Then, in May and June 2015, the first publicly known large-scale disinformation operation, dubbed “Saudi Cables,” tested an innovative tactic: hacking a target, exfiltrating compromising material (kompromat), setting up a dedicated leak website under false flag, and then passing files to Wikileaks for laundering and wide distribution.9 Between June 2015 and November 2016, at least six front organizations sprung up as outlets for compromised files by GRU: Yemen Cyber Army, Cyber Berkut, Guccifer 2.0, DC Leaks, Fancy Bears Hack Team, and @ANPoland.
Finally, in past year, the timeline of US-election operations began to align. In early March, GRU began to train its well-established, semi-automated targeting tools from worldwide military and diplomatic targets to US political targets. Between 10 March and 7 April, GRU targeted at least 109 Clinton campaign staffers with 214 individual phishing emails (with 8 more attempts on 12 and 13 May). 36 times Clinton staffers clicked a malicious link (the success rate of actually breaching the account after a victim clicked this link is 1-in-7). Russian intelligence targeted Jake Sullivan in at least 14 different attempts beginning on 19 March, each time with a different malicious link against two of his email addresses. GRU targeted Hillary Clinton’s personal email account at least two times in March, but the available data show that she did not fall for the password reset trick. The military intelligence agency also targeted DNC staffers with 16 emails between 15 March and 11 April, and 3 DNC staffers were tricked into clicking the treacherous “reset password” button on 6 April 2016.
Passed to BackChannels in the way of all free press, the Senate report retells not only the story of Russian infiltration of the Democratic National Committee’s computers and subsequent access to internal exchanges in e-mail, it touches on the history, scope, and techniques of KGB-style methods involved.
Mr. Barsamian might enjoy tracing back Moscow’s role in the engineering of the profitable business that has been made of the Middle East Conflict and its efforts to sustain feudal political absolutism throughout the region.
Most Americans — most of the international public — has never heard of “active measures” and “framing” as employed by Imperial, Soviet, and today post-Soviet Moscow, but it may help improve qualities of living worldwide — and help to preserve our ecosystem — if environmental and social progressives were to take stock of Moscow’s autocratic-totalitarian methods proven, so far, consistent across regimes and their revolutions.
BackChannels regards itself as “progressive” but never “those progressives”. It endorses a fuzzy “Qualities of Living” concept, believes in the husbanding of the earth, counsels resistance to extremism, Far Left and Far Right and Other, and suggests always looking at presentations of problems twice.
Wikipedia also supports a page on “Active Measures”, and included on it is this observation:
“According to Stanislav Lunev, GRU alone spent more than $1 billion for the peace movements against the Vietnam War, which was a “hugely successful campaign and well worth the cost”.[3] Lunev claimed that “the GRU and the KGB helped to fund just about every antiwar movement and organization in America and abroad”.
I was young for the Vietnam War and on the draft rolls for just one college semester before Nixon brought to a close America’s role in the tragedy, but it’s easy to recall the “Mobilization Against the War”, the “kids” dressed up in beads and fatigues, in essence the alternative culture of the Baby Boom generation, so here decades later and learning of Moscow’s cynical application of plain old money in producing that zeitgeist comes as a surprise. Of course, it comes as no surprise that much of the more truly revolutionary and independent Left took note of Moscow’s tanks on the streets of foreign capitals (ref., as noted above, Wikipedia’s recounting of the history of the World Peace Council).
As regards the Middle East Conflict as a pretty good business for Palestinian leaders (Arafat and Abbas: multi-millionaires; Haniyeh and Mashaal: billionaires) but not for Palestinians, there’s much data online regarding corruption in the PLO/PA camp and plain exploitation by Hamas. Whether made rich by political corruption or bald crime and political repression, the basis for the “political absolutism” may be linked to the sustained feudal character of the societies involved and the related “malignant narcissism” of their leaders.
Historically, Moscow has devoted itself to managing political perception domestically (thank George Orwell for the parables) and producing political influence in its target states. The depth of the totalitarianism is what strikes us, but other aspects of the state’s diplomacy seem within bounds until one starts looking into 20th Century intellectual and political history.
Today, “Moscow” represents the ultra-nationalist neo-imperial version of KGB-style political expression. It loves conservatives! And does so because it may helped create the same using the same methods with the addition of the possible manipulation of “Allahu Akbar Attacks”, for each one of those has induced a greater patriotic nationalist response!
I hedge but a little to leave it to others to connect a few more dots.
Why conservatives?
Feudalism.
The divisions formed by the urging to demonize one’s opponents and idolize one’s hero conforms exactly to the medieval mode (and for my conservative readers, our impression of Muhammad’s medieval Islam) encouraged by President Putin’s architecture of power in Moscow.
