Russia Hacked the World, DoJ Suing Kremlin Operatives?

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FNC: The Justice Department reportedly has garnered enough evidence to charge at least six Russian government operatives with hacking the Democratic National Committee’s computers during the 2016 presidential election.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that federal prosecutors could bring charges early next year. The Journal reported that dozens of others may have also played a role in the cyberattack.

Even tech companies are suing Russia.

How Russia hacked the world: Putin’s spies used ‘digital hit list’ to hunt global targets

  • 19,000 malicious links collected by Secureworks after Fancy Bear mistake.

  • 4,700 Gmail users across the globe were targeted by the state hacking team.

  • Alongside Democrats, a handful of Republican targets were also identified.

The hackers who upended the US presidential election had ambitions well beyond Hillary Clinton’s campaign, targeting the emails of Ukrainian officers, Russian opposition figures, US defence contractors and thousands of others of interest to the Kremlin, according to a previously unpublished digital hit list obtained by The Associated Press.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 Centre 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.

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.”

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, US Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, and one of his predecessors, US Army Gen. Wesley Clark.

The list skewed toward workers for defence 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.

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 organisation 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 Centre 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, US 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 US 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% of the malicious links were generated during Moscow office hours — between 9 am and 6 pm 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.

Hacking hands
Fancy Bear have long been linked to the Russian security services iStock

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 if 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 rivalling 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 labour 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.

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Axios: Marathon congressional hearings on Russian election interference and social media left execs from Facebook, Google and Twitter badly bruised and with a new view of just how mad Washington is about their handling of content aiming to divide Americans.

The big takeaway: Lawmakers’ rebukes went far beyond the companies’ responses to Russia’s interference. They also repeatedly revealed a discomfort with the size, power and limited accountability of the large web platforms.

What else we learned:

  • Washington isn’t buying that Facebook, Google and Twitter aren’t media companies. Both Republicans and Democrats seemed baffled at times by an assumption that has been fundamental to Google, Facebook and Twitter’s growth: that they are neutral platforms for information, not judges of content. Multiple lawmakers questioned that argument: “That may well be a distinction that is lost on most of us, that you’re just a platform for other people to express their views as opposed to being a publisher in their own right of those views,” said Republican Sen. John Cornyn.
  • We now know what the Russian ads look like. Lawmakers released some of the Russian-bought ads, which were focused largely on divisive political issues like civil rights, immigration and religion. According to the metadata released, the ads targeted both Republicans and Democrats and were paid for in rubles. For example, one “Black Matters” ad targeted adults in Georgia, Maryland, Missouri and Virginia and received more than 200,000 impressions and more than 12,000 clicks. It cost 53,425 rubles ($915).
  • Still no backing for a regulatory fix. The only piece of concrete legislation tied to this issue is the Honest Ads Act, which would require disclosure for online political ads. While the companies all committed to improving transparency, and companies indicated that they could work with lawmakers on the bill, they did not endorse it.
  • Lawmakers felt slighted by the CEOs’ absence. “I wish your CEOs were here,” said Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, one of many lawmakers who voiced that sentiment. “They need to answer for this.”
  • The companies are putting significant resources toward vetting content. During nine hours of hearings, they repeatedly touted how much they were investing in both money and personnel to solve the election interference issue. Facebook is doubling the people working on safety and security issues to 20,000 by the end of 2018, for example.
  • Democrats were the harshest critics. Silicon Valley has long had a strong relationship with the liberal left, but that didn’t stop California Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris, as well as tech ally Sen. Ron Wyden, from lacing into the witnesses. Republicans, while critical of the companies, stopped short of conceding that social media manipulation was a deciding factor in Donald Trump’s win.
  • Congressional investigators are still learning the basics. One lawmaker asked Twitter’s general counsel to explain the difference between a bot and a troll. Several inquired about the definition of “impressions.” This highlights how steep the learning curve is for elected officials to fully grasp the nuances of what went wrong online in 2016.
  • Tech made a huge political miscalculation in not moving faster. Again and again, the companies were chided for how long it took them to deliver the goods to investigators. “I hear all your words,” said Sen. Mark Warner, “but I have more than a little bit of frustration that many of us on this committee have been raising this issue since the beginning of this year, and our claims were frankly blown off by the leaderships of your companies.”
What’s next? All of the companies indicated their investigations are ongoing, so the scale of the Russian disinformation campaign could turn out to be even bigger than we know now.

