A hacking and disinformation team meddling in elections
theguardian.comUS representatives and senators who spoke up against Israeli settlements tended to lose against opponents with AIPAC funding. It's been going on for decades.
What we now see is an evolution into social media.
Al Jazeera had prepared a story on the tentacles AIPAC had into US politics, but at the time Mohammed bin Salman was making serious noises about invading Qatar,one of the reasons being Al Jazeera's reportage.
The story was dropped and MbS was persuaded to back off.
Saudi Arabia put up a blockade (with an Arab coalition support) of Qatar for a number of reasons[1], one of which being Al Jazeera’s incendiary (in their opinion) coverage of sensitive topics within the Arab world during the Arab Spring. Saudi Arabia wanted the channel shut down. They never intended to invade and the biggest factor was Qatar’s relationship with Iran (Saudi Arabia’s arch rival). The link with AIPAC? Why would the Saudis, who have no formal diplomatic relations with Israel care? Sounds like a complete made up conspiracy theory.
Additionally, the blockade you speak of was set up in retaliation for Qatar refusing to make a sucker's solo investment in the floundering Kushner real estate debacle.
https://www.justsecurity.org/69094/timeline-on-jared-kushner...
Wrong. The lack of formal diplomatic relations means little. The Saudis became very friendly with Israel during the Trump administration.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/mideast/open-secret-saudi-arabi...
I don’t understand the link between AIPAC and MBS here. Why would MBS want to suppress a story on AIPAC’s influence on US politics?
"Given their expertise in subterfuge, it is perhaps surprising that Hanan and his colleagues allowed themselves to be exposed by undercover reporters."
Surprising, unless the guys are actually just good at lying to potential customers, to fleece them of as much $$ as possible. I'm not saying they don't use sock puppet social media accounts, etc. but really, how would any of their customers know if it was at all effective? They wouldn't. After the fact, if they won, they wouldn't know if this helped, and if they lost, it's not like they could sue in court, or even just complain loudly to trash this group's reputation.
It seems quite ripe for inflated claims and ineffective results. Of course, they might also be trying, or who knows maybe even succeeding, but it would be a lot simpler just to put up a show for your customer and collect the money.
The Venn diagram overlap between grifters, and mercenary hacker groups is very close to a single circle. Any group with slight competence will find their client an easier and more profitable target than their intended quarry. Do some bare-minimum intelligence work while simultaneously inflating the results with fabricated evidence.
I don't see how the realities of such an industry wouldn't be a race to the bottom
One of the tropes of spy novels is you can never trust a spy, and I think it'd be fair to say you can never trust a hacker or disinformation merchant either. Nevertheless, intelligence agencies and organized crime continues to exist, because the people employing said sources make their own risk assessments and incorporate that into the cost benefit analysis. And it appears that there is still at least some perceived benefit in trying to manipulate the outcomes of democracy on a grander scale than was previously achievable due to vulnerabilities of modern communication platforms.
A more interesting question is why haven't governments - or even the platforms themselves - worked hard to shut down these known vulnerabilities? Doesn't it undermine the trust of the users to know that there are professional organizations actively creating thousands of fake accounts that deliberately spread (at best) partisan propaganda and (at worst) outright disinformation? Doesn't it work against the lofty ideals of social media being a community space where real people can engage with one another? The fact the companies are so unresponsive to removing abusers shows their incentives are not aligned with those of their users.
Facebook, Twitter, etc remove coordinated influence campaigns like these all of the time. There is a headline in major publications almost every time and an article on their corporate blogs. What these political consulting companies do is not exactly illegal in countries with free speech which is why there isn’t as much governmental effort. The American governments argument for “conspiracy to defraud the United States” in the IRA case is tenuous and untested to say the least which is why they mostly focused on the fact that they used fullz to register PayPal accounts in the indictment.
