Here’s Everything The Mueller Report Says About How Russian Trolls Used Social Media

The Mueller report clearly describes how Russian trolls reached millions of people on Facebook, were quoted in major newspapers as real Americans, and even organized rallies.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/mueller-report-internet-research-agency-detailed-2016

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and the Trump campaign provides one of the most detailed looks at how Russia’s Internet Research Agency — the infamous Kremlin-linked troll farm — tried to hijack the 2016 election and swing the vote in favor of Donald Trump.

The report, which concludes that Trump didn’t commit a crime but “also does not exonerate him [of obstruction],” gives us a clear and exhaustive look at the scope, focus, and results of the IRA’s efforts. The agency learned how to use platforms like Facebook and Twitter over the span of four years. By the end, it used analytical tools and the built-in network effect of massive social media platforms to create large artificial grassroots political organizations that were aggressively targeting both Republicans and Democrats.

The IRA was able to reach up to 126 million Americans on Facebook via a mixture of fraudulent accounts, groups, and advertisements, the report says. Twitter accounts it created were portrayed as real American voices by major news outlets. It was even able to hold real-life rallies, mobilizing hundreds of people at a time in major cities like Philadelphia and Miami. Fake online personas were able to communicate with members of the Trump campaign — who were unaware they were ever communicating with foreign nationals.

Here’s everything we know about Russian interference from the report.

It started in 2014.

According to Mueller’s report, the IRA began creating fake Facebook accounts and small groups as early as 2014.

“IRA employees operated social media accounts and group pages designed to attract U.S. audiences,” the report reads. “These groups and accounts, which addressed divisive U.S. political and social issues, falsely claimed to be controlled by U.S. activists."

The lines up with what we already knew about the IRA’s activity. One of its first large-scale misinformation projects was the Columbian Chemicals Plant explosion hoax in September 2014, when IRA members created a completely fake explosion at a chemical plant in Louisiana. “The perpetrators didn’t just doctor screenshots from CNN; they also created fully functional clones of the websites of Louisiana TV stations and newspapers,” the New York Times wrote about the hoax.

The IRA consolidated all of its US operations into one department called the “Translator” department, which appears to have operated like a typical digital media startup with different agents focusing on specific platforms, monitoring analytics, and even graphic designers. About a dozen people, known as “specialists,” would run an account at a time.

The IRA’s activity wasn’t confined to social media, either. IRA employees traveled to the United States on intelligence-gathering missions in 2014.

“Four IRA employees applied to the U.S. Department of State to enter the United States, while lying about the purpose of their trip and claiming to be four friends who had met at a party,” the report reads. “Ultimately, two IRA employees-Anna Bogacheva and Aleksandra Krylova-received visas and entered the United States on June 4, 2014.”

The IRA was on pretty much every platform.

At first, the IRA focused its activity on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Later, Tumblr and Instagram accounts were created. In the beginning, Russian trolls were manning only fake individual accounts. By 2015, however, they began creating larger groups and pages. Finally, they attempted to flex their network effect to hold real-life rallies.

According to Mueller’s report, the Facebook groups were particularly popular. By the time Facebook deactivated them in 2017, the Russia-controlled group "United Muslims of America" had over 300,000 followers, the "Don't Shoot Us" group had over 250,000 followers, the "Being Patriotic" Facebook group had over 200,000 followers, and the "Secured Borders" Facebook group had over 130,000 followers.

A post from an IRA-controlled Facebook page called "Secured Borders".

MUCH MORE TO THIS STORY HERE:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/mueller-report-internet-research-agency-detailed-2016

NOW LET'S HEAR FROM TRUMPERS THAT THE REAL INTERFERENCE WAS REALLY BY THE UKRAINE!!

Climate Change in India

An New York Times article, India’s Ominous Future: Too Little Water, or Far Too Much, points out that climate change has altered the monsoon season. Now, the rains are less predictable and can be more prolonged when they arrive. That leaves large areas of the country in crippling drought or in floods. On top of that, decades of inept government policies leave millions of people mostly defenseless in the face of climate changes and hopeless levels of pollution, garbage and plastic waste.

Dry creek bed choked with litter

Foam from industrial runoff pass worshipers in the Yamuna River

Watching flood water

Collecting water for drinking and cooking

Flood in Mumbai

A resident of New Delhi washing under a broken municipal water line


Flood in Mumbai

A recent report on climate change is arguing that too little is being done. The Washington Post reports:

The world has squandered so much time mustering the action necessary to combat climate change that rapid, unprecedented cuts in greenhouse gas emissions offer the only hope of averting an ever-intensifying cascade of consequences, according to new findings from the United Nations. 

Amid that growing pressure to act, Tuesday’s U.N. report offers a grim assessment of how off-track the world remains. Global temperatures are on pace to rise as much as 3.9 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, according to the United Nations’ annual “emissions gap” report, which assesses the difference between the world’s current path and the changes needed to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris climate accord.

The sobering report comes at a critical moment, when it remains unclear whether world leaders can summon the political will to take the ambitious action scientists say is essential. So far, the answer has been no.

No doubt that climate change science deniers will trot out the usual arguments in defense of doing nothing, just like gun violence deniers trot out their arguments for less gun control after each mass slaughter of innocents. India looks to be well and truly hosed.

A Massive Data Hack: Google Cloud Server Was Unprotected

Tech-Xplore reports a massive database was left unprotected:

"The data left unprotected was actually a database, aggregating 1.2 billion users' personal information, e.g., social media accounts, email addresses and phone numbers. The incident was relayed on the Data Viper blog. 

Bloomberg quoted Troia. "There are no passwords related to this data, but having a new, fresh set of passwords isn't that exciting anymore. Having all of this social media stuff in one place is a useful weapon and investigative tool."

