Devil visits Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s Moscow.

‘Cruel Set-Up’

Ulyukayev, who denies the charge, argued that Sechin presented the bribe as a gift of fine wine with the intent to prevent possible opposition to state-owned Rosneft’s takeover of regional oil producer Bashneft PJSC last year. He said he’d been the victim of an “horrific and cruel set-up” in a rambling and at times emotional statement, in which he apologized to ordinary Russians for failing to improve their lives.

“It’s only when you get into trouble that you begin to understand how hard people’s lives are and what injustices they face,” he said. “When everything’s ok for you, you turn away from human misery. Forgive me for this, people. I’m guilty before you.”

Prosecutors are seeking a 10-year sentence in a maximum security prison, something Ulyukayev, 62, said almost equals the death penalty. The Zamoskvoretsky court resumes on Dec. 15 to give its verdict.

Prosecutors say Ulyukayev first approached Sechin on the sidelines of an international summit in India for a payoff to approve Rosneft’s purchase of Bashneft, a company Russia seized from billionaire Vladimir Evtushenkov in 2014 after he was hit with money-laundering charges that were later dropped.

Sting Operation

This led to Ulyukayev’s arrest in a November 2016 sting at Rosneft’s Moscow headquarters organized by Sechin, a veteran of military intelligence who’s worked for Putin since the 1990s. Recorded conversations between the two presented as evidence showed an intimate, informal relationship even as conflict brewed over asset sales worth billions of dollars to the government.

Money isn’t mentioned in the recording, in which Sechin is heard presenting Ulyukayev with a basket of sausages made from the meat of animals he personally hunted, as well as a locked bag containing the payoff. Federal Security Service agents arrested Ulyukayev as he tried to leave. His defense team argued in court that a bag with that amount of cash would be too heavy to lift easily.

“A young, strong prosecutor could barely lift a bag stuffed with $2 million, while the ageing Ulyukayev, as seen on video, didn’t have any difficulties,” prosecutor Boris Neporozhny said. “But I say this: it always feels lighter when it’s yours.”

Rosneft Demand

Ulyukayev maintains the real motivation of the sting was because, as Economy Minister, he could have interfered with the $11 billion privatization of a 19.5 percent stake in Rosneft that earned the state 18 billion rubles less than the government had anticipated when it approved the sale. He argued at the trial that he had no power to block Rosneft’s purchase of Bashneft, and so there was no reason for him to seek a bribe.

Ulyukayev isn’t the only member of the elite to get into trouble over Rosneft’s desire for Bashneft. Shares in Sistema plunged Thursday after Rosneft increased a demand for damages it said Bashneft suffered under Evtushenkov’s ownership to 300 billion rubles ($5.06 billion). The claim is more than double the 136 billion rubles awarded to Rosneft by an arbitration court in Ufa in August, a ruling that Sistema’s appealing.

Ulyukayev, looking gaunt and tired, appeared resigned to his fate in a court system in which the conviction rate exceeds 99 percent, higher than at the peak of Stalin’s purges. However, corruption cases don’t always end badly for the powerful in Russia.

Former Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov, who was fired by Putin in 2012 amid a $132 million fraud case involving his subordinates, has been rehabilitated and is now a director at Rostec State Corp. He declined to speak to reporters when he was seen Thursday at a meeting with Putin at the presidential residence outside Moscow.

— With assistance by Ilya Arkhipov

[8bitagent]

Since I created this thread, I want to ask why this idea of "Trump colluded with Russia" seems to anger the left more than the endless real crimes Putin's Russia has done. Such as assassinations of whistleblowers/journalists, and most importantly arming genocide in Sudan, and mass bombing in Syria and Chechnya?

the left and the mainstream media's endless whining about Trump/Russia reminds me of the barnyard braying by Republicans over "Benghazi" and Obama's birth certificate

I hate to say it, but the left has become the very Mccarthy era red scare 50's/60's era Republicans they used to make fun of.

[American Dream]

Since I created this thread, I want to ask why this idea of "Trump colluded with Russia" seems to anger the left more than the endless real crimes Putin's Russia has done. Such as assassinations of whistleblowers/journalists, and most importantly arming genocide in Sudan, and mass bombing in Syria and Chechnya?

the left and the mainstream media's endless whining about Trump/Russia reminds me of the barnyard braying by Republicans over "Benghazi" and Obama's birth certificate

I understand the critique but it is not my experience "the left" in the United States gets highly exercised over Russian/Team Trump alliances but rather, a specific subset. The more they align with the Democratic Party and what it represents (liberalism, the electoral strategy) the more this becomes their conspiracy du jour. The socialists/anarchists that I know don't have the same kinds of things to say about Putin at all. The "I'm with her" crowd seems to me more centrist than anything but maybe they qualify as "left" in these, the waning days of Babylon...

[seemslikeadream]

Russian Active Measures and the 2016 Election Hack

December 20, 2017 | John Sipher

John Sipher
Former Member, CIA`s Senior Intelligence Service
They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Funny, that. The Soviet and Russian intelligence services have been doing exactly the same thing against us for decades, but this time it finally worked.