Where Trump may do no wrong and the “Libtard” Left and Far Left have nothing to offer beyond their cries of outrage (over every little thing!) — and Trump, his plutocratic business class, and the host of “Right Wing Nuts” and, now, “Alt-Right” (White Supremacists) may do nothing good for the country — we may have a “Brown” vs “Red-Green” national politics bent out of shape by foreign influence and manipulation or simple contagion.
The failing @nytimes writes total fiction concerning me. They have gotten it wrong for two years, and now are making up stories & sources!
Not only has President Trump today a critical issue continuing to develop over Credibility, Integrity, and Trust (CIT), but his followers do as well.
For the term “lamestream media” (Red State has done the etymology) to pervert to a general smear employed by Far Right media to throw doubt on traditionally highest integrity reporting is one thing: however, to have then convinced a large portion of the American population that it cannot generally trust reportage in The New York Times (or Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, etc.), that is quite another — and pretty much what Moscow would enjoy if it could have only centrally controlled the process of confusing and obliterating the critical reading and reasoning facility of so many American minds.
On that, BackChannels repeats but a little differently with the employment of the passive voice: it may have been known that every “Allahu Akbar Attack” would induce a patriotic nationalist response!
Add the reaction to the vaunted threat posed by refugees from Muslim-majority states, especially Syria, and what illness do Moscow’s target states develop?
Xenophobia!
(Regarding Assad’s indirect engineering and incubation of ISIL as an ideal political tool — a goad for blackmailing the west; a useful foil for demonstrating Moscow’s latest military technology — Moscow’s defense sales have risen on such demonstrations; and in the end the best of enemies prepared for vanquishing — how glorious!): https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/09/syria-assad-isil-background/)
Yo, bro’! Get the picture as President Putin’s Moscow might wish you to get it, albeit without knowing quite so much?
Marine Le Pen appears to represent the French national soul — but with a crooked grin or mouth; President Trump’s own surreal first week and the start of another needs no rehashing here; Viktor Orban has fashioned himself as another palace-building, well palace refurbishing, autocrat; and Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s political repression and Islamist expression have ditched EU accession and imperiled the NATO arrangement in Turkey.
At 6:25 p.m. on Jan. 2, Nick Kouvalis sent out a tweet suggesting that the Canadian government was, among other things, directly funding known terrorist groups. Kouvalis, who is campaign manager of Conservative leadership candidate Kellie Leitch, has a history of posting provocative, absurd and often completely false information. He does so, he says, “to make the left go nuts.”
According to polls conducted by GLOBSEC Trends, about half the populations of these three countries see their country’s position in Europe as something in between the East and the West, with almost half of their citizens preferring “neutrality” to any polar adherence. In effort to divide the societies further, these already doubtful segments of the population are being carefully targeted by hostile disinformation operations. If we take into account the actions of political leaders, which Lenin would call “useful idiots”, the impact is already measurable.
“These leaks are obviously fake,” said President Putin, but then he was to follow with this assertion: “He was just a businessman, one of America’s wealthy men. Does anybody really think that our intelligence services chase every American billionaire?”
Who said anything about “every American billionaire”?
In this next 10-minute or so video, Samantha Power offers some useful advice:
Posted to YouTube by PBS NewsHour, January 17, 2017.
Perhaps BackChannels is not to be trusted . . . well, there’s all of this (and much, much more) for obtaining background on today’s immediate “east-west” politics: “The Russian Section” (of the BC library). For a primer on the cynicism now attaching to Putin’s Moscow enterprise, readers may shuttle over to “Moscow’s Rules“, a primer.
Senior Justice Writer for The New York Daily News has had the following posted to his Facebook page since January 11, 2017:
I want you to view this video from 4 years ago in 2013 in light of recent events.
In it, Trump calmly, cooly, and confidently states that he has a relationship with Vladimir Putin. Then, it gets very weird. Trump then confidently states that Putin is following his every move, was likely even interested in the conversation they were having, and would likely be watching it later.
How did Trump know all of that?
See, this was off of the campaign trail, long before Trump announced his intentions to run. This was before he felt the pressure to say 6 different times “I don’t know Putin” and “I don’t know anything about Putin.”
This seems to be a clearer version of the truth. What’s going on here?
Posted by Shaun King on Wednesday, January 11, 2017
A Facebook friend on the Traditional Far Left — the Aesthetic Left, the Left of guitar players and poets and magical brownies — shared with me this morning the World News Daily piece. The look-up that followed brought a host of similar put-ups from the alley off the mainstream of everything. BackChannels let the matter drop for a few hours — and then thought to look again for the shocker to emerge in the staid BBC or ever respectable Reuters — and so far, so good: the “news” shared to BackChannels this morning by the perhaps Naive Aesthetic Left appears a true paste-up.
“There is a mass of evidence about the strategic cooperation of the Kremlin and ‘the Islamic State,’ about the conscious dispatch by the FSB of Caucasus militants into its ranks, about the use by Moscow of terrorists as an instrument for weakening and destroying the West” and also about Putin’s use of terrorism to build his increasingly vicious state at home.
BackChannels 