Category Archives: Media corruption

Iran Using Same ‘Active Measure’ Tactics Against the U.S.

Posted on by

When traveling internet sites, social media accounts and various news aggregator services, one needs to be even more suspect of what information is out there. Russia has been applying propaganda ‘active measure’ tactics for decades and due to the global internet system, the volume has gone beyond measure.

With all things Russia going on in Washington DC and in media, the success of active measures has been noticed by both China and Iran. Both have launched robust propaganda operations forcing the West and citizens to question authenticity of sites, articles and posts of all forms.

Watch out for those hashtags….influencing voters and fake/false news goes back to at least 2016. The operations are so effective that even big media has been duped and corrections are printed or made often when recognized. Some items are never corrected.

Iran’s Anti-US Propaganda Reflects regime’s instability photo

(Reuters) – Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google said on Thursday it had identified and terminated 39 YouTube channels linked to state-run Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting.

Google has also removed 39 YouTube channels and six blogs on Blogger and 13 Google+ accounts.

“Our investigations on these topics are ongoing and we will continue to share our findings with law enforcement and other relevant government entities in the U.S. and elsewhere,” Google said in a blog post here 

On Tuesday, Facebook Inc (FB.O), Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) and Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) collectively removed hundreds of accounts tied to an alleged Iranian propaganda operation.

Google, which had engaged cyber-security firm FireEye Inc (FEYE.O) to provide the company with intelligence, said it has detected and blocked attempts by “state-sponsored actors” in recent months.

FireEye said here it has suspected “influence operation” that appears to originate from Iran, aimed at audiences in the United States, the U.K., Latin America, and the Middle East.

Shares of FireEye rose as much as 10 percent to $16.38 after Google identified the company as a consultant.

***

The Daily Beast went for a deeper dive on the tactics by Iran and explained a few cases.

An Iranian propaganda campaign created fake Bernie Sanders supporters online, Facebook disclosed Tuesday.

In a press release, the social-media giant said it had removed 652 pages associated with political-influence campaigns traced to Iran, including coordinated inauthentic behavior that originated in Iran and targeted people across multiple internet services in the Middle East, Latin America, U.K., and U.S.”

The cybersecurity company FireEye, which first alerted Facebook to the influence campaign months ago, wrote in a separate posting on its site that it had traced the campaign—including posts from supposed “American liberals supportive of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders”—to Iran through email addresses and phone numbers associated with the “inauthentic” accounts.

The investigation began with FireEye’s discovery of a fake U.S. news outlet called Liberty Front Press, which Facebook says was created in 2013. The actors behind that site over time branched out into different personas intended to appeal to different audiences including “anti-Saudi, anti-Israeli, and pro-Palestinian themes.” Examples included accounts like The British Left, which published content in support of U.K. Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn, and the pro-Palestinian Patriotic Palestinian Front. FireEye also says it “identified multiple Arabic-language, Middle East-focused sites” as part of the effort.

Unlike the Russian cyberinfluence campaign in 2016, FireEye didn’t find a complementary hacking campaign attached to the propaganda activity. Iran has spent big on developing its offensive online capabilities, but FireEye said it found no links to APT35—a hacking group that has targeted U.S. defense companies and Saudi energy firms. Instead, the security firm found links between the campaign and Iran’s state-run TV propaganda channel, PressTV.

The Iranian actors behind the campaign expanded beyond Facebook and Instagram and onto Twitter, according to FireEye. In a separate statement late Tuesday, Twitter announced it had suspended 284 accounts for what it said was “coordinated manipulation” and that “it appears many of these accounts originated from Iran.”

The Daily Beast recovered tweets from what appears to be an account associated with the campaign. @libertyfrontpr has since been deleted, but Google cache results show it linked back to the LibertyFrontPress.com website FireEye attributed to be part of the propaganda effort. The account was active as of at least Tuesday and is not listed as suspended on the platform.

The account used hashtags like “#Resist” and #NotMyPresident when tweeting out anti-Trump sentiments. It also weighed in against the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh. “The #Senate has a responsibility to reject any nominee who would fail to be a fair-minded constitutionalist. That is #BrettKavanaugh. We must #StopKavanaugh.”

In a rare move for Holocaust-denying Iranian propaganda, @libertypr slammed the Republican Party for allowing anti-Semite and Holocaust denier John Fitzgerald to run for a seat in the California legislature.

In addition to the U.S. themes, Liberty’s Twitter account also targeted opponents of the Iranian government, including the Mujahedeen Khalq exile group, or MEK, which advocates the overthrow of Iran’s clerical government, with hashtags like “#BanTerrorOrg.”