Why?

As most Americans are aware by now, the Kremlin undertook a series of actions to interfere in our presidential election in 2016. The sum of these aggressive measures – some overt and some covert – were designed to sow confusion, aggravate political polarization, stir racial tensions, discredit the American democratic system, weaken the U.S. relationship with its allies and hurt Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate. These type of activities – called “active measures” in the Russian foreign policy playbook – are nothing new.

Putin and the Kremlin see the U.S. as their main enemy and use all the tools of state power to hurt the U.S. and weaken the West. Kremlin doctrine holds that political warfare is as important as military action in weakening and defeating an enemy. Active measures are asymmetric political actions meant to influence an adversary – the art of having your enemy think what you want him to think.

Active Measures include propaganda, media manipulation, disinformation, deception, use of forgery, funding of extremist and opposition groups, spreading conspiracy theories and rumor, cyber-attacks, espionage and even assassination. “Political Influence” is considered the most important part of an effective active measures campaign. Political influence involves using spies and cooperative contacts to directly promote Russian interests inside adversary countries. These individuals secretly working on behalf of Russia are called “agents of influence.” It is not clear if the Russians secured spies inside the Trump campaign, but they certainly tried.

Of course, none of this is new. The Russians, and Soviets before them, have been spreading disinformation and attacking American interests with these asymmetric tools since the 1940s.

A Soviet disinformation campaign in the 1980s attempted to spread the theory that the AIDS virus was created by the Pentagon as part of an out-of-control secret biological warfare program, according to The New York Times.

Prior to the use of social media platforms to spread disinformation, the Russians used a then-favorite mechanism to spread the false story – placing an article in an English-language newspaper in India. Then, using spies and collaborators, the KGB helped the article get picked up by increasingly credible media outlets, with the goal of eventually having it picked up by the western press. Once in circulation, the information would complicate efforts to tell truth from fiction, and sow distrust with western leaders. As explained by Dr. Thomas Boghardt in the Times story, “The Soviets intuitively understood how the human psyche works.” He said they identify internal strife, point to inconsistencies and ambiguities in the news, fill them with (fake) meaning, mix in some accurate information, and “repeat, repeat, repeat.”

A 1979 Russian disinformation effort led to the death of American diplomats in Pakistan. When an early Al-Qaida-like group seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca and called for the removal of the ruling Saudi family, the Russians spread an incendiary rumor that American troops were involved in the take-over of the holy site. The hoax inflamed Muslim fears and incited protests around the world. A mob in Islamabad stormed the U.S. Embassy and burned it to the ground, killing U.S. diplomats.

There is no shortage of such examples. During the Cold War and beyond, the KGB spread numerous false stories of U.S. assassination attempts, planted forged documents, stoked racial discord and provided support to violent groups. Former KGB officer Sergei Tretyakov’s book “Comrade J” claims the Kremlin invented and disseminated the notion of nuclear winter in an effort to discredit U.S. missile deployments in Europe.

In Latin-America, the Kremlin circulated allegations that wealthy Americans were buying up and butchering poor children in order to use their body parts for transplants. The story even made it into the U.S. press. More recently, the Kremlin orchestrated a coup attempt in Montenegro, stoked anti-EU sentiments in Britain in the lead-up to the BREXIT vote, spread rumors of rapes by migrants in Germany, and added fuel to the fire of secession discussions in Spanish Catalonia.

As troubling and painful as these and other covert campaigns were, none have had the strategic impact that we witnessed in 2016. Why?

Social media: Although the Russians were up to their old tricks in 2016, the internet and social media provided new means to weaponize information. The Russians no longer need to rely on a small army of spies to spread propaganda and lies from Indian tabloids. Facebook and other venues do the work for them. An algorithm directs fake news to those who might be interested, and our “sharing” does the rest. We learned in 2016 that an emotional meme can have as much impact as a well-researched article in the mainstream media.

We’ve seen the enemy and he is us: The success of the Russian attack was proportional to the ferocity of the partisan divide in the U.S. As former CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden commented in a recent “Atlantic” article, “covert influence campaigns don’t create divisions on the ground, they amplify them.”

In 2016, the dysfunctional U.S. political environment was dry tinder for the Russians. A single match led to a wildfire. Most successful active measures campaigns are not born of elaborate schemes cooked up from whole cloth. Instead, they are often a series of opportunistic and tactical operations that come together due to a unique set of circumstances. In the case of the 2016 attacks, it wasn’t particularly difficult to turn Americans against each other.

Indeed, in 2016, it appears there was a disconnect between the effort, thought and pre-planning expended to carry out the attack, and its resulting impact. The hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was no more than a phishing expedition by a known Russian proxy. As an intelligence operation, it required minimal effort, displayed no professional elegance and was poorly hidden. If the Russians knew ahead of time how important the material would be to the success of their plan, it would have been child’s play to have stolen it without getting caught.

