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Russia had operatives in New York for years, from Wall Street to the UN. Now one is headed to prison.
Bloomberg: Evgeny Buryakov woke up to a snowstorm. On the morning of Jan. 26, 2015, his modest brick home in the Bronx was getting the first inches of what would be almost a foot of powder, and Buryakov, the No. 2 executive at the New York branch of a Russian bank, decided to skip work and head around the corner to a grocery store to buy supplies for his family of four. As the 39-year-old Russian bundled into his winter gear and closed the front door of his house behind him, he didn’t realize he would never set foot in it again.
Since the Buryakovs’ arrival in New York in August 2010, they had seemed like any other immigrant family in the melting-pot Bronx neighborhood of Riverdale. Of average height and build, Evgeny’s only curious feature might have been his near-obsessive taste for McDonald’s. The kids in nice weather played in the sandbox out back, next to the clothesline where their mother, Marina, liked to hang their laundry. While Evgeny commuted to the 29th floor of a Manhattan high rise, she shuttled the children to a nearby parochial school and to afternoon activities like karate. The two nuns who lived next door watched the family parrot while the Buryakovs went on ski vacations.
But Evgeny was leading a double life. His real employer wasn’t a bank, but Russia’s SVR intelligence agency. For a decade, Buryakov had been working under “nonofficial cover”—a NOC, in spy talk—and, now on Wall Street, his task was to extract corporate and financial secrets and report them back to Moscow. His two handlers, also undercover, were attempting to recruit unwitting sources at consulting firms and other businesses into long-term relationships.
Berlin was once the espionage capital of the world—the place where East met West, and where undercover operatives from the KGB, CIA, MI6, and untold other agencies practiced spycraft in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. Since the end of the Cold War, however, New York has probably hosted more intelligence activity than any other city. The various permanent missions and visiting delegations at the United Nations, where even countries that are otherwise banned from the U.S. are allowed staff, have provided cover for dozens of agencies to operate. Wall Street has offered further pretexts for mining information, with its swirl of cocktail parties, networking events, and investor conferences.
The espionage story of the year, and perhaps one of the greatest foreign operations in decades, has undoubtedly been Russia’s successful effort to influence this fall’s presidential election through hacking—penetrating Democratic National Committee servers and the e-mail account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. The strategy marks an evolution for Russia, which historically has valued so-called HUMINT, or human intelligence, over SIGINT, or signals intelligence. It’s an evolution borne of some necessity, as Russia has in recent years struggled to install spies on American soil. The Buryakov affair illustrates the point. As the U.S. election was reeling this spring toward its astonishing conclusion, Russia’s Wall Street spy was being sentenced, haplessly, to prison.
Maria Ricci has spent her FBI career chasing Russian spies up and down the East Coast. After majoring in English at Columbia and working as a lawyer in private practice, she joined the bureau 15 years ago, assigned to the counterintelligence squad. Her first job was known internally as Operation Ghost Stories—Ricci and other agents worked for almost a decade to track a ring of Russian illegals hidden across the country in what became the FBI’s largest espionage case ever. Their investigation ended in 2010 with the arrest of 10 individuals working for the SVR, Moscow’s version of the CIA, including a sultry redhead named Anna Chapman, who became an instant tabloid star. The case inspired the hit FX series The Americans, which follows two Russian “sleeper” spies living deep undercover in 1980s Washington.
When foreign diplomats come to the U.S. for the first time, the FBI routinely scouts their profiles to identify potential intelligence plants. If agents spot something suspicious, they’ll concoct a plan to smoke the person out. The FBI’s alarms were tripped in November 2010 by the arrival in New York of Igor Sporyshev, supposedly a trade representative of the Russian Federation. One red flag was that his father, Mikhail, had been a KGB officer and a major general in its successor agency, the Federal Security Service (FSB).
In 2011, Sporyshev attended a run-of-the-mill energy conference in New York—as did an FBI agent, posing as a Wall Street analyst. The Russian introduced himself, chatted amicably, exchanged business cards, and later followed up. “The Russians are incredibly good at what they do,” Ricci says. “They’re wary of all English speakers. What’s much easier, to get them to trust you, is if they approach you.”
In subsequent conversations, Sporyshev pushed the supposed analyst for information about the energy industry, such as company financial projections and strategy documents. The information wasn’t secret or even especially sensitive. It didn’t give Sporyshev an edge he could use to commit insider trading. Rather, asking for information like this reflected a Russian approach to intelligence that’s endured long after the Cold War.
Coming from a traditionally closed society where the media operates as an extension of the state, Russian agents tend to prioritize human recruitment and generally discount the huge amount of “open source” news and information that flows routinely out of the U.S. in government reports, independent news articles, and think tank analyses. “Whispered conversations always feel sexier,” Ricci says. And relationships that start out innocuously, with junior or midlevel workers, can be cultivated over years, until the target is senior and desensitized to sharing information with someone they think of as a longtime friend.
The FBI’s undercover agent played along with Sporyshev, handing over supposedly confidential corporate reports inside binders that had been rigged with voice-activated recording devices. From the outside, the binders appeared to be part of a numbered set. The agent told Sporyshev that the documents would be missed if they were absent too long and so they had to be returned promptly.
When the first of the binders began to flow back to the FBI, technicians downloaded the audio. “We got ‘take,’ ” they reported to Ricci, using the term for worthwhile intel. As linguists began to translate from Russian, it became clear the ruse had worked even better than the FBI had imagined. In a grave violation of security procedure, Sporyshev had carried the bugs into the secure SVR office, the rezidentura, inside Russia’s UN office on East 67th Street—its equivalent of what U.S. officials call a “SCIF,” or Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, an area that’s supposed to be free of any electronic listening devices. “Nothing given to him by someone in the United States should have ever been brought inside the SCIF,” Ricci says.
Over several months, as one binder after another circulated through Sporyshev’s hands, the FBI collected hundreds of hours of recorded conversation, much of it comically mundane. Sporyshev spent hours chatting with one colleague, Victor Podobnyy, a twentysomething who was also working under diplomatic cover as an attaché to the Russian UN mission. Both belonged to the SVR’s Directorate ER, a branch dealing with economic issues, such as trade and manufacturing. Often, they complained about the lack of drama in their lives.
“The fact that I’m sitting with a cookie right now at the … chief enemy spot—f—!” Podobnyy said in April 2013. Sure, he knew he couldn’t expect action like in the “movies about James Bond,” he said. But the job was supposed to be more invigorating than pushing paper at a desk. “Of course, I wouldn’t fly helicopters,” Podobnyy said, “but pretend to be someone else, at a minimum.”
Sporyshev was sympathetic. “I also thought that at least I would go abroad with a different passport,” he said, and then he complained about the parsimony of the agency’s expense reimbursement.
