Focused Read in 3 minutes,
4-5 minutes if the hit the link and read the article in full
📎 Note: Clint Watts expertise in cyber attacks includes, but is not limited to, "Policy, Russia / Disinformation / Propaganda / Democracy Promotion"
"So What Did We Learn?
Looking Back on Four Years of Russia’s Cyber-Enabled “Active
Measures
By Clint Watts
Americans continue to investigate, deliberate, and wallow in the aftermath of
Russia’s rebirth of “Active Measures” designed to defeat their adversaries through the “force of politics rather than the politics of force.”
Kremlin interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election represents
not only the greatest “Active Measures” success in Russian history
but the swiftest and most pervasive influence effort in world history.
Never has a country, in such a short period of time, disrupted the international order through the use of information as quickly and with such sustained effect as Russia has in the last four years.
Russia achieved this victory by investing in capabilities where its adversaries have vulnerabilities — cyberspace and social media.
... In the four years since I encountered and then monitored Russia “Active Measures” rebirth, there have been four phases to their operations.
The phases layer one on top of each other, rather than successively, with each blending into the other as the Kremlin’s military, diplomacy, intelligence, and information arms pursue complementary tasks mutually supporting each other.
➡ Phase 0: Capability Development (Jan 2014 – Fall 2014)
I encountered Russia’s “Active Measures” reboot in roughly January of 2014 when studying and writing on the self-proclaimed Islamic State’s rise in Syria and Iraq.
... a growing storm of hecklers appearing as anonymous accounts or bogus Western personas engaged Russia’s political opponents pushing foreign policy themes far and wide.
Russia’s interests in Syria and Ukraine appeared prominently in the links and feeds of these trolling accounts,
but their content shares also included Kremlin talking points for conflicts around the globe.
The hackers, honeypots, and hecklers practiced their craft, honed their techniques to include the employment of social bots, and learned from their mistakes.
Finally, a lesser discussed but important capability gained by the Kremlin during this time was information monitoring on Russians domestically..."
➡ Phase 1: Infiltrate Audiences (Fall 2014 – Summer 2015)
Sometime in 2014, the Kremlin realized the success of their new information warfare approaches.
Senior Russian leaders openly boasted at times of their new strategic focus on information warfare and their operations began extending beyond Syria and Ukraine.
... The social media troll army pushed manipulated truths and falsehoods into a wide range of audiences, infiltrating feeds with information they wanted and discussing divisive narratives.
... But in American social media, the Kremlin’s trolls gained the most ground and the greatest resonance through amplification of social issues of race, immigration, and anti-government conspiracies.
➡ Phase 2: Influence Audiences (Fall 2015 – Election Day 2016)
Until the fall of 2015, the Kremlin’s social media influence largely mirrored efforts one might witness with any political campaign. What set Russia apart and provided them unparalleled success was their employment of hacking to power influence. Beginning in the late summer and early fall of 2015 and continuing up to election day,
Russia’s hackers...undertook a targeted, widespread hacking campaign against American political, military, media, and academic targets seeking compromising information that could be used not strictly for its intelligence value but also as nuclear fuel for information warfare.
Hackers gained access to sensitive documents, emails, and archives while their influence efforts shifted from focusing predominately on social issues to a dedicated push into U.S. political discussions.
The Kremlin’s overt outlets, “gray” fringe outlets, and covert social media personas began the first of two sets of political narratives.
Narrative set one began with concerted anti-Clinton messages asserting a wide range of truths, manipulated truths, and falsehoods seeking to sour support for the candidate.
Support for Donald Trump became the second key theme of Russia’s cyber-enabled “Active Measures,” one that grew rapidly and significantly as the Trump campaign gained followers and steam.
The third narrative sought to drive a wedge amongst Trump’s democratic opposition by asserting that the Democratic National Committee never gave Bernie Sanders a legitimate shot to win the nomination.
The final theme, and the most minor of the election set, pushed support for Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
... The second political narrative set pursued by the Kremlin suggests they, like most of America’s mainstream media, thought Trump would lose on Election Day.
Heading into the final months before the election, the Kremlin shifted from strictly political narratives attacking or promoting candidates to attacking the integrity of elections and democracy itself.
... the Kremlin pushed two additional themes alleging widespread voter fraud and election rigging. These final two themes sought not to win the election, but undermine American faith in institutions and processes after Election Day.
➡ Phase 3: Leak Kompromat and Power Narratives (Fall 2015 – Election Day 2016)
The Kremlin’s final phase demonstrated they were willing and able to do what other social media influencers would or could not:
use publicly released kompromat to drive divisive narratives.
Throughout the summer of 2016, via third-party websites, article submissions, and social media amplification, Russia’s “Active Measures” used hacked materials to super-charge their narratives in mainstream media and American political party discussions.
Stolen information provided the nuclear fuel for the Kremlin’s information warfare arming click-bait websites, conspiracy theorists, political opportunists, and mainstream media discussions with corrosive, divisive narratives or timely distractions from more relevant political discussions.
Wikileaks and DC Leaks posted and hosted compromising information in drips and drabs derailing policy debates that not only harmed one candidate more than another, but cemented wedges inside the U.S. electorate that perpetuate today.
Finally, Russia’s cyber actors initiated a late hacking campaign against U.S. electoral systems (October 2016) to further power their second narrative set and undermine American confidence in democratic institutions. Putin’s plan did not seek to change the vote, but to undermine it, and strike a lasting blow against democracy post-election regardless of the victor.