After all, just nabbing names, phone numbers and account URLs delivers ample information to get attackers started."

Data Viper writes:

"On October 16, 2019 Bob Diachenko and Vinny Troia discovered a wide-open Elasticsearch server containing an unprecedented 4 billion user accounts spanning more than 4 terabytes of data. 

A total count of unique people across all data sets reached more than 1.2 billion people, making this one of the largest data leaks from a single source organization in history. The leaked data contained names, email addresses, phone numbers, LinkedIN and Facebook profile information. 

What makes this data leak unique is that it contains data sets that appear to originate from 2 different data enrichment companies. 

For a very low price, data enrichment companies allow you to take a single piece of information on a person (such as a name or email address), and expand (or enrich) that user profile to include hundreds of additional new data points of information. As seen with the Exactis data breach, collected information on a single person can include information such as household sizes, finances and income, political and religious preferences, and even a person’s preferred social activities. 

Each time a company chooses to “enrich” a user profile, they are also agreeing to provide what they know about the person to the enriching organization (thereby increasing the validity of the organization’s future results). Despite efforts from social media organizations like Facebook, the resulting data continues to be compounded, creating a situation with no oversight that ultimately allows all of a person’s social and personal information to be easily downloaded."

Wired magazine writes:

"For well over a decade, identity thieves, phishers, and other online scammers have created a black market of stolen and aggregated consumer data that they used to break into people's accounts, steal their money, or impersonate them. In October, dark web researcher Vinny Troia found one such trove sitting exposed and easily accessible on an unsecured server, comprising 4 terabytes of personal information—about 1.2 billion records in all. 

While the collection is impressive for its sheer volume, the data doesn't include sensitive information like passwords, credit card numbers, or Social Security numbers."

One can only hope that other cloud servers, e.g., ones the Social Security Administration or the US military uses, aren't just left open like that for anyone to play with. Past performance has not been confidence-inspiring and it probably does predict future performance.

Conspiracy Theory Wars

In the coming months, American can reasonably expect that some new information will surface that supports currently debunked conspiracy theories. One is the false theory that the Ukraine, not Russia, attacked the US election in 2106.

 This New York Times article suggests that fabricating evidence is what Giuliani is angling to do:

VIENNA — They were two Ukrainian oligarchs with American legal problems. One had been indicted on federal bribery charges. The other was embroiled in a vast banking scandal and was reported to be under investigation by the F.B.I. 

And they had one more thing in common: Both had been singled out by Rudolph W. Giuliani and pressed to assist in his wide-ranging hunt for information damaging to one of President Trump’s leading political rivals, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. 

That effort culminated in the July 25 phone call between the American and Ukrainian presidents that has taken Mr. Trump to the brink of impeachment and inexorably brought Mr. Giuliani’s Ukrainian shadow campaign into the light.

But interviews with the two Ukrainian oligarchs — Dmitry Firtash and Ihor Kolomoisky — as well as with several other people with knowledge of Mr. Giuliani’s dealings, point to a new dimension in his exertions on behalf of his client, Mr. Trump. Taken together, they depict a strategy clearly aimed at leveraging information from politically powerful but legally vulnerable foreign citizens.

How to assess new information: Don't ignore the old information

When the new information surfaces, one can ask by what measure should the new information by assessed? That is an excellent question. It's the key question.

The answer is to apply reasonable, logical measures of transparency and credibility to the new information in view of existing information. If the Senate investigation finds legitimate evidence of significant bad acts by Biden and/or Ukraine in the 2016 election, and is transparent about the sources and their credibility, then that evidence has to be accepted as real and given whatever reasonable probative weight it deserves.

However, one can reasonably expect that any new evidence that comes out from the Senate investigation will have to contradict existing contrary evidence. That's the point of building new conspiracy theories. If the origins or sources of the new evidence are not credible, and/or opaque or not revealed, e.g., for 'national security' reasons, then one can reasonably conclude that the GOP has now fallen so far into immorality that it is now willing to fabricate or rely on fabricated false evidence to lie to and deceive the American people for purely partisan gain.

If one wants to be fair and rational about this, these facts (not opinions) need to be kept in mind. Solid evidence already exists that shows (1) the Ukraine was not involved in the 2016 attacks on the US election, (2) Russia orchestrated the 2016 attacks on the US election, and (3) Trump[1] and his enablers, e.g., Rudy Giuliani,[2] are chronic liars who do not hesitate to lie, withhold information and emotionally manipulate to distract, deceive and confuse the American people. Those people would not hesitate to fabricate evidence to support the new conspiracy theory.

Whatever evidence the Senate comes up with has to (a) properly take existing evidence into account and render it not persuasive, and (b) be transparent in view of the mountain of lies and deceit the GOP has operated with since Trump came to power. In other words, existing evidence of lies, deceit and manipulation by Trump and the GOP means that they get no benefit of any doubt because they earned and fully deserve deep public distrust.

Footnotes:
1. The president's track record of false and misleading statements to the public is staggering. That constitutes solid evidence of his deeply immoral character. The existing herd of admitted or convicted felons the president has surrounded himself is more evidence of the president's immoral character.

2. In response to being asked what he would do if the president decided to 'throw him under the bus', Mr Giuliani responded with this retort: "I have insurance". That means that Mr. Giuliani probably has information that incriminated the president in illegal acts. What other kind of insurance would the president fear? It is hard to embarrass a man who isn't fazed by his acts and lies, e.g., sex with porn stars or the tape where he brags about sexually assaulting women. This is more evidence of the sleaze and immorality that the president and his enablers operate by. Given his behavior after prior gaffes, it is reasonable to expect Giuliani will deflect or distort his insurance comment by saying he did not mean that he had any evidence against the president.