However, once they had it in hand and realized how well it fit with other material from separate operations, it was too tempting not to use it. In this sense, the hack of the DNC and subsequent publication of the material in WikiLeaks is surely one of history’s best examples of enormous impact from minimal input.

Putin’s rage: The scale and brazen nature of the 2016 attack can be attributed in part to the personality of Vladimir Putin. For Putin, years of resentment against the U.S. for perceived disrespect and betrayal, culminating in 2012 street riots in Moscow and the publication of the Panama papers, created a convenient target in Hillary Clinton and the Washington foreign policy establishment. Putin’s animus toward Clinton increased his tolerance for risk, and willingness to show his hand.

U.S. wasn’t prepared: By 2016, the years of focus on terrorism and the Middle East had fooled many into assuming that the Russians were no longer a threat. Greater familiarity with the Russian threat led to a better defense during the Cold War. Indeed, proximity to an aggressive Russia helped our European allies be better prepared to counter Russian propaganda and fake stories in 2015 and 2016. They Russians tried similar methods in France, Germany and elsewhere but did not have the same level of success.

Collusion? According to Russian doctrine, a successful active measures campaign relies on enlisting spies and “agents-of-influence” to help focus the attack. The Russians certainly called on all available resources to insure success, and like any good intelligence service, continued to seek new spies. Were the Russians aided by collaborators inside or around the Trump campaign, or inside our social media companies? We don’t know. If not, it would be a rare covert campaign that did not leverage human sources.

We do know, however, that countering similar attacks in the future will be made more difficult by the failure to hold Russia to account, and by Trump administration attacks on the media and national security institutions. Weakening our defenses does not seem a wise course of action.

Russian-born British journalist and author Peter Pomerantsev has written how Putin has used lies, disinformation and an assault on the media to disable the ability to hold the powerful to account in Russia. As Pomerantsev explained in Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, the goal of Russia’s dirty tricks “is to confuse rather than convince, to trash the information space so the audience gives up looking for any truth amid the chaos.” When the waters have been so fouled, the population develops a hardened cynicism and no longer tries to discern truth from fiction. No set of facts is better than another, all politicians are the same, no country is better than any other. As they say in Russia, “everything is PR.”

Let’s hope that U.S. institutions prove stronger than those in Russia. For, even if President Donald Trump does not fully understand the damage he is doing, the Russians do, and will seek exploit our weaknesses in the future.
https://www.thecipherbrief.com/column_a ... _4.twitter

[seemslikeadream]

Russian Trolls Target British MPs

Online abuse from pro-Russian, and apparently Russian, accounts

@DFRLabDec 20
@AtlanticCouncil's Digital Forensic Research Lab. Catalyzing a global network of digital forensic researchers, following conflicts in real time.


On December 21, the British parliament is to debate Russian interference in the United Kingdom’s democratic processes. Ahead of the debate, it was suggested that Russian internet trolls — anonymous, abusive accounts — may be targeting Members of Parliament (MPs) who criticize Russia and its propaganda.


Tweet from Lucy Fisher of the Times, quoting Chris Bryant MP, Labour chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Russia. (Source: Twitter / @LOS_Fisher)
@DFRLab looked into several potential cases and found a group of trolls, which not only appear pro-Kremlin, but share many of the characteristics of earlier accounts run from the so-called “troll factory”, a building in St. Petersburg in which Russians are employed to maintain fake social-media accounts and to post pro-Russian or anti-Western propaganda.

Troll factory accounts played a prominent role in the 2016 United States elections, as the most effective accounts built up tens of thousands of followers and interacting with top officials from President Donald Trump’s campaign.

The pro-Kremlin accounts we found account for only a small proportion of the abusive messages sent to MPs, and to journalists who reported on them; the great majority appear to come from genuine, and genuinely disgruntled, British voters. However, these pro-Kremlin, and potentially troll-factory, accounts directly targeted British MPs. Their behavior, therefore, constitutes a targeted attempt to influence British democratic debate as it happened.

Angry Russians

The most obvious pro-Kremlin posts came from apparently Russian-language accounts. For example, on November 10, Conservative MP Damian Collins tweeted an article by Wired magazine, setting out the first evidence of Russian interference in the UK’s Brexit debate.


The post from Damian Collins, MP, which triggered the outburst. (Source: Twitter / Damian Collins)
One of the replies came from a Russian-language user who posted in capitals, and obscenity.


“BE AFRAID OF RUSSIA!!! IF YOU ANNOY (IT), YOUR ISLAND WILL DISAPPEAR INTO NOTHINGNESS AT A SINGLE STROKE!!! THE ENGLISH ALWAYS WERE THE MOST STUPID PEOPLE AND THAT’S HOW THEY’LL REMAIN IN HISTORY!! AND YOU PERSONALLY SUCK PUTIN’S ****!” Archived on December 20, 2017. (Source: Twitter / @khaag65)
This account is clearly a Russian patriotic troll. Its profile page features a background of the Russian leadership in combat uniform on an idealized battlefield; its aggression towards Collins marks it out as a troll.


