There is some Russophobia in this thread. I don't see the point of disliking Russia. Rather we should dislike the current KGB infested leadership of Russia. I lived in Poland for a good while, and the Russophobia is very strong is post-communist states like Poland or the Balkan/Baltic states. So, whatever propaganda is being pushed by Russia, it's not on the airwaves in those states (Belarus being the exception given it's rosy relationship with Russia). In other words, they are well guarded already against Russia.
If you sit down and think about it, Russia only stands to lose from its current disinformation campaign. People can only be fooled so many times.
Instead of creating a ministry of truth, I think the money would be better spent on education and critical thinking. That's what worked during the '50s in the States, so why not try it again?
education and critical thinking. That's what worked during the '50s in the States
Reply to Wallows What piece of education and critical thinking worked so well in the 1950s? That there was a homosexual communist behind every 10th desk in the State Department? That the Soviets had a huge stockpile of atomic bombs? That blacks were not allowed to live in the suburbs? That Leave It To Beaver reflected the American reality? And so on and so forth.
Reply to tim wood Sure; what the Russians (previously the Soviets) are doing to us is disruptive, but they are probably not doing anything we are not trying to do to them, at least in terms of disruption. You and I have friends. Nations do not have friends; they have interests. It is an interest of the US to protect our infrastructure from cyber attack -- something we don't seem to be doing very well at. Thieves and national operatives are ripping off data left and right. Interfering with our elections? Did the dimwits in Florida need any help screwing up their election mechanics? If our voting system isn't secure, whose fault is that--theirs or ours?
People lie. Corporations lie. Holy Mother Church lies. Other countries lie. The first step in defense is to recognize that lies are part of statecraft, as well as part of business, religion, and ordinary life as we know it. Nobody lies all the time, so one should look for the advantageous lie when something doesn't smell right.
When you set foot on a car lot (new car, used car) just remember: it isn't in the interest of General Motors, Toyota, or VW to be perfectly frank about the nature of their products. Caveat emptor!
Terrapin StationDecember 03, 2018 at 14:49#2332030 likes
I'm fine with parsing some things as contractual fraud, and I think there should be prohibitions against contractual fraud.
Contractual fraud doesn't obtain when we're talking about subjective assessments/judgment calls, though. So "this is a great car" wouldn't count.
Contractual fraud has to be based on objective, factual matters. For example, if you were contractually promised a car with a radio that can access Sirius XM and you don't receive that. Contractual fraud can obtain via ommissions, too. If you buy food containing eggs, but it makes no mention of this on the ingredient list, for example.
I don't at all agree with speech restrictions per se, including general prohibitions against lying.
Metaphysician UndercoverDecember 03, 2018 at 14:58#2332070 likes
If you sit down and think about it, Russia only stands to lose from its current disinformation campaign. People can only be fooled so many times.
I think that Putin plays his game brilliantly. Thanks to his earlier life as a career spy, who rose to be the director of the FSB. And he has a clear objective.
You see what Russia wants is that the multinational organizations like the EU and NATO to dissolve or severely weaken. This weakening makes Russia to have more say especially if Western countries have to negotiate with it on a bilateral basis. How to weaken these multinational organizations and institutions is simply to get the people not to trust their own states and especially multinational organizations like the EU.
Yet one has to remember that the whole disinformation or active measures campaign isn't based on totally artificial or made up reasons. Americans are wary and disappointed in their political establishment and the Europeans are somewhat dissappointed to the EU. These things would happen even without Russia. But as they exist, it's easy to nurture that disenchantment and enforce these kinds of current undertows with a disinformation campaign. And that's why the campaigns have been so successfull.
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But, I must ask. What has the Russian active measures campaign resulted in, which goes all the way back to the creation of the KGB and now FSB? That Trump got elected? America is experiencing an economic boom from fracking, and other economic factors.
In my view, the real threat is from China, if we're going to jump on the scaremongering bandwagon. The amount of IP theft and their mercantilist based economy is a force to be reckoned with. Trump is a sideshow.
ValentinusDecember 04, 2018 at 03:11#2334280 likes
Reply to Wallows
Nothing the Russians made possible is separate from interested parties in the U.S.A.. The same goes for leverage exerted by China. What Trump conceals is exactly who the benefactors of such arrangements may be. And he does it while pretending to be opposed to them.
Pretty slick side show.
But, I must ask. What has the Russian active measures campaign resulted in, which goes all the way back to the creation of the KGB and now FSB? That Trump got elected?
That the Russians have leverage over the US President and the president is compromised like this is the most outstanding intelligence coup of all time.
Historically in my view no spy scandal does top this. Even the stealing of nuclear secrets (the Klaus Fuchs case) isn't as big, as it's obvious that good enough physicists can create a nuclear weapon even without stolen information.
That the US president doubts Americas own alliance, goes against his own intelligence services and sides with Vladimir Putin (even if later tries to change his remarks) and many time states Russian views is simply unbelievable. Naturally Trump's own administration, that got immediately rid of the russophiles in the Trump team, tries to show that everything is normal: that the US policies haven't changed, but a lot of damage has already been done. Biggest damage is that people understand that the US is an untrustworthy ally, where corruption is so rampant that even an presidential candidate and later president in Office can be influence by a competitor nation. And that his supporters are totally happy with this.
That the Russians have leverage over the US President and the president is compromised like this is the most outstanding intelligence coup of all time.
The degree to which this has happened is still a known unknown. We don't know how much Trump is corrupted by Russia. I say we wait and refrain from judgements as to how influenced he is.
SophistiCatDecember 04, 2018 at 15:09#2335010 likes
The degree to which this has happened is still a known unknown.
Unknown? Really?
Perhaps it might be even worse, but that it has happened is quite clear already. It was perhaps unclear in 2016, when Trump's appraisal of Putin and Russia was a bit odd (among other odd things with Trump). I personally noticed the odd thing in an article that was questioning why Trump had put Carter Page into his foreign policy advisor team as that was totally off from the ordinary GOP thinking. Now we have a better picture.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team has indicted or gotten guilty pleas from 33 people and three companies that we know of — the latest being former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.
That group is composed of five former Trump advisers, 26 Russian nationals, three Russian companies, one California man, and one London-based lawyer. Seven of these people (including now all five former Trump aides) have pleaded guilty.
But we don't know. Yeah, sure. But this really is only now about the degree. Otherwise there's a problem with this argument.
You see, to give a proof the argument that Trump furthers Russian agenda you just need to listen to Trump. Has Trump any time something negative or critical about Putin? Never. He has deliberately altered a speach with taking out the pre-written part about the US commitment to NATO at a NATO summits. Trump makes this all very simple to follow. Of course, one has to follow it and not retreat to one's own echo chamber.
SophistiCatDecember 04, 2018 at 15:44#2335100 likes
That's a Russian propaganda term, which in practice means any word or action by an outside actor or an opposition figure that rubs the Russian leadership the wrong way. Russophobic is an update of the Soviet-era go-to term Anti-Soviet, which was used just as freely by Soviet leadership and propaganda.
You couldn't be more wrong. Everything we've learned indicates that people can be fooled as long as they are willing to be fooled, which is most of the time.
I'm thinking that's because you operate with a personal axiom that you can expect the truth, and what departs from the truth is a departure from your norm.
No, it's not that. I really am a free speech absolutist, where I realize that's going to include lots of expressions of lies, offensive remarks, slander/libel, incitement, etc.
Part of my aim there is to get people to not put such a ridiculous amount of weight on what other people say, especially not when it's purely based on what people say and not based on actions, other sources of knowledge, etc. too. I want people to be skeptical in general.
Although I don't consider myself "just a libertarian" any longer--I'm rather a very idiosyncratic brand of "libertarian socialist," my disposition when it comes to laws that are meant to prohibit things, to control what people can choose to do, etc., is still very much that of a minarchist (close-to-but-not-quite-anarchist) libertarian. You can easily sign me up for removing laws. It's much harder to get me on board for creating more laws..
Beware of bias. Beware of propoganda. Beware of people who are preying on your darker nature. Be aware of what constitutes your darker nature.
Yet please understand how Russia works and how different it is from other countries.
It's peacetime deterrence would be with any other country seen as preparations for war. Russia understands that it's not as strong as the US and it's allies, but it can improve it's position by smart intelligence operations.
The bias a lot of people in America have is the "we likely do it also"-bias. This is really a bias because many times no serious thought goes into this, just with the assumption that because the US has it's CIA, it has to do totally similar things as the Russians. Well, the fact is that you can see these information warfare operations that the US has done especially in hindsight. The reasoning to the Iraq War is a classic information campaign, pushed by the White House. The help that the State department gave to the Serbian opposition in throwing out Milosevic is another classic move (which the Russians use as the justification for their own operations). Yet do you think that the US would openly start meddling in Russian elections? They think, after Operation Ajax in Iran, assume that there wouldn't be blowback with direct meddling in Russian politics?
