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David Carroll Profile picture
@profcarroll
Feb 16, 2018 • 33 tweets • 15 min read • Read on X
Foreign governments can buy ads targeting Americans, as long as they register. CONSPIRACY
They can’t commit mass identity theft and use falsified social media accounts to command an army of imposters. FRAUD
Such as how IRA Facebook information operation, especially Events feature, yielded false counter protests from fraudulent front groups. Statement on campaign coordination here is critical. justice.gov/file/1035477/d…
Amazing that @d1gi has been all over this starting Nov 9, 2016 and more recently with his work on fraudulent BLM Instagram/Facebook forensics. medium.com/berkman-klein-…
The section on identity theft and fraud is significant. Shows the extent and sophistication of the RU IRA effort to impersonate and evade anti-fraud mechanisms and policies by stealing the identities of REAL AMERICANS. SSNs, the works.
Doesn’t really matter if the ads are effective or not. What matters more is that false and stolen personas were used to buy the ads.
Destruction of Evidence: “We had a slight crisis here at work: the FBI busted our activity (not a joke). So, I got preoccupied with covering tracks together with the colleagues.”
There are is much insane stuff like this. Goes on for pages. Unreal.
Russian “bots” in Mueller’s charges involve elaborate identity theft and wire fraud operation that used identity theft to commit fraud and FARA, FECA violations, a cross-platform army of imposter accounts commanded by the agency and its agents on US soil.
Kremlin support of Jill Stein appears in IRA indictment and Steele Dossier
Just yesterday @bpopken released an RU IRA Twitter dataset and today we’ve got new analysis that lines up with Mueller’s indictment: Kremlin targeted “purple” swing states with their information war army of online imposters and secret agents on the ground.
In case you haven’t seen any footage of an RU IRA agitated discord protest/counterprotest operation that involves both online impersonation for Facebook events but also secret operatives on the ground in the US, per Mueller’s indictment.
Example in the indictment of an RU IRA operative impersonating a US voter getting official Trump campaign to respond over Facebook to discuss campaign coordination. Wow.
The scope, scale, and sophistication of the information operation is unprecedented, as revealed by Robert Mueller’s historic indictment, impressively detailed with Putin’s expansive efforts to manufacture political chaos to the benefit of Trump.
The RU IRA Mueller indictment charges are just tip of the iceberg. See @d1gi’s latest analysis of how imposter accounts build credible reputations with followers for tactical disinformation seeding in coordination with other accounts keyed to time/topics. washingtonpost.com/business/techn…
Note how frequency of news articles pushed by RU IRA imposter accounts shapes a particular blend of media, and injects just enough RT into a heavy cocktail of Breitbart and fringe sites with mainstream news, so it mixes in. Camouflaged.
2014: Troll factory opens
2015: @AdrianChen‘s article
2016: Information War
2017: Investigations
2018: Indictments
The phases of the operation:
2014: Capability Development
2015: Infiltrate Audiences
2016: Influence Audiences
2016 (June-Nov): Leak Kompromat & Power Narratives
twitter.com/selected wisdom/status/964678932514586624
[fixed link] “The Kremlin’s playbook is in the wild, and authoritarians around the world have begun adopting their techniques in pursuit of domestic and foreign audience manipulation.”
“Soviet concept [of] “reflexive control”—applying pressure in ways to elicit a specific, known response. The intention of these campaigns was to activate—or suppress—target groups. Not to change their views, but to change their behavior.” –@MollyMcKew wired.com/story/did-russ…
The 2017 US Defense Intelligence Agency report on Russia covers now-indicted Internet Research Agency as a covert “CyberBerkut” paramilitary force. (Flynn served as Obama’s DIA Director and visited GRU HQ during an unprecedented visit in 2013.)
Prosecuting the new crimes of 21st century information warfare: conspiracy to commit wire/passport/identity fraud by mounting massive and unregistered foreign propaganda campaign on social media supported by imposter operatives hoaxing purple state voters.
politi.co/2FaPksC
Mueller‘s patient, systematic setup. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
“While they went to great pains to say they are not indicting any Americans today, if I was an American and I did cooperate with Russians I would be extremely frightened today,” -former Fed prosecutor reut.rs/2ocZZLl
Threaded annotations of Facebook ad exec’s response to #MuellerIndictments by @donie in which the “puppet” protests in Texas are specifically mentioned:
Covert team of 80 reached 126 million Americans, starting month after annexation of Crimea, coordinating with imposter operatives catfishing grassroots orgs and campaigns.
“Inside a 3-Year Campaign to Influence US Voters” by @ScottShaneNYT @MarkMazzettiNYT nyti.ms/2BwXs70
The exquisite shrewdness of Mueller. nyti.ms/2C6XKm6
Indictment lays bare how a foreign intelligence operation turned to targeting capabilities across Facebook and Instagram to exploit susceptible cultural divisions as an insidiously covert subversion effort. nyti.ms/2BBBbET @ktbenner @sheeraf
We’re getting closer to confronting how indicted information warfare criminals used retargeting techniques to capture trackers from IG profile links to upload Custom Audiences data to FB.
IG meme warfare > FB CustomAudiences > FB Ad/Post > FB Group/Event
“Why did this get released before POTUS decides whether to take an interview with SC? All this is timed to build more public & private pressure…. I believe there should be no comfort…that this somehow absolves them from inquiry.” gu.com/p/858hg/stw
“Goldman’s tweets not only contradict the indictment, they also indicate he doesn’t understand the true purpose of the ads.” Facebook execs are loathe to discuss how Custom Audiences & Lookalikes let Russians refine retargeting across platforms & devices. wired.com/story/what-tru…
Used our of free speech and anonymity against us says @normative. Op-ed doesn’t mention our lack of privacy/data-protection rules as another key vulnerability adversarially exploited. Let’s not censor—instead demand data privacy for cognitive security. nyti.ms/2C4mLOD
A “factory that turned lying, telling untruths, into an industrial assembly line. The volumes were colossal — there were huge numbers of people, 300 to 400, and they were all writing absolute untruths. It was like being in Orwell’s world.” wapo.st/2o9gTuY
The incredible story behind “Putin’s cook” Yevgeny Prigozhin, criminal behind the troll factory’s information warfare operation, “a key figure in the overlapping circles of oligarchs, spooks, and organized crime figures who run Russia under Vladimir Putin” wired.com/story/inside-t…