Amid the hours of bellyaching, one thing stood out: an oblique reference to a NOC hidden inside Wall Street. FBI agents pieced together that Sporyshev and Podobnyy had been discussing Buryakov. The putative banking analyst had previously appeared on the FBI’s radar, but the agency hadn’t yet pinned him as a spy.
Buryakov in court.
Photographer: Elizabeth Williams/AP Photo
The son of a government construction engineer, Buryakov grew up in the remote southern Russian village of Kushchyovskaya, where he met Marina in 1994, when she was still in high school; they married in 1999. Smart and inquisitive, Buryakov was gifted at learning foreign languages. He worked in Moscow first as a tax inspector, then joined the Vnesheconombank, or VEB—the Russian government’s development bank, which backed economic projects that would boost growth and employment.
At some point, Buryakov signed on with the SVR intelligence agency. Following a five-year stint with VEB in South Africa, he arrived in the U.S. just weeks after the FBI had rolled up Operation Ghost Stories. He was the first of the next wave of Russian intelligence officers.
Buryakov, his wife, and their two children, Pavel and Polina, rented a $3,000-a-month, two-story house on Leibig Avenue in Riverdale. The Bronx neighborhood was well-known to U.S. counterintelligence. A few blocks away, clearly visible from the Buryakovs’ driveway, looms a 20-story, cream-colored high-rise built for Russia’s UN staff. The six-acre compound, known as the White House, had long made the area a favorite for other Eastern European diplomats and immigrants. Sporyshev lived right around the corner. The Buryakovs mostly kept to themselves, but the nuns next door often saw Evgeny smoking cigarettes at the end of his driveway late at night, and Marina would host other mothers from school.
By day, Buryakov lived the ordinary life of a Wall Street analyst: reading and writing reports; attending meetings, conferences, and parties; building connections on LinkedIn. His employer, VEB, occupied a useful niche in the global banking network. The public-private nature of the bank allowed Buryakov to move freely in government, corporate, and nongovernmental organization circles, without anyone suspecting they were talking to an intelligence officer. (Alexander Slepnev, the head of VEB’s New York office, didn’t respond to requests for comment.)
As one of Buryakov’s handlers, Sporyshev gave him a series of often menial side projects. In May 2013, Sporyshev asked him to outline some questions that the Russian news outlet ITAR-TASS could use when interviewing an official from the New York Stock Exchange. Buryakov did about 20 minutes of research, then recommended asking about exchange-traded funds.
Buryakov also became involved in a multibillion-dollar aerospace deal when Canada’s Bombardier attempted to team up with Rostek, Russia’s state-owned defense manufacturer. Using his bank job as cover, Buryakov traveled to Canada twice, in 2012 and 2013, to participate in meetings and conferences about the proposed agreement. Then, after researching the Canadian labor unions’ resistance to overseas production, he wrote a proposal for the SVR’s “active measures directorate” that Sporyshev described as “geared towards pressuring the unions and securing from the company a solution that is beneficial to us.” It wasn’t 007-worthy. But it helped Russian industry pursue a lucrative contract. (The arrangement was paused after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, alarming Western governments.)
As Buryakov performed more such tasks, the FBI built a surveillance dragnet around him. Agents conducted multiple covert searches of his office at VEB. In December 2013, Gregory Monaghan—the lead agent on the case—showed up at Buryakov’s landlord’s office to ask about gaining entrance to the house. The landlord consented, and while the Buryakovs were away on a ski trip that winter, the FBI sneaked in and wired the house for audio and video. Over the next several months, the bureau surveilled more than four dozen meetings between Buryakov and his handlers.
Inside Russia’s UN mission, in New York’s Lenox Hill neighborhood, Sporyshev and Podobnyy were also recorded trying to recruit sources across Wall Street: consultants, analysts, and other financial professionals who had access to proprietary data or documents—or might win access later in their careers. Russian intelligence agencies have demonstrated extreme patience for schemes that play out over many years—time horizons far beyond those that will hold the interest of U.S. agencies, presidential administrations, and congressional leaders. The agents of Directorate ER sought to build relationships by asking for innocuous information that nobody would suspect might one day lead to the sharing of more valuable intelligence.
As the FBI’s bugs listened, Podobnyy informed Sporyshev that he’d told one woman, a recent college graduate, that he “needed answers to some questions, answers to which I could not find in open sources. Due to that, I am interested to find information from paid publications and opinions of independent people who discuss these topics amongst themselves behind closed doors.” The woman, Podobnyy said, responded favorably.
Podobnyy also approached a male financial consultant he’d met at an energy symposium. The consultant often traveled to Moscow and was keenly interested in Gazprom, Russia’s massive energy conglomerate. “It’s obvious that he wants to earn lots of money,” Podobnyy told Sporyshev. “For now, his enthusiasm works for me. I also promised him a lot: that I have connections in the trade representation, meaning that you can push contracts.” He laughed. “I will feed him empty promises.”
The FBI’s Ricci says such attempts at cultivating connected New Yorkers are far more common, and successful, than many people in the financial world think. Americans regularly become unwitting agents, passing along useful tips to Russian officers without realizing who they’re dealing with. “When the Russians come to you, they don’t say, ‘Hey, I’m an intelligence officer,’ ” Ricci says. “They say, ‘Hey, friend, it’d be useful to have this information.’ ”
Buryakov devoted his time to finding and making contacts across New York—referring potential sources and future contacts for his handlers and other intelligence officers to pursue. “This isn’t about just stealing classified information. This is about stealing you,” Ricci says. “It’s about having you in a Rolodex down the road when they need it.”
Or, as Sporyshev put it in a recorded conversation: “This is intelligence method to cheat. How else to work with foreigners? You promise a favor for a favor. You get the documents from him and tell him to go f— himself. ‘But not to upset you, I will take you to a restaurant and give you an expensive gift. You just need to sign for it.’ This is ideal working method.”
By the middle of 2014, FBI agents thought they had enough evidence to arrest Buryakov but decided to go for more—preparing a final dramatic episode that would document the full cycle of a foreign spy recruiting a Wall Street source, from first contact to document handoff. The bureau asked an Atlantic City businessman (his name hasn’t been disclosed) to approach Buryakov, pretending to represent a wealthy investor who wanted to open casinos in Russia. In a bugged call with Buryakov, Sporyshev was dubious, saying the encounter seemed like “some sort of setup. Some sort of trap.”
Buryakov proceeded anyway. On Aug. 8, 2014, he spent seven hours touring Atlantic City with the FBI source, visiting casinos and looking over a PowerPoint presentation about the project. The FBI source provided Buryakov with government documents, marked “Internal Treasury Use Only,” about individuals who had been sanctioned by the U.S. over the Crimean invasion. Buryakov said he’d like more documents like that, and later in the month, the source handed over another report, this one on the Russian banking sector, labeled “Unclassified/FOUO, or “For Official Use Only.” That same day, Buryakov called Sporyshev to discuss “the schoolbooks,” and that night, briefcase in hand, he went directly from his VEB office to Sporyshev’s home in the Bronx. An FBI surveillance team monitored from outside.