And here is the utter brilliance of Putin. Any ordinary politician or even an intelligence chief would think that this kind of operation, direct interference on the elections and also direct assistance to one candidate (with the candidate being totally open to this) would be extremely risky and create a huge blowback as Americans would go ape shit crazy about the thing. But Putin likely understood this wouldn't happen.
You see, the outrage would be seemed as partisan. It's the losing democrats bitching about losing to Trump. The Trump voters simply would see it as a way that to take away their victory. And many Americans will want to sideline the humiliating issue and want to forget it. I actually believe that in a few decades young Americans will be totally ignorant about this whole event. Not only is the whole debacle very humiliating for the Republican party, but actually also for the intelligence services too.
This is because after the Mueller report comes out, the obvious question would be then "How did the system let this to happen"? One of the jobs that the FBI is stated to do is to keep taps on foreing intelligence services and their operations in the US. Why was the FBI asleep on the switch? Hence there isn't this urgency from the intelligence services to look at their own performance. Actually the whole thing would have been over if total idiot Trump wouldn't have fired Comey.
Above all, it's the American voter who did vote for Trump who will not get it. He or she will likely go with the excuse that the whole thing is blown out of proportion by the leftist liberal media. That a Republican presidential candidate conspired with a foreign nation that isn't even an ally won't sink in. The Trump supporter will fail to look at the issue objectively. And that's the brilliance of what Russian intelligence services did.
They outright admit that the USA meddles in foreign elections and other kinds of domestic politics of foreign states.
Great powers do that. They do influence especially smaller countries in their "sphere of influence". For example France meddles a lot in the politics of it's old African colonies. Yet trying to meddle directly in Russian affairs? Or the Chinese? That Russia had an success with this, that Trump retweets Russian disinformation etc, is quite astounding.
among their examples of American interventionism you'll find that of the US meddling in Russian elections.
Please do give an example of this in Russia. I truly would like to know this.
Some may say that the US had Yeltsin as "their man", yet that the US (especially the Clinton administration) pinned hopes that he would make reforms in Russia is quite different to this when you think about it.
Anyone who's not totally disconnected with reality can see that events, actions, facts and "scandals", of varying magnitude, are rationalised and/or ignored all the time.
And how many are disconnected or just uninterested? Those are the focus group of disinformation. In fact, one could argue that the whole objective of active measures such as disinformation is to disconnect and confuse people.
Pattern-chaserDecember 05, 2018 at 13:23#2337590 likes
There is some Russophobia in this thread. — Wallows
If the attitude within the Russian leadership is that we are "the enemy", then "Russophobia" is justified.
Yes, I think it would be. But (in my view), the new 'truth' (i.e. lies) comes out of the West, not Russia. Presidents Bush and Blair introduced the concept of defining truth by constant repetition, although they were just completing what had gone before. Now 'experts' are treated with contempt, and truth is something you create by repeating your own beliefs over and over, ignoring any factual objections that may be offered.
Given the fact that Clinton and the IMF hand-picked Yeltsin
Handpicked Yeltsin??? Where on Earth do you get that idea?
Did Clinton handpick Yeltsin to climb on a tank in front of the White House (the Russian one in Moscow) and oppose the "August Putsch" and be the leader opposing the Soviet establishment? Because that was basically the reason that Yeltsin, then the head of the Russian Government, got to lead new Russia as the Soviet Union quickly collapsed afterwards. If I remember correctly, it was Yeltsin that abolished the Soviet Union.
The idea that the US picked Yeltsin because the IMF gave a loan is really absurd. Yes, it is support, but how does this mean they picked Yeltsin? Who else would the Americans have picked? The communists? If the other candidate was Zyuganov of the Communist party, how much picking sides there was? Would Clinton pick a candidate riding on nationalism and Soviet nostalgia and the candidate of the party that was (and is) the immediate successor of the Soviet Communist Party (that Yeltsin banned)? Basically Americans were more like forced to back Yeltsin. Especially when you remember that Russia had the Rubble crisis in 1998, one IMF loan here or there doesn't matter so much.
No, the Clinton administration just assumed that everything would be fine and dandy and democratic with Yeltsin and simply hoped for the best. As your article emphasizes, then the Russian leader was then at an extremely weak position, which naturally the Americans thought as the new normal. Yeltsin couldn't even handle the Chechens and everyone was back then writing off the Russian military. And actually the article you refer to notes the obvious thing: Yeltsin had the same policies, starting from opposing NATO enlargement, as Putin has now. But then, American leadership seemed to have thought that Russia is over, it will never recover as obviously oil prices couldn't rise.
In fact those who supported in a crucial way Yeltsin in the elections were the infamous oligarchs of the period. They did the promoting, they supported the media campaign roughly giving over 700 million dollars to Yeltsin's campaign. They likely got their money back until Putin cracked on them.
And finally, how much CIA involvement was there in this support of Yeltsin? There is really a profound difference with giving public and Private support or picking sides in an election (as even the EU sometime does) and an intelligence service operation.
Trump retweeting Russian (or any other kind of) disinformation is just Trump being Trump, not a success of the Russians. It's not like there were negotiations and they convinced him to do something he didn't want.
Trump surely isn't coerced, he was a willing partner here.
After all, who could know that one of the main missions of the FBI is to keep taps on the actions and operations of foreign intelligence services in the US?
If the attitude within the Russian leadership is that we are "the enemy", then "Russophobia" is justified.
So, likewise the Russians are justified in Americaphobia? Everyone is justified in their phobias about anyone they even suspect might see them as the enemy? Does it matter who sees whom as the enemy first? Might paranoia not be universal when it comes to international affairs? If it is universal does that make it justifiable?
Deleted UserDecember 06, 2018 at 05:08#2339710 likes
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SophistiCatDecember 06, 2018 at 14:28#2340230 likes
Reply to tim wood Your proposal to go to war over fake news suggests the knee-jerk reaction of a right-wing authoritarian. The priority is not so much to deal with the situation as to punish the transgressor, no matter the cost and the consequences.
As to actually addressing the problem, you have to accept the reality that many problems cannot be successfully resolved - as in Mission Accomplished! - only mitigated or contained at best. In the end you have to choose between the least of evils, and the choices are often far from obvious. Sometimes the least worst option is to do nothing. I am not saying that this is the case here. I don't know what the best approach to deal with information warfare (as Russians themselves like to refer to it) would be.
Education (counter-propaganda) and exposure may help to mitigate and contain, but not every such effort is going to be successful, and some may even be counterproductive. Simply debunking lies can actually have a blowback effect, as some studies suggest.
Political pressure? Sanctions? I have a feeling that these are the kinds of direct responses that are easy to sell to your domestic audience, because they show that you are doing something and being firm. But do they actually work? I am not so sure.
I guess they must have been forced to be involved and be involved exactly in the the way they did. Some sort of fatalism, I presume
Yep. Sometimes what people say they thought earlier is actually what they thought earlier.
Yet my point here is that US moves here aren't out of the realm of ordinary influencing. Now with a small Latin American country they, the US, could and have been far more hostile and rough as these countries have been considered the backyard of the US. Yet with a nuclear state like Russia things have to be handled far more delicately, just as with the Yeltsin and the US. To try to influence opinions, views and policies isn't a taboo. After all, the job of all ambassadors is to influence their country of residence.
Yet the Trump-Russia axis is quite different from the ordinary. And for Russia to get involved with US politics in such way is very much "out-of-the-box" moves.
(And anyway, after the Soviet Union collapsed there indeed was a brief window when Russians were totally open to new ideas and genuinely open to the West. During that brief time you would have to had larger than life politicians to understand the exceptionality of the situation and do a dramatic reallignment either by truly accepting Russia into the West and into NATO or dissolve NATO. But that didn't happen. We had mediocre ordinary politicians that didn't use the opportunity. And with the war in Kosovo, that sealed Russian thinking to what it is today.)
Had Putin given a 10bn loan to Trump to boost his chances for success, the whole world would have imploded
Sure, it would.
Because that IMF loan went to the Russian state, not to the personal pockets of one individual reality TV celebrity. Yeltsin's administration could pay salaries to government employees thanks perhaps to the IMF loan. When you give Trump money, that isn't the same as giving money to the US and it uses it to pay public sector salaries.
Furthermore, it's really difficult now to understand how perilous the situation of the collapse of the Soviet Union was. For example my country was really making plans how to cope with masses of refugees if there would happen a civil war in Russia (as we have an +1000km border with Russia). We seldom give credit to the many Soviet politicians that made the disintegration so peaceful. Now with the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine we can indeed imagine that the Soviet Union could have gone the way of Yugoslavia and disintegrated to a bloody civil war (which it actually did in the Caucasus), and then we could have seen deaths in the hundreds of thousands or even a million or so.
. In the end you have to choose between the least of evils, and the choices are often far from obvious. Sometimes the least worst option is to do nothing. I am not saying that this is the case here. I don't know what the best approach to deal with information warfare (as Russians themselves like to refer to it) would be.
