Another hearing on Russian interference in US elections

There was another Senate hearing today on Russian interference in Western elections. I found the statements of the three witnesses notably unanimous in much of what they said in the first part of the hearing. Which isn't necessarily something that should inspire confidence.

Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Russian interference in European elections PBS Newshour 06/28/2017:

I take the news and what evidence we have about Russian interference in the US elections very seriously. It really does need to be investigated and clearly exposed.

I also worry that the Democrats' commitment to a New Cold War policy toward Russia may be having too heavy an influence on how they talk about the election-interference issue.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein in this hearing shows how those two factors can work to complement each other in articulating an anti-Russian foreign policy. "The iron bear [?] is on a march," she says, in reference to Russia. She does allow, "There is a downside to a cyberwar." She speaks as though she takes it for granted that Hillary Clinton's loss in the 2016 Presidential election was caused by Russian intervention. (Apparently, so does Marco Rubio!) She also claims that "every single one of America's intelligence services" agrees on the major aspects of Russian interference in the election and with "full confidence." Those famous "17 intelligence agencies." I do hope the

The PBS Newshour description of the segment:

Ambassador Nicholas Burns, Roy and Barbara Goodman Family Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Relations, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Janis Sarts, Director, NATO Strategic Communication Center of Excellence, Ambassador Vesko Garcevic, Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Relations, Frederick Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University and Constanze Stelzenmueller, Bosch Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution will testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday about Russian interference in European elections.

Nicholas Burns was Ambassador to Greece during the Clinton Administration, then US Ambassador to NATO and Under Secretary for Political Affairs during the Cheney-Bush Administration.

Constanze Stelzenmueller at one point she does expresses some general reservations about free governments directly regulating the content of the public space in the discussion of political ideas. And she talks about how the best protection against disinformation via RT or Sputnik comes from having a public that is able to distinguish effectively what is a more credible source and what is not. Sen. Angus King seconded that idea and saying that what Americans need to learn is "shrug it off."

Janis Sarts suggests during the questions that the central concern in US response to the evidence should be establishing "resilence." He defined that in a general way as cyberdefense, and being able to "operationalize the information battlespace," whatever the heck that may mean. He does make the point after 1:04:00 that "Russian documents" show that "they believe we are attacking them. I think they really believe that." But then he says one of our "most powerful weapon" is getting "the truth" to Russian citizens about their government's meddling in US elections. And we will do that without meddling in Russian politics and without using sneaky ways to get information to ordinary Russians ... how?

This is a frustrating problem with "cyberwar." If Americans are going to make a reasonably informed judgment on how to "hit back" against Russia, as DiFi demanded several times in the hearing, we need to be reasonably informed about the kinds of cyber-operations the US is running against Russia. And we don't have to think about that too much to see how murky that can get.

Vesko Garcevic wrote about Russian interference in Montenegro in Russia, an alleged coup and Montenegro’s bid for NATO membership The Conversation 03/21/2017. That intervention manifested itself in a coup attempt there, much more visible and obvious than suspect tweets of RT news items. But Garcevic writes, "Montenegro is one of only a few contests that Moscow has lately lost in its zero-sum style competition with the West. Despite efforts and money, Moscow has made no measurable progress in slowing the pro-Western direction of the country."

But DiFi and, seemingly, Rubio take it for granted that the 2016 effort in the US election was very effective. Which means, what? That American voters are notably less sophisticated and less able to evaluate news critically than Montenegrin voters?

What I take from this hearing is that countering Russian interference in US elections needs a couple of basic things. One is secure and auditable voting, like using paper ballots with counting by optical scan. The other is that people need to be able to distinguish legitimate reporting from the latest goofball urban legend you get in an email from a cranky friend. Or via Facebook, or whatever. The latter, of course, would interfere with the business models of FOX "News," Breitbart, along with Russ Limbaugh and his clones.

The exotic "cyberwar" aspects may be minor elements in defending the election process.

And the notion that political ideas shouldn't cross national borders is a non-starter. The most telling moment I noticed in the hearing was the discussion about how getting the Truth to the Russian public is our "most powerful weapon" in countering this in active way. No one seemed to show any inkling that they were talking about active US attempts to influence Russian politics, the mirror image of what the Senators were metaphorically rending their garments about in the hearing.

