• Lega Nord’s Bedfellows: Russians Offering Illicit Funding to Italian Far-Right Party Identified

    In the last four years, the Kremlin has engaged in a broad, systematic campaign – consisting of hacking, a vast social media disinformation effort, and illicit funding – to weaken the West by helping far-right, populist, pro-Russian politicians and movements reach power. One of their successes was in Italy, where the far-right, anti-EU, anti-immigrant Northern League and the eclectic, anti-establishment 5 Star Movement won enough seats in the Fall 2017 election to form a coalition government (which collapsed last week, after more than a 1.5 years in power). Prosecutors in Milan have launched an investigation of The League after recordings emerged of meetings between League leaders and Kremlin emissaries, in which a scheme to secure funding for The League in the upcoming European parliament elections was discussed. The funding – in the millions of Euro – was to be funneled via artificially underpriced Russian oil export transactions.

  • The BBC Joins Up with Google, Facebook, and Twitter to Try to Tackle Misinformation Online

    The BBC is teaming up with some of the biggest names in tech to coordinate a defense against the online disinformation campaigns endemic to some of their platforms, the outlet announced Saturday. Google, Twitter, and Facebook said that they, and the BBC, would come up with a targeted approach which, in part, uses an early warning system during critical periods when the spread of misinformation “threatens human life or disrupts democracy during election,” per the BBC.

  • Hostile Social Manipulation by Russia and China: A Growing, Poorly Understood Threat

    With the role of information warfare in global strategic competition becoming much more apparent, a new report delves into better defining and understanding the challenge facing the United States by focusing on the hostile social manipulation activities of the two leading users of such techniques: Russia and China.

  • The Truth About Conspiracy Theories

    Conspiracy theories have been around for hundreds of years, but with the rise of the internet, the speed with which they spread has accelerated and their power has grown. But do they work, who believes them, and why? What kind of damage can they do—and how can we do a better job of controlling that damage, as individuals and as a society? Tufts University Kelly M. Greenhill says that the answers are complicated—but with misinformation proliferating and mutating like a virus, and the health of civil society and democratic governance at stake, it’s crucial to try to address them and contain them.

  • DOD Recognizes Virginia Tech’s Contribution to Counterintelligence

    DOD’s Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency last month awarded Virginia Tech the 2018 Award for Excellence in Counterintelligence to the university. The award, given annually since 2010, recognizes up to four companies or institutions, out of about 10,000, which exhibit the best counterintelligence results and cooperation to support the U.S. government’s efforts to detect and stop foreign entities from stealing national security information.

  • Why the 2020 Campaigns Are Still Soft Targets for Hackers

    Three and a half years have passed since John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, fell for a phishing email—granting Russian hackers, and thereby the world, access to his Gmail account and coming to embody the devastating ways foreign governments can meddle in democratic politics. In light of that trauma, the current crop of presidential campaigns has made progress in fortifying their digital operations. But according to those who have worked with the campaigns on these efforts, they nevertheless remain vulnerable to attack and lack cybersecurity best practices.

  • The CAR Murders: A Critical Cold Case in the New Cold War Points to “Putin’s Chef”

    It’s been more than a year now since someone murdered three Russian journalists on a dark road in a remote corner of the Central African Republic. The journalists’ investigation had peeled back layer after layer of an ostensibly private “company” noteworthy for conspiracy and corruption, which Russian President Vladimir Putin evidently employs to extend his influence around the world. Americans concerned about the ruthlessness of Moscow’s operations to subvert or dominate other countries should take note as evidence mounts that some of the central figures in the cyberattacks on the U.S. presidential election in 2016 may also be implicated in the Africa homicides.

  • Disinformation Is Catalyzing the Spread of Authoritarianism Worldwide

    There’s a segment of the American left that believes we’re in no position to be outraged over Russia’s multifaceted campaign to swing the 2016 election to Trump because the U.S. has meddled in its share of elections in other countries. Setting aside the fact that this is a prime example of the tu quoque fallacy, it ignores the specific context of that intervention. Joshua Holland writes in Raw Story that this is not about the U.S. alone. “As I wrote for The Nation in 2017, long before Trump descended on that gaudy golden escalator to announce his candidacy…, Russia had honed its tactics in Estonia, followed soon after by attempts, with varying degrees of success, to disrupt the domestic politics of Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Finland, Bosnia and Macedonia.” It also isn’t about Russia. “As the New York Times reported earlier this year, researchers have ‘discovered numerous copycats, particularly on the far right. Those groups often echo Kremlin talking points, making it difficult to discern the lines between Russian propaganda, far-right disinformation and genuine political debate,’” Holland writes.