One thing is to get journalists themselves educated before anybody starts a disinformation campaign. Disinformation is most effective when people cannot see it, when they are totally ignorant about the subject at hand. Just look how confused the Western media was when Russian troops invaded Crimea and simply took off their Russian flags and spread the outrageous lie that these well armed, uniformily clad, young fit soldiers were "Crimean volunteers", not Russian paratroops. (That's actually the lie that Putin did admit being wrong, but hey, he could had been silent to this day about it.)
The best example of this "pre"-education is what the BBC did at the height of the Crimean crisis: it sent one of it's journalist to a potential possible flashpoint, to the city of Narva in Estonia and interviewed people of the sleepy town and made a story about it.
Now why Narva is a strategic flashpoint is because it's a border town (opposite to Ivanogorod in Russia) and the most ethnically Russian city in the European Union. Estonia is part of NATO and has a large Russian minority and it has unfortunately already experienced hostile Russian active measures operations with the 2007 cyberattacks during the Bronze Statue-incident and the kidnapping of an Estonian intelligence officer Eston Kohver in Estonia after Obama visited the country. Hence Narva in Estonia was the perfect place to visit.
So when the British journalist went to interview ordinary ethnic Russian EU-citizens, it could discover what the people actually thought and what the reality was as there wasn't any ongoing information campaign underway. Now if the situation would escalate, that journalist that has already visited the town would understand what could be true and what is invented far better than the journalist that hears the name Narva or Estonia for the first time.
And U.S. (or great power) exceptionalism is not a taboo either, but it remains exceptionalism (and a double standard). In a way that's what makes a state a "great power"; it exempts itself from the rules others are expected to follow, till people are conditioned to accept it as "ordinary".
Great powers exist. And even small countries can be very hypocrite and have double standards, because states are utterly selfish in the end. Somehow many have this idea that the US is exceptional in this.
That's crap. The loan was specifically given to a candidate in order to boost his chances of election.
No. It was given to the Russian government. Please read more carefully what I say. The loan the International Monetary Fund gave as Russian media now tells it:
granted a US$10.2 billion loan to Russia that enabled the embattled government to throw huge sums at recompensing paying long-owed back wages and pensions to millions of Russians — some overdue wages arrived just before (or indeed on) June 16, polling day.
The West has few means at its disposal to influence the Russian electorate, especially since too blatant an endorsement of Mr. Yeltsin could backfire with nationalists. But the West does have money to encourage market reforms here and is willing to use it.
At $10.2 billion, the fund's loan is $1.2 billion more than had been discussed just a month ago. Significantly, more than $4 billion of the loan is to be provided during the first year. That is especially important because Mr. Yeltsin has signed a number of decrees to increase social spending in the run-up to the presidential election. On Feb. 15, in announcing his intention to seek re-election, Mr. Yeltsin also promised to pay $2.8 billion in back wages, addressing a compelling emotional issue in a country where many laborers, scientists and teachers have not been paid for months.
Still, the loan will not be provided on the basis of trust. There are steps the Russians must take in order to keep the money flowing. Before the first installment can be disbursed, Mr. Camdessus must present his recommendation to the I.M.F.'s executive board, which is expected to give formal approval for the loan by mid-April.
In the meantime, Western officials said, Russia must demonstrate its commitment to economic reform by phasing out tariffs on the export of natural gas and by beginning to eliminate tariffs on the export of oil. All export tariffs on oil are to end by July 1.
Which of course has nothing to do with Yeltsin's "accomplishments" and USA's involvement.
Nothing? Are you saying that Yeltsin had nothing to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union being so peaceful?
(NY Times, AUG. 25, 1991) President Boris N. Yeltsin of the Russian federated republic said today that his republic formally recognized the independence of Estonia and Latvia and urged President Mikhail S. Gorbachev of the Soviet Union and the rest of the world to do the same.
Mr. Yeltsin issued decrees recognizing the two republics. Lithuania, which declared its independence in March, has already been recognized by Russia as a sovereign state.
There's a reason why Putin's media critisizes harshly Yeltsin nowdays. It isn't suprising coming from the country lead by a leader who thinks that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century" and " would reverse the collapse of the Soviet Union if he had a chance to alter modern Russian history".
Deleted UserDecember 06, 2018 at 23:18#2341900 likes
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I'd like to say a few words on the subject of the OP (though on the subject of "what about America meddling in foreign elections" I have to backup ????????????? arguments here; it's as well documented historical fact as any other; it's in fact so well documented that the former CIA director, Woolsey, didn't even bother denying it just saying “Oh, probably, but it was for the good of the system in order to avoid communists taking over” (and keep in mind the subject is meddling in elections). So, as ????????????? points out, you need a double standard to defend the US and condemn the Russians on this point, that the US is good and either knows what's best for other electorates (which again no one really even bothers to defend anymore, though I welcome anyone to try) or then the morally neutral "defending US interests" which translates directly to "Russians can defend their interests too". However, it's not clear to me anyone in the thread is actually defending US's meddling or simply denying specific comparisons as reaching the threshold for meddling.
What the Russians have done and are doing to us is no joke, and to be sure, they're doing it harder in other parts of the world. Perhaps it started, in the modern era, with Stalin. At issue is the lie, backed where possible by force. I don't see much news from Eastern Europe or the Baltic States, but I'd guess there is relentless pressure from the Russians on those countries to corrupt the narrative in any way possible, so that truth and news become essentially impossible.
I'd like to point out what's usually minimized or not mentioned at all, which is is the whole disinfo meddling story essentially boils down to the Russians influencing voters primarily through twitter bots and facebook, and a particular focus on facebook adds.
Even assuming the (scant examples so far of) trolling and adds coming from Russia was a Russian government operation, Twitter and Facebook are US corporations in US jurisdiction responsible for obeying American laws with sophisticated data analysis and profiling, In terms of organic spreading of information ... you need to be in people's social networks for this to have much effect; just making an anonymous bot on twitter will end up being followed by a few other bots. Accounts with influence on Twitter are real people or organizations with millions of followers genuinely giving weight to the opinions of the objects of their fandom. There's no evidence of the Russians bribing or blackmailing twitter or facebook influencers to support Trump nor some mysterious widespread hacking of hundreds of accounts that all shouted for Trump on election day; that's what a real disinfo campaign would be like on this social media level (to have any real effect); the idea that just making accounts and tweeting some poorly crafted memes, which is what I got from Mueller's actual case against the Russians, has any affect is preposterous. The whole thing, on face value, basically makes Mueller look like an idiot ... but there's a good reason for indicting what seems like a two-bit Russian troll farm which is to maintain the facade of the primary purpose of the investigation in order to continue also investigating other crimes that are very serious just not Russian election meddling per se (money laundering going way back and corruption and campaign finance violations of various kinds, involving American porn starts, as well as various other corruption schemes ).
More important, it's not clear if making accounts and tweeting opinions as some anonymous world citizen and trying to attract followers and act like a random twitter user is legally actionable in any sense. Millions of people around the world as well as plenty other bot networks based elsewhere (it's a hot topic which plenty of bot nets are sophisticated enough to jump on the ban-wagon on all by themselves) tweeted and retweeted opinions about Trump or Hillary; why can't Russians participate? If they can't, why just them but every other country can? If no one can, how is Twitter supposed to enforce this (if laws have actually been broken then Twitter is responsible to attempt to make some reasonable effort to make sure laws are respected on their platform, or is this not the case: non-US citizens outside US jurisdiction can break US laws on a US platform that need not do anything about it, only the non-US citizen is at fault?)?
Where someone could have some real effect would be in facebook adds. But here who's to blame? Russian oligarchs and shady characters with perhaps even the blessing of Putin to go buy some facebook adds? Or the US regulation for allowing Facebook to allow clients to buy targeted adds without even bothering to check who's buying them to ensure campaign finance laws are being enforced?
US lawmakers left an obvious door for any foreign entity to buy influence anonymously wide open with the precision of Facebooks user profiling, and somehow the narrative is Russian's orchestrated a sophisticated disinfo campaign. Even if Putin himself poured billions of his own money into facebook adds, who's fault is that really? Now, if it wasn't really much adds for anyone to notice compared to the hundreds of millions spent of legitimate campaign and pack money, then well who cares? If it was enough to make a difference, no one at facebook noticed hundreds of millions of shady political add buying from ambiguous organizations requesting to target American citizen profiles?
And let's say facebook does turn a blind eye because "hey it's money, I like money, letting this slide could definitely have zero future PR consequences we should think about", none of various US intelligence services with their sophisticated analysts, human intelligence, money flow and internet monitoring algorithms, direct access to facebook servers, no one there saw or suspected hundreds of millions of foreign funds are buying political adds and we should maybe go and knock on Facebook's door and see what's going on?
The whole social media disinfo story, thus far, is so easily stopped by a few monitoring algorithms and some extra steps to verify you are can buy political adds in conformity with campaign finance laws (problem solved). I see no way to argue that the fault is either on American regulators and facebook for enabling foreign political add buying, of then their not at fault because some got through but such a small amount compared to billions of domestic money spent on adds that it's totally irrelevant and of no real concern (though still good to plug any wholes for the future).