Their prepared statements are online: Nicholas
Burns; Janis Sarts; Vesko Garcevic; Constanze Stelzenmueller.

The conjoined fake-news/Russian-propaganda brouhaha continues

I don't pretend to know what's really behind the "fake news"/Russian propaganda story that the Democrats in particular have been pushing. Obviously, since the whole story is based on claims about highly secret operations, there's not a lot of definitive information in the public record on this. To put it mildly.

Spencer Ackerman reports on Obama taking a new step in the process of developing whatever this is, President Obama is acting Election hacking: Obama orders 'full review' of Russia interference Guardian 12/09/2016:

Lisa Monaco, the White House counterterrorism director, announced what she called a “full review” at a breakfast briefing sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor on Friday.

“This is good news. Declassifying and releasing information about the Russian government and the US election, and doing so quickly, must be a priority,” said Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee.

In October, the director of national intelligence and the secretary of homeland security publicly accused the “senior-most” levels of the Russian government of directing those digital breaches. Trump, who has treated Russian president Vladimir Putin with a warmth unequalled by most US politicians, has repeatedly dismissed the accusation as politically motivated.

US intelligence laid the blame for the DNC hack at Russia’s feet but has not provided evidence supporting the accusation, although several private cybersecurity firms reaching the same conclusion have. Earlier this month, all the Democratic members of the Senate intelligence committee publicly intimated the administration knows significantly more about Russian culpability than the October statement revealed, and implored Obama for a public disclosure he has thus far resisted. [my emphasis]

Presidential election winner Hillary Clinton made a high-profile statement about "fake news" yesterday (Lauren Gambino, Hillary Clinton warns fake news can have 'real world consequences' Guardian 12/09/2016):

Hillary Clinton issued a call to action against the “epidemic” of fake news in a rare public appearance since her unexpected loss to Donald Trump.

The Democratic presidential nominee warned that the proliferation of false news stories online can have “real world consequences”, alluding to an incident over the weekend in which a man opened fire at Comet Ping Pong after reading a false news story that purported the DC pizzeria was harboring children as part of a sex ring led by Clinton. No one was injured.

“This is not about politics or partisanship,” Clinton said, during a tribute to departing Senate minority leader Harry Reid. “Lives are at risk. Lives of ordinary people just trying to go about their days to do their jobs, contribute to their communities.”

“It is a danger that must be addressed and addressed quickly.”

She linked that theme to legislation in Congress to get more aggressive in responding to "foreign propaganda."

The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur is highly suspicious of this whole story line (Hillary Wants Government To Decide What "Fake News" Is 12/08/2016):

Truthdig provides an update on their attorney's letter to the Washignton Pot over an aspect of this story, Here’s The Washington Post’s Letter Responding to Truthdig’s Demand for a Retraction 12/08/2016.

Mark Ames writes on the same story about a smear in a Washington Post article on the fake-news/Russian-propaganda theme in The Anonymous Blacklist Promoted by the Washington Post Has Apparent Ties to Ukrainian Fascism and CIA Spying AlterNet 12/07/2016

Featured alongside those anonymously accused of treason by PropOrNot, among a long list of marginal conspiracy sites and major news hubs, is Truthdig. This news and opinion site was co-founded by Zuade Kaufman and the veteran journalist Robert Scheer, who is a professor of USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and former columnist for the LA Times. It would not be the first time Scheer has come under attack from dark forces. In the mid-late 1960s, Scheer made his fame as editor and reporter for Ramparts, the fearless investigative magazine that changed American journalism. One of the biggest bombshell stories that Scheer’s magazine exposed was the CIA’s covert funding of the National Student Association, then America’s largest college student organization, which had chapters on 400 campuses and a major presence internationally.

