13 Russian nationals indicted for interfering with U.S. elections and political processes

Your lips move but I can't hear what you say...

 

Atta boy... That's what's up... FOR NOW !

 

Don't you try looking in the mirror saying that out loud because I'm afraid you'd be shocked seeing how fast you could actually grow nose

 

I don't give a "rat's ass" to what you don't have an idea of because that's what you usually do: Have no idea...

 

This is way "above" your pay-grade dude... Partisanship is on the ground floor, just check with the front desk. This is patriotism...

 

Oh really? So when was the last time Russian nationals involved into a conspiracy with the US elections "in post cold war era" then?

 

Check this out... Our Russian trolls already started with "discrediting" something negative about the Kremlin... Yay...

 

I don't know Scarlet...

 

Oh and what a grand conspiracy it was!!! lol. They wasted a little bit of their money.

Of course when you have a nation which still has some freedom of speech left, and you have high tech communication, like the internet, foreigners could post anything they wanted to in social media. To think that some political driven russians would not do this is silly. But that they do it as they did, should be expected. And yet according to the DOJ, it had no effects. And why should it, given it was so little from the big picture view. So, impossible to get concerned about it, unless you were just not very bright to begin with. Or needed it to enlarge the military industrial national security state complex. Which many in congress, the complex, and those Gen. Butler referred to in War is a Racket would certainly want to do! Never let an opportunity pass you by! And of course the sore losers, hillary voters are still looking for a reason that she got beat. They are still clueless.

 

We may have some here, sure, but just because an american sees the utter absurdity of this when others are incapable of critical thinking, does not create a russian troll. Your thinking is bi polar. Get it checked. Bi polar thinking tends to try to transcend logic, reason, rationality. And that is a deep dive into nonsense for it creates an alternative reality. Not good, not good at all.

 

There's not a magic word because there are two of them, written in the biggest fonts: "NOT HOAX!"

Trump was calling this entire thing as a hoax from the beginning. Now his argument changed into: "Dude it was back in 2014". Pathetic...

And I don't understand why the Kremlin is becoming a real embarrassment to you? I bet you are proud... For now...

We don't use this language as you use Slavic languages. So when you say; "Washington is getting mad at Russia" it sounds funny. Like a first grader spitting out the first thing in mind when asked about ongoing tensions between DC and "the Kremlin" (capital city vs capital city, not country).

Just letting you know...

 

Please don't tell me you are American too... ahahah...

 

It never came up until trump and his campaign were accused of colluding with putin. He defended his campaign and himself on this accusation. And the simple fact that he voiced a desire to get some deal with russia, in regards to isis was then used as evidence he and putin were co conspirators. You must not have kept up with the history of this ruse of collusion?

 

Where is this evidence?

 

Yes, and if you have read my posts beginning when I first joined, it would be self evident.

Calling someone a russian troll, because they do not agree with PNAC driven neocon foreign policy is only a sign of ignorance. Or deceit. Not sure which it is. But if it quacks like a duck, waddles like a duck and looks like a duck....then yes sir, I am looking at a duck. A duck socially conditioned by clever propaganda. A fu*ked duck, in other words.

 

Never was any evidence, it was only accusations, taken as evidence. Keep up man, the trump haters don't need no stinkin' evidence!! They rely upon dreams and imagination.

Trump got the neocons worried when he voiced a desire to work up a deal with Putin. And that was verboten! The neocons, the military industrial national security intel complex want a new cold war with russia. And here trump was, campaigning not on that but working up a deal with russia!! And they went after him. As VIPS saw early on, about the same time that I noticed it. It was so overt that anyone who was not consumed by partisanship would have noticed it.

 

OK...

 

LOL. You almost make we wish I had supported him and voted for him, so you could at least have one thing right.

If we ever get another candidate who runs on making peace instead of war mongering, and a person who wants to change our PNAC driven foreign policy I might vote for him or her, regardless of the tribe they belong to. The only thing I liked about trump, his campaign promises was stopping illegal immigration for it hurts the common man as FDR called him, and his apparent resistance to slave labor globalism which has devastated our working americans and middle class. Which BTW any FDR democrat would agree with. The only other thing was his rhetoric on draining the swamp and his campaign speeches where he voiced a concern for stopping invading other nations and spend that money here in america on updating and repairing out infastructure. SO, I tell you this in order to inform you of facts in order to stop you from making up your own facts. Somehow though, I just doubt you have that in you.

 

Why should I lie when you are impervious to the truth? Telling you the truth, after you are living with lies for so long looks like a lie to you. You have no idea what truth looks like, obviously.

Yet if you do not accept that some americans do not agree with our foreign policy, then your disconnect is just too great to save you. You don't know much about americans, apparently. Yes, unlike perhaps turkey, we have a diversity of belief and opinion in america, although one should not use MSM including FOX if you want to be objective and be forced to use the brain, instead of being told what to believe, and what to think. Some of us are just not that lazy, or stupid enough to do that. So you call us russian trolls. Which is the madness and irrationality created by this new McCarthyism, which is as disgusting as it is ignorant. Especially to americans who have not consumed the poisonous kool aid. That stuff evidently destroys brain cells, surpassing even the most dangerous mind robbing illegal drugs.