Now, why is Russian disinfo such an important topic for US elites. Part of it is blaming Russians for Hillary's loss, but Hillary and other US commentators were already saying there was an information war with Russia before the election (and that the US was losing). There just wasn't any mention of twitter trolls and facebook adds (which obviously the next sentence would be, we should probably get Twitter to shut down Russian disinfo bot nets and we should probable get Facebook to stop selling add-space to Russian political disinfo operations).
And this is true. There is a sophisticated Russian "disinfo campaign", it's called RT. It operates exactly like the BBC or any american news network, except it will host American journalist and intellectual voices that are essentially blacklisted from appearing on any Western platform as well as journalists and intellectuals that jumped ship in order to not self-censor.
These American and Western dissidents basically say whatever they want about American politics without any instruction from the Kremlin. The only disinfo part of RT is that they are not allowed to criticize Putin or Russia in any significant way.
RT also allows anyone to actually know the Russian side of the story on any political event, whether truth or lies you can hear what the Russian government has to say for themselves.
The reason RT is not a big part of the disinfo conversation (though mentioned from time to time as "the problem") is that countries can have their own media organizations, and RT is not some covert operation masquerading as US based (it's literally called Russia Today). US media has a US bias, British media has a British bias, French a French bias etc. yet RT having a Russia bias is suddenly a problematic disinformation campaign. There's no real international law argument or even philosophical argument to make with RT (they haven't kidnapped any US journalist and forced them to repeat prepared statements at gun point; everyone who works for them is doing so voluntarily).
Russia can also host whistle blower dissidents physically. Snowden's plan was just take the material and go to Russia. Without having a place outside US influence to go to, Snowden may have not leaked to begin with, been captured before being about to transfer the information, and even if successful at least made an example of. That there is a physical refuge for dissidents is just as frustrating for US elites as is a media platform refuge (just as the west being a refuge for soviet dissidents was a frustration for the Soviets).
The reason it's a problem, is simply the West was accustomed to controlling the narrative and it's way easier if there's simply no way people can easily hear the other side of the story; so it makes life difficult. And here, (because RT does have a meaningful affect) US elites immediately identified google's amplification of RT's reach through the youtube algorithm (treating RT the same as any other content that a given profile may or may not be interested in), as something that "should be done about it". Here google resisted a time but ultimately caved, changing their algorithm as well as joining in platforming Alexjones and a bunch of other US citizens.
The other part of Russia's disinfo campaign is just normal international politics, taking advantage of a loss of credibility of the US after the disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria as well as things like Yemen. When a US narrative breaks down around something, because it makes no internal sense (like funding jihadists to fight Assad), this gives space for Russian diplomats to advance other ideas.
The biggest problem of all of course is Russia propping up Assad to fight the jihadists. If it was quick and easy toppling like Libya shortly after it would "oh golly gee, Islamists and jihadists have basically taken over, they weren't democratic activists after all" and everyone would forget about it. But having it drag on, even western journalists going to Syria and seeing that their all Jihadists. This brokedown the US narrative to the point where US DoD supported factions are fighting CIA supported Factions (meaning the US military system themselves couldn't agree on which narrative their following).
But regardless of narrative, Russian intervention in Syria created the worse information of all which is the CIA can't just topple any government at will nor rally the West for any cause at Will. There's enough a priori doubt about US claims and enough Russia view-points being heard (on internet or by ambassadors) that the rally the clans "this guy is evil, we got to take him out, no time to think of what's likely to happen after" effect, as we saw in Libya, stopped working in Syria. For instance, the chemical weapons; there was enough doubt about what really happened for real diplomats and analysts (not just US mainstream media) and more importantly enough doubt about US ability to control the narrative regardless of facts on the ground (people remember the last time WMD claims started a war ... and more importantly could not be maintained indefinitely without any facts; hence, what the facts are actually matter and reasonable doubts need to be considered regardless of appearances).
The second biggest problem is Turkey, it's rumored that Russian infosec tipped Erdugan off about the coup, which is nearly impossible to believe occurred without US blessing and likely aid. This again undermines the "topple governments at will" assumption as well as US infosec omnipotence.
Erdogan surviving the coup creates all sorts of problems.
I could go on, but my point is what Russian is doing is similar to what the US did to the Soviet Union. Host dissident intellectuals that have opinions and analysis that spread one way or another (i.e. breakdown narratives despite large internal propaganda trying to maintain those narratives), and frustrate military adventures in the middle-east, use loss of narrative credibility to sow doubt and undermine alliances via normal diplomatic channels (so when there are problems there is no coordinated response from allies, institutions and even soldiers, as people ponder both factual and moral doubts instead of acting to protect the system). However, just like the Soviet Union, these are internal processes and weaknesses that are happening anyway (it wasn't Russia that invented the idea Iraq was a mistake, nor leaked the Torture tapes nor gave Trump 2 billion dollars of free air time) and can only be helped along on the outside (there are US intellectual dissidents without RT, but with RT hosted dissidents can outproduce essentially the rest of the internet in terms of dissident content weighted for quality, and likewise allies can start to doubt US narratives without Russian diplomats providing further contradictory arguments and information).
All this to say, if you want to get worked up by the US media going on about the Russian information war, at least get worked up about the right information war, not twitter and facebook posts and adds.
Deleted UserDecember 07, 2018 at 16:29#2344280 likes
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Yours is a disturbing post. I hope most folks will try to read it. What is disturbing about it? It is a long piece of misdirection and apologetics for Russian activity, built on an extended tu quoque argument.
I'm not defending the Russians here. Putin is definitely trying to do everything he can to disrupt the Western system, just as the US did everything they could to disrupt the Soviet system (and the similarities of tactics are in my view striking).
If I had to choose between a US, Soviet or Chinese dominated system, I would not hesitate choosing to live under US hegemony; and I basically do, living on the periphery of the US system where I am not bothered much by US policies but have no real risk of falling under Russian or Chinese domination either.
However, just because the peripheral places orbiting the US system is the best place to live at the moment, does not mean the US system can or even should be saved.
The point of the OP is that the Russians wage war, make war. Part of that war is disinformation. The question is, what to do about it?
The conclusion of my post was that Russia is simply stoking (how effectively can be debated both ways) processes that are happening in the US anyways. These processes are things like a delusional war lobby that led the US into the Iraq war that was later found for discredited WMD reasons, general quagmire in the middle east, polarized political system far beyond ability for reasonable compromises to make sound policy when needed to fix real domestic and foreign relation problems that are very real problems, legalized cronyism now at eleven under Trump, de-industrialization to focus on "innovation" but then letting the Chinese steal all the IP anyway because promoting real information security would frustrate information collection, various addiction problems from opiates to television, inflating a real-estate bubble and then bailing out the bankers with zero percent credit who then foreclosed on overdue interest payment of citizens, out of control debt at every level, dilapidated infrastructure, natural disasters costing hundreds of billions made much worse by climate change and bad zoning and land management over decades, are all problems that have nothing to do with the Russians.
Now that these, among many, problems are starting to reach a breaking point where the citizenry find them intolerable but the political system can't respond in a reasonable way (producing Trump as an answer, for reasons including but not limited to a prior inability to modernize presidential elections, a break down of reasoned discourse due to Fox news and conservative talk radio, systematically disenfranchising black voters, a reality-TV culture with many just wanting to see the next season of "The Trumps vs the Establishment", a distrust of established media fueled by things like supporting the WMD narrative which creates a credibility vacuum filled by the echo chamber of your choice with a little help from your friend Facebook, and maybe even some Russian and Saudi money cutting deals here and there to tip the balance for certain supporters to jump in with Trump, and maybe even some twitter posts too), the system is starting to destabilize and both Russian legitimate arguments (i.e. Russia looking after Russian interests just like US looks after US interests, prove yourselves morally superior) as well as genuine disinformation starts to add to the problems.
So what to do? In my opinion there is nothing to be done other than solve the underlying problems causing the US domestic economy and political system to destabilize. That what Russia does and says starts to matter (have some sort of real effect) these days is evidence that the system maybe past saving.
For certain, Putin learned a lot about weaknesses of Empire from the collapse of the Soviet Union and is trying to help along similar tendencies towards collapse in the West. My previous post was just trying to point out troll farms and facebook adds are not Putin's tools of choice here (though of course if facebook did allow Russians and other foreigners to buy hundreds of millions of dollars of adds, enough to matter, as foreigners or then laundering to pack money in the US, I'm sure Putin would have jumped on this opportunity too; just the blame here is Facebook and US government for letting it happen as it's pretty easy to stop; you simply can't move that kind of money to a US corporation without that corporation or any cursory regulatory fiscal investigation finding out, which "ensure campaign finance laws are being respected" is plenty enough reason to investigate in any reasonable legal system ... though I wouldn't be surprised if it was either impractical or legally impossible to force facebook to allow scrutiny of political add purchases during the election, and maybe still is as it seems measures taken since were voluntary).