Profile page for @khaag65. The background features, from left to right, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Prime Minister Dmitriy Medvedev, President Vladimir Putin, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitriy Rogozin, and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. Archived on December 20, 2017. (Source: Twitter / @khaag65)
However, as of December 20, 2017, all its most recent posts were shares of videos, suggesting automated behavior. Some of the posts were patriotic, but others appeared unrelated, such as promoting videos on how to make crab sticks and how to make furniture.


Posts from @khaag65, on Russian patriotism (top left), crab sticks (bottom left) and furniture (right). All posts archived on December 20, 2017. (Source for all posts: Twitter / @khaag65)
The language of these shares was Russian, albeit probably automated. We can therefore conclude that this is a Russian troll account, but not an especially active or effective one; it is likely to be run by a private individual, rather than the troll factory, since we would expect the latter to be much more active.

More questionable is the account @iatetwit. On December 15, Lucy Fisher,a reporter with the Times, tweeted an open letter from MP and Labour chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Russia Chris Bryant, which warned UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson of potential “active measures” against him on a scheduled trip to Moscow.


The tweet from Lucy Fisher. (Source: Twitter / @LOS_Fisher)
This drew the ire of an account called @iatetwit, screen name “dayjuska”, who sent two replies a few minutes apart, attacking both Bryant and the British media. Bryant is one of the leading British MPs to have warned of pro-Russian troll campaigns.


Tweets from @iatetwit, replying to Fisher and attacking Bryant. Archived on December 20, 2017. (Source: Twitter / @iatetwit)
@iatetwit is a new account, created on October 3, 2017. It is not a prolific poster, but it has kept up a slow but steady flow of tweets and retweets.


@ieattwit’s profile page, showing the creation date and number of tweets. Archived on December 20, 2017. (Source: Twitter / @iatetwit)
The account is effectively anonymous. It gives no verifiable name or location details. Its profile picture is taken from the Instagram account of former Russian Olympic figure skater Yulia Lipnitskaya (the Instagram account is restricted, but the images are reproduced here).


Screenshot from website sovsport.ru, showing Lipnitskaya’s Instagram posts. Archived on December 20, 2017. (Source: sovsport.ru)
Early in its life, it posted retweets in Russian and English about sports, especially figure-skating, interspersed with political content in English.


Retweets from @iatetwit. (Source: Twitter / @iatetwit)
Its English appears non-native, with an inability to use the words “a” and “the” often noted in Russian-speakers.


Tweets, one on sports, the other on politics, from @iatetwit. Note the lack of “a” and “the”. Archived on December 20, 2017. (Source: Twitter / @iatetwit)
However, increasingly, it took on English far-right positions, equatded immigration with the destruction of “English” society, and claimed to be English itself.


Posts from @iatetwit on English society and immigration; note the use of “we” in the last post, which is in reply to another UK politician, the Mayor of London. Tweets archived on December 20, 2017. (Source for posts: Twitter / @iatetwit)
Other posts were anti-EU and, especially, anti-Irish, in what appears to be an attempt (copied to a journalist, Sky’s Adam Boulton) to provoke inter-ethnic anger in the UK.


@iatetwit on the Irish, and the Remain campaign. Archived on December 20, 2017. (Source: Twitter / @iatetwit)
Increasingly, it became more troll-like and abusive, progressing deeper into obscenity as it defended Russia against being banned from the Olympics for massive state-sponsored doping by accusing others of the same.


Troll posts from @iatetwit on the Olympics. Tweets archived on December 20, 2017. (Source for posts: Twitter / @iatetwit)
One post returned to an old piece of Kremlin propaganda: the insinuation that Ukraine was responsible for shooting down Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine in July 2014, despite all evidence to the contrary. Another replied to Kremlin propaganda outlet Sputnik, abusing UK Prime Minister Theresa May.


@iatetwit’s MH17 and Sputnik posts. Archived on December 20, 2017. (Source: Twitter / @iatetwit)
All this behavior is characteristic of pro-Kremlin trolls, and, in particular, the accounts known to have been run by the “troll factory”. There are too few data to allow for a firm identification as a probable troll-factory account as yet; however, the indicators point in that direction.

The professionals?

We can be more confident about an account which trolled another MP, Liberal Democrat Tom Brake. The trolls spread their venom across all the mainstream parties. Brake posted a tweet criticizing Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson for apparently belittling the danger of Russian interference in UK debates; an account called @iamjohnsmith retorted by demanding Brake’s resignation.


The post by Tom Brake MP, and the reply from @iamjohnsmith, who is almost certainly not John Smith. Archived on December 20, 2017. (Source: Twitter)
Like @iatetwit, this account is functionally anonymous. Its username gives nothing away; it provides no personal information other than a location, which can easily be faked. It has posted 11,000 tweets since creation in March 2017 and gained a modest 556 followers.


