Titushki (or titushky) are paid street thugs sent to act as provocateurs, who provoke clashes or destroy property to tarnish peaceful protests and blame the left for “violence.”
The concept is from Ukraine, where it was first employed by later ousted President Viktor Yanukovych. He hired street hooligans in civilian clothing to perform illegal acts including street beatings, carjackings, kidnappings, and murders. Their purpose was both to intimidate the opposition against his government and create pretexts for arresting pro-democracy protestors.
During the events of Euromaidan in 2013-14, Yanukovich’s Party of Regions paid titushki about $100 per day to blend into peaceful crowds and start picking fights. After violence broke out, mass arrests would disperse the gatherings and round up protestors — and the titushki were again used as either “witnesses or “victims” for the show trials of these ginned up “crimes.”
The right wing is full of contradictions — a defining trait, almost. Chief among them is this bit of cognitive dissonance:
hatred of liberals
love of “freedom”
You can’t have this both ways, philosophically speaking. The entire concept of individual liberty (hint: it’s right there in the name!) is a core insight of the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment Inspired the United States
This 18th century philosophical movement grew large in Europe, predating the French Revolution of 1789 and influencing heavily the American Revolution. Resting on the then recent revolutions in science, math, and philosophy including the works of Descartes, Galileo, Kepler, and Leibniz, The Enlightenment has its roots in 1680s England with the political philosophy of John Locke.
Locke argued that human beings are capable of self-improvement via rational thought and accumulated experience. His philosophy was a break with traditional assumptions that knowledge came only from authorities, and that truth was opaque and unknowable. Working in the same era as Isaac Newton, Locke’s ideas about human nature were highly informed by the Scientific Revolution well underway by this time. The two strains of philosophy have a common commitment to reason and empiricism at their core.
Political ideas of The Enlightenment
You can appreciate why any number of authorities would find the radical ideas of the Enlightenment philosophers potentially threatening — their age-old power structures were in jeopardy. It represented the democratization of knowledge, removing a dependency of the less powerful upon the powerful as a singular source of truth. The church, monarchy, and aristocracy were all on the chopping block — sometimes literally — during this age of philosophical and political revolutions.
The following philosophical and political ideals emerged from The Enlightenment:
Reason is the primary source of authority and legitimacy. Phenomena can be examined in the real world to understand more about how things work and what is true. Everything should be subject to critical examination, versus simply being taken on faith.
People have natural rights, and prime among them is liberty — or freedom to pursue the kind of life they so choose, without infringing upon the natural rights of others.
Equality is the concept that all members of a nation or society are equal members and have equal standing in terms of their political influence and power. These are expressed in the American concept of equality before the law (14th Amendment), free speech, and one person/one vote.
Progress as the collective project and meaningful unifying force for a nation or group. The goal is to create better societies and better people by discarding outmoded traditions and embracing rationalism.
Religious tolerance as a rational way to prevent civil unrest. Appears in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789) and in the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
Consent of the governed is one of several foundations of liberal thought from philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who stated that to be legitimate, political power must be representative and agreed to by the people bound by it.
The social contract is a foundational concept from both John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, extending the consent of the governed and placing it as the true basis for governmental authority.
Fraternity in a philosophical sense is concerned with an ethical relationship between people, based on love and solidarity as the foundation for how individuals in society should treat each other.
Separation of church and state is a logical outgrowth of freedom of religion. The idea is older, but its introduction to the United Sates is attributed to Thomas Jefferson who declared the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause to be about building a “wall of separation between church and state.”
Property rights as a natural outgrowth of natural rights and labor (Locke).
Freedom is self-determination, but is not unlimited
The history of political philosophy reveals the evolution of Enlightenment thinking over the course of centuries, and how the ideas underpinning our government have deep roots. Freedom isn’t a new idea, and it does come with some caveats.
