GHOSTING IN, AND GHOSTING OUT: We can’t just move on from foreign influence campaigns
Democratic nations being ripped apart by foreign influence operations in lockstep with domestic traitors need to acknowledge they are at war and then fight back ffs
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“We’ve just used a different organization to run a very, very successful project in an Eastern European country. No one even knew they were there. They were just ghosted in, did the work, and ghosted out.”—Cambridge Analytica’s executive Mark Turnbull, on the use of subcontractors in a 2018 Channel 4 undercover report
’Sex, Secrets, and Spies’
Channel 4’s four-month investigation into Cambridge Analytica that aired in March of 2018 — revealing sex, secrets, and spies at the heart of the now bankrupt, military-grade political consulting firm is worth a revisit.
Its former CEO, Alexander Nix, in a recorded phone conversation tells a Channel 4 undercover reporter:
“We are used to operating through different vehicles, in the shadows… and I look forward to building, a very longterm and secretive relationship with you.”
Another memorable quote from former CA executive Mark Turnbull, captured in Channel 4’s undercover report:
“We just put information into the bloodstream of the internet and then watch it grow.”
Information being a euphemism for disinformation, like, how proud they were with when the created the ‘Crooked Hillary’ campaign, boasting that “the OO of Crooked were a pair of handcuffs… and it was all about… she belongs behind bars,” Turnbull explained, in a Channel 4 follow up report.
‘No Branding… Unattributable, Untrackable’
And Nix told Channel 4’s undercover reporter, who was acting as a potential client from Sri Lanka, that their services also included staging compromising situations to entrap target candidates… “offer them a deal too good to be true… offer a large amount of money to finance their campaign”… or “bring in very beautiful Ukrainian girls” to set up honey pots on film.
Nix continued: “Often we set up… fake IDs, websites…”
Most of my readers know about the Facebook data illegally stolen by Cambridge Analytica — 87 million accounts, through the ‘This Is Your Digital Life’ personality quiz, where those who took the quiz were sent one or two dollars by mail, and in return, they gave up their location, and the privacy of all their friends. The Russian researcher who created the quiz, who also worked in St. Petersburg, Russia, had access to all those millions of likes, messages, personal data.
No one even knew they were there.
Cambridge Analytica, which was always just a shell for SCL, a British defense contractor, had meetings with Lukoil, the Russian oil giant, which also engages in targeted psychological operations.
I don’t feel a need to have to prove any of this anymore. The facts have already been vetted.
But it’s always good to be reminded that greed has poisoned men’s souls, and that the US and the Western world made a mistake when it went into business with Russia in the ‘90s.
And now, we can’t just move on from foreign interference in our elections.
We know the US was not unique. Russia engaged/engages in foreign elections attacks in dozens of countries, but because the West never admits its at war with Russia, the global war is still largely invisible.
But those of us who report on these attacks, we see it. We see the patterns, we see through the nationalist messaging of the pro-Russian leaders installed throughout the world.
And where Cambridge Analytica promised discretion, we now see Twitter as a fully operational overt Russian propaganda farm. It was used to throw the 2016 election in the US, still slightly opaquely, but now, it’s fully out in the open.
And while Twitter is not the real world, it has real world impacts. One of the current operations unfolding is the ‘Angry European,’ whose job it is to hate ‘All Americans.’
On its face, it’s understandable. Americans didn’t fight back when Russia helped install Trump in 2016. America didn’t support the incumbent who had already beat Trump once in 2024. We deserve some ire.
Women marched in 2017, but the march was infiltrated. Teams of four working around the clock in St. Petersburg, pretending to be angry Americans destroyed the Women’s March movement from within. On Putin’s birthday in 2023, Joe Biden was indirectly targeted, put in the crosshairs of a war he didn’t start but one that would annihilate his career, paving the way for the return of Trump. To not view Trump as a Russian active measure is to ignore the fact that the world is on fire and Putin is lighting the matches.
“I see Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a war against the West, and I think it’s taken a long time, but more and more people see that’s what it is,” Dr. Michael MacKay told me. “That’s the context in which I always saw the Trump for President initiative — as a Russian active measure that exploited or poured gasoline on existing divisions in the United States.”
To think we can just move on from this is to deny reality.
America, and Americans, look further over the waves and see how not alone you truly are...
Russia targeted other countries first, installing puppet leaders with money stolen from the Russian people, using propaganda, cyberwar, and paid influencers. Trump’s presidency only begins to makes sense when you see that the same tactics were used to install other Kremlin puppet leaders.
We can’t just move on from Russian and foreign influence. War is being waged on our minds, our sovereignty, our rights, our freedom, and now, our allies.