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More from @profcarroll

David Carroll Profile picture
Oct 8, 2018
The election of 2016 was a PSYOP. No, really. nyti.ms/2E6xgmD
Cambridge Analytica and Psy Group had a memorandum of understanding, reported in May. wsj.com/articles/israe…
Fact that Cruz’s Cambridge Analytica appears to have sought to team up with Psy Group, which sought to run a social media PSYOP against Cruz is…awkward.
Read 8 tweets
David Carroll Profile picture
Oct 6, 2018
So many simultaneous Kavanaugh scandals, overloaded the system.
- sexual (how can he deny blackouts?)
- financial (how did he pay off debt?)
- hacking (how can he deny knowing about pilfered docs)
- surveillance (how can he deny his role?)
- perjury (how can he lie about it all?)
- financial scandal: the unexplained mystery of the impossible Kavanaugh family finances is nicely documented and explained here (although I do bristle at how it downplays the sexual scandal; again see above on scandal overload) medium.com/@gregolear/sup…
- hacking and surveillance scandal: this piece by @nycsouthpaw is a twofor in that you get deep coverage on both the surveillance FOIA revelation and the senate hacking scandal context yahoo.com/news/lawsuits-…
Read 4 tweets
David Carroll Profile picture
Oct 4, 2018
Kavanaugh’s toxicity poisons an already reeling Facebook, enraging employees and flummoxing executives. nyti.ms/2CpoSwI
Facebook’s behavioral microtargeting political ad business unit is a moneymaker. They all shouldn’t be surprised when the chickens they hatched come home to roost.
Joel Kaplan was sitting behind Zuckerberg for his Congressional hearings. That too was a rather perjurious affair. (Zuck remains in contempt of UK parliament committee for failing to appear.)
Read 4 tweets
David Carroll Profile picture
Oct 3, 2018
Defence entered a Not Guilty plea this morning in Westminster Magistrate Court. Trial is set for January 2019. #CambridgeAnalytica
It’s a criminal act in the UK to defy the Information Commissioner’s specific order to comply with data protection law. This order is from May 2018 and now we can confirm it will go to trial in the UK next year. wired.com/story/uk-regul…
A “defunct” company sure seems willing to spend its allegedly sparse resources going to trial against the data cops for refusing to hand over all the personal data it collected about me. What are they hiding? Will their creditors tolerate this?
Read 5 tweets
David Carroll Profile picture
Oct 2, 2018
If you’re up for SCOTUS then yeah all your shit is gonna get dredged up. Welcome to the future.
Kavanaugh stands to be the most anti-privacy justice on the bench. His view of the 4th is as warped as his view of the 1st. He’s most likely to rule in favor of a Citizens United-type decision for Silicon Valley, ruling that business surveillance is protected commercial speech.
It’s hard to imagine a future where Kavanaugh is confirmed and we don’t find ourselves, a decade later, in some fucked up dystopia.
Read 6 tweets
David Carroll Profile picture
Oct 1, 2018
I suspect one reason this mega-breach isn’t causing a bigger reaction is that it has no name. Usually hacks and breaches are quickly dubbed something catchy which catapults them thru the coverage and watercooler debates.
Cleverest I can come up is #ChuckE in reference to Chuck E Cheese’s where you get tokens for your birthday parties, in reference to how access tokens were hacked thru exploits in birthday video upload tool. But that’s quite a US-centric reference.
News overload tho
Read 4 tweets

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