The first caveat is that freedom cannot be unlimited if we are to have a civil society. As Hobbes put it, if men are left to their natural state our lives will be “nasty, brutish, and short.” Also, we cannot preserve equal rights for all citizens if some members of society are allowed to trample on the rights of others.
That’s why the concept of liberty is so important. It’s important to our democracy, and it’s important to our day to day lives and how we treat each other. Freedom and liberty are similar and we often use these words interchangeably, but there is a very important distinction between them.
Liberty flows from equal rights
Liberty means that I have freedom, but only insofar as I don’t intrude upon your freedom. I must respect your rights and not invade your sovereign boundaries of life and property. For all persons are created equal, and the rights of one another shall not be infringed.
Political liberty has its foundations in Greek philosophy and was closely linked with the concept of democracy. Aristotle and Plato among others planted the seeds that would later be picked up by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and John Stuart Mill — giving us our modern concept of liberty today.
What I do when I have compromising files to hide is I distribute them evenly across 3 different laptops and ensure that all 3 highly reliable “works for decades” Apple machines go kaput at the same exact time, at which point I leave my home and fly across the country to a jurisdiction patrolled by Rudy Giuliani to service these machines and perform data recovery because I am looking to add maximum inconvenience to my very busy life — a life so busy that I completely forget about my 3 precious laptops which once contained both my livelihood and my most deeply personal and secret materials.
1. Position himself (and the group — his extension) as the benevolent safe haven to turn to when afraid
2. Isolate the follower from other sources of safe haven
3. Arouse fear in the follower
Rinse; repeat.
Qualities of a Cult Leader
Narcissistic — highly self-absorbed, they demand excessive admiration and slavish devotion to their whims.
Charismatic — they have a way of grabbing attention, whether positive or negative.
Unpredictable — erratic behavior keeps enemies on their toes and fans “on edge” with desire to please Dear Leader.
Insatiable drive — it could be status, money, sex, power, or all of the above, but they feel they deserve it more than anyone else on the planet.
Lack of conscience — they have no shame and will demand things a decent human being would not.
Trump has all the cult leader qualities and follows the playbook to a tee — doing little else, in fact. He should be considered highly armed and dangerous. An emotionally unstable individual with access to the United States’ greatest powers and deepest secrets. A threat to American life and liberty. Dictator Don.
The cognitive dissonance of the so-called Republican “agenda” is on acute display, wherein mortal threat to a literally enumerated power of the Constitution given to Congress to establish a federal US postal service seems not to bother the Constitutional originalists one bit. Not to mention said power’s role in facilitating free and fair elections. Curioser and curioser!
Somehow, one of the nation’s oldest institutions — instrumental in both our political and economic history throughout its existence — is suddenly considered yesterday’s fish by the seemingly randomly fiscal conservative. It’s, apropos of nothing (except an upcoming election in a pandemic), nigh time to punish the historic public service for not being more focused on the opposite of its stated mission:
Moreover, the origin of the importance of the post to the Founders of the nation lies even deeper within the soul of the formation of American independence: as a backlash to the British Stamp Act of 1765.
The colonies’ budding sense of unity was emboldened by collective action overtaken to dislodge the British Imperial Post (and its taxes with it), and this sentiment continued to grow through related historical affronts including the Townshend Acts of 1767, the Boston Massacre of 1768, and the Tea Party of 1773 into the full-fledged political pursuit of independence waged as the American Revolutionary War.
Foundational Acts: Establishing the post was a first priority
Benjamin Franklin became the first Postmaster General when the Second Continental Congress created the Constitutional Post in 1775. In his first term, the nation’s inaugural President George Washington signed the Post Office Act into law, establishing the USPO in early 1792. By the end of his second term, the number of post offices, miles of post roads, and post revenues had grown by 400%.
Washington spearheaded the creation of the post with help from James Madison. With it the two philosophical fathers of the revolution established both a right to personal privacy and a right to public information for citizens of the new nation. They specifically made it cheaper to send news — believing that an informed population was of utmost importance to a self-governing country.