The CIA was not pleased with Scheer’s magazine’s work, and shortly afterwards launched a top-secret and illegal domestic spying campaign against Scheer and Ramparts, believing that they must be a Russian Communist front. A secret team of CIA operatives—kept secret even from the rest of Langley, the operation was so blatantly illegal—spied on Scheer and his Ramparts colleagues, dug through Ramparts’ funders lives and harassed some of them into ditching the magazine, but in all of that they couldn’t find a single piece of evidence linking Scheer’s magazine to Kremlin agents. This secret illegal CIA investigation into Scheer’s magazine expanded its domestic spying project, code-named MH-CHAOS, that grew into a monster targeting hundreds of thousands of Americans, only to be exposed by Seymour Hersh in late 1974, leading to the creation of the Church Committee hearings and calls by Congress for the abolition of the Central Intelligence Agency.

It’s one of the dark ugly ironies that 50 years later, Scheer has been anonymously accused of working for Russian spies, only this time the accusers have the full cooperation of the Washington Post’s front page.

He also discusses the Ukrainian connection in their title:

Because the PropOrNot blacklist of American journalist “traitors” is anonymous, and the Washington Post front-page article protects their anonymity, we can only speculate on their identity with what little information they’ve given us. And that little bit of information reveals only a Ukrainian ultranationalist thread—the salute, the same obsessively violent paranoia towards Russia, and towards journalists, who in the eyes of Ukrainian nationalists have always been dupes and stooges, if not outright collaborators, of Russian evil.

One of the key media sources who blamed the DNC hacks on Russia, ramping up fears of crypto-Putinist infiltration, is a Ukrainian-American lobbyist working for the DNC. She is Alexandra Chalupa—described as the head of the Democratic National Committee’s opposition research on Russia and on Trump, and founder and president of the Ukrainian lobby group “US United With Ukraine Coalition”, which lobbied hard to pass a 2014 bill increasing loans and military aid to Ukraine, imposing sanctions on Russians, and tightly aligning US and Ukraine geostrategic interests.

In October of this year, Yahoo News named Chalupa one of “16 People Who Shaped the 2016 Election” for her role in pinning the DNC leaks on Russian hackers, and for making the case that the Trump campaign was under Kremlin control. “As a Democratic Party consultant and proud Ukrainian-American, Alexandra Chalupa was outraged last spring when Donald Trump named Paul Manafort as his campaign manager,” the Yahoo profile began. “As she saw it, Manafort was a key figure in advancing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s agenda inside her ancestral homeland — and she was determined to expose it.”

Chalupa worked with veteran reporter Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News to publicize her opposition research on Trump, Russia and Paul Manafort, as well as her many Ukrainian sources. In one leaked DNC email earlier this year, Chalupa boasts to DNC Communications Director Luis Miranda that she brought Isikoff to a US-government sponsored Washington event featuring 68 Ukrainian journalists, where Chalupa was invited “to speak specifically about Paul Manafort.” In turn, Isikoff named her as the key inside source “proving” that the Russians were behind the hacks, and that Trump’s campaign was under the spell of Kremlin spies and sorcerers.

The more I hear about the Russian hacking story, the more I think that whatever the result of this scare turns out to be, it will not be good for progressives or the New Deal wing of the Democratic Party.

Here's a different twist from Greg Sargent What happens if Russia did interfere in our election? Washington Post 12/09/2016:

James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan international security think tank, suggests that a finding of Russian interference of some kind might “hem in the next administration,” i.e., the Trump administration. That’s because any evidence that Russia tried to swing the election in some form or other — if such evidence is found — might shine a harsher light on Trump’s foreign policy choices.

Trump has publicly expressed skepticism that Russia was behind the hacks, claiming that “I don’t believe they interfered,” and suggesting that “it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.” Trump has also suggested that he wants much smoother relations with Russia.

“But if the administration releases some information on Russian interference, saying, ‘here’s how they did it and here’s what their intent was,’ it would make it harder to argue that it was a hacker in New Jersey,” Lewis tells me. “That could help shape our approach towards Russia next year. The hope is, Trump would have to be more careful.”

So, is the purpose of this to make it harder for the Trump Family Business Administration less willing to improve relations with Russia no matter what?

The "fake news" and the hyped scare over Russian propaganda

It looks like the paired stories on "fake news" and alleged Russian manipulation of the US election will percolate for a while.

