The Russia watchCollateral damage of Trump's extreme declassifications; squaring up to Russian propaganda; the most devastating cyberattack in history

The collateral damage of Trump’s extreme declassifications (Lily Hay Newman, Wired)
On Monday evening, the White House released an order instructing the Department of Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to declassify excerpts from an array of documents related to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference. He has every legal right to do so. But national security analysts and former intelligence officials say that such a demand isn’t just largely unprecedented; it’s potentially dangerous.
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Complicating the interpretation of the White House order is the question of whether the Trump Administration only requested specific pages from the FISA application to protect law enforcement sources and methods on other pages, or whether it’s selectively excluding information that validates the FBI’s Carter Page wiretap. Given how Trump associate Devon Nunes has misled the public about key aspects of the FISA application, hopes aren’t high.
“There are obvious privacy and investigative reasons that you might legitimately not want to publish certain pages,” says Julian Sanchez, a national security-focused research fellow at the Cato Institute. “But the problem with the incomplete way information has been dribbling out is that it might also be that that stuff confirms the utility of the surveillance. It’s an issue of selective disclosure and the potential to support a narrative through omission.”
Which is a shame, because there’s an argument to be made that the FISA process really is too secretive. Selectively declassifying self-serving information, though, doesn’t achieve that end. “On the one hand I would love to see the FISA process generally be more transparent,” Sanchez says. “But it’s clearly a terrible precedent for the White House to be picking and choosing specific investigations that personally affect the president. There are reasons that the White House is not in a position to weigh the equities impartially or expertly.”

‘Carter Page is a very unlikely GOP hero’ (Natasha Bertrand, The Atlantic)
President Trump and House Republicans are declassifying documents to allege the campaign aide was spied on by Hillary Clinton partisans, but the FBI had been investigating Page’s ties to Russian intelligence for years.

Russia is gearing up to misinform the U.S. public about Syria. Here’s our cheat sheet to identify Twitter trolls. (Jack Nassetta and Ethan Fecht, Washington Post)
The Syrian government has announced plans to launch