Go deeper:

Tech Companies Regulate Free Speech, are they a Utility?

When social media sites like Google, Facebook, YouTube or Twitter terminate accounts over  subjective decisions due to ‘offensive’ material, there is very little the user can do to fight back. Most users complain among themselves and give up the fight immediately. Others file a challenge and the success rate is slim.

So, social media tech companies are privately owned except for Google and Google should be made to answer when it comes to videos that are moved from YouTube.

Related reading: How to Break Silicon Valley’s Anti-Free-Speech Monopoly

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The left, the liberals and the Marxists launched a 1st Amendment battle that few are set to confront to our own peril.Frankly there should be congressional hearings where these tech company officials should be required to answer on the record just how and why these random decisions are made. Further, if a tech company regulates free speech and content, they are self described as utility companies….agree?

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There are some reasonably strong arguments that the biggest online services today are similar to traditional public utilities due to their high market share, network effects, and difficulty for consumers to live without the service.  On the other hand, the old public utility approach to regulation had numerous flaws, and does not adapt readily to high-innovation markets where competition is typically based on factors other than price.

Rather than fitting public utility models for electricity or airline pricing, the emerging calls for regulation bear a closer resemblance to some of the Federal Communications Commission’s past efforts to use its public utility authority to regulate television content. The growing calls for online services to take down ISIS and other terrorist communications can be seen as an update to the FCC’s prohibitions on profanity (George Carlin’s “seven dirty words”) and broader historical efforts to prohibit indecent content.  The calls for limits on fake news can similarly start to resemble a modern-day Fairness Doctrine, where “fake news” is unfair and blocked, while “real news” is fair and goes out to viewers.    Read more here from Lawfare.

We do have a champion on this argument…..

PragerU — the educational video outfit founded by conservative commentator Dennis Prager in 2011 — is suing YouTube and its parent company Google for unlawful censorship and free speech discrimination.

Prager said in a statement that his company believes the internet giants are trying to squelch “conservative political thought” by restricting access to or demonetizing PragerU videos.

How did this all start?

  • PragerU CEO Marissa Streit told TheBlaze that college students began contacting PragerU in the summer of 2016 saying they couldn’t view some of the outfit’s videos on campus browsers.
  • That’s when PragerU discovered that YouTube subjected the videos to “restricted mode” filtering.
  • Streit said at first YouTube didn’t respond to PragerU’s information requests — but after a ton of people signed a petition and the issue began hitting the news cycle, YouTube finally started answering.
  • This summer, she said, YouTube indicated it had reviewed the videos in question and determined they should be restricted as “inappropriate” for younger viewers or demonetized — which means PragerU loses advertising revenue.
  • The explanations for the decision were vague and included continued referrals to YouTube’s community guidelines, which Streit said are so broad that they amount to “we can do whatever we want.”

How about an example?

  • The suit said Google/YouTube told PragerU the videos “Why Isn’t Communism as Hated as Nazism?” and “What’s Holding the Arab World Back?” were placed in Restricted Mode because they purportedly discussed “hate and genocide” and “terrorism and genocide,” respectively.
  • “No further explanation as to what language constituted an inappropriate discussion of ‘hate and genocide’ or ‘terrorism and genocide’ was given,” the suit read.
  • Following rebuff after rebuff, PragerU brought the suit Monday in U.S. District Court, asking for monetary damages and an end to the censorship.

What did YouTube/Google have to say?

  • Google on Tuesday didn’t immediately reply to TheBlaze’s request for comment on the matter.