 

I can't post all of this. Limitations from Forum system. A lot of information on Russian trolling, the link should work. This is some really 'deep state'.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html?mcubz=2

The Agency

From a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, Russia,
an army of well-paid “trolls” has tried to wreak havoc all
around the Internet — and in real-life American communities.

By ADRIAN CHEN
JUNE 2, 2015

Around 8:30 a.m. on Sept. 11 last year, Duval Arthur, director of the Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness for St. Mary Parish, Louisiana, got a call from a resident who had just received a disturbing text message. “Toxic fume hazard warning in this area until 1:30 PM,” the message read. “Take Shelter. Check Local Media and columbiachemical.com.”

St. Mary Parish is home to many processing plants for chemicals and natural gas, and keeping track of dangerous accidents at those plants is Arthur’s job. But he hadn’t heard of any chemical release that morning. In fact, he hadn’t even heard of Columbia Chemical. St. Mary Parish had a Columbian Chemicals plant, which made carbon black, a petroleum product used in rubber and plastics. But he’d heard nothing from them that morning, either. Soon, two other residents called and reported the same text message. Arthur was worried: Had one of his employees sent out an alert without telling him?

If Arthur had checked Twitter, he might have become much more worried. Hundreds of Twitter accounts were documenting a disaster right down the road. “A powerful explosion heard from miles away happened at a chemical plant in Centerville, Louisiana #ColumbianChemicals,” a man named Jon Merritt tweeted. The #ColumbianChemicals hashtag was full of eyewitness accounts of the horror in Centerville. @AnnRussela shared an image of flames engulfing the plant. @Ksarah12 posted a video of surveillance footage from a local gas station, capturing the flash of the explosion. Others shared a video in which thick black smoke rose in the distance.

Dozens of journalists, media outlets and politicians, from Louisiana to New York City, found their Twitter accounts inundated with messages about the disaster. “Heather, I’m sure that the explosion at the #ColumbianChemicals is really dangerous. Louisiana is really screwed now,” a user named @EricTraPPP tweeted at the New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter Heather Nolan. Another posted a screenshot of CNN’s home page, showing that the story had already made national news.

ISIS had claimed credit for the attack, according to one YouTube video; in it, a man showed his TV screen, tuned to an Arabic news channel, on which masked ISIS fighters delivered a speech next to looping footage of an explosion. A woman named Anna McClaren (@zpokodon9) tweeted at Karl Rove: “Karl, Is this really ISIS who is responsible for #ColumbianChemicals? Tell @Obama that we should bomb Iraq!” But anyone who took the trouble to check CNN.com would have found no news of a spectacular Sept. 11 attack by ISIS. It was all fake: the screenshot, the videos, the photographs.

In St. Mary Parish, Duval Arthur quickly made a few calls and found that none of his employees had sent the alert. He called Columbian Chemicals, which reported no problems at the plant. Roughly two hours after the first text message was sent, the company put out a news release, explaining that reports of an explosion were false.

When I called Arthur a few months later, he dismissed the incident as a tasteless prank, timed to the anniversary of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “Personally I think it’s just a real sad, sick sense of humor,” he told me. “It was just someone who just liked scaring the daylights out of people.” Authorities, he said, had tried to trace the numbers that the text messages had come from, but with no luck. (The F.B.I. told me the investigation was still open.)

The Columbian Chemicals hoax was not some simple prank by a bored sadist. It was a highly coordinated disinformation campaign, involving dozens of fake accounts that posted hundreds of tweets for hours, targeting a list of figures precisely chosen to generate maximum attention. The perpetrators didn’t just doctor screenshots from CNN; they also created fully functional clones of the websites of Louisiana TV stations and newspapers.

The YouTube video of the man watching TV had been tailor-made for the project. A Wikipedia page was even created for the Columbian Chemicals disaster, which cited the fake YouTube video. As the virtual assault unfolded, it was complemented by text messages to actual residents in St. Mary Parish. It must have taken a team of programmers and content producers to pull off.

And the hoax was just one in a wave of similar attacks during the second half of last year. On Dec. 13, two months after a handful of Ebola cases in the United States touched off a minor media panic, many of the same Twitter accounts used to spread the Columbian Chemicals hoax began to post about an outbreak of Ebola in Atlanta.

The campaign followed the same pattern of fake news reports and videos, this time under the hashtag #EbolaInAtlanta, which briefly trended in Atlanta. Again, the attention to detail was remarkable, suggesting a tremendous amount of effort. A YouTube video showed a team of hazmat-suited medical workers transporting a victim from the airport. Beyoncé’s recent single “7/11” played in the background, an apparent attempt to establish the video’s contemporaneity. A truck in the parking lot sported the logo of the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

On the same day as the Ebola hoax, a totally different group of accounts began spreading a rumor that an unarmed black woman had been shot to death by police. They all used the hashtag #shockingmurderinatlanta. Here again, the hoax seemed designed to piggyback on real public anxiety; that summer and fall were marked by protests over the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. In this case, a blurry video purports to show the shooting, as an onlooker narrates.

