29 Thursday Jun 2017
Tags
21st Century Feudalism, 21st Century Neo-Feudalism, Atlantic Council, disinformation, Framing, information warfare, KGB methods, Moscow, Russia, Soviet / post-Soviet politics
How Putin’s Moscow and its information warfare work.
Related on BackChannels: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/23/moscows-rules-a-module/
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17 Wednesday May 2017
The above were posted today, May 17, 2017, on YouTube. The “feed” from Ukraine’s war with Russia is continuous, but all seems to quiet at the desktop as the drama becomes familiar and outside anger dissipates into other breaking news.
https://www.unian.info/war/1926419-ato-hq-russian-proxies-attack-ukraine-43-times-in-last-day.html – 5/17/2017
http://uaposition.com/latest-news/500-homes-avdiyivka-damaged-militants-years-start/ – 5/17/2017
http://uaposition.com/latest-news/ukraine-adds-more-russian-crimean-transport-enterprises-sanction-list/ – 5/17/2017
Every hour, all 24, every day, the global public may not see the “blast and battle” taking place in Crimea, but what is happening appears in the government’s response to exigencies as well as reports from the front lines.
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/15/ukraine-conflict-resources-short-list/
BackChannels hopes it will “scrape” less and interview now and then as the post-Cold War conflicts move through time and, God willing, resolve against the feudal past and for the more favorable modern democratic future with the strength to support rule of law in service to liberal ideals.
For this post, the blog may only encourage looking at the struggle of a state leaning westward and putting distance between itself and a demonstratively barbaric, corrupt, criminal, cruel, disingenuous, and kleptocratic feudal society that adorns itself on the spoils of malign narcissistic thieving under the guise of “protection”.
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17 Wednesday May 2017
Posted in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Journalism
Tags
freedom of speech, information warfare, Latin America, media, political interference in speech, press freedom, South America, state-controlled media
After only a few minutes at the podium, however, the transmission of his speech was interrupted without warning.1 President Maduro had ordered a blanket broadcast across all radio and television stations–what is known in Spanish as a cadena nacional. These presidential broadcasts resemble a US Oval Office address in style, but in Venezuela the law obliges both state‑owned and private media to carry the transmissions, which have lasted as long as eight hours. When Maduro invoked this law to interrupt Torrealba’s speech, Venezuelans had no choice but to listen to Maduro or simply switch off their TVs and radios.
Source: Center for International Media Assistance – 5/15/2017
30 Thursday Mar 2017
Tags
Cold War history, information warfare, intelligence history, modern spychology, Putin's Russia, Russian Active Measures, Soviet post-Soviet
Publisher: President Trump Speeches & Press Co., – 3/30/2017
C-Span source: https://www.c-span.org/video/?426227-1/senate-intelligence-panel-warned-russians-play-sides (Morning Session) Afternoon Session as recorded at this posting: https://www.c-span.org/video/?426227-101/former-nsa-director-testifies-russian-interference-capabilities&vod
https://conflict-backchannels.com/library/russian-section/
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/23/moscows-rules-a-module/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Measures_Working_Group
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Peace_Council
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11 Wednesday Jan 2017
Tags
disinformation, FSB, information warfare, KGB, KGB methods, Kompromat, political dirty tricks, Putin, scandal, Trump, Trump's Russian Phantoms
A spokesman for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, on Wednesday denied Russia has collected compromising information on Trump and dismissed news reports as a “complete fabrication and utter nonsense”. Dmitry Peskov insisted that the Kremlin “does not engage in collecting compromising material”.
In the material quoted, the URL goes directly to The Guardian article in which both denials appeared.
Well, here’s a still recent header that contradicts the point: “Foes of Russia Say Child Pornography Is Planted to Ruin Them” (The New York Times, December 9, 2016).
“The whole affair is Kafkaesque,” Mr. Bukovsky said in an interview. “You not only have to prove you are not guilty but that you are innocent.” He insisted that he was the victim of a new and particularly noxious form of an old K.G.B. dirty trick known as kompromat, the fabrication and planting of compromising or illegal material.
Old-style kompromat featured doctored photographs, planted drugs, grainy videos of liaisons with prostitutes hired by the K.G.B., and a wide range of other primitive entrapment techniques.