Reply to boethius Very interesting last post. What are your thoughts on the current situation on the US border with immigrants? Solutions to solving the American debt problem? I think a large part of it simply has to do with financial contributions to politicians. Reversing Citizens United vs. FEC would be incredible as it would help reverse "dark money" from foreign entities trying to influence elections+politicians like you are describing.
It seems like humanity at large, not just America, is headed for a major change up. Not only are we seeing populist movements in America but Europe and Central/South America.
What are your thoughts on the current situation on the US border with immigrants?
US illegal immigration is a complicated issue. The root causes are first and foremost immigrants needed to drive economic growth by importing births to grow the population (easiest way to grow GDP) and on a micro level various industries wanting cheap vulnerable disenfranchised exploitable labour (including sexually) who then use profits to, in part, corrupt the political system to maintain the status quo. This economic incentive for illegal immigration often combines with people compassionate for illegal immigrants and wanting to protect them from deportation. These are the internal reasons.
The external reasons are mainly the war on drugs and CIA actions that, as I mention in my first post, "was for the good of the system in order to avoid communists taking over" that disrupt fragile democracy, result in crony capitalism riddled with drug gains and so failed, tyrannical or inefficient states people have many reasons to leave and take their chances in the US (to build a new life or remit money back home).
So, for solutions. Why is GDP growth an absolute imperative? Why is US birth rate below replacement? Why do companies easily get away with exploiting illegal immigrants? Why is the war on drugs still a thing even after the obvious reality has emerged that it causes way more problems and doesn't even solve any problems, both in the US and the drug supplying countries? Why is US policy to support crony capitalism in its poor periphery?
The above root causes need to be addressed so solve the causes of illegal immigration. However, now that there's 11-12 million illegal immigrants in the US, it's simply impractical from both the economic and compassionate point of view to deport any significant percentage of them; making a immunity period where legal immigrants can be made legal in one form or another and then afterwards large fines for companies employing illegal immigrants and even larger fines and prison time for any company obstructing their illegal workers from getting documented, can then turn the illegal problem in to a legal problem, which would still be nuanced and complicated situation but the first step.
I think a large part of it simply has to do with financial contributions to politicians. Reversing Citizens United vs. FEC would be incredible as it would help reverse "dark money" from foreign entities trying to influence elections+politicians like you are describing.
Yes, corruption is now legal in the US. These laws are essentially represent the "rats looting and abandoning the ship" phase of collapsing empire.
When I talk about the US system, I refer to the US global system (empire, hegemony, power projection, Internationale order, or whatever it's called in a given context). I see essentially no way this system will continue for the reasons in the first post. Bush II oversaw the overstretching and loss of credibility supported by economic crisis at home phase; Obama oversaw a very tense but diligent strategic retreat and salvaging America's international brand phase; but Trump is simply trashing the whole system and there is no recovery or even consolidation and maintenance of a smaller empire as
far as I can tell: the system is in free fall.
However, the prospects of the US as a country is not so bleak. Though the root problems are numerous and have been neglected for decades, it also means there's plenty of low-hanging fruit so a group of competent politicians could make life significantly better for US denizens in short time. Most people in the US don't actually benefit from the US global system. If the momentum reversed it could go a long way very quickly. However, it's a race against time since if the US global system collapses with incompetent, delusional and/or corrupt politicians in charge the result will most likely be total chaos domestically (hyperinflation, disrupted supply chains, roaming bandits, doubling down on the police state, riots like we are now seeing in France but with lot's and lot's of guns; it could go as far as things like a coup); just like a cycle of fixing problems could suddenly make life a lot better, a cycle of violence could spiral out of control (Appendix: Mexico).
Comments (35)
If you sit down and think about it, Russia only stands to lose from its current disinformation campaign. People can only be fooled so many times.
Instead of creating a ministry of truth, I think the money would be better spent on education and critical thinking. That's what worked during the '50s in the States, so why not try it again?
What piece of education and critical thinking worked so well in the 1950s? That there was a homosexual communist behind every 10th desk in the State Department? That the Soviets had a huge stockpile of atomic bombs? That blacks were not allowed to live in the suburbs? That Leave It To Beaver reflected the American reality? And so on and so forth.
Sure; what the Russians (previously the Soviets) are doing to us is disruptive, but they are probably not doing anything we are not trying to do to them, at least in terms of disruption. You and I have friends. Nations do not have friends; they have interests. It is an interest of the US to protect our infrastructure from cyber attack -- something we don't seem to be doing very well at. Thieves and national operatives are ripping off data left and right. Interfering with our elections? Did the dimwits in Florida need any help screwing up their election mechanics? If our voting system isn't secure, whose fault is that--theirs or ours?
People lie. Corporations lie. Holy Mother Church lies. Other countries lie. The first step in defense is to recognize that lies are part of statecraft, as well as part of business, religion, and ordinary life as we know it. Nobody lies all the time, so one should look for the advantageous lie when something doesn't smell right.
When you set foot on a car lot (new car, used car) just remember: it isn't in the interest of General Motors, Toyota, or VW to be perfectly frank about the nature of their products. Caveat emptor!
Contractual fraud doesn't obtain when we're talking about subjective assessments/judgment calls, though. So "this is a great car" wouldn't count.
Contractual fraud has to be based on objective, factual matters. For example, if you were contractually promised a car with a radio that can access Sirius XM and you don't receive that. Contractual fraud can obtain via ommissions, too. If you buy food containing eggs, but it makes no mention of this on the ingredient list, for example.
I don't at all agree with speech restrictions per se, including general prohibitions against lying.
If the attitude within the Russian leadership is that we are "the enemy", then "Russophobia" is justified.
I think that Putin plays his game brilliantly. Thanks to his earlier life as a career spy, who rose to be the director of the FSB. And he has a clear objective.
You see what Russia wants is that the multinational organizations like the EU and NATO to dissolve or severely weaken. This weakening makes Russia to have more say especially if Western countries have to negotiate with it on a bilateral basis. How to weaken these multinational organizations and institutions is simply to get the people not to trust their own states and especially multinational organizations like the EU.
Yet one has to remember that the whole disinformation or active measures campaign isn't based on totally artificial or made up reasons. Americans are wary and disappointed in their political establishment and the Europeans are somewhat dissappointed to the EU. These things would happen even without Russia. But as they exist, it's easy to nurture that disenchantment and enforce these kinds of current undertows with a disinformation campaign. And that's why the campaigns have been so successfull.
In my view, the real threat is from China, if we're going to jump on the scaremongering bandwagon. The amount of IP theft and their mercantilist based economy is a force to be reckoned with. Trump is a sideshow.
Nothing the Russians made possible is separate from interested parties in the U.S.A.. The same goes for leverage exerted by China. What Trump conceals is exactly who the benefactors of such arrangements may be. And he does it while pretending to be opposed to them.
Pretty slick side show.
That the Russians have leverage over the US President and the president is compromised like this is the most outstanding intelligence coup of all time.
Historically in my view no spy scandal does top this. Even the stealing of nuclear secrets (the Klaus Fuchs case) isn't as big, as it's obvious that good enough physicists can create a nuclear weapon even without stolen information.
That the US president doubts Americas own alliance, goes against his own intelligence services and sides with Vladimir Putin (even if later tries to change his remarks) and many time states Russian views is simply unbelievable. Naturally Trump's own administration, that got immediately rid of the russophiles in the Trump team, tries to show that everything is normal: that the US policies haven't changed, but a lot of damage has already been done. Biggest damage is that people understand that the US is an untrustworthy ally, where corruption is so rampant that even an presidential candidate and later president in Office can be influence by a competitor nation. And that his supporters are totally happy with this.
The degree to which this has happened is still a known unknown. We don't know how much Trump is corrupted by Russia. I say we wait and refrain from judgements as to how influenced he is.
Oh sure. There's no problem that a little hot war won't fix. It's been working out great up to now, so why not do it more often?
We all like to moan about how awful our leaders are, but when you read something like this, you realize that it could've been a lot worse...
Unknown? Really?
Perhaps it might be even worse, but that it has happened is quite clear already. It was perhaps unclear in 2016, when Trump's appraisal of Putin and Russia was a bit odd (among other odd things with Trump). I personally noticed the odd thing in an article that was questioning why Trump had put Carter Page into his foreign policy advisor team as that was totally off from the ordinary GOP thinking. Now we have a better picture.
But we don't know. Yeah, sure. But this really is only now about the degree. Otherwise there's a problem with this argument.
You see, to give a proof the argument that Trump furthers Russian agenda you just need to listen to Trump. Has Trump any time something negative or critical about Putin? Never. He has deliberately altered a speach with taking out the pre-written part about the US commitment to NATO at a NATO summits. Trump makes this all very simple to follow. Of course, one has to follow it and not retreat to one's own echo chamber.