Alexander Hamilton helped the fledgling post office with legal challenges it faced as it modernized, including a dispute with contracted stagecoach services who refused to adhere to delivery standards. Alexis de Tocqueville was impressed by the postal service on his historic visits to the new nation, convinced that the organizational capability of the early post office was essential to sustaining this fledgling American experiment with democracy.
Without the post, no West
Not to mention that, historically speaking, it’s likely there would have been no westward expansion without the post office. Cameron Blevins’ awesome infovisualisation of post office openings and closings between 1850 and into the 1900s clearly shows the reach of the system and its status as the veins and arteries of a rapidly scaling up nation.
Roads in general owe their ubiquity and quality to pressures from the mail service to provide reasonable passage for delivery. The Pony Express provides to this day some of the most iconic imagery and symbolism Americans associate with the Wild West.
The postal service was the largest communications network of the 19th century; it bound the nation back together to some small but not insignificant degree following the Civil War. Later, the Air Mail Service of the Unites States Post Office Department would be inaugurated only shortly after motorized plane flight was in regular usage towards the end of World War I.
Without the West, no America
Anyone care to argue that this country would be the same without the great American West? Surely not you, Texas — nor you, Montana. Not even Wyoming. Our national self-conception as a people of Manifest Destiny — a people whose boundless horizons were thrilling, exciting, and full of possibility. Of social mobility. Of personal responsibility.
The American identity is bound to the West. Our entrepreneurship, our creativity, our explorative and adventurous spirit finds itself embodied in the iconic images of the cowboy, the dusty plain, the purple mountains’ majesties that we all learn in childhood curricula. How would we ever have shared that imagery in the first place, if not for the post?
Cruelty is a line for me. It’s a one-strike-you’re out policy. We will not be friends.
Cruelty is a moral stain. Something we need to outgrow from childhood to become a member of society. As a form of sadism, it does basic disrespect to the natural rights of persons and flouts the core ideals of democracy. Cruelty is antisocial behavior, and will not be tolerated.
I will speak up for those being crueled. And speak out against those crueling.
We have so many mental frames related to numbers, that have been handed down culturally for, in some cases, hundreds and even thousands of years. These numerical superstitions come from myths, some from science, some cultural and historic — and many are universal. They remind us that despite our differences across nations and across time, we human beings still have a lot more in common with one another than we have differences.
1 is the loneliest number… but can also be unity, and the origin of all things
2 is duality ☯️
3’s a crowd
4 is a square; representative of justice | Buddhist Four Noble Truths ⬛
5 is alive
6 is the first perfect number
7 notes in the musical scale 🎼
8 is paradise; lucky in Buddhism 🍀
9 lives 😺
10 is the most perfect number 🔟
11 players in soccer & football ⚽
12 is cosmological: zodiac symbols, stations of the Moon, stations of the Sun | 12 inches in a foot 📏
In contrast to the cult of personality, the rule of law is a moral force. It’s an ethical tour de force that’s been hard-fought and won in democracies around the world beginning with the French Revolution. And it’s still going on today — everywhere citizens are struggling to achieve political power and equality.
When justice holds sway, there is a true objective arbiter and an ethical framework society can hang from. Imperfect though its actual execution by actual humans may be, the rule of law provides a fundamental basis for agreement on what is right, what is wrong, and how best we shall live in our societies.
The Right-wing and the rule of law
The right-wing faction once gave lip service to the rule of law — when they still had a monopoly over it. Now that they no longer do, the extreme right has abandoned it in favor of a venal power grab in the form of an essentially fascist idea: the Cult of Personality.
In Donald Trump and in authoritarian leaders around the world, the Cult of Personality reigns. These leaders go out of their way to flout the law. They repeatedly allege or assert that they are above it; that they are special. They allege that they’re so special as to be immune to application of the rule of law that applies to other citizens.