The takedown marks the second time since the 2016 election that Facebook has appeared to act without U.S. government pressure to stop an alleged political-influence campaign. In late July, Facebook took down a handful of sock-puppet accounts purporting to be black, Hispanic, and #Resistance activists. Facebook didn’t attribute that campaign to a specific country or group, but it did note that some of the accounts had links to the infamous Russian Internet Research Agency troll farm.

Facebook said Tuesday that it had taken down the new batch of pages only after waiting “many months” after being alerted to the campaign by FireEye. The delay allowed the company to further investigate the campaign and improve its defenses against future efforts.

What About those 3 Dead Russian Journalists?

Posted on by

Rather interesting that fellow journalists are not outrages and there is not full reporting on these murders. Jim Acosta? April Ryan? CNN? (snarky)

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a Russian exile and Putin foe has a news organization called Investigation Control Center. Three investigative journalists were dispatched to (CAR) Central African Republic to determine why a Putin connected militant group Wagner is operating there. Sadly, it did not end well.

On the 31st of July news broke about the murder of the Russian journalists Orkhan Djemal, Alexander Rastorguev and Kirril Radchenko. They were working in the Rental African Republic on a joint project with Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Investigation Control Center. In particular, they intended to visit the grounds of Berengo estate, where, it is alleged, the base of the mercenaries of the private military organisation “Wenger” is situated.

The journalists arrived in Bangi, the capital of CAR, on Saturday. The next day they went to Berengo’s estate. However, they were denied access, requiring accreditation from CAR’s Ministry of Defense. Their details were noted down and they were promised that they would be given a pass after five days.

On Monday the group had to meet the fixer (a journalism consultant) from a UN delegation called Martin (he was the one who recommended the driver to the journalists). The journey ought to have taken about a day and a half because of roadblocks and poor-quality roads.

On Sunday evening the journalists were ambushed and shot in their vehicle at around 22:00 local time.

French media reported that the murders were motivated by theft – the journalists were carrying roughly 9,000 dollars and their equipment. Mikhail Khodorkovsky has promised to help find and identify the journalists’ killers.

***

Photographs of journalists Orkhan Dzhemal (right), Kirill Radchenko (center) and Aleksandr Rastorguyev are seen at a small memorial to the slain jounalists outside the Central House of Journalists in Moscow. Photographs of journalists Orkhan Dzhemal (right), Kirill Radchenko (center) and Aleksandr Rastorguyev are seen at a small memorial to the slain jounalists outside the Central House of Journalists in Moscow.

Russian investigators said they have opened a criminal case to look into the deaths of the journalists. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on August 1 that the stated purpose of their visit to the CAR was tourism, seeming to take them to task for allegedly misstating the intent of the trip.

That remark drew rare criticism of the ministry from a senior pro-Kremlin lawmaker. Leonid Slutsky, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, wrote on Telegram that issues such as the purpose of the trip were “not very important now.”

“What is important is that Russian citizens have been killed,” he wrote. “Here we should follow the example of our ‘strategic friends’ from across the ocean: the United States does not leave the death of any of its citizens without consequences. No matter what country they were in and what political views they adhered to.”

Henri Depele, the mayor of the town of Sibut, around 200 kilometers northeast of the capital, Bangui, said the journalists were killed late on July 30. Their driver survived the attack.

***

The investigative media outlet the journalists worked for is financed by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oil tycoon who spent 10 years in prison following convictions in financial-crimes trials supporters contend were a Kremlin-orchestrated campaign to seize his company’s production assets and punish him for challenges to President Vladimir Putin.

He was pardoned by Putin, released, and flown out of Russia in 2010, and now lives in Europe, where he is one of Putin’s most vehement critics.

TsUR has published a number of investigations alleging corruption by senior members of Putin’s entourage.

Khodorkovsky called the three journalists who were killed “brave men who were not prepared simply to collect documentary material, but wanted to ‘feel’ it in the palms of their hands…. Rest in peace.”

Dzhemal, 51, was a respected Russian military correspondent who covered conflicts around the world. He was seriously injured in Libya in 2011 and published a book in 2008 giving a firsthand account of the five-day Russia-Georgia war.

Rastorguyev, 47, was a prominent documentary filmmaker and a contributor to RFE/RL. He was among the three directors of an award-winning 2013 film about leaders of the Russian opposition.

Radchenko, 33, started his career as a projectionist, but had become a cameraman in recent years. He served as an election observer in Chechnya in March.

The Central African Republic has been riddled by violence, often fought along religious lines between predominantly Christian and Muslim militias, since a 2013 rebellion overthrew then-President Francois Bozize.

Most of the country is beyond the control of the Bangui government, and a 12,000-strong UN peacekeeping mission has struggled to keep a lid on the violence.

As Facebook Continues to Stray From a Social Media Platform

Posted on by

Angry Emoticon Facebook | www.imgkid.com - The Image Kid ...