Which PragerU videos have been affected?

  • PragerU made a list of nearly 40 videos that YouTube restricted — and many of them also have been demonetized, the suit says. The total number of videos that have been restricted or demonetized is about 50, Streit said.
  • Among the restricted videos are “Why America Must Lead,” “The Ten Commandments: Do Not Murder,” “Why Did America Fight the Korean War,” and “The World’s Most Persecuted Minority: Christians.”

 

  • Of course, less controversial videos like the clip on forgiveness have been left alone, she said:

 

  • “It looks like it’s the videos they don’t agree with ideologically,” Streit told TheBlaze.
  • And since PragerU’s charter includes a commitment to reach young people with its conservative message, the censorship hurts all the more, she added.
  • For noted Harvard Law Professor Alan Derschowitz — who spoke on a PragerU video on the legal founding of Israel — the fact that YouTube restricted his clip was unsettling.
  • Streit recalled getting a phone call from Dershowitz in which he asked, “Does YouTube think our content is pornographic?”

  • In fact, she said, there’s “no profanity, nudity or otherwise inappropriate ‘mature’ content” in PragerU videos, which “fully comply with YouTube’s user guidelines.”

How has PragerU been impacted?

  • Streit told TheBlaze it isn’t as though PragerU has tens of thousands of videos in its library — there are only about 250, she said.
  • Therefore when 50 or so are restricted or demonetized — a fifth of its total catalogue — that’s a significant portion.
  • Streit added to TheBlaze that PragerU is in the process of determining how much ad revenue it has lost due to demonetization — but she mentioned a couple of other disturbing revelations found along the way.
  • She said YouTube “copycats” have taken videos restricted on PragerU’s YouTube page, uploaded them on their personal pages — and voila: the videos weren’t restricted anymore.
  • Streit told TheBlaze that means the issue isn’t a global algorithm but a concerted effort by YouTube to “specifically” target PragerU videos.
  • What’s more, she said those “copycats” also are making ad money from PragerU clips.
  • Streit added that new PragerU videos are added Monday mornings and “within an hour they’re restricted.”

What does PragerU want?

  • “As the person who runs this organization, I want fair treatment,” Streit said. “I don’t want to be discriminated against. … Our hope is to make a correction that will lead to goodness.”
  • But in the end, the lawsuit isn’t about recouping lost ad revenue — it’s about taking a stand for freedom of speech and “for America.”
  • “Can you imagine what the wold would look like if Google is allowed to continue to arbitrarily censor ideas they simply don’t agree with?” Streit asked.
  • And right now Google/YouTube is “controlling one of the largest vehicles of information of all time,” she told TheBlaze — and their video censorship is “one of the most un-American things you can do.”
  • “We feel like this is an important cause to take on,” Streit added, knowing full well that comparatively tiny PragerU taking on behemoths like Google and YouTube is akin to David challenging Goliath.
  • But she said, “somebody has to fight Goliath.”

Here’s a look at another restricted PragerU clip:

Facebook Scrubbed Data, Possible Obstruction of Investigation

Related reading: Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg meets with lawmakers investigating Russia-linked Facebook ads

Blame ‘crowdtangle’ among others. As noted on their site: ‘the easiest way to keep track of what’s happening of social media. Other sites such as meltwater broadcasts that they are ‘influencers’ and then leaderboards are created such that real or hoax operations become a trending topic.

Lots of fake news gets blamed on bloggers posing as official media outlets while quoting unnamed sources and rightly so. Some of those blogs are concoctions of Moscow while others websites repeated fake stories stoking issues and divisions within the United States from Russia media outlets such as Sputnik News and RT.

Facebook is the location of choice for millions to park links and fake items resulting in Facebook often being referred to as Fakebook.

Moscow, along with out social media tech software in the United States created algorithms that counted ‘likes and ‘shares’ which then manifested unreliable stories and questionable sources. These analytic tools have become the norm across the world and consequentially having credibility and reliance on issues or stories has fallen.