As I documented in my report America, You Are Not Alone:
“Among the Russian-sponsored trickery: referendums, malinformation campaigns, third party spoiler candidates, misogyny targeting women candidates, oligarchs funding politicians, narrative warfare driven on virtual battlefields, well-funded domestic propagandists delivering pro-Russian, anti-Ukraine narratives, while wrapped in the flag of their respective countries to obfuscate intent. Poisoning the democratic wells to disengage voters leading to low voter turnout, which makes its easier to manipulate extremist results. Poisoning and defenestrating opponents of the regime. Assassinations and hacking…”
We see these active measures in so many countries, who are told they’re not great, and then pro-Russian leaders seduce the third-of the populace that is already authoritarian-leaning with promises of greatness, but really, they’re job is to systematically destroy hard-earned freedoms, like Andrei Babiš is doing in the Czech Republic, forcing the decline of Czech democracy, like Orbán did in Hungary, like Fico in Slovakia, Ivanishvili in Georgia, Lukashenko in Belarus, and of course, as Yanukovych did in Ukraine, before a revolution forced him to run to Moscow, after stealing billions from the Ukrainian people, and later being convicted of treason.
Estonia, Moldova, and Romania have lessons for us.
Estonia just convicted three pro-Russian politicians of high treason, with one receiving a 14-year prison sentence. Estonians know that not only is national security jeopardized when Russian propagandists enter the body politic, but their very democracy is at risk. Moldova beat the latest round of Russian interference with unity. It also helps that they convicted their version of Elon Musk — billionaire criminal election meddler, Ilan Shor — for fraud, forcing him to flee to Russia. Moldova even doubled his original sentence to 15 years, for good measure. Romania, too, managed to stop Russia’s TikTok candidate in its latest election. Perhaps enough Romanians still recall the brutality of Ceaușescu.
Elves
The Czech Resistance founded a unit of volunteers called Czech Elves, citizens with military training who monitor and analyze disinformation. They constantly measure the Czech infospace and report on disinformation campaigns. Here is one of their word clouds from December 1 - 15:
Green reflects a campaign’s ‘positive’ sentiment; red is ‘negative’…
It’s amazing that this unit exists, and other threatened countries should take inspiration from the elves. But it was never supposed to fall on the shoulders of reporters and pro-democracy activists to be the frontline defense against military grade psychological operations. Democracies are supposed to defend their populations from threats, within and without.
Instead, we handed over the keys and said, have at it. And people, with no inoculation against information warfare — their data illegally stolen for targeted attacks — were left defenseless.
As geopolitical analyst, Monique Camarra, reminds me, when domestic problems are left unresolved, it leaves the door wide open for foreign malign actors: “The Rust Belt in the US and Southern Italy, the rural areas outside of Prague, they become easy targets for info campaigns, and empty promises… the idea is, the problems domestically, if these issues are left unchecked, foreign malign actors, like Russia and China, through their proxies, can take advantage of them. In states where things are going well, disinformation and other forms of aggressive information campaigns or covert actions (such as election rigging), don’t take hold. They fail as in the case of the Romanian elections. Disinformation takes hold in countries that do not resolve their domestic issues and let them fester or do not present counternarratives or they do it too late. There is one recent case where the Russians simply put out pure disinformation: they just made up a ‘Lichtenstein is a full of Nazi gold’ narrative because the authorities in Lichtenstein refuse to unfreeze Russian assets deposited in the banks there.”
Because of these failings, criminals, felons, rapists, and thieves lead multiple countries in alignment with the objectives of Vladimir Putin, himself a criminal, and other foreign autocrats.
I will keep pushing to grow a movement to get Trump and Putin and their allied thugs to The Hague, where Duterte awaits his trial for crimes against humanity. Only then, will the world have any ability to begin the necessary purge of this transnational crime syndicate.
We made a mistake taking Russian money, and tethering the West to a state run by spies and mobsters. Be good if we admitted it.
You Were Already Great
Today, I am haunted by the words of my friend Matthew Pearce, a founding member of NAFO. On an episode of RadPod, he told America, we were already great:
“You didn’t need to do this to be made great again, because you were already pretty damn cool in the first place. You had awesome cars and amazing cocktails and roof bars on your hotels. And San Francisco is the most amazing place and New York is stunning, and it’s like, you’re great anyway.
“Everyone liked you pretty much. You did some daft things. Everyone does some daft things, right? But everyone liked you, you know... We thought you were cool. Your TV was cool. Your movies were great. And then all of a sudden, it’s like, ‘we need to be made great again.’ Huh?! You’re already great. It’s just nonsense. I call it the Restoration Bloc: these leaders who want to turn back the clock. They can’t, because we’ve gone past the point of no return.”
When I asked Pearce, who lives in the UK, why he’s not worried about their own pro-Russian proxy Nigel Farage taking his country down in the same way Trump is bulldozing America, he said: “Europe will be in a war with Russia before that happens.”
We’re already at war.
If European leaders would simply declare it, maybe that could prevent the worst from happening. If Russia’s maskirovka was exposed, all that would remain is a decrepit empire, whose ‘two-day special military operation’ has now last-longer than World War II, as the crowd-funded Ukrainian military continues to defend all of us in the remaining free world.
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