1) well, they do remove some, and in order to not reveal how they identify them, they may not wish to talk all that much about it 2) it is baked into the model of free social media, not only that attention=advertising=money, but also that cost per user is very low (so they can keep the accounts free). If you add $1/user cost (to monitor with humans), for Facebook that would be billions more in cost. I don't know that a responsible social media company could be profitable; it may be that the very business model requires not policing it very well.
Another discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34803779
Better article than this.
The sad thing is we’re probably trivially close to the tech needed for direct democracy, but the powers that be use tech to confuse and supplant democratic institutions and propose their authoritarian rule.
I don't want direct democracy: the problem of voting shenanigans and corruption just expands from a known set of elected officials who vote on laws to...everyone. Aside from that, people in aggregate just aren't that bright: I don't want them making decisions much more substantial than what they'll have for dinner, much less voting on issues that affect me.
The argument that people aren't to be trusted with a more direct democracy always falls flat to me. The alternative is power concentrated to a few people which introduces a risk for developing a ruling class, an aristocracy, or plutocracy. Arguing against direct democracy feels elitist, like only certain people should be trusted with actual power.
The truth is half of the population is dumber than the average, but the other half is smarter than average. Groups of people are susceptible to bias just like individuals. At least when people vote we know they are considering their own interests.
Smart and dumb is the wrong way to think about it. The important thing is that people want different things, there are real conflicts of interest.
And moreover, we can't trust each other fully. We can try to aspire to it, but none of us can honestly say we just want what's best for everyone.
Just because someone is smarter than you by some measure, doesn't mean you're better off letting them rule you.
My comment on intelligence was directly in response to my parent comment's quote "Aside from that, people in aggregate just aren't that bright"
> We can try to aspire to it, but none of us can honestly say we just want what's best for everyone.
This is exactly why having anything approaching a ruling class is a large hazard to avoid. Intermediate steps between citizens voting and power being executed are an attack area for people with selfish interests to inject themselves.
I don’t want direct democracy deciding specific environmental regulations. Some things need to be done by appointed experts.
Yes it’s “elitist”, but it’s the equivalent of expecting someone qualified to perform a heart surgery rather than a rando off the street.
A "direct" democracy should be perfectly capable of calling in expert opinion, if they decide that a question isn't really political. But which questions are political, is itself a political question.
(You do need the random lottery version of DD, sortition, rather than the everyone gets to vote on everything type).
> Aside from that, people in aggregate just aren't that bright: I don't want them making decisions much more substantial than what they'll have for dinner, much less voting on issues that affect me.
If you evaluate it on a longer timeline, people achieve a greater political intelligence because of increased voter participation and a quicker policy feedback loop.
Yeah, collectively, humans are still idiots. That being said, we do have a decent amount of technological promise and maybe just enough idealism in our blood to sustain the species. It's probably worth a try.
> If you evaluate it on a longer timeline, people achieve a greater political intelligence because of increased voter participation and a quicker policy feedback loop.
Similar idealism was expected before everyone use Internet. Internet would make everyone smart. Now we can see current awful situation.
I mean we don’t really have to imagine - we can analyze how direct democracies perform in real life.
They apparently do have their own problems and pressures that need to be balanced, but that’s why we don’t just say everyone can decide anything, but with some rules and regulations I really think it can work … I mean it seems to *be* working - just analyze Switzerland.
There is still a need for an Environmental Protection Agency, an Anti Corruption agency, a Police etc, but it seems much closer to the ideal of what a democratic society should look like than what I can see in my own country.
I’ve always thought why not try that out, sure there would be some blunders, but it would be made by us, ourselves, so we can always revisit, fix and learn.
> people in aggregate just aren't that bright
The premise of Humanism is that people should decide for their own future.
It also means we won’t hide the bible in Latin and we’ll translate it in current languages; In other words we’ll educate people. If you don’t trust people, that means school is failing, but remember that we’ve invented democracy in the 1700 across the world, when schools weren’t briliant either. And it was a much better system than anything else. And it outran any other system ever.
Maybe you are not in favour of democracy. Many people support despotism because they think [place any way to choose leaders] will be better.