That's a Russian propaganda term, which in practice means any word or action by an outside actor or an opposition figure that rubs the Russian leadership the wrong way. Russophobic is an update of the Soviet-era go-to term Anti-Soviet, which was used just as freely by Soviet leadership and propaganda.
Quoting Wallows
You couldn't be more wrong. Everything we've learned indicates that people can be fooled as long as they are willing to be fooled, which is most of the time.
One thing you and Trump have in common is that if either of you said the sky is blue on a sunny day, I'd be inclined to fact check it.
Beware of bias. Beware of propoganda. Beware of people who are preying on your darker nature. Be aware of what constitutes your darker nature.
No, it's not that. I really am a free speech absolutist, where I realize that's going to include lots of expressions of lies, offensive remarks, slander/libel, incitement, etc.
Part of my aim there is to get people to not put such a ridiculous amount of weight on what other people say, especially not when it's purely based on what people say and not based on actions, other sources of knowledge, etc. too. I want people to be skeptical in general.
Although I don't consider myself "just a libertarian" any longer--I'm rather a very idiosyncratic brand of "libertarian socialist," my disposition when it comes to laws that are meant to prohibit things, to control what people can choose to do, etc., is still very much that of a minarchist (close-to-but-not-quite-anarchist) libertarian. You can easily sign me up for removing laws. It's much harder to get me on board for creating more laws..
Quoting frank
Yet please understand how Russia works and how different it is from other countries.
It's peacetime deterrence would be with any other country seen as preparations for war. Russia understands that it's not as strong as the US and it's allies, but it can improve it's position by smart intelligence operations.
The bias a lot of people in America have is the "we likely do it also"-bias. This is really a bias because many times no serious thought goes into this, just with the assumption that because the US has it's CIA, it has to do totally similar things as the Russians. Well, the fact is that you can see these information warfare operations that the US has done especially in hindsight. The reasoning to the Iraq War is a classic information campaign, pushed by the White House. The help that the State department gave to the Serbian opposition in throwing out Milosevic is another classic move (which the Russians use as the justification for their own operations). Yet do you think that the US would openly start meddling in Russian elections? They think, after Operation Ajax in Iran, assume that there wouldn't be blowback with direct meddling in Russian politics?
And here is the utter brilliance of Putin. Any ordinary politician or even an intelligence chief would think that this kind of operation, direct interference on the elections and also direct assistance to one candidate (with the candidate being totally open to this) would be extremely risky and create a huge blowback as Americans would go ape shit crazy about the thing. But Putin likely understood this wouldn't happen.
You see, the outrage would be seemed as partisan. It's the losing democrats bitching about losing to Trump. The Trump voters simply would see it as a way that to take away their victory. And many Americans will want to sideline the humiliating issue and want to forget it. I actually believe that in a few decades young Americans will be totally ignorant about this whole event. Not only is the whole debacle very humiliating for the Republican party, but actually also for the intelligence services too.
This is because after the Mueller report comes out, the obvious question would be then "How did the system let this to happen"? One of the jobs that the FBI is stated to do is to keep taps on foreing intelligence services and their operations in the US. Why was the FBI asleep on the switch? Hence there isn't this urgency from the intelligence services to look at their own performance. Actually the whole thing would have been over if total idiot Trump wouldn't have fired Comey.
Above all, it's the American voter who did vote for Trump who will not get it. He or she will likely go with the excuse that the whole thing is blown out of proportion by the leftist liberal media. That a Republican presidential candidate conspired with a foreign nation that isn't even an ally won't sink in. The Trump supporter will fail to look at the issue objectively. And that's the brilliance of what Russian intelligence services did.
Quoting ?????????????
Please do give an example of this in Russia. I truly would like to know this.
Some may say that the US had Yeltsin as "their man", yet that the US (especially the Clinton administration) pinned hopes that he would make reforms in Russia is quite different to this when you think about it.
Quoting ?????????????
And how many are disconnected or just uninterested? Those are the focus group of disinformation. In fact, one could argue that the whole objective of active measures such as disinformation is to disconnect and confuse people.
Yes, I think it would be. But (in my view), the new 'truth' (i.e. lies) comes out of the West, not Russia. Presidents Bush and Blair introduced the concept of defining truth by constant repetition, although they were just completing what had gone before. Now 'experts' are treated with contempt, and truth is something you create by repeating your own beliefs over and over, ignoring any factual objections that may be offered.
Handpicked Yeltsin??? Where on Earth do you get that idea?
Did Clinton handpick Yeltsin to climb on a tank in front of the White House (the Russian one in Moscow) and oppose the "August Putsch" and be the leader opposing the Soviet establishment? Because that was basically the reason that Yeltsin, then the head of the Russian Government, got to lead new Russia as the Soviet Union quickly collapsed afterwards. If I remember correctly, it was Yeltsin that abolished the Soviet Union.
The idea that the US picked Yeltsin because the IMF gave a loan is really absurd. Yes, it is support, but how does this mean they picked Yeltsin? Who else would the Americans have picked? The communists? If the other candidate was Zyuganov of the Communist party, how much picking sides there was? Would Clinton pick a candidate riding on nationalism and Soviet nostalgia and the candidate of the party that was (and is) the immediate successor of the Soviet Communist Party (that Yeltsin banned)? Basically Americans were more like forced to back Yeltsin. Especially when you remember that Russia had the Rubble crisis in 1998, one IMF loan here or there doesn't matter so much.
No, the Clinton administration just assumed that everything would be fine and dandy and democratic with Yeltsin and simply hoped for the best. As your article emphasizes, then the Russian leader was then at an extremely weak position, which naturally the Americans thought as the new normal. Yeltsin couldn't even handle the Chechens and everyone was back then writing off the Russian military. And actually the article you refer to notes the obvious thing: Yeltsin had the same policies, starting from opposing NATO enlargement, as Putin has now. But then, American leadership seemed to have thought that Russia is over, it will never recover as obviously oil prices couldn't rise.
In fact those who supported in a crucial way Yeltsin in the elections were the infamous oligarchs of the period. They did the promoting, they supported the media campaign roughly giving over 700 million dollars to Yeltsin's campaign. They likely got their money back until Putin cracked on them.
And finally, how much CIA involvement was there in this support of Yeltsin? There is really a profound difference with giving public and Private support or picking sides in an election (as even the EU sometime does) and an intelligence service operation.
Trump surely isn't coerced, he was a willing partner here.
After all, who could know that one of the main missions of the FBI is to keep taps on the actions and operations of foreign intelligence services in the US?
So, likewise the Russians are justified in Americaphobia? Everyone is justified in their phobias about anyone they even suspect might see them as the enemy? Does it matter who sees whom as the enemy first? Might paranoia not be universal when it comes to international affairs? If it is universal does that make it justifiable?
As to actually addressing the problem, you have to accept the reality that many problems cannot be successfully resolved - as in Mission Accomplished! - only mitigated or contained at best. In the end you have to choose between the least of evils, and the choices are often far from obvious. Sometimes the least worst option is to do nothing. I am not saying that this is the case here. I don't know what the best approach to deal with information warfare (as Russians themselves like to refer to it) would be.
Education (counter-propaganda) and exposure may help to mitigate and contain, but not every such effort is going to be successful, and some may even be counterproductive. Simply debunking lies can actually have a blowback effect, as some studies suggest.
Political pressure? Sanctions? I have a feeling that these are the kinds of direct responses that are easy to sell to your domestic audience, because they show that you are doing something and being firm. But do they actually work? I am not so sure.
War? Are you fucking nuts?
How many options were there?
Quoting ?????????????
Yep. Sometimes what people say they thought earlier is actually what they thought earlier.
Yet my point here is that US moves here aren't out of the realm of ordinary influencing. Now with a small Latin American country they, the US, could and have been far more hostile and rough as these countries have been considered the backyard of the US. Yet with a nuclear state like Russia things have to be handled far more delicately, just as with the Yeltsin and the US. To try to influence opinions, views and policies isn't a taboo. After all, the job of all ambassadors is to influence their country of residence.
Yet the Trump-Russia axis is quite different from the ordinary. And for Russia to get involved with US politics in such way is very much "out-of-the-box" moves.
(And anyway, after the Soviet Union collapsed there indeed was a brief window when Russians were totally open to new ideas and genuinely open to the West. During that brief time you would have to had larger than life politicians to understand the exceptionality of the situation and do a dramatic reallignment either by truly accepting Russia into the West and into NATO or dissolve NATO. But that didn't happen. We had mediocre ordinary politicians that didn't use the opportunity. And with the war in Kosovo, that sealed Russian thinking to what it is today.)
Quoting ?????????????
Sure, it would.
Because that IMF loan went to the Russian state, not to the personal pockets of one individual reality TV celebrity. Yeltsin's administration could pay salaries to government employees thanks perhaps to the IMF loan. When you give Trump money, that isn't the same as giving money to the US and it uses it to pay public sector salaries.