@iamjohnsmith’s profile page. Archived on December 20, 2017. (Source: Twitter / @iamjohnsmith)
The choice of account name — John Smith — and the use of the nouns “tosh” and “tripe”, current in approximately the 1890s, are almost parodically English. However, the account’s behavior is near-identical with that of known troll-factory accounts which Twitter Public Policy closed down in summer 2017. This is certainly a pro-Kremlin troll account, and likely to be a troll-factory one.

@iamjohnsmith repeatedly shares articles by Kremlin broadcaster RT, and tags RT and Sputnik in its posts.


Shares of RT stories by @iamjohnsmith on Syria (right and left) and the EU. Note the time of the right-hand post, 3.43 am UTC, which is an unusual time for a UK user to be online. Tweets archived on December 20, 2017. (Source for posts: Twitter / @iamjohnsmith)
It regularly repeats some main points of Kremlin propaganda, such as accusing U.S. Senator John McCain of supporting Nazis in Ukraine, attacking the Bellingcat group of investigative journalists, and denying the use of sarin gas by the Syrian government, despite all findings to the contrary.


Tweets from @iamjohnsmith on Ukraine, Bellingcat and sarin. Tweets archived on December 20, 2017. (Source for posts: Twitter / @iamjohnsmith)
It trolls politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, including McCain, Nancy Pelosi, Brake and Prime Minister Theresa May — hitting McCain and May in the same tweet.


@iamjohnsmith’s May-McCain double whammy. Archived on December 20, 2017. (Source: Twitter / @iamjohnsmith)
The account’s posts repeatedly tag known pro-Kremlin, anti-Western, and far-right commentators on both sides of the Atlantic. This is a technique known to be used by the troll factory’s accounts, as they try to infiltrate specific user groups, and then use those groups to validate themselves to a wider audience.


Posts from @iamjohnsmith to Jack Posobiec, Katie Hopkins and Nigel Farage, all influential voices among the far right in the UK and US; earlier troll-factory accounts such as @TEN_GOP targeted far-right validators in exactly this way. Tweets archived on December 20, 2017. (Source for posts: Twitter / @iamjohnsmith)
Even more tellingly, it tags known troll-factory accounts in its posts, particularly @Pamela_Moore13 (repeatedly) and @TEN_GOP (twice). Both these accounts posed as far-right Americans, but were exposed and suspended as Russian trolls by Twitter in the summer.


@iamjohnsmith’s tagging of @TEN_GOP (left) and @Pamela_Moore13 (right). Source: Twitter searches, archived on December 20, 2017. (Source: Twitter / @iamjohnsmith)
@iamjohnsmith’s behavior is a near-perfect match with that of @TEN_GOP and @Pamela_Moore13, with which it sought to interact. It is not possible to say definitively, from open sources, whether it is a troll-factory account; but all the evidence suggests that it is.

Other accounts behaved similarly. On November 23, Conservative MP David Gauke tweeted an exchange he had with RT, in which he refused to talk with what he termed a “propaganda station”. He was soon trolled by an account called @FXdestination, which elevated RT above the Western media.


The exchange between David Gauke and @FXdestination. Archived on December 20, 2017. (Source: Twitter / @FXdestination)
This account is a high-volume and functionally anonymous tweeter (despite being created in 2011, it has no profile picture).


@FXdestination’s profile page. Archived on December 20, 2017. (Source: Twitter / @FXdestination)
It regularly shares Kremlin messages on issues including Ukraine, Crimea, the shooting down of MH17, and Turkey’s downing of a Russian aircraft in November 2015 — all hot topics for the troll factory.


Posts by @FXdestination on MH17, Ukraine and Turkey. Searches archived on December 20, 2017. (Source for searches: Twitter / @FXdestination)
In a separate analysis, data expert @conspirator0 highlighted the resemblance between @FXdestination and known troll-factory accounts. The likelihood is that this is a troll-factory user, although open-source evidence does not allow for a definitive decision.


Tweet from thread by @Conspirator0, assessing @FXdestination’s activity. (Source for the full thread: Twitter / @conspirator0)
Like @iamjohnsmith, @FXdestination repeatedly tagged @TEN_GOP and @Pamela_Moore13. It also regularly tagged another account, @ProudPatriot101, which also trolled Gauke after his RT post.


Troll post from @ProudPatriot101. Archived on December 20, 2017. (Source: Twitter / @ProudPatriot1)
Like @iatetwit, @ProudPatriot101 takes an anti-migrant and white supremacist line. Its current screen name is “It’s OK to be white”; its background proclaims it to be “a proud British”, although the noun is missing. Created in 2011, it has posted almost quarter of a million tweets.


@ProudPatriot101’s profile page. Archived on December 20, 2017. (Source: Twitter / @ProudPatriot1)
However, yet again, it regularly tags @TEN_GOP and @Pamela_Moore13 (and also @FXdirection), and shares Kremlin messaging on issues including Ukraine, Turkey, and MH17.


Tweets from @ProudPatriot101 on Turkey, Ukraine and MH17. Note the preponderance of shares from RT. Searches archived on December 20, 2017. (Source for searches: Twitter / @ProudPatriot1)
This behavior is consistent with that of the known troll-factory accounts. It marks @ProudPatriot101 out as a confirmed member of the disinformation community which surrounds the troll factory, and possibly an account run from the factory itself.