We didn’t invent democracy in the US: it has been around since at least Ancient Greece, and before then, too. I am opposed to direct democracy and am absolutely fine with representative/republican democracy.
> tech needed for direct democracy
Tech isn't the issue, making everyone find time to stay sufficiently informed is.
I already have one full-time job, I don't need 2-3 more (city and county which might be part-time, state, maybe federal).
There doesn't seem to be such a problem in Switzerland.
Direct democracy with full vote transparency for every voter.
I don't what you mean by vote transparency, but I definitely do not want to be accountable to my boss for voting against his political opinions.
Point is, whatever option is agreeable wouldn’t require the kind of build out to get us here-wiring up the internet, researching and scaling smartphone tech, etc. direct democracy seems like a pretty obvious max for logistical problems to governance and modern tech would make it possible. So anything below it possible too.
They have direct democracy in Switzerland and they don't need the internet for that.
> Popular votes can be held up to four times a year.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/07/switzerland-direct-de...
At some point you need technology, otherwise it would just get too expensive.
Many states in the USA have had ballot propositions for over one hundred years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initiatives_and_referendums_...
Yes but not once every 4 months. People keeping a check on the actions of their representatives needs to happen more than once per election cycle otherwise once the politician gets in they just do whatever they want.
That's what the USSR had. Didn't work so well. A secret ballot is a major requirement for democracy.
There was one option on the ballot, I think that was more the problem. Having choice and not having someone with a gun escort you to the ballot box are bigger requirements. If there were no repercussions, voting could totally be open, don't you think?
There will always be repercussions. Sweden have been doing public voting for decades by forcing you to pick the ballot out in the open, before going into a booth and putting the public ballot into an envelope. Your family, friends and the whole neighborhood will know whomever voted for the wrong party and will treat you thereafter.
EU and election authorities have demanded change to make it private but the previously ruling party didn't want to. Now we got a new government a few months ago and this was one of their first tasks, so it might be changed in time for the election in 2026.
> There will always be repercussions.
> Your family, friends and the whole neighborhood will know whomever voted for the wrong party and will treat you thereafter.
"Repercussions" from family or neighbours, sure, but not from whoever has the monopoly on violence. I haven't heard of the Swedish government going after people that "voted wrong".
Do you really want the thug in power to know you didn't vote for him?
That's exactly my point, it's a problem because there is a "thug in power". That's the problem, not open voting.
Even the nicest people become thugs when in power. Power corrupts.
Most, perhaps yes! But not always. You seem to often have so binary thoughts xD
Do you work with programming or something?
I don't know, in my experience most governments aren't run by "thugs" but YMMV.
The only reason for open ballots is to hold individuals "accountable" for their votes.
Why do you feel the need to hand over your decision making to someone else?
I've seen no evidence that the democracy model employed across large parts of the western world and elsewhere, is anything other than criminal. Its like watching a punch and judy show where the public get to chose their puppets, but the shadowy puppeteers are lurking in the background, mainly wearing or have worn fancy dress.
what do you suggest?
this kinda proves how pointless social media are for public discussion. You either follow profiles you trust (friends, public figures) or you can flat-out disregard the rest as utter rubbish.
So long as every one else also know this
Why should i believe you?
:)
don't need to. Free to waste your time and life over pointless interactions on "social" media.
How does one use HN with a whitelist?
First it was Russia meddling with elections (Trump, Brexit), now it's a team led by an ex Israeli special forces guy — which reminds me a bit of the NSO Group story.
You know what is terrifying? That upon learning about Russia having a major hand in Western election, nothing concrete was done. In Britain we learned the whole Brexit movement was paid for, and manipulated by Russian money (and it was arguably a crucial milestone mentioned in the infamous Foundations of Geopolitics book), yet there was a little noise on printed media that went nowhere. No one investigated, no top politician jailed, just business as usual.
I'm not even sure that what they're selling us in our free Western countries is democracy at all.
wasn't 'Russia meddling' a planted story by US domestic intelligence, as has come to light in the Twitter files?