It all boils down to communication, collaboration, branding, feedback and scoring results. You are the sheep, money is made from your activity on social media with every keystroke and you don’t get paid a dime….secret financial extortion, meaning without your knowledge unless you read ALL the mice type. Facebook is a master and frankly a player where you are being punked.

This is yet another form of cyber-warfare….

Facebook scrubbed potentially damning Russia data before researchers could analyze it further

  • Facebook scrubbed thousands of posts shared during the 2016 campaign by accounts linked to Russia.
  • The removals came as a Columbia University researcher was examining their reach.
  • Facebook says the posts were removed to fix a glitch.

BI: Facebook removed thousands of posts shared during the 2016 election by accounts linked to Russia after a Columbia University social media researcher, Jonathan Albright, used the company’s data analytics tool to examine the reach of the Russian accounts.

Albright, who discovered the content had reached a far broader audience than Facebook initially acknowledged, told The Washington Post on Wednesday that the data had allowed him “to at least reconstruct some of the pieces of the puzzle” of Russia’s election interference.

“Not everything, but it allowed us to make sense of some of this thing,” he said.

Facebook confirmed that the posts had been removed, but said it was because the company had fixed a glitch in the analytics tool — called CrowdTangle — that Albright had used.

“We identified and fixed a bug in CrowdTangle that allowed users to see cached information from inactive Facebook Pages,” said Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesman.

Facebook’s decision to remove the posts from public view raised questions about whether the company could be held liable for suppressing potential evidence, given its role in the wide-ranging investigation of Russia’s election interference.

Albright told Business Insider that “because this is clearly a legal and imminent justice-related matter, I can’t provide much critical insight at this stage.

“I feel like my 10 rounds with the $500 billion dollar tech juggernaut are over,” he said.

Legal experts and scholars on the subject say scrubbing the data Albright used for his research is Facebook’s prerogative as long as it isn’t knowingly removing content sought under a court order or by government request.

“If Facebook has no reason to think that it should retain the data (subpoena, court order), then it can make choices about what appears on its platform,” said Danielle Citron, a professor of law at the University of Maryland, where she teaches and writes about information privacy.

Citron said Facebook and other private tech companies have in the past argued, successfully, that they have free speech interests and enjoy immunity from liability for the content posted by their users — immunity that extends to their ability to remove it if it violates their terms of service.

Albert Gidari, the director of privacy at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, said it’s likely that Facebook has kept copies of “anything at issue as part of its preservation obligation” in light of special counsel Robert Mueller’s search warrant and the House and Senate Intelligence Committee subpoenas.

Gidari said that because there hasn’t been any allegation against Facebook itself, the company has no obligation, absent a court order, to maintain information “that later may be evidence.”

But the question becomes more complicated when considering the ethical obligations of a company whose tools were exploited by a foreign adversary to try to influence a US election.

Gidari, for his part, said he doesn’t think “any platform has an independent or ethical obligation to run a research playground for third-party data analysts.”

But Tom Rubin, a lecturer at Stanford Law School, said that Facebook’s “credibility as a global social platform and its responsibility as an internet giant require it to fully embrace an independent, urgent and public review of the facts.”

“Facebook’s Russia predicament is of its own doing — it controls the platform, runs the ads, and profits mightily,” said Rubin, who previously served as the assistant US Attorney in New York heading investigations and prosecutions of computer crimes.

“The investigation here is as serious as it gets: illegal and hostile foreign influence on the US presidential election,” Rubin said. “The issue confronting Facebook is the extent to which it should commit to complete transparency, and the answer to that is straightforward.”

Citron agreed.

“For transparency’s sake and for our broader interest in our democracy, people should know the extent to which they have been played by the Russians and how a hostile state actor has interfered with, manipulated, and generally hacked our political process,” she said.