What the heck Facebook? Perhaps it is just time to terminate relationships with Facebook. Zuckerberg thought in his early conception and launch of Facebook it was a global means to connect people together, you know expand friendships so we can all like each other worldwide.

Ahem, that is hardly where he and Sheryl Sandberg have has take the company in recent years.

FACEBOOK ROLLS OUT REACTIONS | iNexxus

Let’s begin here:

The aggressive push by Democrats and left-wing activists for social media companies to combat Russian bots and trolls may have backfired, exposing potential foreign efforts to whip up political passions on their side.

Facebook announced last week that it had yanked 32 pages from Facebook and Instagram because they were “involved in coordinated inauthentic behavior,” potentially tied to Russia.

Facebook said that “inauthentic” administrators of a page called “Resisters” were connected with those from other, legitimate pages who worked to drum up support for the protest. “The most followed Facebook Pages were ‘Aztlan Warriors,’ ‘Black Elevation,’ ‘Mindful Being,’ and ‘Resisters.’ The remaining Pages had between zero and 10 followers, and the Instagram accounts had zero followers,” Facebook said. Read more here.

So, beyond selling access to the Facebook databases and user profiles to companies such as Cambridge Analytica, something else is afoot and it too is far beyond the scope of social media.

Ready?

Facebook in talks with banks to add your financial information to Messenger

  • Facebook is considering a Messenger feature that would incorporate a user’s bank information.
  • The feature, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, applies only to Messenger and not the larger Facebook platform.
  • It comes at a sensitive time for Facebook, as it continues to battle privacy concerns and adjust company policy regarding user data.

The feature, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, applies only to Messenger and not the larger Facebook platform. It comes at a sensitive time for Facebook, as it continues to battle privacy concerns and adjust company policy regarding user data.

Facebook’s stock was up about 2.5 percent Monday following the initial Wall Street Journal report.

“Like many online companies, we routinely talk to financial institutions about how we can improve people’s commerce experiences, like enabling better customer service. An essential part of these efforts is keeping people’s information safe and secure,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC. “We don’t use purchase data from banks or credit card companies for ads.”

Incorporating a user’s financial information into Messenger would allow banks to offer customer service through the platform, as some credit card companies already do, Facebook said. The Wall Street Journal reported the feature could also offer fraud alerts and help users track their account balances.

Isn’t this getting a little creepy? Would Facebook sell banking data also to outside corporations without your knowledge, consent or compensation? Would your bank be part of this new feature and relationship also without your knowledge or consent?

As we are finding, Facebook is clearly in the business of censorship which often violates the First Amendment yet they claim their scrutiny and termination is in violation of terms of service where it has been proven more than once it is just selective censorship. Just ask Diamond and Silk.

Thanks to TechRepublic: In part –

What is the timeline of the Facebook data privacy scandal?

Facebook has more than a decade-long track record of incidents highlighting inadequate and insufficient measures to protect data privacy. While the severity of these individual cases varies, the sequence of repeated failures paints a larger picture of systemic problems.

In 2005, researchers at MIT created a script that downloaded publicly posted information of over 70,000 users from four schools. (Facebook only began to allow search engines to crawl profiles in September 2007.)

In 2007, activities that users engaged in on other websites was automatically added to Facebook user profiles as part of Beacon, one of Facebook’s first attempts to monetize user profiles. As an example, Beacon indicated on the Facebook News Feed the titles of videos that users rented from Blockbuster Video, which was a violation of the Video Privacy Protection Act. A class action suit was filed, for which Facebook paid $9.5 million to a fund for privacy and security as part of a settlement agreement.

In 2011, following an FTC investigation, the company entered into a consent decree, promising to address concerns about how user data was tracked and shared. That investigation was prompted by an incident in December 2009 in which information thought private by users was being shared publicly, according to contemporaneous reporting by The New York Times.

In 2013, Facebook disclosed details of a bug that exposed the personal details of six million accounts over approximately a year. When users downloaded their own Facebook history, that user would obtain in the same action not just their own address book, but also the email addresses and phone numbers of their friends that other people had stored in their address books. The data that Facebook exposed had not been given to Facebook by users to begin with—it had been vacuumed from the contact lists of other Facebook users who happen to know that person. This phenomenon has since been described as “shadow profiles.”

The Cambridge Analytica portion of the data privacy scandal starts in February 2014. A spate of reviews on the Turkopticon website—a third-party review website for users of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk—detail a task requested by Aleksandr Kogan asking users to complete a survey in exchange for money. The survey required users to add the thisisyourdigitiallife app to their Facebook account, which is in violation of Mechanical Turk’s terms of service. One review quotes the request as requiring users to “provide our app access to your Facebook so we can download some of your data—some demographic data, your likes, your friends list, whether your friends know one another, and some of your private messages.”