Is this sarcasm, or is there a subset of people here who truly believe that the Twitter “files” prove the significant investigative effort, offensive actions by US Cyber Command against the IRA, direct acknowledgement of the activities by Yevgeny Prigozhin, additional investigation and confirmation by private security companies that all echoed the same, highly-believable conclusion were fabricated in a coordinated effort by US intelligence to deceive the people into believing that a nation that has been openly hostile against US cyberspace has… continued to do so, this time in a new way?
If this was indeed a sarcastic comment, I would consider dialing back the subtlety so you don’t inadvertently appear to lend credence to misinformation currently being spread among less scrupulous portions of the population.
Unfortunately there are plenty of people who believe this.
No, the previous comment brought up Trump, which is clearly alluding to "Russian collusion".
I'm fine with distaste for Trump and the realities of disinformation campaigns, but the focus of the Twitter files in this regard is clearly specific to the false Russia Trump connection propagated by Dem polticians and leftists.
There's enough there to remain suspicious. The Trump campaign hid their meetings with Russians (see Flynn's transition meetings). They lied about the purpose of the Trump tower meetings. They have claimed financial ties to Russian financial institutions in the past.
None of these things are "false connections propagated by Dem politicians and leftists". They have made these connections evident through their own admissions, and denials.
There is certainly a narrative that drives beyond what we have evidence for, but it's absurd to pretend these things were only propagated from political rivals trying to attack their rivals.
Keep your head in the sand all you like.
>There's enough there to remain suspicious.
Honestly, after years of the Democrats throwing everything they can at Trump, still nothing. Yet you persist.
Switch your focus to Biden perhaps, the current corrupt president that mishandled classified documents, has made a fortune off his political position.... see the similarities here? No? Of course not.
Which makes the comment I was replying to (which is the comment one level above mine, not two levels above mine) even more incorrect, as it claims that the Twitter files prove that Russian meddling did not occur, which is a claim orders of magnitude broader than the claim that Trump-Russian collusion did not occur.> but the focus of the Twitter files in this regard is clearly specific to the false Russia Trump connection propagated by Dem polticians and leftists.The trump crime family is demonstrably highly connected to russian oligarchs and russia generally.
“Domestic intelligence”? You mean the FBI? US intelligence agencies by law do not operate within the US.
Did the Russians interfere in the US election? This is unquestionably true. The DNC did not leak their strategy docs by themselves.
Was Russian interference in the 2016 election decisive? Highly unlikely. Imo, it would be generous to say the effect was marginal at best.
In hindsight the whole thing was pretty stupid; and lines with the Russian government’s increasingly erratic and incompetent behavior. They could have achieved the same end with none of the blowback by just doing nothing.
> US intelligence agencies by law do not operate within the US
Ever heard of Edward Snowden? I mean that's just for starters https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/06/05/nsas-v...
> US intelligence agencies by law do not operate within the US.
The NSA (a US intelligence organization) has verifiably been conducting widespread surveillance of US citizens on US soil for decades.
“US intelligence agencies by law do not operate within the US.”
This is an extremely naive statement with no basis in history. At least you recognize that Russian election interference had little, if any impact on the 2016 election.
> US intelligence agencies by law do not operate within the US.
Just incredible. Thanks for giving me a hearty laugh. Make sure to refill your pitcher of kool-aid, I see you're running low!
> US intelligence agencies by law do not operate within the US.
An unbelievably naive statement.
Yes, but people that were duped prefer to keep that info from themselves
What's even more scary to me is that there are several groups out there openly advertising the fact that they have exploits that can compromise all major cell phone brands, undetectably.
These groups, some commercial and some governmental inside the US, Israel, Italy, and elsewhere, can hack the phones and mobile devices of Presidents/Prime Ministers, member of Congress/Parliament, Supreme Court justices, and the military. This presents the risk of blackmail/extortion being used to control critical decisions and actions made by these people every day. They are not shy about advertising these capabilities and the rules they put in place to limit damage mostly concern damage to the hacking groups, not to countries or people.