That is what Albright said was his mission when he downloaded the last 500 posts shared by six accounts that Facebook has confirmed were operating out of Russia. Those accounts — Blacktivists, Being Patriotic, Secured Borders,  Heart of Texas, LGBT United, and Muslims of America — were among the 470 pages Facebook shut down in September as part of its purge of “inauthentic accounts” linked to Russia’s Internet Research Agency.

The data Albright obtained using CrowdTangle showed that the Russians’ reach far exceeded the number of Facebook users they were able to access with advertisements alone — content including memes, links, and other miscellaneous postings was shared over 340 million times between the six accounts.

The other 464 accounts closed by Facebook have not yet been made public. If they are, an analysis of their combined posts would likely reveal that their content was shared an estimated billions of times during the election.

Center for Community Change, Good Right? Heck NO

Update:

WT: Even before its feud over the national anthem with President Trump, the NFL Players Association wasn’t on the same political team as many of its fans, judging from its contributions to leftist advocacy groups.

Tax documents released by 2ndVote show the NFLPA donated $5,000 in 2015 to the Center for Community Change Action, a group active in the anti-Trump resistance and bankrolled by a host of liberal foundations, including top Democratic donor George Soros’s Foundation for Open Society.

A member of the AFL-CIO, the NFLPA also contributed in 2013 and 2015 to Working America, the AFL-CIO’s community affiliate, which Open Secrets said spent $1 million in 2016 to defeat Mr. Trump.

Working America has since mobilized against the Republican tax-cut framework, denouncing it as the “Trump tax scam.”

The NFLPA contributed $5,000 in 2014 to Jobs with Justice, another pro-union group backed by Mr. Soros, and $5,000 in 2013 to the progressive Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy.

The NFLPA donations from 2013, 2014 and 2015 were made before Mr. Trump was elected.

Do you ever wonder why the left never seems to fund causes that have a positive mission or fund causes that are solutions to issues like cyber threats or cures for health conditions like cancer?

Then there is the matter of basis sedition where activities are counter to stable and functioning government operations where the left always appears to launch concepts to model citizen behavior and strip away more more fundamental rights.

The usual names appear below and the IRS is all too cooperative with granting legitimate non-profit status without any concern yet this is the same IRS that worked diligently to stop conservative groups under the ‘targeting program’.

Read on and begin to challenge these operations where they fully interfere and halt a representative government. This operation as described below is an ANTIFA model on a well funded scale. Communists, socialists and marxists at work…where is the Department of Justice and further just how much is the FBI involved regarding investigative measures?

Related reading: Who is Deepak Bhargava?

Check out the names and associated organizations here.

 

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Donors of Anti-Trump ‘Resistance’ Group Revealed

(Updated) Center for Community Change’s unredacted tax forms show stealth funders

The hidden donors to a prominent anti-Trump “resistance” organization are revealed in unredacted tax forms obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The Center for Community Change Action, a Washington, D.C.-based progressive community organizing group that does not reveal its donors, has been involved in direct action against President Donald Trump and Republicans before and after the November elections. The organization’s members sit on the boards of other prominent liberal activist groups.

The Free Beacon has obtained the group’s unredacted 2015 tax forms that shed light on its funders, who provide millions of dollars in assistance. The group appears to rely heavily on a few major liberal foundations, organizations, and unions.

The Center for Community Change’s largest contribution was $3,000,000 from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which was initially created by Will Kellogg, the food manufacturer and founder of Kellogg Company. The Ford Foundation, which was first created by the founders of the Ford Motor Company, added a $2,350,000 donation. The Open Society Foundation, a foundation run by liberal billionaire mega-donor George Soros, gave $1,750,000 to the Center for Community Change.

Other donors to the organization include the California Endowment, which gave $524,500; the Marquerite Casey Foundation, which gave $515,000; Fidelity Charitable Gift, which donated $505,100; and the National Immigration Law Center, which gave $316,000.

The Center for Community Change Action, the “social welfare” (c)(4) arm of the group, additionally relies on a handful of donors for almost all of its funding, according to its documents that do not include the privacy redactions.

