{"id":1209,"date":"2016-09-29T15:31:51","date_gmt":"2016-09-29T15:31:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/dcss\/?p=1209"},"modified":"2016-09-29T15:31:51","modified_gmt":"2016-09-29T15:31:51","slug":"russia-steps-up-trolling-attacks-on-the-west-u-s-intel-report-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/dcss\/2016\/09\/29\/russia-steps-up-trolling-attacks-on-the-west-u-s-intel-report-finds\/","title":{"rendered":"RUSSIA STEPS UP TROLLING ATTACKS ON THE WEST, U.S. INTEL REPORT FINDS"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"%ce%b9%ce%bd%cf%84%ce%b5%ce%bb-%ce%b5%ce%b3%ce%b3%cf%81%ce%b1%cf%86%ce%bf\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Sourced : Yahoo News<\/p>\n

By : Michael Isikoff<\/p>\n

Chief Investigative Correspondent<\/p>\n

A new U.S. intelligence report says the Russian government is conducting a wide-ranging and \u201copportunistic\u201d campaign to expand its political influence in Europe by deploying Internet \u201ctrolls and other cyber actors\u201d to challenge pro-Western journalists and spread pro-Kremlin messages in social media forums.<\/p>\n

Yahoo News obtained a declassified summary of the report, which also describes the role of two state-owned media outlets, RT and Sputnik, in what some experts say is an increasingly aggressive \u201cinformation warfare\u201d campaign. According to the report, the outlets promote Russia\u2019s political aims with programming targeted to \u201cactivist\u201d audiences including \u201cfar-right and far-left elements of European society.\u201d It adds that the RT channel gives \u201cdisproportionate coverage and airtime to the European Parliament\u2019s more extreme factions.\u201d<\/p>\n

The report, by the office of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, was originally requested by congressional intelligence committees late last year. The panels also asked for a separate report on Russia\u2019s use of political assassination. Classified versions of both documents were delivered by Clapper\u2019s office to Capitol Hill in July.<\/p>\n

The decision to declassify brief excerpts from the first report coincides with recent disclosures about suspected Russian cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee and other political groups. Many in the U.S. intelligence community believe that indicates Russia has expanded its cyberwar and disinformation efforts to the United States. \u201cThis is the 21st century version of \u2018active measures,\u2019\u201d said Heather Conley, director of the Russia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a reference to the Cold War term for the Soviet Union\u2019s efforts to manipulate Western opinion by spreading false information, such as the claim that U.S. scientists had manufactured the AIDS virus as part of a biological weapons project at Fort Detrick, Md.<\/p>\n

Conley added that the use of \u201cinformation warfare\u201d techniques to pursue political goals has now been incorporated into official Russian military doctrine. The goal, she said, is not \u201cthe annihilation\u201d of the country\u2019s enemies, but to \u201cweaken them from within\u201d by \u201ckeeping everybody off balance\u201d and \u201csowing doubt\u201d about their political leaders and institutions. A report by Conley describing this effort is due to be released by CSIS next month.<\/p>\n

Russia\u2019s use of trolls on social media would appear to fit that pattern. A report in the Guardian last year identified a St. Petersburg office building where \u201chundreds of paid bloggers work around the clock\u201d to flood Internet sites and Western social media forums with posts praising Russian President Vladimir Putin and denouncing the \u201cdepravity and injustice\u201d of the West.<\/p>\n

Michael Weiss, editor of the Interpreter, an online publication that tracks the Russian media (and that is funded by Radio Free Europe\/Radio Liberty), said he was personally targeted by Russian trolls after he published an article exposing a frequent RT commentator on Germany as the editor of a neo-Nazi magazine. \u201cThey\u2019ve been on a campaign to destroy my career,\u201d said Weiss. He\u2019s found himself attacked on social media forums as a \u201cneocon Zionist propagandist,\u201d he said. A pro-Russian troll even dug into his wife\u2019s Facebook account to retrieve old photos, he said.<\/p>\n

Another tactic of the trolls is to inject blatantly false stories into the media, forcing public officials in Europe and the U.S. to respond, according to Weiss and other experts. A New York Times Sunday Magazine piece last year documented how Russian trolls based in the St. Petersburg office had swamped Twitter with hundreds of messages about an explosion at a Louisiana chemical plant that never took place, setting up dozens of fake accounts and doctoring screenshots from CNN and Louisiana TV stations to make the pseudo-event seem real. (The trolls even created a fake Wikipedia page about the supposed explosion, which in turn linked to a phony YouTube video.) Similar methods were used to spread false stories about an outbreak of Ebola in Atlanta, the Times account reported.<\/p>\n

The author of the Times article, Adrian Chen, now a writer for the New Yorker, recently said many of the Russian trolls he was tracking have begun tweeting favorably about Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

Although the activities of the Russian trolls have been aired in a handful of media accounts in recent years, the decision to include references to them in the declassified DNI summary appears to be part of a stepped-up effort by Washington to publicly combat Russian Internet efforts and cyberattacks. The full report covers a much broader subject: the scope of Russian influence operations throughout Europe and Central Asia, including the covert funding of political parties and nongovernmental organizations.<\/p>\n

\u201cMoscow has been opportunistic in its efforts to strengthen Russian influence in Europe and Eurasia by developing affiliations with and deepening financial or political connections to like-minded political parties and Non-governmental Organizations,\u201d according to a letter containing the declassified excerpts that was sent this week by Clapper\u2019s office to House Intelligence Committee Chair Rep. Devin Nunes and ranking minority member Rep. Adam Schiff.<\/p>\n

\u201cMoscow appears to use monetary support in combination with other tools of Russian statecraft, including propaganda in local media, direct lobbying by the Russian Government, economic pressure, and military intimidation,\u201d the letter states.<\/p>\n

The declassified excerpts don\u2019t include specific examples. But a separate report on the same subject earlier this year by the Congressional Research Service, prepared at the request of Rep. Chris Stewart, a Republican from Utah, cited as evidence Russian financial and political support for far-right, anti-immigrant European political parties, including the National Front in France and Jobbik in Hungary. The French National Front, which is headed by Marine Le Pen and which backed Russia\u2019s annexation of Crimea, has received a loan of 9 million euros from a Russian bank with close ties to Putin, the CRS report notes, and Jobbik\u2019s finances have been under investigation by the Hungarian Parliament amid allegations that it had received funding from Moscow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sourced : Yahoo News By : Michael Isikoff Chief Investigative Correspondent A new U.S. intelligence report says the Russian government is conducting a wide-ranging and \u201copportunistic\u201d campaign to expand its political influence in Europe by deploying Internet \u201ctrolls and other cyber actors\u201d to challenge pro-Western journalists and spread pro-Kremlin messages in social media forums. Yahoo… Continue reading RUSSIA STEPS UP TROLLING ATTACKS ON THE WEST, U.S. INTEL REPORT FINDS<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1210,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[996,995,997,999,27,998,1000,243],"class_list":["post-1209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-security-and-strategy","tag-center-for-strategic-and-international-studies-csis","tag-european-parliament","tag-national-intelligence","tag-rt","tag-russia","tag-russian-government","tag-sputnik","tag-united-states","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/dcss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/dcss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/dcss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/dcss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/dcss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1209"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/dcss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1211,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/dcss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209\/revisions\/1211"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/dcss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/dcss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/dcss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/dcss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}