SVR agents work on five-year contracts, and toward the end of 2014, Sporyshev and Podobnyy returned to Russia, their tours over. Now that Buryakov’s handlers were gone, the FBI grew concerned about identifying their replacements. “They could’ve completely changed the meetups and contact procedures, so we didn’t think it was worth letting [Buryakov] continue to operate,” Ricci says. One of the oddities of counterintelligence is that countries regularly tolerate both known and suspected spies, allowing them to operate under what they hope is a watchful eye. “The original goal for a counterintelligence case isn’t an arrest—it’s to recruit or deflect them,” Ricci says. “My No. 1 priority is to make sure no one steals our secrets.” That mission appears to have succeeded. Aside from documents the FBI allowed him to see, Buryakov rarely seemed to get his hands on material more valuable than what any average Wall Streeter might possess.
The FBI scheduled his arrest for Jan. 26, 2015. As the snow fell on VEB’s headquarters and Buryakov’s Riverdale home, search teams and dozens of agents waited anxiously outside both locations. Buryakov headed out to get groceries. After he paid, he found Ricci’s agents, clad in blue FBI windbreakers, waiting in the parking lot. “Sir, you have to come with us,” they said, then hurried him into an SUV. Buryakov, the agents later reported, was calm and hardly seemed surprised. Other agents then took his purchases the two blocks back along Leibig Avenue, where they knocked on his door, delivered the groceries, and told Marina that they had a warrant to enter. As they searched the house, technicians covertly removed the FBI’s audio and video surveillance tools.
By day’s end, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the arrest and unsealed the criminal complaint against Buryakov, as well as naming Sporyshev and Podobnyy, who were both protected by diplomatic immunity. The arrest and announcement touched off a flurry of international activity. In Moscow, the Russian government summoned the U.S. ambassador to protest. In New York, Marina and the children fled into the nearby Russian mission residence, their family car abandoned on Mosholu Street outside, until they were able to leave the country. Russian colleagues hurriedly moved the family’s belongings out of the Riverdale home, tearing the house apart in the vain hope of uncovering the FBI’s recording devices.
VEB paid $45,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by Buryakov’s landlord and also paid for his legal counsel. Initially, Buryakov’s defense was that he’d done nothing more than many professionally ambitious expatriates in New York do: He’d simply agreed to help his countrymen, Sporyshev and Podobnyy, with their work and lives in America. But eventually he pleaded guilty to being an unregistered foreign agent—the technical federal charge for espionage.
Buryakov’s arrest did little to slow the flow of intelligence operatives into America. Even as his case played out in the New York courts in the summer of 2015, Border Patrol agents apprehended a man from Ukraine crossing the Texas border, according to previously unreported internal U.S. Customs and Border Protection documents. “It is my opinion that this subject is a Russian asset and was sent by the Russians to infiltrate the U.S.,” the agent wrote. “[The individual] is a perfect asset since he already knows some English, is militarily trained, and is fluent in Russian and his native tongue of Arabic.” Following standard procedure, though, the man was released into the U.S. with a notice to appear at a deportation hearing. The FBI refuses to confirm if it’s aware of the incident or if it’s monitoring the man.
On May 24, 2016, Buryakov was sentenced to 30 months in prison, and he now resides in the federal low-security prison in rural Lisbon, Ohio. He’s still listed on VEB’s website as its deputy representative in New York.
Full the 3 day agenda is packed full of communists, Marxists and progressives and is found here.
Soros bands with donors to resist Trump, ‘take back power’
Major liberal funders huddle behind closed doors with Pelosi, Warren, Ellison, and union bosses to lick wounds, retrench.
Politico: George Soros and other rich liberals who spent tens of millions of dollars trying to elect Hillary Clinton are gathering in Washington for a three-day, closed door meeting to retool the big-money left to fight back against Donald Trump.
The conference, which kicked off Sunday night at Washington’s pricey Mandarin Oriental hotel, is sponsored by the influential Democracy Alliance donor club, and will include appearances by leaders of most leading unions and liberal groups, as well as darlings of the left such as House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chairman Keith Ellison, according to an agenda and other documents obtained by POLITICO.
The meeting is the first major gathering of the institutional left since Trump’s shocking victory over Hillary Clinton in last week’s presidential election, and, if the agenda is any indication, liberals plan full-on trench warfare against Trump from Day One. Some sessions deal with gearing up for 2017 and 2018 elections, while others focus on thwarting President-elect Trump’s 100-day plan, which the agenda calls “a terrifying assault on President Obama’s achievements — and our progressive vision for an equitable and just nation.”
Yet the meeting also comes as many liberals are reassessing their approach to politics — and the role of the Democracy Alliance, or DA, as the club is known in Democratic finance circles. The DA, its donors and beneficiary groups over the last decade have had a major hand in shaping the institutions of the left, including by orienting some of its key organizations around Clinton, and by basing their strategy around the idea that minorities and women constituted a so-called “rising American electorate” that could tip elections to Democrats.
That didn’t happen in the presidential election, where Trump won largely on the strength of his support from working-class whites. Additionally, exit polls suggested that issues like fighting climate change and the role of money in politics — which the DA’s beneficiary groups have used to try to turn out voters — didn’t resonate as much with the voters who carried Trump to victory.
“The DA itself should be called into question,” said one Democratic strategist who has been active in the group and is attending the meeting. “You can make a very good case it’s nothing more than a social club for a handful wealthy white donors and labor union officials to drink wine and read memos, as the Democratic Party burns down around them.”
Another liberal operative who has been active in the DA since its founding rejected the notion that the group — or the left, more generally — needed to completely retool its approach to politics.
“We should not learn the wrong lesson from this election,” said the operative, pointing out that Clinton is on track to win the popular vote and that Trump got fewer votes than the last GOP presidential nominee, Mitt Romney. “We need our people to vote in greater numbers. For that to happen, we need candidates who inspire them to go to the polls on Election Day.”
But Gara LaMarche, the president of the DA, on Sunday evening told donors gathered at the Mandarin for a welcome dinner that some reassessment was in order. According to prepared remarks he provided to POLITICO, he said, “You don’t lose an election you were supposed to win, with so much at stake, without making some big mistakes, in assumptions, strategy and tactics.”
LaMarche added that the reassessment “must take place without recrimination and finger-pointing, whatever frustration and anger some of us feel about our own allies in these efforts,” and he said “It is a process we should not rush, even as we gear up to resist the Trump administration.”