Donors to its “social welfare” arm in 2015 included Every Citizen Counts ($1,750,000 contribution), a nonprofit that was created by allies of Hillary Clinton to mobilize Latino and African-American voters; the Open Society Policy Center ($1,475,000), another Soros group; the Sixteen Thirty Fund ($610,000), a progressive advocacy group; Center for Community Change ($150,000); Services Employees International Union (SEIU) ($150,000); Atlantic Philanthropies ($75,000); and the Tides Foundation ($50,000), the largest liberal donor-advised network, among other funders.

The Center for Community Change Action has been involved with anti-Trump campaigns for some time now. The group’s members also sit on the advisory boards of other prominent liberal organizations.

Deepak Bhargava, the executive director of the Center for Community Change, sits on the advisory board of George Soros’s Open Society Foundation.

The “Families Fight Back” voter campaign was launched during the 2016 presidential election by the Center for Community Change Action, the Latino Victory Project, an immigration group co-founded by actress Eva Longoria, and America’s Voice, a group that fights for a “direct, fair, and inclusive road to citizenship for immigrants in the United States without papers.”

Soros, who last year vowed to spend $15 million to court Hispanic voters, was for months the sole funder of the Immigrant Voters Win PAC, which was part of the “Families Fight Back” campaign.

Others involved with the Center for Community Change sit on boards of other resistance groups.

The Emergent Fund, a fund that consists of the Solidaire Network, the Threshold Foundation, and the Woman’s Donor Network, claims a goal of pushing back against “immediate threats” to “immigrants, women, Muslim and Arab-American communities, black people, LGBTQ communities, and all people of color.”

The Emergent Fund’s advisory board, which decides what organizations receive money from the group, features individuals from a number of prominent liberal organizations.

Charlene Sinclair, the director of reinvestment at the Center for Community Change, sits on the board of directors of the Emergent Fund, which surpassed its initial fundraising goal of $500,000 following its inception and quickly approved $205,000 in rapid-response grants at the end of last year.

The Emergent Fund gives grants ranging from $10,000 to $50,000 and has provided financing to Black Lives Matter; the Center for Media Justice, which was created to “organize the most under-represented communities in a national movement for media rights”; the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative; and United We Dream, the largest immigrant youth-led organization in the United States.

The Center for Community Change later joined United We Dream for nationwide immigration protests leading up to Trump’s inauguration. United We Dream was additionally behind “sanctuary campus” anti-Trump protests across the country to protect undocumented students.

Christina Jimenez, the co-founder and managing director of the United We Dream Network, herself attended high school and college as an undocumented immigrant.

The Center for Community Change did not return a request for comment by press time.

UPDATE 10:30 AM: Following publication, a representative from Fidelity Charitable said that the donations under their name was recommended from individual donors who have donor-advised fund accounts with the group, and do not represent the views or endorsement of Fidelity Charitable or Fidelity Investments.

Ford additionally added that although the charity was started by Ford family members, it is no longer connected to the Ford Motor Company.

Russia Bought BLM Ads Dupes Were Willing

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This website has published countless articles warning of these operations going back as far as 2014. This site has also warned of Russian hybrid warfare as noted by the Gerasimov Doctrine.

Russian State, Non-State Cyber Intrusions Sway Voting/Political Decisions

Russian Troll Operations Continue, What are You Reading?

During the campaign season, the Obama White House knew more than they were telling or sharing. Furthermore, that same White House refused to take any real action with regard to Russian interference.

Huddled in a private room on the sidelines of a meeting of world leaders in Lima, Peru, two months before Trump’s inauguration, Obama made a personal appeal to Zuckerberg to take the threat of fake news and political disinformation seriously. Unless Facebook and the government did more to address the threat, Obama warned, it would only get worse in the next presidential race.

Zuckerberg acknowledged the problem posed by fake news. But he told Obama that those messages weren’t widespread on Facebook and that there was no easy fix, according to people briefed on the exchange, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of a private conversation. More here.

