‘Welcome to Electro-Fascism’ — My Latest Hot Type Column in Byline
For this week’s Hot Type column in Byline, I encourage people to see beyond the spectacle that’s camouflaging tech tyranny. Also, next Happy Hour is July 22, noon Pacific with Zarina Zabrisky!
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I just finished an exhilarating three-days at Byline Festival in the UK, and had the pleasure of sharing panels with amazing global talent at the forefront of information warfare defense, as well as thoughtful takes on the new transatlantic divide. Along with the amazing Byline Times and Byline Supplement team, I had the pleasure of meeting Christopher Steele, Carole Cadwalladr, Katherine Stewart, and many many other brilliant minds. I also met multiple transnational Bette Dangerous supporters, as well as supporters of Jim Stewartson’s mind-war substack. It was nice to log into Jim’s weekly Zoom yesterday and catch up with longtime allies.
I will be writing about the Byline Festival experience in coming days, but first I wanted to dash off an excerpt of my latest Hot Type column and let you know I’ll be traveling tomorrow so our next Bette’s Happy Hour is Tuesday, July 22, with Zarina Zabrisky, updating us on excellent news from her documentary Kherson: Human Safari, and all the donations pouring in to help the people of Kherson.
For a limited time, you can watch the full film and learn more about it here:
As I noted in Kyiv Insider,
“Putin is the primary threat to democracy on earth. If Ukraine defeats Russia, Putin’s regime will fall. The fate of the world depends on the fate of Ukraine.”
Look for an invite to Bette’s Happy Hour with Zarina in coming days.
For this week’s Hot Type column, I focus on the spectacle that continues to obfuscate tech tyranny, and expose a new intricate hacking technique that targeted Bette friend and Russia watcher Keir Giles.
Thank you to everyone who supports the good work we do at Byline Supplement — it means a great deal to those of us on the frontline of independent investigative reporting. If you are not yet a member of Byline, and you would like to read any of my paywalled columns in full, please reach out to me at bettedangerous/gmail.
Below, is an excerpt from this week’s Hot Type column:
Hot Type: Welcome to Electro-Fascism — Warning: Prolonged Exposure May Be Harmful
Spectacle continues to camouflage the core malfeasance of our growing tech tyranny, writes Heidi Siegmund Cuda
There’s a moment in the film, It’s a Wonderful Life, when Jimmy Stewart’s character George Bailey gasps in horror when he is shown what his bucolic town of Bedford Falls, New York, would have become if he had never been born — Pottersville — sleazy, cruel, and morally bankrupt. In other words, much like New America.
Under the current sadistic regime, every day brings a new staged horror event, brought to citizens through internet platforms and TV news by an administration with exquisite media training and nefarious intentions.
They make such a spectacle of oppression — it’s Electro-Fascism, starring Mr Orange and His Cadre of Elevated Half-Wits.
Every day, the curtain opens again to another carefully crafted scene to the tune of the rat-a-tat-tat of shotgun propaganda.
And the show’s now on tour, coming to a fragile democracy near you.
Electro-fascism, with its sordid cruelty, is all the rage. You can’t scroll X/Twitter without being fed helpings of something awful. Even if you block Elon Musk, there he is with an engineered army of fanboys launching narrative warfare into cyberspace.
It’s all just too much.
As the cast of bad actors mug for the camera, relentlessly planting sick tropes in our brains, we continually forget the revelatory mantra that if the service is free, we are the product. We constantly engage with services that actively exploit us.
Are these services really free or are we paying for them with our freedom? I shudder to think what role Google’s AI – trained on our personal data – will play in our future lives.
Do you think Trump or Musk will protect your privacy? Does that seem likely? And who do you turn to when you’ve been harmed on the internet? The tech CEOs smiling at Trump’s inauguration?
The Extent of the Damage
When Russia watcher Keir Giles was hacked in May by an intricate scheme, he said if it hadn’t been for The Citizen Lab in Toronto, he may never have learned the extent of the damage.
Giles, an author and prominent British researcher on Russian information warfare, was targeted by hackers impersonating the US State Department. The author of Russia’s War On Everybody and a consulting fellow at Chatham House, Giles was targeted last year by hackers working for Russia’s intelligence services who posed as academics.
As Giles noted: “For professional Russia watchers such as myself, being the subject of unwanted online attention comes with the job. Crude attempts at hacking and phishing are more or less constant, and every now and then we encounter something genuinely novel or clever. Back in 2019, I blew the whistle on an online deception campaign using LinkedIn that was the first documented instance of a deepfake-generated face being used as part of such an operation.”
He said that “a couple of years later, a well-constructed phishing attempt had me half a second away from clicking on a deceptive link that appeared to be an appointment reminder from my actual, real, optician.”
The setup to his latest attack: he received an email from someone posing as a senior program advisor at the US State Department.
“A Claudie Weber got in touch with me by email in May, looking to discuss ‘recent developments’ and copying several of her departmental colleagues. That’s not unusual for people in my line of work. What was slightly less common was that ‘Claudie’ didn’t exist, and neither did any of her colleagues with State Department addresses. The approach was part of a careful plan to break into my Gmail account. And it seems to have succeeded.”
The Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, which focuses on communication and human rights research, did a deep dive on how the hack occurred, and the sophisticated lengths the schemers went to personalize the attack.
According to The Citizen Lab report summary:
“The attacker took extensive measures to avoid raising Mr. Giles’ suspicions, and deceived him into creating and sending them App-Specific Passwords for his accounts, bypassing Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA).”
“Google later spotted and blocked the attacker. Their Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) labels the operator Russian state-backed UNC6293, which they link with low confidence to APT29, which is attributed to Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).”
“We expect more social engineering attacks leveraging App-Specific Passwords in the future.”
“Many millions of other people could be affected once this becomes widespread,” Giles told Byline Supplement. “To Google's credit, it was their automated systems that detected a problem and shut down my accounts. If that hadn't happened, the attackers would still be sitting in my emails, and I would be none the wiser. But on the other hand, if it were down to Google I would still be locked out with no idea what had happened — except for misleading messages that my Gmail had been blocked because of ‘policy violations’. It was help from user-friendly individuals like John Scott-Railton at The Citizen Lab and James Pearson at Reuters that allowed me to recover the accounts — by reaching into parts of Google that ordinary users can't reach.”
Because services like Google are free to the user, there’s no incentive for companies to explain themselves or modify their behaviour in any way. If something goes wrong, ‘oh well’.
And this is endemic not only in the technology sector, but it’s the nature of the political environment in which we now live. In New America, it’s an epidemic.
A lot of glitz, profound discomfort. Pottersville became reality.
As Giles told Byline Supplement: “If it is possible for this immensely powerful tool to be abused in this manner, there are many more people than me at risk.”
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The above excerpt of my weekly Hot Type column was originally published Saturday, July 13, 2025, in Byline Supplement.
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More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.
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