By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick
o Vyacheslav Nikonov surfaces again in a blast on Russian state TV:
Nikonov is grandson of Molotov and specialist on GOP, American politics; often deployed for major propaganda blasts, eg against @McFaul https://t.co/OEnw9Zpzts
— CatherineFitz (@catfitz) September 11, 2017
Nikonov is a prominent expert on the GOP and the American conservative movement, and given his service to the regime, would likely have been consulted in Russia's hacking and influence operation during the 2016 elections. Remember Nikonov was at the famous airport press conference with Edward Snowden where I recall a video clip where he can be seen urgently walking to and fro talking on his cell phone and to aides -- and a Russian media interview. (Impossible to find even my own blog on Google -- Yandex has more, including picture proof and RT's story with Nikonov's quotation that Snowden "will no longer harm the US" if given asylum in Russia. Funny, that -- and untrue, as Snowden not only presided over the leaking of damaging documents but continued verbal statements attacking the US.
Vyacheslav Nikonov at airport giving an interview after meeting with Edward Snowden. Photo by Maksim Blinov/ RIA Novosti
Nikonov also penned a strong rebuttal to the farewell op-ed piece by Amb. Michael McFaul, former US envoy to Russia, and was central in the campaign against McFaul. While a staunch Kremlin loyalist, Nikonov is on the conservative/reactionary side; for example, he was a panelist at the "Moscow: The Third Rome" conference with the Russian Orthodox Church leadership and believes Russians descended from the Aryan race. Even the Russian state organ Russia Beyond the Headlines calls the Aryan theory "like a persistent cold virus, in fringe academic circles," albeit in service to another aim, to charge the UK with the Holocaust, given the British racist theories underpinning colonialism in India.
This clip is worth watching for a number of reasons, among which how instructive it is to see Ariel Cohen vainly trying to argue logic and reason (and remind the audience that Syria didn't destroy all its chemical weapons) at this tendentious venue (an indication of why it's better not to appear in these Russian media settings). In a long diatribe, Nikonov smugly denounces the US as a "graying" and "declining" power -- where even the host, once an economist, interjects with some surprise, given US economic influence in the world.
o You know when a Russian TV Sunday talk show with Solovyov actually makes US news -- the Hill has the story -- a nerve has been struck (like that time Dmitry Kiselyev said Russia could reduce America to "nuclear ash". Prof. Allen Lynch (who must understand Russian) is right: the show isn't about the election hack per se, as the point about US intelligence "being asleep during" (prospali, a colloquial use which means "missed") the DNC hack was made in passing in a larger context detailing America's decline as opposed to BRICS.
To me, the real story of this talk show is just how aggressive, raucous, and even crazy the Russian conservatives are and how hard it is to debate them -- especially if they don't let you talk. If Ariel Cohen, a highly-seasoned political analyst with years of experience in the Soviet and American systems finds it hard to get a word in edgewise without grotesque derision and fact-free denunciations from his interlocutors, so much more the entire American political establishment. I personally think the solution is never to go on their TV shows. But Cohen, who does a lot of advertising for his talk shows on the Russia media, follows the strategy of getting in and mixing it up with them -- and there's something to be said for that, because ultimately, disinformation work has to be about polemics.
o Sputnik is under investigation by the FBI. Many will say "it's about time". What caused the tumblers to click were requests for investigation over suspicious behavior, first by former Sputnik journalist Joseph John Fionda, then an interview by the FBI with Andrew Feinberg, who put himself at the center of this story by first telling all after he quit Sputnik, then talking to Yahoo's well-versed Michael Isikoff and Hunter Walker who had earlier found out from a US intelligence source about the probe.
Congress has been pushing Justice to investigate both Sputnik and RT, the main propaganda arm of the Kremlin. Naturally, there are cries of First Amendment injustices but these may be overcome as Yahoo reports:
“This is incredibly significant,” said Asha Rangappa, a former FBI counterintelligence agent and now an associate dean of Yale Law School, about the bureau’s questioning of the former Sputnik reporter. “The FBI has since the 1970s taken pains not to be perceived in any way as infringing on First Amendment activity. But this tells me they have good information and intelligence that these organizations have been acting on behalf of the Kremlin and that there’s a direct line between them and the [Russian influence operations] that are a significant threat to our democracy.”