The Two U.S. Strategic Intelligence Failures on Russia’s Cyber-enabled “Active Measures”
America’s intelligence agencies have taken a beating for not detecting, anticipating, and fending off Russia’s “Active Measures.” They did not entirely miss the Russian information attack, but they were slow to react, and thus unsure how to prevent it, or counter it. This miss comes from two intelligence failures.
The first failure was hubris.
The signs were there, and America knew what the Russians were up to, but no one in the intelligence community, it appears, thought the Kremlin would deploy their information campaign on the United States.
... The second failure was imagination.
The United States did not recognize how hacked information, on a wide scale, would be used to power influence.
... Americans should refrain from being too harsh on the U.S. government’s late response to Russian meddling.
Foreign policy discussions in 2016 were dominated and distracted by the immediate need to stop Islamic State attacks in the West, leaving little time for preempting the creeping rise of Russia’s Active Measures into America. I watched the rise of Kremlin trolls for some time and did not believe until mid-2015 that Americans would be influenced so sharply by these techniques.
Structurally, the United States, then and now, remains highly vulnerable to information attacks via social media.
Who in the U.S. government has the mandate to protect Americans from cyber-enabled influence?
The FBI pursued its investigations as designed. The CIA conducted foreign intelligence, but does not assess actions happening in America. The military remains deliberately barred from influence operations related to the U.S. homeland. The Department of Homeland Security’s mandate includes many things, but not an assignment to defend American minds from foreign manipulation.
Defending America against Russian “Active Measures” or any hostile foreign influence requires a task force approach, not a whole of government bureaucratic quagmire.
More than a year after Russia’s information attack on America though, the U.S. continues to whine about Kremlin meddling at home and abroad
without putting forth any strategy to adequately counter it.
It is impossible to know who in the U.S. government is in charge of counter influence, when no one is certain what the plan is.
... I estimate the decision point, from a strategic perspective, for Putin’s plan to mess with the 2016 presidential election came in the summer of 2015.
Russia’s hacking decision demonstrated execution of a planned campaign, the pursuit of defined goals, and the level of Kremlin commitment to achieving its foreign policy goals vis-à-vis other actions.
... Looking back, hacking to influence on behalf of a candidate likely requires a year’s lead time; hacking to advance a general conspiracy, possibly only two to three months.
The Kremlin’s playbook is in the wild, and authoritarians around the world have begun adopting their techniques in pursuit of domestic and foreign audience manipulation.
The world, and particularly the West, must move past the presidential election of 2016, learn from its mistakes, and begin anticipating where the Kremlin will move next. No one has successfully countered Russia’s approach yet, and Putin has no reason to stop...
You can read more here
( You can read more about Watts here )
Focused Thought in 30 seconds
( Courtesy of Courtesy of @sammypolsen12 over on Twitter!)
Focused Action in 30 seconds
You can share the Women's March Tweet here
.
.
.
→ Direct sources for Democrats:
* ( Personal favored and most informative follows are shared here with the understanding that readers will always apply their own critical thinking to any information provided anywhere by anyone. #StrongerTogether does not share sources of information lightly but -- no one is perfect! -- so always #DistrustAndVerify I am using a star rating that is strictly based on my situational experience with the work of the media personality specifically in relation to issues of interest to me. )
The Democratic Party Website
Also
C-SPAN (a good place for speeches & hearings direct source (s))
→ Fact checking organizations courtesy of the Society of Professional Journalists
in alphabetical order...
→ Some of my favorite, most informative
follows on Twitter include:
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ US Intelligence | Author | Navy Senior Chief | NBC/MSNBC
⭐⭐⭐ Federal Government Operations | Vanity Fair | Newsweek | MSNBC Contributor | Author
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Voting Rights/Voter Suppression | Author | Mother Jones
→ Some of the most credible media -- at the moment:
📰📰📰 Mother Jones
→ Some of the most credible Talking Heads -- at the moment -- and their Twitter handles:
( ⬆⬆⬆ Wallace is new to the job but for right now
her work on Trump GOP has been credible, IMO)
...for Networking for Democrats today!
.
.
.
(Linked) "...is our 2016 platform...a declaration of how we plan to move America forward. Democrats believe that cooperation is better than conflict, unity is better than division, empowerment is better than resentment, and bridges are better than walls.
It’s a simple but powerful idea: We are stronger together."
( #its2018now )
In honor of women leading the American Resistance ~
" ... Susan, a Quaker, came from a background where girls were valued and educated just as Quaker boys were, but Susan began to see the real world when she became a teacher and was routinely paid about one-quarter of the salary she would have received if she had been a man.
Elizabeth was from a well-to-do family where boys were favored. Elizabeth married and began having children ... At that time, women had little opportunity to control whether or not they became pregnant, and it frequently happened that just as Elizabeth was about to attend a new round of meetings or take on a new push for voting rights, she would find herself pregnant and more or less homebound again. Despite this, Elizabeth attended everything she could and when she was needed at home, she served their team effort by writing speeches that Susan could use at conventions or on the road. ... "
You can read more about this power friendship here
*
Curated by Gail Mountain, with occasional personal commentary, Network For #StrongerTogether ! is not affiliated with The Democratic Party in any capacity. This is an independent blog and the hope is you will, at a glance, learn more about the Party and you will, with a click or two, also take action on its behalf as it is provided!
( You can also find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/GKMTNtwits )
*
See the League of Women Voters website:
Vote411 here
Thank you for focusing!
g., aka Focused Democrat
✊ Resisting "Fake News"
No comments:
Post a Comment