In December 2015, Facebook learned for the first time that the data set Kogan generated with the app was shared with Cambridge Analytica. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg claims “we immediately banned Kogan’s app from our platform, and demanded that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica formally certify that they had deleted all improperly acquired data. They provided these certifications.”

Hey Jim Acosta, this Could be Why Media is an Enemy

Posted on by

Traveling over the CNN’s Jim Acosta’s Twitter account, this is his pinned tweet:

Then yesterday, he re-tweeted this:

And he retweeted this:

At the White House press briefing, Sarah Sanders called on @Acosta and he asked Sarah if she or the Trump White House would denounce that the media is an enemy of the people. She did not denounce that but went on to describe the media and progressive abuse the Trump administration endures, listing many nasty encounters.

What did @Acosta do?

He tweeted again:

As a conservative radio host, I watched that WH exchange between them and sent a tweet to @Acosta inviting him to an interview with me. ……crickets….

But there is more. It goes beyond CNN actually. Media and the left are simply branding all things law enforcement as racists including those in government, Republican voters and even some at Fox News. So we are in a posture war here that is undeniable. So….no sooner was all that over, here comes the New York Times.

***

Meet Sarah Jeong. She’s the newest member of the New York Times editorial board. She also has a history of saying pretty vile, racist things on Twitter.

Saved tweets from Sarah Jeong, the newest member of the New York Times editorial board. (source: Twitter)

Heck, just read more here, if you can stomach the vile branding of her and where the NYT’s is going in the future.

Tommy Robinson is Free, but Hold on….

Posted on by

Daniel Pipes posted:

But Robinson still has to go to court again for another hearing, where he could still be found guilty of contempt of court, which would be in breach of his suspended sentence that still stands, for doing the same thing previously.

Manchester far-right protestors tussle with police | Daily ...

Tommy Robinson has been freed from prison on bail after judges quashed findings that he committed contempt of court in Leeds.

But the Court of Appeal dismissed the far-right figure’s case against another incident in Canterbury and ordered him to attend a new hearing where he could be jailed again.

The Lord Chief Justice took little over a minute to read out the judgment to a packed courtroom, silencing Robinson’s supporters as they started applauding.

Lord Burnett said the court was allowing his appeal only “in respect of the committal for contempt at Leeds Crown Court” and granted Robinson bail ahead of a hearing to take place at the Old Bailey in London.

Supporters who had gathered outside the Royal Courts of Justice cheered as news of the judgment came through, as counter-demonstrators shouted “Nazi scum, off our streets” through a megaphone.

Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was released from HMP Onley later on Wednesday.

“I have a lot to say, but not to you,” he told journalists while flanked by two men carrying his luggage, before being driven away.

High-profile backers including the Ukip leader Gerard Batten, Dutch opposition leader Geert Wilders and the former Breitbart London editor Raheem Kassam hailed the verdict as a victory for “freedom of speech”.

But judges did not say Robinson had not committed contempt of court, and accused him of delaying the appeals “for tactical reasons and collateral advantage”.

They dismissed calls to quash findings that he committed contempt at Canterbury Crown Court in May 2017, saying criticism by Robinson’s legal team “had no substance”.

Robinson was handed a three-month suspended sentence for trying to film defendants inside the court during jury deliberations, after being told to stop and warned filming was against the law.

But Lord Burnett, Mr Justice Turner and Mrs Justice McGowan found that procedural failings by a judge who later jailed Robinson for 13 months at Leeds Crown Court “gave rise to unfairness” and meant proceedings were “fundamentally flawed”.

Robinson was arrested on 25 May after broadcasting a Facebook Live video that broke a blanket reporting restriction on an ongoing set of trials, and jailed hours later.

The Court of Appeal previously heard that footage of Robinson discussing the ongoing case caused jury deliberations to be paused, sparking an attempt by defence lawyers to have the case dismissed.

Judges found that while Geoffrey Marson QC was right to bring Robinson before him to have the video deleted and protect jury deliberations, the case was dealt with too fast and did not follow criminal procedure rules.

“There was no clarity about what parts of the video were relied upon as amounting to contempt, what parts the appellant accepted through his counsel amounted to contempt and for what conduct he was sentenced,” the judgment said.

“Whilst the judge was entitled to deal with the contempt himself, the urgency went out of the matter when the appellant agreed to take down the video from Facebook. There should have been an adjournment to enable the particulars of contempt to be properly formulated and for a hearing at a more measured pace, as had happened in Canterbury.”

They ordered the matter to be heard again at the Old Bailey “as soon as reasonably possible”, and bailed Robinson on the condition he attends the new hearing and does not go within 400m of Leeds Crown Court. More here.