Conclusion

Attribution of troll accounts is always challenging, given the easy anonymity which Twitter provides. @khaag65 is a Russian-language account, but seems unlikely to be professionally run; @iatetwit is likely to be Russian-language in origin, and may be a fledgling troll-factory account.

@iamjohnsmith, @FXdirection and @ProudPatriot101 all strongly resemble the known troll-factory accounts. They are anonymous, active, and aggressive; they seek to interact with far-right amplifiers while trolling critics of Russia; and they interact with one another, and with known troll-factory users.

There is a likelihood — though not a certainty — that some or all three of these last accounts are connected with a troll factory. They are certainly active members of the broader pro-Kremlin community which surrounds it.

All have, in the recent past, trolled British MPs directly. Their interactions do not appear to have raised much echo, or to have achieved many retweets; despite their high volumes, only @ProudPatriot101 has a significant number of followers. Neverthless, they represent a direct attempt by pro-Kremlin, and perhaps Kremlin-controlled, accounts to have an impact on UK politicians, and thus on UK politics.
https://medium.com/dfrlab/russian-troll ... 6713a051a0

[seemslikeadream]

'Russian spy in Downing Street': Ukrainian interpreter in Theresa May talks accused of espionage for Moscow


Stanislav Yezhov, seen centre, with Theresa May and Ukraine PM Volodymyr Groysman at a meeting in July
A senior Ukrainian government interpreter who attended sensitive security talks with Theresa May inside Downing Street has been arrested for allegedly spying for the Kremlin.

Ukraine’s security service on Thursday said it had arrested Stanislav Yezhov and opened a treason investigation, five months after he accompanied the country’s Prime Minister on an official visit to London.

The interpreter for Ukrainian cabinet ministers had been recruited by a Russian intelligence agency and had been electronically passing them secrets, authorities in Kiev alleged.

Mr Yezhov was seen in photographs interpreting for Volodymyr Groysman at a meeting with Mrs May at Downing Street in July, as well as a meeting with Joe Biden, then US vice president, in 2016.

Mr Groysman said in a Facebook post the spy had “long been working in the interests of a hostile government”, but it was not clear if he was already thought to be spying at the time of the London visit.

Mr Yezhov was photographed alongside Mr Groysman and Mrs May as the pair held discussions on how to tackle Russian support for separatists in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.

He interpreted the leaders discussions on topics including British military aid to Kiev, UK support to bolster the country’s cyber defences and sanctions against Russia.

Stanislav Yezhov was detained by the Ukrainian state security service SBU
Stanislav Yezhov was detained by the Ukrainian state security service SBU Credit: Reuters
Mrs May, who was on Thursday in Poland to deepen cooperation on fighting Russian disinformation, said: “I'm aware of the reports in relation to the Ukrainian individual who attended Downing Street earlier in the summer.

"The action that's been taken is a matter for the Ukrainian authorities.”

Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, said the incident highlighted the need to ensure the Ukraine "isn't captured by the wrong influences".

Speaking on a flight to Moscow, where he will raise the issue of hacking and cyber warfare, Mr Johnson said: "We want Ukraine to go on the right path and we are worried that Ukraine needs more encouragement, more help, to reform and make sure it isn't captured by the wrong influences.

Ukrainian servicemen shot with machine guns during fighting with pro-Russian separatists in Avdiivka, Donetsk region on March 31, 2017
The interpreter was privy to talks on military aid to Ukrainian forces fighting Russian backed separatists Credit: ANATOLII STEPANOV/AFP
"I think possibly what this episode shows is that with the real difficulties and risks that the Ukrainian Government is running they need a lot of encouragement and a lot of support."

Mr Yezhov was seen being led away in handcuffs after his arrest. Oleksiy Petrov, head of the Ukraine security service's counter-intelligence department said Mr Yezhov had “access to fairly specific insider information in the cabinet of ministers”.

He told a Ukraine television channel: “He was respected. He was working for the Russian special services very responsibly, thoroughly and creatively.”

Mr Petrov called Mr Yezhov a “rat in glasses”.

Ukrainian Pravda newspaper reported that security services had discovered the alleged spy several months ago, but allowed him to continue working as an interpreter while secretly gathering evidence against him.

Mr Yezhov’s wife is a Russian citizen and a declaration he filed in March about his family's property revealed significant financial ties to the country.

His wife Yulia Miroshnikova, with whom he has a daughter worked at the Washington-based energy consulting firm Numark Associates, according to the declaration.

Ms Miroshnikova Ms Miroshnikova had holdings of 286,641 roubles and $31,713 in the Russian state bank Sberbank.

Ukrainian media reported that Mr Yezhov had once worked at the Ukrainian embassy in the United States and suggested he had been recruited in Washington DC.

Meanwhile a Commons debate on Moscow’s interference in UK politics was interrupted while a "Russian diplomat" was escorted from the public gallery after accusations he was "filming and taking pictures".

