Nothing to fear but FEAR itself; U.S. outgunned in fight against Russia’s disinformation; dissecting the Trump-Russia Dossier, and more

Russian propagandists seize Kavanaugh controversy to sow division online (Davis Richardson, Observer)
Russia has seized on the controversy surrounding Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh to further sow division within the United States. Throughout Tuesday and Wednesday, Kavanaugh’s name was a trending topic among 600 Twitter accounts disseminating pro-Kremlin narratives, according to the Hamilton 68 dashboard.All stories are aggregated from right-wing outlets and look to discredit the accusations against Kavanaugh described by Christine Blasey Ford.

Beware of Russian fake news (Jakub Kalenský, PKK-ICDS)
The Kremlin’s disinformation campaign has only one strategic purpose: to weaken the West

Trump’s State Department outgunned in fight to counter Russian disinformation around globe (Deirdre Shesgreen, USA TODAY) Critics say the U.S. response to Russia’s disinformation and fake-news campaigns around the world is ineffective and meager – barely causing a ripple against a tsunami of fake Russian news. Supporters say it’s a vital service – and a desperately needed tool as the U.S. adjusts to an era of weaponized information. Both sides agree the U.S. is massively outgunned in the fight.

Who spread disinformation about the MH17 crash? We followed the Twitter trail. (Yevgeniy Golovchenko and Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Washington Post)We know some of the top-down Russian disinformation tactics and strategies, but far less about who actually spreads digital disinformation and who counters it. To understand who spreads disinformation on social media, we looked at the MH17 debate on Twitter.

Select Committee on fake news: Russian trolls divided societies and turned countries against one another (Charissa Young, Strait Times)
In 2016, two groups of protesters showed up in front of the Islamic Da’wah Centre in Houston, Texas, in support of two diametrically opposite causes.
Donning “White Lives Matter” T-shirts, the first group of 10 protested against what they called the Islamisation of America. The second group of 60, waving signs declaring “Muslims are welcome here”, were there in counter-protest to the first.
Both sides were galvanised by their respective Facebook groups - Heart of Texas and United Muslims of America - and even urged to bring firearms to the protest, though Houston police made sure the protest did not turn violent.
What neither group knew was that a Russia-linked group known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA) had been behind them both, and at the cost of a paltry US$200, had succeeded in stirring up a very real security threat.
The case was one of several examples cited in a report released by the anti-fake news parliamentary committee on Thursday (Sept 20), to show how deliberate disinformation operations aim to widen social divides and undermine democratic processes and institutions.

Dissecting the Trump-Russia Dossier (Michael Weiss and Cynthia A. Fitzpatrick, Coda Story)
“The Dossier,” as everyone calls it, is talked about either as the key to what really happened in the 2016 presidential election, as likely ordered by Vladimir Putin; or it’s an artful but largely invented tapestry of libels and innuendo meant to discredit Donald Trump’s presidency. Most likely there is something in it of both. And in the shadowland of espionage it is even possible that parts of it were planted by Russian operatives to distract and discredit investigators trying to get to the bottom of the Kremlin’s skullduggery.
Paid for by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic Party, The Dossier was compiled by a highly respected former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, who was subcontracted by a more dubious American research firm, Fusion GPS. When it was published it was at first a source of prurient titillation, but more recently became the focus of ferocious contention and competing classified/unclassified memos in Congress. It is relevant to the work of federal investigators headed by former FBI Director Robert Mueller, who have sought to confirm or discredit every last detail, but they are pursuing many other avenues of inquiry as well.
Skeptics looking at Steele’s memos argue that they read a lot like a Russian disinformation campaign. Daniel Hoffman, a former CIA station chief in Moscow, has given three reasons to be wary of the contents of the dossier: that Steele himself never went to Russia to conduct his own investigation but relied on intermediaries of unknown trustworthiness; that Steele would have been under surveillance by the Russians, given his well-known tenure in MI6; and that the Kremlin may have known about his fact-finding efforts through the hacked DNC emails, given that the party was Steele’s paymaster.
Other respected intelligence analysts, such as Steven Hall, the CIA’s former station chief in Moscow and John Sipher, the former head of the Agency’s Russia program, are more inclined to believe in the veracity of Steele’s spadework. According to British journalist Luke Harding, Steele himself has told his friends that the dossier is “70 to 90 percent accurate.”
All of which suggests that some of the material is true, some not. But which?
….
So, we’ve made our notes on the reordered dossier reports according to their file numbers and attempted to fit them into the relevant narrative of what was going on as they were written. What emerges is a complex but comprehensible story of gossip, intrigue, and spycraft.

Brits warned Trump against releasing Carter Page surveillance docs (Spencer Ackerman, Daily Beast)
The U.K. is America’s closest intelligence ally and has a strong interest in keeping the surveillance application out of sight. But Trump still hasn’t ruled out declassification.

California launches new effort to fight election disinformation (Capital Public Radio)
California election officials are launching a new effort to fight the kind of disinformation campaigns that plagued the 2016 elections — an effort that comes with thorny legal and political questions. The state’s new Office of Election Cybersecurity will focus on social media efforts to discourage or confuse voters into not casting a ballot. During the 2016 election, in addition to hacking email accounts and attacking voting systems, Russian agents used social media also planted disinformation intended to drive down voter turnout.