Did you read Mindf*ck? Fascinating book. I'd be so so angry about Brexit after reading it if I'd been affected.
Russia didn’t have a “major hand” in western elections.
It sounds as though Israel might have though...
Given how close the 2016 elections were, even a relatively "non-major" influence (via hacking and releasing the DNC emails and running social media campaigns) was plausibly enough to change the actual outcome.
Perhaps those who were instrumental in how elections were influenced were afraid that by changing the system, they'd lock themselves out of the existing election-meddling process?
I'm not saying that votes are fixed (though I wouldn't be surprised), but lots of money goes into essentially buying seats of power.
You missed the update where it was proven that the "Russian meddling" story was fake.
The meddling in our elections was the social media companies suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story right before the election, which the media also claimed was "Russian ops" while Hunter since admitted it was his laptop (full of emails detailing the corruption in his family).
The amount of propaganda and lies that is fed to the American public through these corporate media outlets is absolutely astounding.
One minute of googling found these:
- https://www.justice.gov/file/1080281/download
- https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
- https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf
- https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
- https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download
Spending some time flipping through these (ignore the last two if you please, one heavily redacted and the other focusing on Trump) after reading your comment makes me wonder if we live in two parallel universes that are in the process of converging.
It's one universe -- this activity within the government you're citing culminated in the Mueller investigation's final report, which read "insufficient evidence of a criminal conspiracy". Let me translate that for you: the whole thing was a hoax from day 1, discussed non-stop by our de-facto state media corporate press, and pushed non-stop for years on the American public by the DNC which is the source of those documents.
The dossier that was used as a basis for launching all of this in the first place: "Main Steele dossier source Igor Danchenko was FBI operative: court document" https://nypost.com/2022/09/14/main-steele-dossier-source-igo...
Actually it was discovered that the Clinton campaign paying for "opposition research" was in turn the source of that fake dossier.
The whole thing was made up, that's not even controversial at this point. The fact that you're on here citing those documents as if it wasn't just proves the pervasiveness of the corruption of our system of democracy and media.
Here's coverage on all of this from the journalist that broke the Snowden story and is maligned by our state/corporate/fascist media outlets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-lg5RU8xAI
Quote from Mueller's report: "The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion".
...but you seem to have ignored that.
This is effectively a strawman argument. My comment, and the one I was responding to, are discussing Russian meddling (as in election interference efforts) while you are discussing Trump-Russia collusion, a (very, very) small subset of the actual topic we were discussing.
I do not understand your hand-wavey dismissal of the documents I linked to, as I do not understand how you could have checked their contents and came away believing they all discussed Trump-Russia collusion. For example, the indictment I linked to is very clear, direct proof of election interference activities performed by an offensive cyber unit within the Russian military and never makes any implications of involvement by Trump.
Regarding Trump-Russia collusion - since you brought the topic up - the things you are asserting still seem potentially dubious.
A decision to not indict and prosecute is not based on whether it is more likely that the crime was committed than not, but whether or not it can be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, especially in a scenario like this. It is not 50% sure, not 80%, closer to 99% sure. If you read the Mueller report is is most definitely not a conclusive exoneration of Trump. You cannot honestly argue that collusion did not occur because Mueller did not indict.
Opposition research is research funded by opposition. That does not imply that the output of the research must therefore be asserting the opposite of the reality of its subject matter. I don’t understand this point.
Somebody who was a source for Steele, who is ex-Western intelligence, also being a source for other components of Western intelligence like the FBI seems wildly unsuspicious. Of course, the Post tries to spin it anyway, which is unsurprising for media outlets in general today, but particularly unsurprising for this particular outlet.
Basically, I am not saying that collusion did or did not occur, because I do not know. And if we do truly live in the same universe, you do not know either, you just think you do.