Labour MPs Chris Bryant and Ben Bradshaw could be seen pointing at the mystery man during a debate on Russian interference in UK politics.

However the man, speaking outside the public gallery, expressed his confusion at the accusations.

Speaking anonymously, he said: "I work for a think tank in London, my phone is taped up over the camera so I can't take pictures.

"I was just here for the day, I didn't know what was happening."

During the debate, Mr Bradshaw could be heard saying: "He is from the Russian Embassy. He has been taking pictures."

After several exchanges with Mr Bradshaw, Mr Bryant approached a door keeper to express concern and the man, who was wearing a grey suit and yellow tie, was temporarily removed from the gallery.

However, he returned several minutes later and remained in his seat for the rest of the debate.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12 ... ed-spying/

STATEMENTS & RELEASES

Text of a Letter from the President to the Congress of the United States
LAW & JUSTICE
Issued on: December 21, 2017
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menuALL NEWS
TO THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES:

Pursuant to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, as amended (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (IEEPA), I hereby report that I have issued the enclosed Executive Order (the “order”) declaring a national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States posed by serious human rights abuse and corruption around the world. In addition to taking action under IEEPA, the order implements the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act (Public Law 114-328) (the “Act”) and delegates certain of its authorities.

The order blocks the property and interests in property of persons listed in the Annex to the order. It also blocks the property and interests in property of any foreign person determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Attorney General:

(1) to be responsible for or complicit in, or to have directly or indirectly engaged in, serious human rights abuse;

(2) to be a current or former government official, or a person acting for or on behalf of such an official, who is responsible for or complicit in, or has directly or indirectly engaged in:

(a) corruption, including the misappropriation of state assets, the expropriation of private assets for personal gain, corruption related to government contracts or the extraction of natural resources, or bribery; or

(b) the transfer or the facilitation of the transfer of the proceeds of corruption;

(3) to be or have been a leader or official of:

(a) an entity, including any government entity, that has engaged in, or whose members have engaged in, any of the activities described in (1), (2)(a), or (2)(b) above relating to the leader’s or official’s tenure; or

(b) an entity whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to the order as a result of activities related to the leader’s or the official’s tenure; or

(4) to have attempted to engage in any of the activities described in (1), (2)(a), or (2)(b) above.

The order also blocks any person determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Attorney General:

(5) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services to or in support of:

(a) any activity described in (1), (2)(a), or (2)(b) above that is conducted by a foreign person;

(b) any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to the order; or

(c) any entity described in (3)(a) above where the activity is conducted by a foreign person;

(6) to be owned or controlled by, or to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to the order; or

(7) to have attempted to engage in any of the activities described in (5) or (6) above.

In addition, the order suspends entry into the United States of any alien listed in the Annex or determined to meet one or more of the criteria above.

I have delegated to the Secretary of the Treasury the authority, in consultation with the Secretary of State, to take such actions, including adopting rules and regulations, and to employ all powers granted to the President by IEEPA and the Act, as may be necessary to implement the order and relevant provisions of the Act. I have delegated to the Secretary of State the authority to take such actions, including adopting rules and regulations, and to employ all powers granted to the President by IEEPA and the Act, as may be necessary to implement the provisions of the order and the Act suspending entry into the United States of certain aliens. All executive departments and agencies are directed to take all appropriate measures within their authority to implement the order.

DONALD J. TRUMP

THE WHITE HOUSE,
December 20, 2017.

[seemslikeadream]

Russian hackers targeted more than 200 journalists globally

PARIS (AP) — Russian television anchor Pavel Lobkov was in the studio getting ready for his show when jarring news flashed across his phone: Some of his most intimate messages had just been published to the web.

Days earlier, the veteran journalist had come out live on air as HIV-positive, a taboo-breaking revelation that drew responses from hundreds of Russians fighting their own lonely struggles with the virus. Now he’d been hacked.

“These were very personal messages,” Lobkov said in a recent interview, describing a frantic call to his lawyer in an abortive effort to stop the spread of nearly 300 pages of Facebook correspondence, including sexually explicit messages. Even two years later, he said, “it’s a very traumatic story.”

The Associated Press found that Lobkov was targeted by the hacking group known as Fancy Bear in March 2015, nine months before his messages were leaked. He was one of at least 200 journalists, publishers and bloggers targeted by the group as early as mid-2014 and as recently as a few months ago.

The AP identified journalists as the third-largest group on a hacking hit list obtained from cybersecurity firm Secureworks, after diplomatic personnel and U.S. Democrats. About 50 of the journalists worked at The New York Times. Another 50 were either foreign correspondents based in Moscow or Russian reporters like Lobkov who worked for independent news outlets. Others were prominent media figures in Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltics or Washington.

The list of journalists provides new evidence for the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Fancy Bear acted on behalf of the Russian government when it intervened in the U.S. presidential election. Spy agencies say the hackers were working to help Republican Donald Trump. The Russian government has denied interfering in the American election.