Furthermore, it's really difficult now to understand how perilous the situation of the collapse of the Soviet Union was. For example my country was really making plans how to cope with masses of refugees if there would happen a civil war in Russia (as we have an +1000km border with Russia). We seldom give credit to the many Soviet politicians that made the disintegration so peaceful. Now with the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine we can indeed imagine that the Soviet Union could have gone the way of Yugoslavia and disintegrated to a bloody civil war (which it actually did in the Caucasus), and then we could have seen deaths in the hundreds of thousands or even a million or so.
One thing is to get journalists themselves educated before anybody starts a disinformation campaign. Disinformation is most effective when people cannot see it, when they are totally ignorant about the subject at hand. Just look how confused the Western media was when Russian troops invaded Crimea and simply took off their Russian flags and spread the outrageous lie that these well armed, uniformily clad, young fit soldiers were "Crimean volunteers", not Russian paratroops. (That's actually the lie that Putin did admit being wrong, but hey, he could had been silent to this day about it.)
The best example of this "pre"-education is what the BBC did at the height of the Crimean crisis: it sent one of it's journalist to a potential possible flashpoint, to the city of Narva in Estonia and interviewed people of the sleepy town and made a story about it.
Now why Narva is a strategic flashpoint is because it's a border town (opposite to Ivanogorod in Russia) and the most ethnically Russian city in the European Union. Estonia is part of NATO and has a large Russian minority and it has unfortunately already experienced hostile Russian active measures operations with the 2007 cyberattacks during the Bronze Statue-incident and the kidnapping of an Estonian intelligence officer Eston Kohver in Estonia after Obama visited the country. Hence Narva in Estonia was the perfect place to visit.
So when the British journalist went to interview ordinary ethnic Russian EU-citizens, it could discover what the people actually thought and what the reality was as there wasn't any ongoing information campaign underway. Now if the situation would escalate, that journalist that has already visited the town would understand what could be true and what is invented far better than the journalist that hears the name Narva or Estonia for the first time.
Great powers exist. And even small countries can be very hypocrite and have double standards, because states are utterly selfish in the end. Somehow many have this idea that the US is exceptional in this.
Quoting ?????????????
No. It was given to the Russian government. Please read more carefully what I say. The loan the International Monetary Fund gave as Russian media now tells it:
Or as it was explained by the New York Times in 1996:
Quoting ?????????????
Nothing? Are you saying that Yeltsin had nothing to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union being so peaceful?
There's a reason why Putin's media critisizes harshly Yeltsin nowdays. It isn't suprising coming from the country lead by a leader who thinks that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century" and " would reverse the collapse of the Soviet Union if he had a chance to alter modern Russian history".
As for the OP's contention:
Quoting tim wood
I'd like to point out what's usually minimized or not mentioned at all, which is is the whole disinfo meddling story essentially boils down to the Russians influencing voters primarily through twitter bots and facebook, and a particular focus on facebook adds.
Even assuming the (scant examples so far of) trolling and adds coming from Russia was a Russian government operation, Twitter and Facebook are US corporations in US jurisdiction responsible for obeying American laws with sophisticated data analysis and profiling, In terms of organic spreading of information ... you need to be in people's social networks for this to have much effect; just making an anonymous bot on twitter will end up being followed by a few other bots. Accounts with influence on Twitter are real people or organizations with millions of followers genuinely giving weight to the opinions of the objects of their fandom. There's no evidence of the Russians bribing or blackmailing twitter or facebook influencers to support Trump nor some mysterious widespread hacking of hundreds of accounts that all shouted for Trump on election day; that's what a real disinfo campaign would be like on this social media level (to have any real effect); the idea that just making accounts and tweeting some poorly crafted memes, which is what I got from Mueller's actual case against the Russians, has any affect is preposterous. The whole thing, on face value, basically makes Mueller look like an idiot ... but there's a good reason for indicting what seems like a two-bit Russian troll farm which is to maintain the facade of the primary purpose of the investigation in order to continue also investigating other crimes that are very serious just not Russian election meddling per se (money laundering going way back and corruption and campaign finance violations of various kinds, involving American porn starts, as well as various other corruption schemes ).
More important, it's not clear if making accounts and tweeting opinions as some anonymous world citizen and trying to attract followers and act like a random twitter user is legally actionable in any sense. Millions of people around the world as well as plenty other bot networks based elsewhere (it's a hot topic which plenty of bot nets are sophisticated enough to jump on the ban-wagon on all by themselves) tweeted and retweeted opinions about Trump or Hillary; why can't Russians participate? If they can't, why just them but every other country can? If no one can, how is Twitter supposed to enforce this (if laws have actually been broken then Twitter is responsible to attempt to make some reasonable effort to make sure laws are respected on their platform, or is this not the case: non-US citizens outside US jurisdiction can break US laws on a US platform that need not do anything about it, only the non-US citizen is at fault?)?
Where someone could have some real effect would be in facebook adds. But here who's to blame? Russian oligarchs and shady characters with perhaps even the blessing of Putin to go buy some facebook adds? Or the US regulation for allowing Facebook to allow clients to buy targeted adds without even bothering to check who's buying them to ensure campaign finance laws are being enforced?
US lawmakers left an obvious door for any foreign entity to buy influence anonymously wide open with the precision of Facebooks user profiling, and somehow the narrative is Russian's orchestrated a sophisticated disinfo campaign. Even if Putin himself poured billions of his own money into facebook adds, who's fault is that really? Now, if it wasn't really much adds for anyone to notice compared to the hundreds of millions spent of legitimate campaign and pack money, then well who cares? If it was enough to make a difference, no one at facebook noticed hundreds of millions of shady political add buying from ambiguous organizations requesting to target American citizen profiles?
And let's say facebook does turn a blind eye because "hey it's money, I like money, letting this slide could definitely have zero future PR consequences we should think about", none of various US intelligence services with their sophisticated analysts, human intelligence, money flow and internet monitoring algorithms, direct access to facebook servers, no one there saw or suspected hundreds of millions of foreign funds are buying political adds and we should maybe go and knock on Facebook's door and see what's going on?
The whole social media disinfo story, thus far, is so easily stopped by a few monitoring algorithms and some extra steps to verify you are can buy political adds in conformity with campaign finance laws (problem solved). I see no way to argue that the fault is either on American regulators and facebook for enabling foreign political add buying, of then their not at fault because some got through but such a small amount compared to billions of domestic money spent on adds that it's totally irrelevant and of no real concern (though still good to plug any wholes for the future).
Now, why is Russian disinfo such an important topic for US elites. Part of it is blaming Russians for Hillary's loss, but Hillary and other US commentators were already saying there was an information war with Russia before the election (and that the US was losing). There just wasn't any mention of twitter trolls and facebook adds (which obviously the next sentence would be, we should probably get Twitter to shut down Russian disinfo bot nets and we should probable get Facebook to stop selling add-space to Russian political disinfo operations).
And this is true. There is a sophisticated Russian "disinfo campaign", it's called RT. It operates exactly like the BBC or any american news network, except it will host American journalist and intellectual voices that are essentially blacklisted from appearing on any Western platform as well as journalists and intellectuals that jumped ship in order to not self-censor.
These American and Western dissidents basically say whatever they want about American politics without any instruction from the Kremlin. The only disinfo part of RT is that they are not allowed to criticize Putin or Russia in any significant way.
RT also allows anyone to actually know the Russian side of the story on any political event, whether truth or lies you can hear what the Russian government has to say for themselves.
The reason RT is not a big part of the disinfo conversation (though mentioned from time to time as "the problem") is that countries can have their own media organizations, and RT is not some covert operation masquerading as US based (it's literally called Russia Today). US media has a US bias, British media has a British bias, French a French bias etc. yet RT having a Russia bias is suddenly a problematic disinformation campaign. There's no real international law argument or even philosophical argument to make with RT (they haven't kidnapped any US journalist and forced them to repeat prepared statements at gun point; everyone who works for them is doing so voluntarily).
Russia can also host whistle blower dissidents physically. Snowden's plan was just take the material and go to Russia. Without having a place outside US influence to go to, Snowden may have not leaked to begin with, been captured before being about to transfer the information, and even if successful at least made an example of. That there is a physical refuge for dissidents is just as frustrating for US elites as is a media platform refuge (just as the west being a refuge for soviet dissidents was a frustration for the Soviets).
The reason it's a problem, is simply the West was accustomed to controlling the narrative and it's way easier if there's simply no way people can easily hear the other side of the story; so it makes life difficult. And here, (because RT does have a meaningful affect) US elites immediately identified google's amplification of RT's reach through the youtube algorithm (treating RT the same as any other content that a given profile may or may not be interested in), as something that "should be done about it". Here google resisted a time but ultimately caved, changing their algorithm as well as joining in platforming Alexjones and a bunch of other US citizens.
The other part of Russia's disinfo campaign is just normal international politics, taking advantage of a loss of credibility of the US after the disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria as well as things like Yemen. When a US narrative breaks down around something, because it makes no internal sense (like funding jihadists to fight Assad), this gives space for Russian diplomats to advance other ideas.
