When facts no longer matter; fake news a threat to democracy; Putin's Russia turned humor into a weapon, and more

Fake news a threat to our democracy (John Dobson, Guardian)
The risk of disinformation contagion is growing as we are increasingly connected by social media.

Another episode of Russian information warfare and active measures (Stephen Blank, International Policy Digest)
For the last two years we have been consumed with reports of Russian information warfare (IW) and active measures to attack the U.S. and allied governments. But by focusing on those attacks we have neglected other vital sectors that are constantly and daily under Russian and other attacks, namely the corporate sector. Private, semi-public, public, and government corporations, have all been subjected to major cyber-attacks that aim not only to injure them but to discredit their businesses and, if they are tied to a government, cripple that government’s policies.
Readers should remember the 2014 North Korean attacks on Sony to register Pyongyang’s displeasure over a movie satirizing Kim Jong-Un. Indeed, the U.S. government recently indicted a North Korean national, Park Jin Hyok for attacking Sony, orchestrating the 2017 WannaCry malware attack that infected over 200,000 computers in 150 countries. He also orchestrated a massive 2016 heist of $81 million from the Bangladesh Bank through the SWIFT network. We also know of the Iranian hack of the Saudi oil company, ARAMCO, that evidently intended not only to destroy data or force a shutdown of operations but also to sabotage ARAMCO operations and cause a lethal explosion. And these attacks preceded the more recent well-known Russian probes and attacks of our national electric grid.
To undermine a business however, it is not even necessary to attack it directly. Often it suffices to destroy its reputation and drive away supporters and customers by disinformation cleverly placed, as is often the case in Russian strikes, in obscure international media that is then used to furnish a supposedly respectable basis for escalating attacks on a business to destroy it and the state policies with which it is associated.
A recent example of such operations occurred when an article in an obscure Bulgarian journal charged that Silk Way Airlines, a subcontractor of the Pentagon through U.S. firms working with the Defense Department, is using diplomatic privileges to carry weapons to terrorists in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Congo. The author alleges that documents allegedly obtained from an anonymous Twitter account in Bulgaria that supposedly sent files from Bulgarian and Azeri diplomatic sources show that Silk Way Airlines offered diplomatic flights to private companies and arms manufacturers from the U.S., Balkans, and Israel, as well as to the militaries of Saudi Arabia, UAE, Germany and Denmark in Afghanistan and of Sweden in Iraq. A subsequent article based itself on this original article, argued that Silk Way Airlines, which has received government loans from the Export-Import Bank of the United States, was also ferrying weapons to terrorists.
However, this is a classic example of Russian disinformation and active measures to destroy Silk Way Airlines and undermine U.S. and allied policies in all these countries who are either fighting terrorism or threatened by it. Indeed, the original sources for the Bulgarian article come from IP addresses in Russia and Armenia, not Bulgarian or Azeri diplomatic files. Furthermore, the Bulgarian journalist who originally reported this story, Dilyana Gaytandzhieva, was subsequently fired for reporting this disinformation.

The “global cybercrime problem” is actually the “Russia problem” (John P. Carlin, The Atlantic)
Convincing Putin that further attacks will trigger automatic, severe responses is the best path to deterrence.

EU’s Juncker takes aim at Hungary’s Orban over fake news (Channel News Asia)
European Union leaders on Friday backed a plan to tackle fake news on the internet and the bloc’s chief executive rounded on one of the EU chiefs, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, as one of the main culprits in spreading disinformation.

EU leaders call for urgent action against disinformation (Reuters)
European Union leaders called for urgent action to combat fake news on the Internet at a summit on Friday, saying more needed to be done to safeguard next year’s EU election against disinformation.
The bloc’s 28 heads of state backed a plan to help stop what the United States, NATO and the EU say are Russian attempts to undermine Western democracies with disinformation campaigns that sow division. Russia has repeatedly denied any such action.
The plan calls for an early warning system to alert governments and tech giants such as Facebook and Google to do more to remove misleading or illegal content.

How Putin’s Russia turned humor into a weapon (Olga Robinson, BBC)
In the dying days of the Soviet Union, Russians used humor to escape the bleak reality of economic stagnation, food shortages and long queues.
Political satire flourished on TV in the form of latex puppets during the 1990s, but it was quickly slapped down when Vladimir Putin came to power.
In today’s Russia, where the media is largely controlled by the Kremlin and its allies, there is little room for genuine political humor unless it is used to deflect the blame from the government.