Previous AP reporting has shown how Fancy Bear — which Secureworks nicknamed Iron Twilight — used phishing emails to try to compromise Russian opposition leaders, Ukrainian politicians and U.S. intelligence figures, along with Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and more than 130 other Democrats.

Lobkov, 50, said he saw hacks like the one that turned his day upside-down in December 2015 as dress rehearsals for the email leaks that struck the Democrats in the United States the following year.

“I think the hackers in the service of the Fatherland were long getting their training on our lot before venturing outside.”

___

“CLASSIC KGB TACTIC”

New Yorker writer Masha Gessen said it was also in 2015 — when Secureworks first detected attempts to break into her Gmail — that she began noticing people who seemed to materialize next to her in public places in New York and speak loudly in Russian into their phones, as if trying to be overheard. She said this only happened when she put appointments into the online calendar linked to her Google account.

Gessen, the author of a book about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rise to power, said she saw the incidents as threats.

“It was really obvious,” she said. “It was a classic KGB intimidation tactic.”

Other U.S.-based journalists targeted include Josh Rogin, a Washington Post columnist, and Shane Harris, who was covering the intelligence community for The Daily Beast in 2015. Harris said he dodged the phishing attempt, forwarding the email to a source in the security industry who told him almost immediately that Fancy Bear was involved.

In Russia, the majority of journalists targeted by the hackers worked for independent news outlets like Novaya Gazeta or Vedomosti, though a few — such as Tina Kandelaki and Ksenia Sobchak — are more mainstream. Sobchak has even launched an improbable bid for the Russian presidency.

Investigative reporter Roman Shleynov noted that the Gmail hackers targeted was the one he used while working on the Panama Papers, the expose of international tax avoidance that implicated members of Putin’s inner circle.

Fancy Bear also pursued more than 30 media targets in Ukraine, including many journalists at the Kyiv Post and others who have reported from the front lines of the Russia-backed war in the country’s east.

Nataliya Gumenyuk, co-founder of Ukrainian internet news site Hromadske, said the hackers were hunting for compromising information.

“The idea was to discredit the independent Ukrainian voices,” she said.

The hackers also tried to break into the personal Gmail account of Ellen Barry, The New York Times’ former Moscow bureau chief.

Her newspaper appears to have been a favorite target. Fancy Bear sent phishing emails to roughly 50 of Barry’s colleagues at The Times in late 2014, according to two people familiar with the matter. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential data.

The Times confirmed in a brief statement that its employees received the malicious messages, but the newspaper declined to comment further.

Some journalists saw their presence on the hackers’ hit list as vindication. Among them were CNN security analyst Michael Weiss and Brookings Institution visiting fellow Jamie Kirchick, who took the news as a badge of honor.

“I’m very proud to hear that,” Kirchick said.

The Committee to Protect Journalists said the wide net cast by Fancy Bear underscores efforts by governments worldwide to use hacking against journalists.

“It’s about gaining access to sources and intimidating those journalists,” said Courtney C. Radsch, the group’s advocacy director.

In Russia, the stakes are particularly high. The committee has counted 38 murders of journalists there since 1992.

Many journalists told the AP they knew they were under threat, explaining that they had added a second layer of password protection to their emails and only chatted over encrypted messaging apps like Telegram, WhatsApp or Signal.

Fancy Bear target Ekaterina Vinokurova, who works for regional media outlet Znak, said she routinely deletes her emails.

“I understand that my accounts may be hacked at any time,” she said in a telephone interview. “I’m ready for them.”

___

“I’VE SEEN WHAT THEY COULD DO”

It’s not just whom the hackers tried to spy on that points to the Russian government.

It’s when.

Maria Titizian, an Armenian journalist, immediately found significance in the date she was targeted: June 26, 2015.

“It was Electric Yerevan,” she said, referring to protests over rising energy bills that she reported on. The protests that rocked Armenia’s capital that summer were initially seen by some in Moscow as a threat to Russian influence.

Titizian said her outspoken criticism of the Kremlin’s “colonial attitude” toward Armenia could have made her a target.

Eliot Higgins, whose open source journalism site Bellingcat repeatedly crops up on the target list, said the phishing attempts seemed to begin “once we started really making strong statements about MH17,” the Malaysian airliner shot out of the sky over eastern Ukraine in 2014, killing 298 people. Bellingcat played a key role in marshaling the evidence that the plane was destroyed by a Russian missile — Moscow’s denials notwithstanding.

The clearest timing for a hacking attempt may have been that of Adrian Chen.

On June 2, 2015, Chen published a prescient expose of the Internet Research Agency, the Russian “troll factory” that won fresh infamy in October over revelations that it had manufactured make-believe Americans to pollute social media with toxic rhetoric.

Eight days after Chen published his big story, Fancy Bear tried to break into his account.

Chen, who has regularly written about the darker recesses of the internet, said having a lifetime of private messages exposed to the internet could be devastating.

“I’ve covered a lot of these leaks,” he said. “I’ve seen what they could do.”
https://apnews.com/c3b26c647e794073b762 ... s-globally