  • The Corrupting of Democracy

    Democracies are generally thought to die at the barrel of a gun, in coups and revolutions. These days, however, they are more likely to be strangled slowly in the name of the people. The Economist writes that Hungary offers a cautionary example. Fidesz, the ruling party, has used its parliamentary majority to capture regulators, dominate business, control the courts, buy the media and manipulate the rules for elections. In form, Hungary is a thriving democracy; in spirit, it is a one-party state. The forces at work in Hungary are eating away at other 21st-century polities, too.

  • Calling Off Iowa’s “Digital Caucuses” Is a Wise Display of Caution

    Caution and restraint are not known as the hallmarks of the digital revolution. Especially when there’s the admirable possibility of increasing participation by going digital, the temptation to do so is strong—and rarely resisted. But a decision reportedly taken by the Democratic National Committee, however, presents a significant display of caution that deserves both attention and praise. “Showing restraint usually isn’t exciting or flashy,” Joshua Geltzer writes. “But it can be admirable. And, here, organizations like the DNC that take these steps deserve our collective applause for erring on the side of caution, especially in a world replete with cybersecurity and election interference threats.”

  • U.S. Cracks Down on Chinese Economic Espionage

    The U.S. Justice Department is escalating prosecution of Chinese economic espionage cases, part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on China’s alleged theft of American intellectual property and other predatory practices that are at the heart of trade tensions between Washington and Beijing.

  • A College Reading List for the Post-Truth Era

    “We live in a time beset with belittlement of science, hostility toward expertise and attacks on traditional democratic institutions,” Michael T. Nietzel, president emeritus of Missouri State University, writes. “It’s a post-truth period where conspiracy theories and crackpot ideas flourish. If the facts conflict with someone’s sense of identity or political ideology, then the facts are disposable. They can be replaced with notions that feel better or reverberate on social media.” What is the best way to achieve the goal of making young students less susceptible to dangerous s stupidities and toxic conspiracy theories? Nietzel has a suggestion — although he admits it is increasingly rare as an academic expectation: serious reading. He offers seven recent books which champion reason over emotion, distinguish facts from fallacies, and enumerate the dangers of ignoring the truth.

  • China’s Spies Are on the Offensive

    Espionage and counterespionage have been essential tools of statecraft for centuries, of course, and U.S. and Chinese intelligence agencies have been battling one another for decades. But what recent cases suggest is that the intelligence war is escalating—that China has increased both the scope and the sophistication of its efforts to steal secrets from the U.S.

  • Facebook, Google, Twitter and the “Digital Disinformation Mess”

    The preliminary results of Facebook’s long-awaited “bias” audit are out. The key takeaway? Everyone is still unhappy. The report is little more than a formalized catalog of six categories of grievances aired in Republican-led congressional hearings over the past two years. It doesn’t include any real quantitative assessment of bias. There are no statistics assessing the millions of moderation decisions that Facebook and Instagram make each day. The results are all the more remarkable because the audit was an exhaustive affair, the fruit of about a year of research led by former Republican Sen. Jon Kyl, encompassing interviews with scores of conservative lawmakers and organizations. “Despite the time and energy invested, the conspicuous absence of evidence within the audit suggests what many media researchers already knew: Allegations of political bias are political theater,” Renee DiResta wites.

  • How a “Political Astroturfing” App Coordinates Pro-Israel Influence Operations

    The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long been a global battle, fought by hundreds of proxies in dozens of national capitals by way of political, economic, and cultural pressure. As the internet has evolved, so have the tools used to wage this information struggle. The latest innovation — a pro-Israel smartphone app that seeds and amplifies pro-Israel messages across social media — saw its first major test in May 2019. It offered a glimpse of the novel methods by which future influence campaigns will be conducted and information wars won.