In Reference, the RAND article, “Beyond the Headlines: RAND’s Christopher Paul Discusses the Russian ‘Firehose of Falsehood'”, December 13, 2017, contains a summary of KGB/(FSB) methods in Russia’s massive perversion of information intended to scramble reasoning and politically divide and diminish political coherence in the EU and NATO states.
Incidentally, BackChannel’s sources have suggested the Kremlin employs more than 800,000 Russians in its Information Warfare capacity. What that may mean for those invested in integrity and truth-telling worldwide, and whether for business, government, or personal conscience, is that Russia maintains a veritable army of professed liars whose paid mission is to confuse, disinform, and disrupt the processes of reason itself in each mind across hundreds of millions of souls.
For near corroboration of the above-cited figure, BackChannels directs the reader to Owen Matthews article in Politico: “Vladimir Putin resurrects the KGB” (September 28, 2016).
In the world in which the latest Trump scandal is unfolding, there appears both a natural limit to what the public may know with certainty and a stranger-than-fiction aspect that fairly begs credulity. Nonetheless: as regards President Elect Trump, the American electorate certainly heard the ” . . . grab them by the pussy” comment released as an information grenade only weeks before the general election, and it has by now accumulated awareness of the President’s character in business in ways possibly unsurpassed in history. If ever an American President were examined like an organism, this one has been diced, sliced, smeared, and laid out on the slide bed of the highest resolution political microscope ever imagined.
The multiple images of damage — offhand remarks; a relationship with the world’s foremost political consultant to dictatorships (Paul Manafort); family relationships that go back to the Soviet Era and include fluency in Russian — then too, the family is immensely gifted with multilingual talent; possible Russian real estate interests as a matter of “business empire” deeply invested in real estate development — may continue to accumulate even though the truth remains sketchy — or held close by governments plunged into a different kind of war.
Trump’s “Russian Phantoms” — Manafort, Manafort-Kilimnik (relationship), Millian and any related business that has or may come to light — have already dogged the incoming Administration, and more may come to light as the Inauguration approaches.
Searches applied while developing this post: “KGB, Kompromat”; “Russian Influence Operations”; “Trump, Compromised”; “Trump, Russian Fluency”; “Trump Family, Russian Fluency”.
Bilingual Kidspot. “President Donald Trump and his Multilingual Family.” November 9, 2016.
“The ultimate goal of Kremlin hostile influence and disinformation operations is to weaken its opponents’ will to resist,” Jakub Janda, deputy director of nonpartisan think tank European Values, explained in an email from Prague. “Simply to manipulate the West, its politicians and its societies to stop resisting invasions of the Russian Federation to foreign countries.
In Europe, the East StratCom Task Force issues a “Disinformation Review” every week, giving a round-up of pro-Kremlin disinformation in Europe and beyond.
In its most lurid allegation, the report alleges that Trump defiled a hotel suite in which the Obamas had stayed during a Moscow visit. Trump allegedly brought prostitutes to the Ritz Carlton suite, bugged by the FSB, the KGB’s successor. There, Trump allegedly ordered the prostitutes to perform “golden showers” in front of him.
“The whole affair is Kafkaesque,” Mr. Bukovsky said in an interview. “You not only have to prove you are not guilty but that you are innocent.” He insisted that he was the victim of a new and particularly noxious form of an old K.G.B. dirty trick known as kompromat, the fabrication and planting of compromising or illegal material.
Old-style kompromat featured doctored photographs, planted drugs, grainy videos of liaisons with prostitutes hired by the K.G.B., and a wide range of other primitive entrapment techniques.
Matthews, Owen. “Vladimir Putin resurrects the KGB.” Politico, September 28, 2016.
RAND Corporation. “Information Operations” & “Beyond the Headlines: RAND’s Christopher Paul Discusses the Russian ‘Firehose of Falsehood'”, December 13, 2017.
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04 Wednesday Jan 2017
Source of my aggravation:
https://capx.co/the-european-union-is-heading-for-the-dustbin-of-history-2016/
Is it really?
The contemptuous tone and upside-down spin says something about the writer or about ignorance as regards the Moscow-Tehran nexus in the development of the conflict managed by Damascus. Those who know the truth — and thank God it’s not myself along! — know that Assad had to work to create “The Terrorists” with which to blackmail and goad the west, and the “producers” would have known that every “Allahu Akbar Attack” would promote a reflexive response (it’s a term of art) in patriotic nationalist sentiment.