Russian operatives used Facebook ads to exploit divisions over Black Lives Matter, Muslims

ChicagoTribune: The batch of more than 3,000 Russian-bought ads that Facebook is preparing to turn over to Congress shows a deep understanding of social divides in American society, with some ads promoting African-American rights groups including Black Lives Matter and others suggesting that these same groups pose a rising political threat, say people familiar with the covert influence campaign.

The Russian campaign — taking advantage of Facebook’s ability to simultaneously send contrary messages to different groups of users based on their political and demographic characteristics — also sought to sow discord among religious groups. Other ads highlighted support for Democrat Hillary Clinton among Muslim women.

These targeted messages, along with others that have surfaced in recent days, highlight the sophistication of an influence campaign slickly crafted to mimic and infiltrate U.S. political discourse while also seeking to heighten tensions between groups already wary of one another.

The nature and detail of these ads has troubled investigators at Facebook, on Capitol Hill and at the U.S. Justice Department, say people familiar with the advertisements who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share matters still under investigation.

The House and Senate Intelligence committees plan to begin reviewing the Facebook ads in coming weeks as they attempt to untangle the operation and other matters related to Russia’s bid to help elect Trump in 2016.

“Their aim was to sow chaos,” said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “In many cases, it was more about voter suppression rather than increasing turnout.”

The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, said he hoped the public would be able to review the ad campaign.

“I think the American people should see a representative sample of these ads to see how cynical the Russian were using these ads to sow division within our society,” he said, noting that he had not yet seen the ads but had been briefed on them, including the ones mentioning “things like Black Lives Matter.”

The ads which Facebook found raise troubling questions for a social networking and advertising platform that reaches two billion people each month and offer a rare window into how Russian operatives carried out their information operations during an especially tumultuous period in U.S. politics.

Investigators at Facebook discovered the Russian ads in recent weeks, the company has said, after months of trying in vain to trace disinformation efforts back to Russia. The company has said it had identified at least $100,000 in ads purchased through 470 phony Facebook pages and accounts. Facebook has said this spending represented a tiny fraction of the political advertising on the platform for the 2016 campaign.

The previously-undisclosed ads suggest that Russian operatives worked off of evolving lists of racial, religious, political and economic themes. They used these to create pages, write posts and craft ads that would appear in user’s news feeds — with the apparent goal of appealing to one audience and alienating another. In some cases, the pages even tried to organize events.

“The idea of using Facebook to incite anti-black hatred and anti-Muslim prejudice and fear while provoking extremism is an old tactic. It’s not unique to the United States and it’s a global phenomenon,” said Malkia Cyril, a Black Lives Matter activist in Oakland, California. and the executive director for the Center for Media Justice. Social media companies “have a mandate to standup and take deep responsibility for how their platforms are being abused.”

Facebook declined to comment on the contents of the ads being turned over to congressional investigators, and pointed to a Sept. 6 statement by Alex Stamos, the company’s chief security officer, who noted that the vast majority of the ads run by the 470 pages and accounts did not specifically reference the U.S. presidential election, voting or any particular candidate.

“Rather, the ads and accounts appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the idealogical spectrum — touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights,” Stamos said at the time.

Moscow’s interest in U.S. race relations date back decades.

In Soviet times, operatives didn’t have the option of using the Internet, so they spread their messages by taking out ads in newspapers, posting fliers and organizing meetings.

Much like the online ads discovered by Facebook, messages spread by Soviet-era operatives were meant to look as though they were written by bonafide political activists in the United States, thereby disguising the involvement of an adversarial foreign power.

Russian information operations didn’t end with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

After a lull in tensions, Russia’s spy agencies became more assertive under the leadership of President Vladimir Putin. In recent years, those services have updated their propaganda protocols to take advantage of new technologies and the proliferation of social media platforms.

“Is it a goal of the Kremlin to encourage discord in American society? The answer to that is yes,” said former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. “More generally, Putin has an idea that our society is imperfect, that our democracy is not better than his, so to see us in conflict on big social issues is in the Kremlin’s interests.”