It's hard to tell at this point who and what are behind this particular meme. I always suspected that the anti-Russian emphasis of the Hillary Clinton campaign was in part meant to lay the groundwork for a more aggressive policy against Russia than even the Obama Administration has run. Part of it was what they saw as a convenient way to duck questions about the Wikileaks revelations of the campaign's e-mails.

Specifically branding Wikileaks as Russian sockpuppets was also an obvious part of the intention of both the Clinton campaign and the Obama Administration. Obama has literally had a more severe policy against whistleblowers than even the Cheney-Bush Administration and Hillary Clinton supported that stance, as well. Wikileaks has obviously played a role in investigative reporting that the corporate media have to a large extent abandoned.

Lee Fang explains that Trump's allies are producers of "fake news" in Some Fake News Publishers Just Happen to Be Donald Trump’s Cronies The Intercept 11/26/2016. For instance:

Laura Ingraham, a close Trump ally currently under consideration to be Trump’s White House press secretary, owns an online publisher called Ingraham Media Group that runs a number of sites, including LifeZette, a news site that frequently posts articles of dubious veracity. One video produced by LifeZette this summer, ominously titled “Clinton Body Count,” promoted a conspiracy theory that the Clinton family had some role in the plane crash death of John F. Kennedy, Jr., as well as the deaths of various friends and Democrats.

The video, published on Facebook from LifeZette’s verified news account, garnered over 400,000 shares and 14 million views.

Progressive news and commentary sites listed on a frivolous list of alleged Russian-influenced "fake news" websites, which the Washington Post publicized as though it were a legitimate and credible group, have been pushing back. Natasha Hakimi breaks it down in Truthdiggers of the Week: Journalists Who Ripped Washington Post, PropOrNot for McCarthyite Hogwash Trughtdig 12/03/2013:

The list, which some in the media have branded “McCarthyite,” has been widely criticized, particularly because Timberg and the Post did not disclose sufficient identifying details about the accusing group, which has not released its members’ names. And neither Timberg nor Post editors have provided any insight on their reasoning in publishing PropOrNot’s findings. For its part, PropOrNot continues to offer erratic, at times childish, responses to the backlash.

She cites Ben Norton's and Glenn Greenwald's article, Washington Post Disgracefully Promotes a McCarthyite Blacklist From a New, Hidden, and Very Shady Group The Intercept 11/26/2016, where they justifiably charge, "Yet the [WaPo] article is rife with obviously reckless and unproven allegations, and fundamentally shaped by shoddy, slothful journalistic tactics."

She also references and provides quotes from these additional pieces:

Adrian Chen in The Propaganda About Russian Propaganda New Yorker 12/01/2016, which gives an excellent summary of how flaky the PropOrNot group's criteria for pushing Russian propaganda are.
Matt Taibbi, The 'Washington Post' 'Blacklist' Story Is Shameful and Disgusting Rolling Stone 11/28/2016
Joshua Frank, CounterPunch as Russian Propagandists: the Washington Post’s Shallow Smear Counterpunch 12/02/2016; also including the following Vimeo report featuring Joshua Frank:

Truthdig also has another article about the smear effort, Preserving Independent Journalism and Fighting the New McCarthyism 11/29/2016. Also including video, Robert Scheer: PropOrNot List 'An Attack on Internet Freedom" You Tube truthdig 12/02/2016:

Truthdig's Editor in Chief Robert Scheer has been here before. He was the editor of Ramparts magazine, a left alternative magazine from the 1960s and 1970s. Int hat role, he was well known for his critical coverage of the Vietnam War. One of his best-known scoops was breaking the story at Ramparts about how the CIA was clandestinely infiltrating student groups in the United States. He also worked at the Los Angeles Times.

The attorney of one of the smeared sites, the financial blog Naked Capitalism, has sent a Request for retraction of: "Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say" (November 24, 2016), for public apology, and for opportunity to respond, accusing WaPo's article of Making "false and defamatory accusations." While I'm not at all a big fan of legal actions against publication for defamation, promoting unsubstantiated allegations effectively suggesting that a group is acting as an illegal foreign agent really is pretty serious.

The letter includes some further web links on the topic.