Hamilton 68 and Securing Democracy

CLBR #271 SHOW NOTESHamilton 68 and Securing Democracy

GERASIMOV DOCTRINE(2013)

The very ‘rules of war’ have changed. The role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness.http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/05/gerasimov-doctrine-russia-foreign-policy-215538

We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments.

Moscow’s influence campaign followed a Russian messaging strategy that blends covert intelligence operations—such as cyber activity—with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or “trolls.”

TARGET: NATO

Almost half the messages in English that mention NATO in the Baltic states and Poland are also likely to be automated, the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence said.

Estonia, where 800 British soldiers are deployed to deter Russian aggression against NATO’s eastern flank, “has disproportionately frequently been targeted by bots”, the analysis found.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/russian-robots-target-nato-with-twitter-assault-gpzcn2zjd

TARGET: CHARLOTTESVILLE

This time around, they took to Twitter with an army of bots to promote and share extremist right-wing tweets and disinformation.

One of the central themes shared by the Russian-linked accounts after Charlottesville was an accusation, propagated by both the Russian news agency Sputnik and American far-right media personality Alex Jones, that the left-leaning philanthropist George Soros had supported the counter protesters.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2017/08/24/russian_bots_are_sharing_extreme_right_wing_information_on_twitter_after.html?wpsrc=sh_all_dt_tw_ru

TARGET: CHAOS

The long view of the Russian active measures program is chaos and disunity among the American government,” Clint Watts, a former FBI agent and cybersecurity expert who developed the Hamilton 68 dashboard, told NPR earlier this month.

“The reason the #FireMcMaster topic is so potent is it's one of the key themes that you consistently will see the Russians push,” Watts said. “One is anti-EU. They want to see the EU break up. The other one is anti-NATO. And they want to see the U.S. back away from both of those alliances. McMaster's very much about staying engaged in those alliances, which is different from other people in the White House.”

http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/348054-russias-propaganda-machine-amplifies-alt-right

FRENCH ACTION, US INACTION

• Before campaigning in its recent Presidential race began, all major parties in France were informed by the authorities of the threat of outside interference and advised on how to make their operations more secure. Disinformation attempts by Kremlin outlets, targeting mainstream candidates and attempting to bolster far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, were publicly identified.

• The problem is that continued questions about Russian influence efforts in 2016 are dominating the attention of Congress and the U.S. media, without any serious discussion of how to defend against and deter such activity now and in the future. As former DNI Clapper has warned, Russia has already started to “prep the battlefield [for] 2018.” Indeed, the Russians continue to use social media and overt and covert propaganda outlets to influence the political debate in the United States. The partisan nature of much of the debate about Russia’s interference in 2016 also plays directly into Russian goals.

http://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/blog/2017/07/17/lessons-france-fighting-russian-interference-democracy

LESSONS NOT LEARNED

Dwight D. Eisenhower

“If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.”

Washington-Tech Divide

There is a general distrust between the government and the tech sector. Incentives for the public and private sectors in combatting Russian interference are misaligned. For example, about 20 percent of Twitter’s users are bots. Getting rid of those accounts would significantly decrease the corporation’s user base.

HAMILTON 68

“In the Federalist Papers No. 68, Alexander Hamilton wrote of protecting America’s electoral process from foreign meddling. Today, we face foreign interference of a type Hamilton could scarcely have imagined."

HAMILTON METHODOLOGY

• First, we tracked disinformation campaigns that synchronized with overt Russian propaganda outlets like Sputnik and RT (Russia Today). We analyzed the social networks of users who were promoting this disinformation to identify which users were centrally involved, and to remove users who tweeted disinformation casually, after encountering it online.

• Second, we identified a group of users online that openly professed to be pro-Russian and tweeted primarily in support of Russian government policies and themes. We analyzed followers of these accounts to identify a large and interconnected social network that tweeted the same themes and content.

• Third, we identified accounts that appear to use automation to boost the signal of other accounts linked to Russian influence operations. We assessed this group by looking at accounts that had disproportionately large numbers of interactions with other accounts (including sending and receiving retweets) along with a very high number of tweets per day. These accounts may be bots, meaning a piece of computer code that tweets automatically based on pre-determined rules, or they may be cyborgs, meaning that some of their activity is automated, which is then manually supplemented by a human user.

HAMILTON OBJECTIVE

• Samples from each of these three datasets were combined to populate the dashboard monitoring list, with an eye toward providing a representative snapshot of Russia’s English-language influence operations on Twitter. Within the network are numerous subgroups specializing in certain kinds of content, such as Ukraine, Syria, or far-right views. The content on the dashboard varies widely from day to day depending on what is going on in the news.

• Our objective in providing this dashboard is to help ordinary people, journalists, and other analysts identify Russian messaging themes and detect active disinformation or attack campaigns as soon as they begin. Exposing these messages will make information consumers more resilient and reduce the effectiveness of Russia’s attempts to influence Americans’ thinking, and deter this activity in the future by making it less effective.

TOP THEMES SAMPLE

• Updated on September 5, 6:57 PM

• We examined the top themes being promoted and/or amplified between August 28th and September 4th.

• 68 stories listed among the Top/Trending URLs on the dashboard were categorized by theme.

• Of these, over 25% have a primary theme of Anti-Americanism.

• Of 18 Anti-USA stories, 9 are Anti-State Department in the context of the closure of Russian diplomatic facilities, and 6 are Anti-CIA in the context of Syria. Both State and CIA can be viewed as the insiders, the DC Establishment, the Deep State. In other words, when the US does something the Kremlin doesn't like, it's not Trump who is blamed. It is more like Russia is a victim of the same embedded forces in Washington that are supposedly working against the President.

• 11 stories are Anti-Protest, 11 are in defence of Trump, 7 oppose the GOP establishment, and 6 are anti-Democratic Party. Together, these broad themes made up about 80% of all the promoted content during the period.