LaMarche emailed the donors last week that the meeting would begin the process of assessing “what steps we will take together to resist the assaults that are coming and take back power, beginning in the states in 2017 and 2018.”
In addition to sessions focusing on protecting Obamacare and other pillars of Obama’s legacy against dismantling by President-elect Trump, the agenda includes panels on rethinking polling and the left’s approach to winning the working-class vote, as well as sessions stressing the importance of channeling cash to state legislative policy battles and races, where Republicans won big victories last week.
Democrats need to invest more in training officials and developing policies in the states, argued Rep. Ellison (D-Minn.) on a Friday afternoon donor conference call, according to someone on the call. The call was organized by a DA-endorsed group called the State Innovation Exchange (or SiX), which Ellison urged the donors to support.
Ellison, who is scheduled to speak on a Monday afternoon panel at the DA meeting on the challenge Democrats face in winning working-class votes, has been a leading liberal voice for a form of economic populism that Trump at times channeled more than Clinton.
As liberals look to rebuild the post-Clinton Democratic Party on a more aggressively liberal bearing, Ellison has emerged as a top candidate to take over the Democratic National Committee, and he figures to be in high demand at the DA meeting. An Ellison spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday evening. Nor did a Trump spokesman.
Raj Goyle, a New York Democratic activist who previously served in the Kansas state legislature and now sits on SiX’s board, argued that many liberal activists and donors are “disconnected from working class voters’ concerns” because they’re cluster in coastal cities. “And that hurt us this election,” said Goyle, who is involved in the DA, and said its donors would do well to steer more cash to groups on the ground in landlocked states. “Progressive donors and organizations need to immediately correct the lack of investment in state and local strategies.”
The Democracy Alliance was launched after the 2004 election by Soros, the late insurance mogul Peter Lewis, and a handful of fellow Democratic mega-donors who had combined to spend tens of millions trying to boost then-Sen. John Kerry’s ultimately unsuccessful challenge to then-President George W. Bush.
The donors’ goal was to seed a set of advocacy groups and think tanks outside the Democratic Party that could push the party and its politicians to the left while also defending them against attack from the right.
The group requires its members — a group that now numbers more than 100 and includes finance titans like Soros, Tom Steyer and Donald Sussman, as well as major labor unions and liberal foundations — to contribute a total of at least $200,000 a year to recommended groups. Members also pay annual dues of $30,000 to fund the DA staff and its meetings, which include catered meals and entertainment (on Sunday, interested donors were treated to a VIP tour of the recently opened National Museum of African American History and Culture).
Since its inception in 2005, the DA has steered upward of $500 million to a range of groups, including pillars of the political left such as the watchdog group Media Matters, the policy advocacy outfit Center for American Progress and the data firm Catalist — all of which are run by Clinton allies who are expected to send representatives to the DA meeting.
The degree to which those groups will be able to adapt to the post-Clinton Democratic Party is not entirely clear, though some of the key DA donors have given generously to them for years.
That includes Soros, who, after stepping back a bit from campaign-related giving in recent years, had committed or donated $25 million to boosting Clinton and other Democratic candidates and causes in 2016. During the presidential primaries, Soros had argued that Trump and his GOP rival Ted Cruz were “doing the work of ISIS.”
A Soros spokesman declined to comment for this story.
But, given that the billionaire financier only periodically attends DA meetings and is seldom a part of the formal proceedings, his scheduled Tuesday morning appearance as a speaker suggests that he’s committed to investing in opposing President Trump.
The agenda item for a Tuesday morning “conversation with George Soros” invokes Soros’ personal experience living through the Holocaust and Soviet Communism in the context of preparing for a Trump presidency. The agenda notes that the billionaire currency trader, who grew up in Hungary, “has lived through Nazism and Communism, and has devoted his foundations to protecting the kinds of open societies around the world that are now threatened in the United States itself.”
LaMarche, who for years worked for Soros’s Open Society foundations, told POLITICO that the references to Nazism and Communism are “part of his standard bio.”
LaMarche, who is set to moderate the discussion with Soros, said the donor “does not plan to compare whatever we face under Trump to Nazism, I can tell you that.” LaMarche he also said, “I don’t think there is anyone who has looked at Trump, including many respected conservatives, who doesn’t think the experience of authoritarian states would not be important to learn from here. And to the extent that Soros and his foundations have experience with xenophobia in Europe, Brexit, etc., we want to learn from that as well.”
The Soros conversation was added to the agenda after Election Day. It was just one of many changes made on the fly to adjust for last week’s jarring result and the stark new reality facing liberals, who went from discussing ways to push an incoming President Clinton leftward, to instead discussing how to play defense.
A pre-election working draft of the DA’s agenda, obtained by POLITICO, featured a session on Clinton’s first 100 days and another on “moving a progressive national policy agenda in 2017.” Those sessions were rebranded so that the first instead will examine “what happened” on the “cataclysm of Election Day,” while the second will focus on “combating the massive threats from Trump and Congress in 2017.”
A session that before the election had been titled “Can Our Elections Be Hacked,” after the election was renamed “Was the 2016 Election Hacked” — a theory that has percolated without evidence on the left to explain the surprising result.
In his post-election emails to donors and operatives, LaMarche acknowledged the group had to “scrap many of the original plans for the conference,” explaining “while we made no explicit assumptions about the outcome, the conference we planned, and the agenda you have seen, made more sense in the event of a Hillary Clinton victory.”
Donald Trump’s transition team is getting a helping hand from the Obama administration on national security matters.
The administration is giving the president-elect and a select few of his top advisers sensitive intelligence briefings.
And, in addition, Trump and his team will take part in two so-called ‘black swan’ exercises that simulate a domestic or national security emergency.
The exercises are intended to help an incoming administration learn how to manage a crisis in real time in case there is some kind of global or domestic emergency in the first days of a Trump presidency.
A black swan exercise would, for example, ensure that a fledgling Trump administration knows how to activate the proper federal agencies to maintain stability.
According to a briefing book from the nonpartisan Center for Presidential Transition, in 2008 the Bush administration hosted two black swan exercises for then president-elect Obama’s national security team. More here from ABC.
Islamic State is urging its followers to carry out acts of terrorism in New York City during the upcoming, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Jamie Schram writes in this morning’s (Nov. 14, 2016) New York Post, that “ISIS is offering a detailed how-to on using trucks as weapons of mass destruction — noting that the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade would be an ‘excellent target.”
MEMRI: On November 11, 2016, Al-Hayat, one of the media centers of the Islamic State (ISIS), released the third issue of its monthly magazine Rumiyah featuring an article calling on lone wolves in the U.S. and Europe to use trucks to target large outdoor conventions, crowded streets, outdoor markets, festivals, parades, and political rallies. The article also emphasized the importance of using trucks in terrorist attacks, and provided suggestions on “ideal vehicles” to use and tactical tips for the preparation and planning of attacks.