Should these agents of Russia be declared foreign agents in the US? There's a report by Elena Postnikova advocating this. Jamie Kirchick was among panelists at the Atlantic Council on this question, which is gathering steam. So often this debate bogs down in false comparisons with the BBC. As Kirchick points out, RT is filled with cranks, racists, and conspiracy theorists unlike the BBC. And -- "The BBC does not have an Illuminati correspondent".
He also aptly points out that the BBC, RFE/RL, VOA and Deutsche Welle all have independent governing boards, unlike RT -- it's hard to conceive of the equivalent type of board in Russia, where people of the caliber that could be on such an independent board have been "killed or chased out of the country". The latest is Yuliya Latyna, a critic of Putin and talk show host force to flee Russia after numerous attacks, including the recent burning of her car. So why will forcing RT to register under FARA be a hard call in the US? As Jeffrey Gedmin, former president of RFE/RL and Senior Fellow, Future Europe Initiative points out in this panel, for this to happen, there would have to be agreement that Russia is a threat, and we "do not have this consensus" in Washington.
o Scott Shane has a much-discussed piece at the New York Times, The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election. (I wish the Times and this author had shown this much enthusiasm and investigative verve on the subject of Edward Snowden). Exposed is "Melvin Redick," an FB fakester who steered people to pro-Kremlin grooves on the US election. (Was his last name chosen to sound like the beloved Reddit?)
Fake accounts on Facebook plague me constantly -- it's always the same type of profile that some genius has decided works on middle-aged single women -- a military widower or divorcee with a child, deployed abroad. I constantly report these to Facebook and am rewarded occasionally with thank-you notes from FB for helping to "clean up" -- except exasperatingly, they don't eliminate some of the really obvious fakes, like a phony account claiming to be "the widower" General Curtis M. Scaparrotti (EUCOM) -- who is in fact happily married to a wife who is alive.
Shane's piece quotes Hamilton 68's J.M. Berger on the accounts identified by FB as fake and removed, proving that the analysis of the data in sound bytes is the most valuable feature of the site, not so much the daily visits:
J. M. Berger, a researcher in Cambridge, Mass., helped build a public web “dashboard” for the Washington-based Alliance for Securing Democracy to track hundreds of Twitter accounts that were suspected of links to Russia or that spread Russian propaganda. During the campaign, he said, he often saw the accounts post replies to Mr. Trump’s tweets. Mr. Trump “received more direct replies than anyone else,” Mr. Berger said. “Clearly this was an effort to influence Donald Trump. They know he reads tweets.”
Naturally, the Times is worried about McCarthyism, and gets the right quote:
Both on the left and the pro-Trump right, though, some skeptics complain that Moscow has become the automatic boogeyman, accused of misdeeds with little proof. Even those who track Russian online activity admit that in the election it was not always easy to sort out who was who.
“Yes, the Russians were involved. Yes, there’s a lot of organic support for Trump,” said Andrew Weisburd, an Illinois online researcher who has written frequently about Russian influence on social media. “Trying to disaggregate the two was difficult, to put it mildly.”
Mr. Weisburd said he had labeled some Twitter accounts “Kremlin trolls” based simply on their pro-Russia tweets and with no proof of Russian government ties. The Times contacted several such users, who insisted that they had come by their anti-American, pro-Russian views honestly, without payment or instructions from Moscow.
Presumably these two -- Marylyn Justice (@mkj1951) and Marcelo Sardo (@marcelosardo)-- are among the 600 -- Shane didn't exhibit curiosity about the other 598, but interviewed these two because they played out his concerns that when a big company calls people "fake," they might be real. To us, it almost seems quaint to see these two featured -- for years they have served as attack dogs on behalf of the Kremlin on issues like the war in Ukraine but without exhibiting any leashes. Although his own web site bears out the impression that he slavishly echoes the Kremlin line, Marcelo has even unsuccessfully sued bloggers for libel (I supposed Shane can't expect the same treatment given far more lax US libel laws).
“Hillary’s a warmonger,” said Marilyn Justice, 66, who lives in Nova Scotia and tweets as @mkj1951. Of Mr. Putin, she said in an interview, “I think he’s very patient in the face of provocations.”
Ms. Justice said she had first taken an interest in Russia during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, while looking for hockey coverage and finding what she considered a snide anti-Russia bias in the Western media.
