There are two takeaways from the story, neither of which bolster the headline. The first is that there is no evidence that Russia is targeting U.S. election infrastructure:
Russia does not, however, appear to be trying to penetrate voting machines or Americans’ ballots, United States officials said.
“While scanning and probing of networks happens across the internet every day, we have not seen specific or credible evidence of Russian attempts to infiltrate state election infrastructure like we saw in 2016,” Jeanette Manfra, the chief cybersecurity official at the Department of Homeland Security, said in an interview last week.
Right now, Mr. Pompeo said, Russia is trying to focus on what are known as influence operations — using social media and other platforms to spread favorable messages — not hacking.
“The things we have seen Russia doing to date are mostly focused on information types of warfare,” he said.Which is takeaway two. What we're talking about here in terms of Russia is people like me, citizens of the United States who read the news and who express dissent when it comes to the destructive course of American global hegemony, whose views are being amplified by Russian clickbots:
“We expect Russia to continue using propaganda, social media, false-flag personas, sympathetic spokespeople and other means of influence to try to exacerbate social and political fissures in the United States,” Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, told the Senate Intelligence Committee at its annual hearing on worldwide threats.
[snip]
Russia appears eager to spread information — real and fake — that deepens political divisions. Bot armies promoted partisan causes on social media, including the recent push to release a Republican congressional memo critical of law enforcement officials.
The bots have also sought to portray the F.B.I. and Justice Department as infected by partisan bias, said Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the intelligence committee.
“Other threats to our institutions come from right here at home,” he said. “There have been some, aided and abetted by Russian internet bots and trolls, who have attacked the basic integrity of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department. This is a dangerous trend.”So at root Russiagate, the New Cold War, Cold War 2.0, the trenchant Russophobia of the Democratic Party are about domestic dissent. Support for the governing political establishment is collapsing. (It is more visible in Europe because European nations have a parliamentary system and party formation and coalition creation are much more fluid.)
But make no mistake. The same thing is happening in the United States. The Democratic Party is facing an existential crisis, one which likely will become even more acute after the November midterms. Ever since the Democrats blocked Bernie in the primaries and then Hillary lost the general, they have been confronting this crisis. Their solution was to concoct Russiagate.
Are clickbots real? Absolutely. They are an inseparable part of the functioning Internet. Giants like Google and Facebook couldn't survive without them. Does Russia employ bots to juice "sympathetic spokespeople"? Absolutely. I can bear witness. This is a humble, low-traffic page. But when I do harvest a lot of clicks on a particular day -- what I consider a lot of clicks, a couple hundred -- the country of origin is Russia; and it is presumably machine driven because the traffic is to entries made several years ago, and they are counted off in chronological sequence.
Is this illegal? Of course not. You don't think U.S. bots juice Russian opposition blogs? How about all those hits for Alexei Navalny's YouTube talks?
So what is to be done? How to keep clickbots for commerce but bar them from enhancing "sympathetic spokespeople"?
I guess we should look to China for an answer. In other words, massive censorship. The corporate world appears to be turning in that direction.
No comments:
Post a Comment