The Russia watchRussian military malware in home routers; Russia targets energy companies; voting machines flaws, and more

Document: Court upholds constitutionality of Mueller appointment in Russian troll farm case (Matthew Khan, Lawfare)
On Monday, Judge Dabney Friedrich of the the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled against a motion challenging the constitutionality of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s appointment.

Russian military spy software is on hundreds of thousands of home routers (Patrick Tucker, Defense One)
In May, the Justice Department told Americans to reboot their routers. But there’s more to do — and NSA says it’s up to device makers and the public.

Lessons from Europe’s fight against Russian disinformation (Dana Priest, New Yorker)
“In every nation on Earth where the government is moving from a participatory to an authoritarian form of rule, seizing the information pipeline is a prerequisite for staying in power.”

“We have a tape of Donald Trump!” Ex-KGB spy claimed In 2016 before dossier “pee tape” story, CIA veteran says (Jonathan Vankin, Inquisitr)
Former CIA agent Bob Baer claims that an ex-KGB spy told him in 2016, before the Donald Trump ‘pee tape’ allegation became public, that Russia had a tape of Trump.

SA congressman warns of Russian hackers targeting oil and gas companies (Sergio Chapa, San Antonio Business Journal)
U.S. Rep. Will Hurd, R-Helotes, a former CIA agent, believes the success of the shale revolution in the Eagle Ford Shale in South Texas and the Permian Basin in West Texas has made oil and natural gas companies a target.

Experts: Americans vulnerable to malign social media messaging (Michael Bowman, Alaska Native News)
While U.S. lawmakers press Twitter and Facebook to better police their platforms against Russian social media trolls and ponder tougher sanctions against Moscow, American voters remain vulnerable to divisive messaging and misinformation before midterm elections in November, experts told VOA. “All of us, left and right [politically], are all very susceptible to being fooled by disinformation,” said Claire Wardle, director of First Draft News, a project at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy that provides tools to fight false content on the Internet and social media.

Inside the poisoning of a Russian double agent (Tom Lamont, GQ)
How a hit on a retired spy named Sergei Skripal became the latest—and most terrifying—front in Vladimir Putin’s war with the West.

Is Russia really trying to sway the midterm elections? (George Beebe, Yahoo)
If Moscow views its social-media campaign as a defensive response to American meddling in Russian politics, then it might see little to gain and much to lose by giving up this activity without getting reciprocal U.S. concessions. Putin often recalls occasions when he made unilateral concessions to the United States, such as closing Russia’s intelligence collection site in Cuba and withdrawing from its naval facility in Vietnam in 2001, without gaining anything in return. As a result, many Russian nationalists view him as too eager to court Washington and too reluctant to stand up to American pressure. He may be wary of feeding those perceptions by ordering Russian trolls to stand down absent an American agreement to abstain from meddling in Russia’s domestic affairs. And, in view of the U.S. media’s near obsessive focus on Russia’s activity, he may well see the continuation of that activity as a bargaining chip too valuable to be tossed aside. (Cont.)