Marilyn Justice joined Twitter on November 18, 2010, and it appears to be true that before the Sochi Olympics in February 2014, say, in 2013, she tweeted about hockey and dogs, and didn't talk about Putin or Russia, unless rhapsodizing about some Siberian ice drummers or sticking up for Russian hockey player Varlamov count.
I think characters like this, who can seem outsized on Twitter, should be looked at not so much for their ties to "Moscow gold" -- likely non-existent -- but for their traits as contrarian personalities -- they see Russia being slammed, they see Russia as an underdog, they see that the US doesn't seem to get equal treatment (a misperception), and they instinctively, or intellectually, take the side of Russia -- to be "different" and "independent". That's why RT's slogan "Question More" (like EAgames "Challenge Everything") is so seductive, especially to these types of personalities. I think continuing to challenge their claims is more effective than finding their Kremlin connection.
o Fred Kaplan at Slate: "We're in an Information War with Russia. It's Time We Started Acting Like It". Kaplan discusses the Times piece on the fake people:
Essentially, what the articles calls “the vanguard of a cyberarmy”—“a legion of Russian-controlled impostors” and bots—turned the most popular social media sites into “engines of deception and propaganda.”
Fred reminds us of the definition of "information warfare":
This is the essence of “information warfare,” defined in a 1997 U.S. Air Force pamphlet as “any action to deny, exploit, corrupt, or destroy the enemy’s information and its functions,” with the aim of “degrading his will or capability to fight.”
Of course, the Russian media calls "information warfare" any criticism of the Kremlin, so that dilutes its meaning.
He also raises the prospect of more regulation of social media as a necessary solution to the Russian "swamping" of social media, and proposes removing the anonymity of Twitter. This has been a perennial debate since the dawn of Twitter in 2007 and long before. There's a half-way house, which is allowing pseudonymous handles, but requiring a credit card -- which itself depends on a real name and address -- for registration. That way if an account exhibits undesirable behavior, it is tethered to a real-life person, in theory. The ability to buy prepaid debit cards (which some online companies don't accept for that reason) defeats this, and in any event, as accounts like Marilyn Justice show, you can be real and authentic and voluntarily perform the Kremlin's mission.
o It's interesting to recall Mrs. Grant's definition. She said, often disinformation "contained 90 and 99% truth" and qualified it as an act "for gain". That seems like a small and subtle but important additional point. It's not just to degrade the enemy, but to gain an advantage.
o No surprise that Meduza -- actually Kevin Rothrock -- thinks "treating Sputnik as a foreign agent" is a bad thing. The issue on the table is making Sputnik register under FARA, not barring its activity -- it's a branding exercise, "truth-in-advertising".
Blokirovka happens. Done before. Blocked Reddit for a day because of one thread.
For journalists, foreign agent laws can be extended https://t.co/nac97OdyUa
— Stefan Karlo Rajic (@geopolskr) September 11, 2017
Rothrock thinks the Russians will do tit-for-tat, although they've already removed RFE/RL from the airwaves. He also cites Matthew Armstrong to bolster his case that FARA will either fail to work on Sputnik or is "too late". That's silly, as it is never too late to counter disinformation and hostile propaganda. What Armstrong meant is that because Russia already enacted a "foreign agents" law against NGOs to crack down on civil society, and the US hasn't reciprocated, it has kept the high ground for recent years and would lose it if RT could make propaganda hay out of being forced to register. And Rothrock fails to make the point that Armstrong does that RFE/RL and VOA are not "like" or "equivalent to" RT and Sputnik -- he asks but doesn't answer the question in a sub-head then archly states:
Nobody (currently) employed at Sputnik or RT embraces claims that they’re foreign propagandists. Journalists at RFE/RL and VOA similarly reject such accusations, along with the very suggestion that their publications are even remotely comparable to these two Russian state-funded media outlets.
Again, the issue isn't whether RFE/RL or VOA are above criticism, or may engage in propaganda (although that isn't proven), the issue is whether they are foreign agents abroad, i.e. directed like the CIA. I think since the BBG is an independent body and the radios are congressionally funded, it's worlds apart from the Kremlin-run Rossiya Segodnya, headed by the Kremlin's top propagandist, Dmitry Kiselyev. It has been 46 years since Sen. Clifford Case blew the whistle on covert funding of RFE/RL by the CIA, which then ended, forcing the radios to restructure their funding.