The article, titled “Just Terror Tactics,” features images of rental trucks from companies such as Hertz and U-Haul, as well as a picture showing the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City. It begins by highlighting the “destructive capability” of motor vehicles and referring to the Bastille Day attack in Nice, France on July 14, 2016. While praising the Nice attacker, the article states: “This was superbly demonstrated in the attack launched by the brother Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel who, while traveling at the speed of approximately 90 kilometers per hour, plowed his 19-ton load-bearing truck into crowds celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, France, harvesting through his attack the slaughter of 86 Crusader citizens and injuring 434 more.”
The article stresses the importance of using a vehicle that can inflict maximum damage, and describes the “ideal” vehicles for lone wolf attacks as “load-bearing trucks, large in size, reasonably fast in speed or rate of acceleration, heavy in weight, double-wheeled, possessing a slightly raised chassis.” The article continued: “If accessible, [vehicles] with a metal outer frame which are usually found in older cars [should be used], as the stronger outer frame allows for more damage to be caused when the vehicle is slammed into crowds, contrary to newer cars that are usually made of plastics and other weaker materials.”
Providing suggestions on how to acquire the vehicle, the article noted that buying it is the “easiest” option; however, it also mentioned renting, borrowing from relatives and acquaintances, hotwiring, and carjacking as additional options. Under “applicable targets” the article listed: “Large outdoor conventions and celebrations, pedestrian-congested streets, outdoor markets, festivals, parades and political rallies.”
The article further emphasized that in order to inflict maximum damage, attackers should consider targeting “any outdoor attraction that draws large crowds,” stating that “it is not conditional to target gatherings restricted to government or military personnel only. All so-called ‘civilian’ (and low-security) parades and gatherings are fair game and more devastating to Crusader nations.”
As for “preparation and planning,” the article recommended “assessing vehicle for roadworthiness, filling vehicle with a sufficient amount of fuel, mapping out the route of the attack, surveying the route for obstacles, such as posts, signs, barriers, humps, bus stops, dumpsters, and if accessible, a secondary weapon should be attained.”
The article also provided ideas for attackers to use in order to declare their affiliation to ISIS to “have their motives acknowledged” such as writing “ISIS will remain” or “I am a soldier of the Islamic State” on pieces of papers and throwing them out of the vehicle’s window during the attack.
The article concludes by instructing attackers to stay inside their vehicles until they are no longer movable and then to start shooting pedestrians, first responders and security forces until they are killed.
****
Black Swan exercises are those that prepare for the unexpected and several events worldwide have been part of these operations.
1. Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) or Solar Burst
As The Heritage Foundation highlighted in the documentary 33 Minutes,[3] an EMP attack could throw America back to the pre-Industrial Revolution era. A powerful solar burst would have the same impact. Should either event occur, people would have little time to react, and the damage would be incalculable.
If the U.S. were to lose power for any prolonged period of time, given the sheer number of people located in the interior of the country, mass starvation and death would become a reality. Most experts consider these events as highly unlikely ones, so little investment or planning is done related to them.
2. Pandemic Virus
Although the U.S. has prepared for a pandemic influenza outbreak, little preparation has gone into other potential viruses. More importantly, it is the unknown virus or “super virus” that represents a Black Swan for America. Recall that it was less than 30 years ago that AIDS first began embedding itself in North America. If a far more deadly and communicable virus hits America, the U.S. would quickly expend its existing resources.
3. Nuclear or Radiological Event
The U.S. has extensive knowledge of what would happen if a nuclear or radiological explosion occurred in a major American city. Theory, however, is a poor replacement for the reality of large numbers of deaths, burn victims, and physical debris. As former Vice President Dick Cheney wisely concluded, because of the sheer consequences, even a 1 percent chance of such an event occurring requires the nation to expend the necessary resources to prevent it.
4. Super-Volcanic Eruption
Seismic activity around the Yellowstone caldera is monitored, but tectonic shifts miles below the surface could result in the buildup of pressure and a super-volcanic eruption. The volcano beneath Yellowstone previously erupted, causing destruction as far away as California, Iowa, and Louisiana. An eruption, though unlikely given current readings, could have truly catastrophic consequences.
5. Nor’Easter/Hurricane
Hurricanes strike America with a fair degree of frequency. A Black Swan event would be a Nor’easter combined with a powerful hurricane that strikes New York City in the same manner as Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. Between the massive flooding and wind damage, New York City could sustain casualties and physical destruction well in excess of Katrina.
How Prepared Is the U.S.?
The honest and unfortunate answer to that question is unknown and, despite attempts to ascertain that answer, will not be known if existing policy remains in place. A Black Swan by definition becomes a Black Swan because it results in catastrophic outcomes. This “delicate” balance between preparing for events and not being able to prepare adequately for all events represents the ultimate risk-based decision making.
From 2003 to 2011, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) distributed roughly $40 billion in funding to states and localities across America. Despite years of reporting requirements, DHS is fundamentally unable to state with any degree of certainty which capabilities exist, where those capabilities exist, the level of those capabilities, and the remaining capability needs. DHS knows it has funded the acquisition of many things, but specifics beyond that are unquantifiable.
Specifically, to gain a full accounting, Congress should:
Be fiscally responsible. Rather than continue to spread federal funds using an “inch thick and a mile wide” mentality, Congress should target federal funds at the highest-risk states, cities, and counties where the funds could meaningfully increase the security of Americans, including reducing the number of high-risk cities that are eligible for special funding.
Examine cooperative agreements. The need for equality downplays the need for the grant structure and invites another approach—such as the use of cooperative agreements, where the federal government and the states can sit down as true and equal partners and negotiate outcomes at the beginning and then direct funds to achieve those desired outcomes without the need for yearly applications.
Appoint a Black Swan commission. Rather than wait until after a catastrophic event has occurred, Congress should appoint an independent commission for the express purpose of analyzing the threats of a potential Black Swan, identifying existing capabilities, and making recommendations on how best to correct errors made thus far and accelerate closing the gap between where the nation stands today and where it needs to be tomorrow. The commission must have the independence and resources to quickly do its job after a full review of the status quo.
Expect the Unexpected
If the catastrophe in Japan has taught any lessons, it is that America must prepare for the unexpected with as much vigor as it prepares for the expected. Because a Black Swan can be so catastrophic, in many ways the ideal role for the federal government is to lead an effort surrounding those events. With the nation’s current fiscal challenges, conserving resources for catastrophic events is more vital than ever. More here from Heritage.
Washington (CNN)Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress and one of only two members in the Capitol, said Wednesday that in the wake of anti-Muslim rhetoric after the Paris attacks, Muslims are feeling a need to assert even more how patriotic they are.
