Russia’s redheaded “spies”; disinformation on steroids; Russian meddling & EU elections, and more

Will Deep-Fake technology destroy democracy? (Jennifer Finney Boylan, New York Times)
Imagine if a doctored video of a politician appeared the day before an election. It’s everything Vladimir Putin ever dreamed of.

Penn professor: Trump would ‘probably not’ be president without Russian help (The College Fix)
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and director of its Annenberg Public Policy Center, doesn’t think that President Trump would have won election without Russian interference. The only problem? She admitted that there isn’t proof that this claim is true.
The Daily Pennsylvanian reports on Jamieson’s book Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President — What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know, which explored what Jamieson called Russian “subterfuge,” or Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
“First, I wouldn’t call it Russian meddling — that’s a benign term and I don’t think anything they did was benign,” she told the Daily.
She pointed to alleged Russian hacking of the emails of Democratic National Committee, John Podesta, and Hillary Clinton herself.
She claimed that Russian hackers were trying to spread misinformation to influence voters “in ways that were consistent with Donald Trump’s objectives”:

Jamieson added that the Russian hackers attempted to mobilize the same voters Trump was trying to mobilize and demobilize the same voters he was trying to demobilize. Further, the Russians attempted to shift voters Trump could not win towards the third–party candidate Jill Stein.

The book claims that Donald Trump “probably would not be president” without Russian “subterfuge.”
The problem? It isn’t clear if this is a true claim. Jamieson added, “it’s hard to know for sure” whether or not Russian interference actually swayed voters:

Facebook hasn’t provided data detailing what demographics were affected by misinformation, such as fake pages and fake people meant to stir up anger and prejudice in key voting groups that were skeptical of Clinton.

Still, Jamieson insisted that “targeted ads, fake Facebook pages, and in some cases, fabricated people,” were all strategically aligned with President Trump’s messages, even though she acknowledged that this might not have had any impact on the election.

Why Assad and Russia target the White Helmets (Janine di Giovanni, New York Review of Books)
Most of Assad’s Western apologists have a presence only on Twitter and obscure websites like 21st Century Wire (a website founded by a former editor of American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s Infowars), yet it would be foolish to disregard them. The work of this small group is also spread by a spectrum of far-left, anti-West conspiracy theorists; anti-Semites; supporters of Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah; libertarians; and far-right groups. At their core are Beeley, the daughter of a British diplomat; a Canadian activist named Eva Bartlett; the Hezbollah-friendly commentator Sharmine Narwani; and Max Blumenthal, the son of the former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal.
As The Guardian recently reported, the Russian government uses Twitter accounts belonging to its embassies, as well as other accounts that have been linked to the Internet Research Agency, which oversees trolls and bots, to spread disinformation. The views of pro-Assad writers also filter into the mainstream through more respectable Assad-friendly American and British journalists such as Robert Fisk, Stephen Kinzer, and John Pilger (who oversees the Martha Gellhorn Reporting Prize, which was previously awarded to Julian Assange, and for which Beeley was a runner-up). In turn, their reports are echoed by public figures such as the British MP Emily Thornberry, Baroness Cox, and the Reverend Andrew Ashdown, an Anglican minister.
The damage the bloggers do is immense. They attack anyone with an account of events that contradicts their own, but their chief target is the White Helmets. The bloggers’ work is repeated on the state-owned Russian news outlets RT and Sputnik; some of it has even been cited by Russian ambassadors at the United Nations. The bloggers resist being linked to the Kremlin, and there is no evidence of financial transactions other than the standard fees paid by RT for television appearances. But the Russian version of its own military strikes is amplified by bloggers like Beeley and Bartlett, who promote RT reports that push the Kremlin’s false narrative about the use of chemical weapons in Syria.

Mueller ready to deliver key findings in his Trump probe, sources say (Chris Strohm, Greg Farrell, and Shannon Pettypiece, Blomberg)
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is expected to issue findings on core aspects of his Russia probe soon after the November midterm elections as he faces intensifying pressure to produce more indictments or shut down his investigation, according to two U.S. officials. Specifically, Mueller is close to rendering judgment on two of the most explosive aspects of his inquiry: whether there were clear incidents of collusion between Russia and Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, and whether the president took any actions that constitute obstruction of justice, according to one of the officials, who asked not to be identified speaking about the investigation.

Fear of Russian meddling hangs over next year’s EU elections (Natalia Drozdiak, Bloomberg)
European Union officials are bracing for attempted meddling by Russia-backed operatives and their copycats ahead of the bloc’s elections in the spring, where far-right parties are set to make gains. That’s led the bloc to bolster its defenses against cyber-attacks and pressure tech platforms to ramp up the fight against misinformation.

U.K. Cyber Security Centre says Russia hacking into systems could enable devastating cyberattacks (NIcholas Cecil, Joe Murphy, Evening Standard)
Russian intelligence agents are hacking into computer systems in Britain to “pre-position” themselves to be able to launch devastating cyber attacks, a spy chief warned today. Ciaran Martin, head of the National Cyber Security Centre, said Moscow was accessing systems in attempts to spy or as a first step towards unleashing attacks on the UK’s critical national infrastructure such as the energy or telecoms networks.