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/09/syria-assad-isil-background/
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/02/syria-assad-vs-the-terrorists-how-isis-defends-assad/
The eight-year-long show of weakness on Washington’s part with regard to Syria and Ukraine and other matters should tell the European Union (and NATO) that it’s not time to fail but rather to get it together to confront the waves of disinformation, propaganda, and spin coming off a kind of “active measures” front.
“Netizens” around the world will have to swim through an ocean of assumptive remarks, confusion, disinformation, and plain old ugly propaganda before picking up the intellectual cudgels themselves and checking claims and narratives for themselves.
http://www.politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-resurrects-the-kgb-moscow-security/ – 9/30/2016.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/putins-real-long-game-214589 – 1/1/2017
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03 Tuesday Jan 2017
Tags
attitude-belief, critical thinking, evil, independent research, information warfare, totalitarianism
Whatever the motivation, the demonizing of Obama formed a part of the ugly polarizing of American politics and, perhaps, clouded the ability of most Americans to develop a more data-rich and reasoned analysis of states of affairs. “Framing” serves the passions, but it’s framing and practically by definition skewed from the surface and into the mix that sustains what we call “attitudes” — a collection of beliefs, their primacy and valence (good thing / bad thing, how much so?) that feed up to our conclusions. As we accumulate information, both beliefs and attitudes may be adjusted to suit what we also believe to be — and may prod and test ourselves — valid and reliable new data.
https://conflict-backchannels.com/category/regions/eurasia/russia/
Putin’s Administration today represents a complete KGB revanche but with the banner of “State Capitalism” in place of “Communism” and in place of socialist equality a new ultra-nationalist and neo-imperial ambition for dominating and looting others under the cover of “protection”.
Perhaps up to this now tense time in history — see “Cold War? Cold Struggle” — the western public, by and large, has been spared the necessity of revisiting history lessons, learning about state-sponsored evil (start that with state-controlled press), and summoning the energy to apply research and critical thinking skills to a thorough evaluation of information for its integrity in the delivery of both factual data and in reasoning.
BackChannels has worked for some time now collecting, analyzing, compressing, and telegraphing observations in the region of foreign affairs. It knows it may not surprise the specialists, those hands who have embraced an appropriate enthusiasm in their teen years, picked up one or more languages, majored in a relevant field, and sallied forth for decades as policy makers and scholars. However, that community forms a lofty and healthy choir. What about those becoming involved in such events as the Syrian Conflict and Tragedy or the “Euromaidan” and the effort to produce a modern democracy in Ukraine? For that, BackChannels pieces provide numerous portals into related fields and topics.
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02 Monday Jan 2017
Tags
democracy, information warfare, Moscow, political absolutism, political infiltration, Putin, Russia, sophistry, totalitarianism
What both administrations fail to realize is that the West is already at war, whether it wants to be or not. It may not be a war we recognize, but it is a war. This war seeks, at home and abroad, to erode our values, our democracy, and our institutional strength; to dilute our ability to sort fact from fiction, or moral right from wrong; and to convince us to make decisions against our own best interests.
Those on the Russian frontier, like my friends from Ukraine and Estonia, have already seen the Kremlin’s new toolkit at work.
Reading highly recommended: Putin’s Real Long Game – POLITICO Magazine – 1/2/2017.
4. Don’t listen to “realists.” Self-described “realists” have suggested that Russia be given a free hand in the former Soviet republics in return for cooperation on issues that are vital to U.S. and Western security. This call to make a “deal,” in addition to its blatant immorality, ignores the fact that it makes sense to reach an understanding only with those who will keep their side of the bargain. The fact that the Russians are seeking to deny the former Soviet republics their rights as sovereign nations is all the indication one needs that an unenforceable “gentleman’s agreement” to cooperate with the West will be violated the minute it ceases to be to Russia’s advantage. The rejection of a moral framework for relations, meanwhile, will set the stage and help provide the justification for new and more outrageous Russian demands in the future.
Satter, David. “Obama and Russia.” Forbes, November 24, 2008.
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