The Minnesota Democrat said when he hears other lawmakers suggesting Christian Syrian refugees should be allowed into the country but Muslim Syrian refugees should not, it reminds him that the First Amendment to the Constitution establishes freedom of religion. More here.
Congressman Ellison attends the Masjid An-Nur mosque in Minneapolis and his visit to Mogadishu fulfilled a request from his constituents with ties to Somalia. Minnesota has one of the largest populations of Somali-Americans in the U.S. April of 2015, six Somali-Americans from Minneapolis were arrested for attempting to travel to Syria and link up with the Islamic State, also referred to as ISIS or ISIL. All were young men between the ages of 19 and 21. Zacharia Yusuf Abdurahman, 19, Adnan Farah, 19, Hanad Mustafe Musse, 19, and Guled Ali Omar, 20, were arrested in Minneapolis while Abdirahman Yasin Daud, 21, and Mohamed Abdihamid Farah, 21, were arrested trying to buy fake passports in San Diego. The criminal complaint is here.
Who is Keith Ellison? Left-wing congressman with past ties to Nation of Islam wants DNC job
FNC: In an attempt to stave off a civil war in the ranks, Democratic leaders are scrambling to unite behind a candidate for the party’s chairmanship – and have landed for now on a Louis Farrakhan-linked congressman who once called for Dick Cheney’s impeachment and compared George W. Bush to Hitler.
Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., the first Muslim elected to Congress and a leading progressive among House Democrats, already has picked up the backing of both the Democratic Party’s left – with support from Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren – and its establishment, receiving endorsements from Senate leaders Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and retiring Harry Reid, D-Nev.
Ellison is firmly on the party’s left – he has a fax line in his office, but his website says they will not respond to faxes “for environmental reasons.” He backed Bernie Sanders during the primaries, even introducing him at the convention.
“Bernie sparked the beginning of a revolution y’all,” Ellison said at his address during the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. “Together we call for climate justice, racial justice, wage justice.”
Sanders has given strong backing to Ellison in return, sending out a fundraising email saying an Ellison-led Democratic Party that will stand up to Wall Street greed and corporate America is “the Democratic Party we need.”
Ellison is expected to formally announce his bid Monday. On Sunday, Ellison hinted he would run and said the party needs to focus on middle- and working-class Americans and less on donors.
“I love the donors and we thank them, but it has to be that the guys in the barber shop, the lady at the diner, the folks who are worried about whether that plant is going to close, they’ve got to be our focus,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Some strategists feel this economic message is exactly what the party needs to reach out to white working-class voters who pulled the lever for Trump.
“You can’t stand up for middle-class families if you are so closely associated with Wall Street and I think that was the issue with Clinton, her ties to Goldman Sachs, and I think that’s shown by how much money we raised from Wall Street,” Brad Bannon, Democratic strategist and CEO of Bannon Communications Research, told FoxNews.com. “We have to become more oriented to working-class families if we’re going to survive and prosper, because we blew the industrial Midwest.”
However, Ellison’s past associations and comments may trouble more moderate voters.
Ellison’s 2006 run for his seat was plunged into controversy after the conservative PowerLineBlog.com found he had once identified with Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam and in 1998 was referring to himself as Keith X Ellison and Keith Ellison-Muhammed.
The Washington Post reported that Ellison had defended Farrakhan against accusations of anti-Semitism in 1989 and in 1990 had called affirmative action a “sneaky” form of compensation for slavery, calling instead for reparations.
When the controversy erupted in 2006, Ellison acknowledged he had worked with the group, but only for 18 months to help organize Farrakhan’s 1995 Million Man March. He distanced himself from both Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, and said he hadn’t scruitinized the group’s anti-Semitic positions appropriately.
“They were and are anti-Semitic, and I should have come to that conclusion earlier than I did,” he said.
Yet it isn’t the only controversy for Ellison. In 2007, Ellison made a comparison between Bush and 9/11 to Hitler and the 1933 Reichstag fire.
“9/11 is the juggernaut in American history and it allows… it’s almost like, you know, the Reichstag fire,” Ellison said, according to a Daily Telegraph report at the time. “After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it, and it put the leader of that country [Hitler] in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted.”
He later clarified that he did indeed believe that Usama bin Laden was responsible for the terror attacks. But it wasn’t the only controversy for Ellison in 2007, as he also backed a movement to impeach then-Vice President Dick Cheney over his alleged fabrication of intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
However, Bannon believes that Ellison’s Muslim heritage could be a boost not a burden, especially in light of Trump’s elevation Sunday of controversial Breitbart boss Steve Bannon to chief strategist.
“[Steve] Bannon propagates Muslim conspiracy theories,” Brad Bannon, who is not related to the Breitbart head, said. “Ellison is the perfect guy to counter that. Ellison is exactly what we need to prove we aren’t the party of hate and racism.”
Ellison would have competition for the job. Former DNC chairman and ex-presidential candidate Howard Dean has put his name in the running. Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malle
Daily, I am asked if this is true or that is true….admittedly it is getting harder each day to vet stories for accuracy and to dissect them for what is accurate and other parts being flatly false. That is what trolls do, mix accuracy with falsehoods so the reader assumes it is all factual….ah not so much.
So, what sites to do visit often and have come to rely on them? InfoWars or Zerohedge? Well what about people that are curiously appearing to be friends with you on Facebook or new followers on Twitter? Take caution and read carefully below, you reliance on truth and accuracy just got harder. Even some in the media are being punked.
Trump isn’t the end of Russia’s information war against America. They are just getting started.
WotR: In spring 2014, a funny story crossed our social media feeds. A petition on whitehouse.gov called for“sending Alaska back to Russia,” and it quickly amassed tens of thousands of signatures. The media ran a number of amused stories on the event, and it was quickly forgotten.
The petition seemed odd to us, and so we looked at which accounts were promoting it on social media. We discovered that thousands of Russian-language bots had been repetitively tweeting links to the petition for weeks before it caught journalists’ attention.
Those were the days. Now, instead of pranking petitions, Russian influence networks online are interfering with the 2016 U.S. election. Many people, especially Hillary Clinton supporters, believe that Russia is actively trying to put Donald Trump in the White House.
But most observers are missing the point. Russia is helping Trump’s campaign, yes, but it is not doing so solely or even necessarily with the goal of placing him in the Oval Office. Rather, these efforts seek to produce a divided electorate and a president with no clear mandate to govern. The ultimate objective is to diminish and tarnish American democracy. Unfortunately, that effort is going very well indeed.
Russia’s desire to sow distrust in the American system of government is not new. It’s a goal Moscow has pursued since the beginning of the Cold War. Its strategy is not new, either. Soviet-era “active measures” called for using the “force of politics” rather than the “politics of force”to erode American democracy from within. What is new is the methods Russia uses to achieve these objectives.