A very very small subset? I don’t think so, they accused the President of being a foreign agent for Moscow and talked about it in the media non stop for years.
The source of the dossier was charged for lying to the FBI. The funds for it were tied back directly to the Clinton campaign. I don’t see any ambiguity here, at all.
I can’t conclude collusion didn’t occur simply because there’s no evidence for it? Do you hear yourself?
Let’s be real dude. You’re an anti-Trump neoliberal whose been gobbling up this media propaganda, you’ve made it part of your identity, and you will twist and say anything to defend it. Your ears and mind is closed. You’re repeating the same line as before this mountain of evidence came out that this whole story line was a hoax. If someone really doesn’t want to be convinced of something they won’t be, that’s what’s going on here. You’re not looking for the truth, you’re trying to defend your tribe.
It’s exactly this type of tribalism that the uniparty in DC uses as a diversion to rob our country blind and it needs to stop.
What exactly should have been done? I don't see why a "top politician jailed" is something that should happen unless they committed a crime. Trump benefited from Russian meddling and refused to admit that it happened, which is a gross failure, but its not criminal. That should be a behavior that loses votes from voters, but that's a very different problem.
The only official actions that should have been taken in response were sanctions or other international relations consequences for Russia. Trump's biggest failing on this issue was to not realize he could do this without compromising the legitimacy of his election.
Russia Meddling was all sourced from Hamilton 68, which is now completely discredited.
Seen it with my own eyes, but several people in this thread go all out to completely dismiss it based on twitter files that exist to push a particular narrative.
There were concerted efforts to push messaging via left-wing sub-reddits. I saw how the narrative pushed had little logical basis towards achieving the ends they pretended to push. I watched as the trolls waxed and waned with the war effort. I watched the same spaces push anti-Ukraine messaging when it had nothing whatsoever to do with their claimed political goals. Then I watched most of them disappear after enough people pointed out what they were doing.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ActiveMeasures/comments/titwwg/fyi_...
> You know what is terrifying? That upon learning about Russia having a major hand in Western election, nothing concrete was done.
I don't think that's entirely fair. There's been no political route open to prosecuting anyone for the above, but there's been plenty of concrete actions. Western opposition to Russia has increased substantially in recent years.
Would we have been as vigorous in our support for Ukraine and eager to supply weapons and all the other things if Russia hadn't been pulling off all these shenanigans? It probably had an effect and Russia is certainly facing consequences.
Western intelligence has also been a lot more proactive in combatting Russian misinformation.
Eh? Twitter Files is a thing now.
“WASHINGTON (TND) — The latest Twitter files release shows the company knew there was no evidence of Russians spreading disinformation on the platform as Democrats pushed those accusations in the media.”
https://abcnews4.com/news/nation-world/russian-disinformatio...
> A hacking and disinformation team meddling in elections
Only one ?
Nation state government model is obsolete... each person needs to be self governed ... no passport needed... each person must be free to live and work anywhere globally... people must be free to choose who/what they align with... full anonymous... notion of zero trust from information theory to guide all transactions... currency also obsolete... until this full global cutover comes noone is fully actualized ... non human life is the model people need to aspire to ... why let iron age societal dynamics rule is all
Yeah sure, tell that to all the obsolete nation states living on the border of Russia.
Who is gonna protect you if the next village town or city decides your individual property is somehow theirs and they have the means and will to enforce it?
As much as you can prep to defend yourself against attacks bh other individuals, nobody around you is bannaed from forming a band/group/nation. And if they are banned, who is going to enforce it?
In the end it all comes down to the ability to direct violence, the society with the bigger stick wins in the end, and nations and systems of governance that can produce smaller sticks are just eventually snuffed from existence, no matter how bright egalitarian and fair they are to their participants … just look at Armenia, Georgia, Cechnia and Ukraine.
And who is going to protect Russian people rights in these "nation states on the border of Russia"? Your country? The only moment when you care about "Russian people rights", is when some ignorant youngsters take out to the streets to make another "revolution" which might destroy their state.