The biggest problem of all of course is Russia propping up Assad to fight the jihadists. If it was quick and easy toppling like Libya shortly after it would "oh golly gee, Islamists and jihadists have basically taken over, they weren't democratic activists after all" and everyone would forget about it. But having it drag on, even western journalists going to Syria and seeing that their all Jihadists. This brokedown the US narrative to the point where US DoD supported factions are fighting CIA supported Factions (meaning the US military system themselves couldn't agree on which narrative their following).
But regardless of narrative, Russian intervention in Syria created the worse information of all which is the CIA can't just topple any government at will nor rally the West for any cause at Will. There's enough a priori doubt about US claims and enough Russia view-points being heard (on internet or by ambassadors) that the rally the clans "this guy is evil, we got to take him out, no time to think of what's likely to happen after" effect, as we saw in Libya, stopped working in Syria. For instance, the chemical weapons; there was enough doubt about what really happened for real diplomats and analysts (not just US mainstream media) and more importantly enough doubt about US ability to control the narrative regardless of facts on the ground (people remember the last time WMD claims started a war ... and more importantly could not be maintained indefinitely without any facts; hence, what the facts are actually matter and reasonable doubts need to be considered regardless of appearances).
The second biggest problem is Turkey, it's rumored that Russian infosec tipped Erdugan off about the coup, which is nearly impossible to believe occurred without US blessing and likely aid. This again undermines the "topple governments at will" assumption as well as US infosec omnipotence.
Erdogan surviving the coup creates all sorts of problems.
I could go on, but my point is what Russian is doing is similar to what the US did to the Soviet Union. Host dissident intellectuals that have opinions and analysis that spread one way or another (i.e. breakdown narratives despite large internal propaganda trying to maintain those narratives), and frustrate military adventures in the middle-east, use loss of narrative credibility to sow doubt and undermine alliances via normal diplomatic channels (so when there are problems there is no coordinated response from allies, institutions and even soldiers, as people ponder both factual and moral doubts instead of acting to protect the system). However, just like the Soviet Union, these are internal processes and weaknesses that are happening anyway (it wasn't Russia that invented the idea Iraq was a mistake, nor leaked the Torture tapes nor gave Trump 2 billion dollars of free air time) and can only be helped along on the outside (there are US intellectual dissidents without RT, but with RT hosted dissidents can outproduce essentially the rest of the internet in terms of dissident content weighted for quality, and likewise allies can start to doubt US narratives without Russian diplomats providing further contradictory arguments and information).
All this to say, if you want to get worked up by the US media going on about the Russian information war, at least get worked up about the right information war, not twitter and facebook posts and adds.
I'm not defending the Russians here. Putin is definitely trying to do everything he can to disrupt the Western system, just as the US did everything they could to disrupt the Soviet system (and the similarities of tactics are in my view striking).
If I had to choose between a US, Soviet or Chinese dominated system, I would not hesitate choosing to live under US hegemony; and I basically do, living on the periphery of the US system where I am not bothered much by US policies but have no real risk of falling under Russian or Chinese domination either.
However, just because the peripheral places orbiting the US system is the best place to live at the moment, does not mean the US system can or even should be saved.
Quoting tim wood
The conclusion of my post was that Russia is simply stoking (how effectively can be debated both ways) processes that are happening in the US anyways. These processes are things like a delusional war lobby that led the US into the Iraq war that was later found for discredited WMD reasons, general quagmire in the middle east, polarized political system far beyond ability for reasonable compromises to make sound policy when needed to fix real domestic and foreign relation problems that are very real problems, legalized cronyism now at eleven under Trump, de-industrialization to focus on "innovation" but then letting the Chinese steal all the IP anyway because promoting real information security would frustrate information collection, various addiction problems from opiates to television, inflating a real-estate bubble and then bailing out the bankers with zero percent credit who then foreclosed on overdue interest payment of citizens, out of control debt at every level, dilapidated infrastructure, natural disasters costing hundreds of billions made much worse by climate change and bad zoning and land management over decades, are all problems that have nothing to do with the Russians.
Now that these, among many, problems are starting to reach a breaking point where the citizenry find them intolerable but the political system can't respond in a reasonable way (producing Trump as an answer, for reasons including but not limited to a prior inability to modernize presidential elections, a break down of reasoned discourse due to Fox news and conservative talk radio, systematically disenfranchising black voters, a reality-TV culture with many just wanting to see the next season of "The Trumps vs the Establishment", a distrust of established media fueled by things like supporting the WMD narrative which creates a credibility vacuum filled by the echo chamber of your choice with a little help from your friend Facebook, and maybe even some Russian and Saudi money cutting deals here and there to tip the balance for certain supporters to jump in with Trump, and maybe even some twitter posts too), the system is starting to destabilize and both Russian legitimate arguments (i.e. Russia looking after Russian interests just like US looks after US interests, prove yourselves morally superior) as well as genuine disinformation starts to add to the problems.
So what to do? In my opinion there is nothing to be done other than solve the underlying problems causing the US domestic economy and political system to destabilize. That what Russia does and says starts to matter (have some sort of real effect) these days is evidence that the system maybe past saving.
For certain, Putin learned a lot about weaknesses of Empire from the collapse of the Soviet Union and is trying to help along similar tendencies towards collapse in the West. My previous post was just trying to point out troll farms and facebook adds are not Putin's tools of choice here (though of course if facebook did allow Russians and other foreigners to buy hundreds of millions of dollars of adds, enough to matter, as foreigners or then laundering to pack money in the US, I'm sure Putin would have jumped on this opportunity too; just the blame here is Facebook and US government for letting it happen as it's pretty easy to stop; you simply can't move that kind of money to a US corporation without that corporation or any cursory regulatory fiscal investigation finding out, which "ensure campaign finance laws are being respected" is plenty enough reason to investigate in any reasonable legal system ... though I wouldn't be surprised if it was either impractical or legally impossible to force facebook to allow scrutiny of political add purchases during the election, and maybe still is as it seems measures taken since were voluntary).
It seems like humanity at large, not just America, is headed for a major change up. Not only are we seeing populist movements in America but Europe and Central/South America.
US illegal immigration is a complicated issue. The root causes are first and foremost immigrants needed to drive economic growth by importing births to grow the population (easiest way to grow GDP) and on a micro level various industries wanting cheap vulnerable disenfranchised exploitable labour (including sexually) who then use profits to, in part, corrupt the political system to maintain the status quo. This economic incentive for illegal immigration often combines with people compassionate for illegal immigrants and wanting to protect them from deportation. These are the internal reasons.
The external reasons are mainly the war on drugs and CIA actions that, as I mention in my first post, "was for the good of the system in order to avoid communists taking over" that disrupt fragile democracy, result in crony capitalism riddled with drug gains and so failed, tyrannical or inefficient states people have many reasons to leave and take their chances in the US (to build a new life or remit money back home).
So, for solutions. Why is GDP growth an absolute imperative? Why is US birth rate below replacement? Why do companies easily get away with exploiting illegal immigrants? Why is the war on drugs still a thing even after the obvious reality has emerged that it causes way more problems and doesn't even solve any problems, both in the US and the drug supplying countries? Why is US policy to support crony capitalism in its poor periphery?
The above root causes need to be addressed so solve the causes of illegal immigration. However, now that there's 11-12 million illegal immigrants in the US, it's simply impractical from both the economic and compassionate point of view to deport any significant percentage of them; making a immunity period where legal immigrants can be made legal in one form or another and then afterwards large fines for companies employing illegal immigrants and even larger fines and prison time for any company obstructing their illegal workers from getting documented, can then turn the illegal problem in to a legal problem, which would still be nuanced and complicated situation but the first step.
Quoting ron
Yes, corruption is now legal in the US. These laws are essentially represent the "rats looting and abandoning the ship" phase of collapsing empire.
When I talk about the US system, I refer to the US global system (empire, hegemony, power projection, Internationale order, or whatever it's called in a given context). I see essentially no way this system will continue for the reasons in the first post. Bush II oversaw the overstretching and loss of credibility supported by economic crisis at home phase; Obama oversaw a very tense but diligent strategic retreat and salvaging America's international brand phase; but Trump is simply trashing the whole system and there is no recovery or even consolidation and maintenance of a smaller empire as
far as I can tell: the system is in free fall.
However, the prospects of the US as a country is not so bleak. Though the root problems are numerous and have been neglected for decades, it also means there's plenty of low-hanging fruit so a group of competent politicians could make life significantly better for US denizens in short time. Most people in the US don't actually benefit from the US global system. If the momentum reversed it could go a long way very quickly. However, it's a race against time since if the US global system collapses with incompetent, delusional and/or corrupt politicians in charge the result will most likely be total chaos domestically (hyperinflation, disrupted supply chains, roaming bandits, doubling down on the police state, riots like we are now seeing in France but with lot's and lot's of guns; it could go as far as things like a coup); just like a cycle of fixing problems could suddenly make life a lot better, a cycle of violence could spiral out of control (Appendix: Mexico).