We have been tracking Russian online information operations since 2014, when our interest was piqued by strange activity we observed studying online dimensions of jihadism and the Syrian civil war. When experts published content criticizing the Russian-supported Bashar al Assad regime, organized hordes of trolls would appear to attack the authors on Twitter and Facebook. Examining the troll social networks revealed dozens of accounts presenting themselves as attractive young women eager to talk politics with Americans, including some working in the national security sector. These “honeypot” social media accounts were linked to other accounts used by the Syrian Electronic Army hacker operation. All three elements were working together: the trolls to sow doubt, the honeypots to win trust, and the hackers (we believe) to exploit clicks on dubious links sent out by the first two.
The Syrian network did not stand alone. Beyond it lurked closely interconnected networks tied to Syria’s allies, Iran and Russia. Many of these networks were aimed at U.S. political dissenters and domestic extremist movements, including militia groups, white nationalists, and anarchists.
Today, that network is still hard at work, running at peak capacity to destroy Americans’ confidence in their system of government. We’ve monitored more than 7,000 social media accounts over the last 30 months and at times engaged directly with them. Trump isn’t the end of Russia’s social media and hacking campaign against America, but merely the beginning. Here is what we’ve learned.
The Russian Social Media Approach: Soviet Union’s “Active Measures” On Steroids
The United States and its European allies have always placed state-to-state relations at the forefront of their international strategies. The Soviet system’s effort to undermine those relations during the Cold War, updated now by modern Russia, were known as “active measures.”
It was often very difficult for Westerners to comprehend this fundamentally different Soviet approach to international relations and, as a result, the centrality to the Soviets (now Russians) of active measures operations was gravely underappreciated.
Active measures employ a three-pronged approach that attempts to shape foreign policy by directing influence in the following ways: state-to-people, people-to-people, and state-to-state. More often than not, active measures sidestep traditional diplomacy and normal state-to-state relationships. The Russian government today employs the state-to-people and people-to-people approaches on social media and the internet, directly engaging U.S. and European audiences ripe for an anti-American message, including the alt-right and more traditional right-wing and fascist parties. It also targets left-wing audiences, but currently at a lower tempo.
Until recently, Western governments focused on state-to-state negotiations with Putin’s regime largely missed Russian state-to-people social media approaches. Russia’s social media campaigns seek five complementary objectives to strengthen Russia’s position over Western democracies:
Undermine citizen confidence in democratic governance;
Foment and exacerbate divisive political fractures;
Erode trust between citizens and elected officials and democratic institutions;
Popularize Russian policy agendas within foreign populations;
Create general distrust or confusion over information sources by blurring the lines between fact and fiction
In sum, these influence efforts weaken Russia’s enemies without the use of force. Russian social media propaganda pushes four general themes to advance Moscow’s influence objectives and connect with foreign populations they target.
Political messages are designed to tarnish democratic leaders or undermine institutions. Examples include allegations of voter fraud, election rigging, and political corruption. Leaders can be specifically targeted, for instance by promoting unsubstantiated claims about Hillary Clinton’s health, or more obviously by leaking hacked emails.
Financial propaganda weakens citizen and investor confidence in foreign markets and posits the failure of capitalist economies. Stoking fears over the national debt, attacking institutions such as the Federal Reserve, and attempts to discredit Western financial experts and business leaders are all part of this arsenal.
In one example from August, Disneyland Paris was the site of a reported bomb scare. Social media accounts on Twitter reported that the park had been evacuated, and several news outlets — including Russian propaganda stations RT and Sputnik — published alarming stories based on the tweets, which escalated in hysteria as the afternoon stretched on. In fact, the park had not been evacuated. But that didn’t stop Disney’s stock from taking a temporary hit. This fluctuation could be exploited by someone who knew the fake scare was coming, but we do not have access to the data that would allow us to know whether this happened.
Finally, wide-ranging conspiracy theories promote fear of global calamity while questioning the expertise of anyone who might calm those fears. Russian propaganda operations since 2014 have stoked fears of martial law in the United States, for instance, by promoting chemtrails and Jade Helm conspiracy theories. More recently, Moscow turned to stoking fears of nuclear war between the United States and Russia.
For the Kremlin, this is not just focused on the outside world. Russian news organizations bombard Russian citizens with the same combination of content. Steve Rosenberg, a BBC News correspondent in Moscow, filmed the Russian domestic equivalent of this approach on November 1, showing Russian language news headlines inciting fears such as impending nuclear war, a U.S.-Russia confrontation in Syria, and the potential for an assassination of Donald Trump.
The Confluence of Information and Cyberspace
Russian active measures use a blend of overt and covert channels to distribute political, financial, social, and calamitous messages (see above). During the Soviet era, “white” active measures were overt information outlets directly attributable to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Today, RT and Sputnik push Kremlin-approved English-language news on television and the Internet. These outlets broadcast a mix of true information (the vast majority of content), manipulated or skewed stories, and strategically chosen falsehoods. RT’s slogan, “Question More,” aptly fits their reporting style — seeding ideas of conspiracy or wrongdoing without actually proving anything.
This “white” content provides ammunition for “gray” measures, which employ less overt outlets controlled by Russia, as well as so-called useful idiots that regurgitate Russian themes and “facts” without necessarily taking direction from Russia or collaborating in a fully informed manner.
During the Cold War, gray measures used semi-covert Communist parties, friendship societies, and non-governmental organizations to engage in party-to-party and people-to-people campaigns. Today, gray measures on social media include conspiracy websites, data dump websites, and seemingly credible news aggregators that amplify disinformation and misinformation.
Conspiracy sites include outlets such as InfoWars and Zero Hedge, along with a host of lesser-known sites that repeat and repackage the same basic content for both right- and left-wing consumers. Sometimes, these intermediaries will post the same stories on sites with opposite political orientations.
Data dump websites, such as Wikileaks and DC Leaks, overtly claim to be exposing corruption and promoting transparency by uploading private information stolen during hacks. But the timing and targets of their efforts help guide pro-Russian themes and shape messages by publishing compromising information on selected adversaries.
The people who run these sites do not necessarily know they are participants in Russian agitprop, or at least it is very difficult to prove conclusively that they do. Some sites likely receive direct financial or operational backing, while others may be paid only with juicy information.
Sincere conspiracy theorists can get vacuumed up into the social networks that promote this material. In at least one case, a site described by its creator as parody was thoroughly adopted by Russian influence operators online and turned into an unironic component of their promoted content stream, at least as far as the network’s targeted “news” consumers are concerned.