Clinton Watts, part of a research team that was among the first to warn publicly of the Russian propaganda campaign during the 2016 election, said that identifying and exploiting existing social and cultural divisions are common Russian disinformation tactics dating back to the Cold War.

“We have seen them operating on both sides” said Watts, a fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a former FBI agent.

When Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in his college dorm room in 2004, no one could have anticipated the company would become an advertising juggernaut worth almost half a trillion dollars — the largest online advertising company in the world after Google. Roughly a third of the world’s population now log in monthly.

As Facebook’s user base rapidly expanded, it wrote the playbook for digital targeting in the smartphone era — and for the type of micro-targeting that has become critical to modern political campaigns.

The social network invested heavily in building highly-sophisticated automated advertising tools that could target specific groups of people who had expressed their preferences and interests on Facebook, from newlyweds who studied at Dartmouth College to hockey enthusiasts living in a particular zip code in Michigan.

The migration from traditional personal computers to smartphones and tablets also helped Facebook gain a major edge: The company pioneered techniques to help advertisers reach the same user on their desktop and mobile devices, leading Facebook to grow seven-fold in its value since it went public in 2012. Today, advertisers who want to target Facebook users by demographics or interests have tens of thousands of categories to choose from, and they are able to flood users with ads wherever they go on the Internet.

Unlike most websites, where ads appear alongside content, ads on Facebook have directly appeared in people’s newsfeeds since 2012. If users like a page, the administrators of that page can pay for ads and post content that will then appear in the cascade of information from publishers and friends that users see right away when they log onto Facebook.

Since the 2012 presidential election, Facebook has become an essential tool for political campaigns that wish to target potential voters. During the height of election season, political campaigns are among the largest advertisers on Facebook. Facebook has built a large sales staff of account executives, some of whom have backgrounds in politics, that are especially trained to assist campaigns in spreading their messages, increasing engagement, and getting immediate feedback on how they are performing.

The Trump campaign used these tools to great effect, while Clinton’s campaign preferred to rely on its own social media experts, according to people familiar with the campaigns.

Since taking office, Putin has on occasion sought to spotlight racial tensions in the United States as a means of shaping perceptions of American society.

Putin injected himself in 2014 into the race debate after protests broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, over the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an African-American, by a police officer who was white.

“Do you believe that everything is perfect now from the point of view of democracy in the United States?” Putin told CBS’ 60 Minutes. “If everything was perfect, there wouldn’t be the problem of Ferguson. There would be no abuse by the police. But our task is to see all these problems and respond properly.”

In addition to the ads described to The Post, Russian operatives used Facebook to promote anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim messages. Facebook has said that one-quarter of the ads bought by the Russian operatives identified so far were targeted to a particular geographic area.

While Facebook has downplayed the impact of the Russian ads on the election, Dennis Yu, chief technology officer for BlitzMetrics, a digital marketing company that focuses on Facebook ads, said that $100,000 worth of Facebook ads could have been viewed hundreds of millions of times.

“$100,000 worth of very concentrated posts is very, very powerful,” he said. “When you have a really hot post, you often get this viral multiplier. So when you buy this one ad impression, you can get an extra 20- to 40-times multiplier because those people comment and share it.”

Watts, the Foreign Policy Research Institute fellow, has not seen the Facebook ads promised to Congress, but he and his team saw similar tactics playing out on Twitter and other platforms during the campaign.

Watts said such efforts were most likely to have been effective in mid-Western swing states such as Wisconsin and Michigan, where Democratic primary rival Sen. Bernie Sanders had beaten Clinton. Watts said the disinformation pushed by the Russians includes messages designed to reinforce the idea that Sanders had been mistreated by the Democratic Party and that his supporters shouldn’t bother to vote during the general election in November.

“They were designed around hitting these fracture points, so they could see how they resonate and assess their effectiveness,” Watts said. “I call it reconnaissance by social media.”