Watching it, I thought I recognized the voice — it sounded the same as the man watching TV in the Columbian Chemicals video, the one in which ISIS supposedly claims responsibility. The accent was unmistakable, if unplaceable, and in both videos he was making a very strained attempt to sound American. Somehow the result was vaguely Australian.

Who was behind all of this? When I stumbled on it last fall, I had an idea. I was already investigating a shadowy organization in St. Petersburg, Russia, that spreads false information on the Internet. It has gone by a few names, but I will refer to it by its best known: the Internet Research Agency.

The agency had become known for employing hundreds of Russians to post pro-Kremlin propaganda online under fake identities, including on Twitter, in order to create the illusion of a massive army of supporters; it has often been called a “troll farm.” The more I investigated this group, the more links I discovered between it and the hoaxes. In April, I went to St. Petersburg to learn more about the agency and its brand of information warfare, which it has aggressively deployed against political opponents at home, Russia’s perceived enemies abroad and, more recently, me.

Seven months after the Columbian Chemicals hoax, I was in a dim restaurant in St. Petersburg, peering out the window at an office building at 55 Savushkina Street, the last known home of the Internet Research Agency. It sits in St. Petersburg’s northwestern Primorsky District, a quiet neighborhood of ugly Soviet apartment buildings and equally ugly new office complexes.

Among the latter is 55 Savushkina; from the front, its perfect gray symmetry, framed by the rectangular pillars that flank its entrance, suggests the grim impenetrability of a medieval fortress. Behind the glass doors, a pair of metal turnstiles stand guard at the top of a short flight of stairs in the lobby. At 9 o’clock on this Friday night in April, except for the stairwell and the lobby, the building was entirely dark.

This puzzled my dining companion, a former agency employee named Ludmila Savchuk. She shook her head as she lifted the heavy floral curtain to take another look. It was a traditional Russian restaurant, with a dining room done up like a parlor from the early 1900s, complete with bentwood chairs and a vintage globe that showed Alaska as part of Russia.

Savchuk’s 5-year-old son sat next to her, slurping down a bowl of ukha, a traditional fish soup. For two and a half months, Savchuk told me, she had worked 12-hour shifts in the building, always beginning at 9 a.m. and finishing at 9 p.m., at which point she and her co-workers would eagerly stream out the door at once. “At 9 p.m. sharp, there should be a crowd of people walking outside the building,” she said. “Nine p.m. sharp.”

One Russian newspaper put the number of employees at 400, with a budget of at least 20 million rubles (roughly $400,000) a month. During her time in the organization, there were many departments, creating content for every popular social network: LiveJournal, which remains popular in Russia; VKontakte, Russia’s homegrown version of Facebook; Facebook; Twitter; Instagram; and the comment sections of Russian news outlets. One employee estimated the operation filled 40 rooms.

Every day at the Internet Research Agency was essentially the same, Savchuk told me. The first thing employees did upon arriving at their desks was to switch on an Internet proxy service, which hid their I.P. addresses from the places they posted; those digital addresses can sometimes be used to reveal the real identity of the poster.

Savchuk would be given a list of the opinions she was responsible for promulgating that day. Workers received a constant stream of “technical tasks” — point-by-point exegeses of the themes they were to address, all pegged to the latest news. Ukraine was always a major topic, because of the civil war there between Russian-backed separatists and the Ukrainian Army; Savchuk and her co-workers would post comments that disparaged the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, and highlighted Ukrainian Army atrocities.

Russian domestic affairs were also a major topic. Last year, after a financial crisis hit Russia and the ruble collapsed, the professional trolls left optimistic posts about the pace of recovery. Savchuk also says that in March, after the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was murdered, she and her entire team were moved to the department that left comments on the websites of Russian news outlets and ordered to suggest that the opposition itself had set up the murder.

...................................cont'd

 

What is patriotism?

Here is how patriotism was defined by Mark Twain in the last century: patriotism means supporting your country all of the time, and supporting its government only when it deserves it.

 

So you contend it has no value? Do you like chess?

 

The Russians hacked into computer systems which is a bit different than just trying to influence an election openly. It amazes me that they did things like this and no one seems to mind. Moreover it appears to conservatives (who used to be strongly anti-communist) who care the least.

Well that is true of younger conservative McCain et el were pretty upset which reflects generational change I think. Conservatives of McCain's generation saw the Soviet Union as the central threat and were willing to support a strong state to fight it. Conservatives now see the US state as the primary threat (and American liberals).

We had best hope we don't have to be united any time soon.

 

Yeah, big deal Russia manipulating our democracy ..but to the right wingers they don’t see that as a threat