A small army of social media operatives — a mix of Russian-controlled accounts, useful idiots, and innocent bystanders— are deployed to promote all of this material to unknowing audiences. Some of these are real people, others are bots, and some present themselves as innocent news aggregators, providing “breaking news alerts” to happenings worldwide or in specific cities. The latter group is a key tool for moving misinformation and disinformation from primarily Russian-influenced circles into the general social media population. We saw this phenomenon at play in recent reports of a second military coup in Turkey and unsubstantiated reports of an active shooter that led to the shutdown of JFK Airport. Some news aggregators may be directly controlled by Russia, while other aggregators that use algorithmic collection may be the victims of manipulation.
“Black” active measures are now easier to execute than they were for the Soviets. During the Cold War, according to the 1992 USIA report, these included:
… the use of agents of influence, forgeries, covert media placements and controlled media to covertly introduce carefully crafted arguments, information, disinformation, and slogans into the discourse in government, media, religious, business, economic, and public arenas in targeted countries.
Black active measures create both risks and costs. Agents deployed into the West must avoid detection or risk state-to-state consequences. The KGB’s Cold War efforts to keep these operations secret bore significant financial costs while producing little quantifiable benefit. Stories were difficult to place in mainstream media outlets, and the slow process made it challenging to create momentum behind any one theme.
On social media, this process is far easier, more effective, and relatively difficult to attribute. Without stepping foot in America, Russia’s coordinated hackers, honeypots, and hecklers influence Americans through people-to-people engagement.
The most notorious Russian-linked hacker, using the handle Guccifer2.0, targets current and former U.S. government officials, American security experts, and media personalities by seeking access to their private communications and records. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta provide two current examples, but there will be many more to come. Today, Guccifer2.0 posts threats of election meddling this coming Tuesday.
Guccifer 2.0 Warning on Election Posted to Social Media
In addition to phishing and cracking attacks, these hackers are aided by honeypots, a Cold War term of art referring to an espionage operative who sexually seduced or compromised targets. Today’s honeypots may include a component of sexual appeal or attraction, but they just as often appear to be people who share a target’s political views, obscure personal hobbies, or issues related to family history. Through direct messaging or email conversations, honeypots seek to engage the target in conversations seemingly unrelated to national security or political influence.
These honeypots often appear as friends on social media sites, sending direct messages to their targets to lower their defenses through social engineering. After winning trust, honeypots have been observed taking part in a range of behaviors, including sharing content from white and gray active measures websites, attempting to compromise the target with sexual exchanges, and most perilously, inducing targets to click on malicious links or download attachments infected with malware.
One of us directly experienced how social media direct messages from hackers or influencers seek to compromise or sway a target by using social engineering to build a rapport. Operators may engage the target’s friends or acquaintances, drawing them into conversations to encourage trust. Once conversations are started, an agent of influence will be introduced into the group and will subsequently post on Russian themes from grey outlets or introduce malicious links.
When targets click on malicious links, Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear extract personal information from public officials, media personalities, and American experts and selectively dump the content obtained at opportune times. The goal is to increase popular mistrust of political leaders and people with expertise or influence in specific circles of interest to Russia, such as national security. In some cases, experts criticizing Russia have had their computers mysteriously compromised by destructive malware and their research destroyed.
Online hecklers, commonly referred to as trolls, energize Russia’s active measures. Ringleader accounts designed to look like real people push organized harassment — including threats of violence — designed to discredit or silence people who wield influence in targeted realms, such as foreign policy or the Syrian civil war. Once the organized hecklers select a target, a variety of volunteers will join in, often out of simple antisocial tendencies. Sometimes, they join in as a result of the target’s gender, religion, or ethnic background, with anti-Semitic and misogynistic trolling particularly prevalent at the moment. Our family members and colleagues have been targeted and trolled in this manner via Facebook and other social media.
Hecklers and honeypots can also overlap. For instance, we identified hundreds of accounts of ostensibly American anti-government extremists that are actually linked to Russian influence operations. These accounts create noise and fear, but may also draw actual anti-government extremists into compromising situations. Based on our observations, the latter effort has not been widely successful so far among anti-government extremists, who tend to stay in their own social networks and are less likely to interact with Russian influence accounts, but our analysis points to greater overlap with networks involving American white nationalists.
Russia’s honeypots, hecklers, and hackers have run amok for at least two years, achieving unprecedented success in poisoning America’s body politic and creating deep dissent, including a rise in violent extremist activity and visibility. Posting hundreds of times a day on social media, thousands of Russian bots and human influence operators pump massive amounts of disinformation and harassment into public discourse.
This “computational propaganda,” a term coined by Philip Howard, has the cumulative effect of creating Clayton A. Davis at Indiana University calls a“majority illusion, where many people appear to believe something ….which makes that thing more credible.” The net result is an American information environment where citizens and even subject-matter experts are hard-pressed to distinguish fact from fiction. They are unsure who to trust and thus more willing to believe anything that supports their personal biases and preferences.
The United States disbanded the U.S. Information Agency after the Cold War and currently fields no apparatus to detect and mitigate Russia’s social media influence campaign. As seen in America’s disjointed counter narratives against the Islamic State, efforts to create any kind of U.S. information strategy are plagued by disparate and uncoordinated efforts strewn among many military, diplomatic, and intelligence commands. American cyber operations and hacking reside separately with the National Security Agency. Russia, on the other hand, seamlessly integrates the two efforts to devastating effect.
After Election Day: What to do about Russia’s Active Measures?
The most overwhelming element of Russia’s online active measures over the last year relate to the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. Russian promotion of Trump not only plagues Clinton, but likely helped sideline other GOP candidates in early 2016 with a more traditional anti-Russia view of foreign policy. It is impossible to assess whether Donald Trump is even fully aware of these efforts, let alone complicit. Setting aside that question for a moment, some readers will immediately ask how we are so sure all this activity goes back to Russia?
There are a number of technical indicators, most tellingly the synchronization of messaging and disinformation with “white” outlets such as RT and Sputnik, as well as the shocking consistency of messaging through specific social networks we have identified.
Dmitri Alperovich of the cyber-security firm Crowdstrike first attributed the DNC hacks to Russia. He explained in a recent War on the Rocks podcast:
The important thing about attribution…is that it’s not that much different from the physical world. Just like someone can plan a perfect bank heist and get away with it, you can do that in the cyber-domain, but you can almost never actually execute a series of bank heists over the course of many years and get away with it. In fact, the probability of you not getting caught is miniscule. And the same thing is true in cyber-space because eventually you make mistakes. Eventually you repeat tradecraft. It’s hard to sort of hide the targets you’re going after…
There are other, less subtle indications as well, for instance, a notification from Google: “We believe we detected government backed attackers trying to steal your password. This happens to less than 0.1% of all Gmail users.” When one of us receives these messages, we feel confident we’re on the right trail.