When the justice goes dark, trouble brews. When the cult of personality holds sway, entire societies become vulnerable to propaganda, disinformation, gaslighting, fakery, and lies of all kinds. Without a grasp of the truth — and mechanisms within the structure of society to champion it and root it out — societies cannot make informed decisions. They cannot effectively self-govern, and cannot wholly wield the political power a democracy is meant to endow them with. Without the rule of law, freedom is not just imperiled — freedom is dead.
surveillance won’t be obvious and overt like in Orwell’s classic totalitarian novel 1984 — it’ll be covert and subtle (“more like a spider’s web”)
social networks use persuasion architecture — the same cloying design aesthetic that puts gum at the eye level of children in the grocery aisle
Example:
AI modeling of potential Las Vegas ticket buyers
The machine learning algorithms can classify people into two buckets, “likely to buy tickets to Vegas” and “unlikely to” based on exposure to lots and lots of data patterns. Problem being, it’s a black box and no one — not even the computer scientists — know how it works or what it’s doing exactly.
So the AI may have discovered that bipolar individuals just about to go into mania are more susceptible to buying tickets to Vegas — and that is the segment of the population they are targeting: a vulnerable set of people prone to overspending and gambling addictions. The ethical implications of unleashing this on the world — and routinely using and optimizing it relentlessly — are staggering.
Profiting from extremism
“You’re never hardcore enough for YouTube” — YouTube gives you content recommendations that are increasingly polarized and polarizing, because it turns out that preying on your reptilian brain makes you keep clicking around in the YouTube hamster wheel.
The amorality of AI — “algorithms don’t care if they’re selling shoes, or politics.” Our social, political, and cultural flows are being organized by these persuasion architectures — organized for profit; not for the collective good, not for public interests, not subject to our political will anymore. These powerful surveillance capitalism tools are running mostly unchecked, with little oversight and with few people minding the ethics of the stores of essentially a cadre of Silicon Valley billionaires.
Intent doesn’t matter — good intentions aren’t enough; it’s the structure and business models that matter. Facebook isn’t a half trillion dollar con: its value is in its highly effective persuasion power, which is highly troubling and concerning in a supposedly democratic society. Mark Zuckerberg may even ultimately mean well (…debatable), but it doesn’t excuse the railroading over numerous obviously negative externalities resulting from the unchecked power of Facebook in not only the U.S., but in countries around the world including highly volatile domains.
Extremism benefits demagogues — Oppressive regimes both come to power by and benefit from political extremism; from whipping up citizens into a frenzy, often against each other as much as against perceived external or internal enemies. Our data and attention are now for sale to the highest bidding authoritarians and demagogues around the world — enabling them to use AI against us in election after election and PR campaign after PR campaign. We gave foreign dictators even greater powers to influence and persuade us in ways that benefit them at the expense of our own self-interest.
When usability pioneers have All the Feels about the nature of our creeping technological dystopia, how we got here, and what we might need to do to right the ship, it’s wise to pay attention. Don Norman’s preaching resonated with my choir, and they’ve asked me to sing a summary song of our people in bulleted list format:
What seemed like a virtuous thing at the time — building the internet with an ethos of trust and openness — has led to a travesty via lack of security, because no one took bad actors into account.
Google, Facebook, et al didn’t have the advertising business model in mind a priori, but sort of stumbled into it and got carried away giving advertisers what they wanted — more information about users — without really taking into consideration the boundary violations of appropriating people’s information. (see Shoshana Zuboff’s definitive new book on Surveillance Capitalism for a lot more on this topic)
Tech companies have mined the psychological sciences for techniques that — especially at scale — border on mass manipulation of fundamental human drives to be informed and to belong. Beyond the creepy Orwellian slant of information appropriation and emotional manipulation, the loss of productivity and mental focus from years of constant interruptions takes a toll on society at large.
We sign an interminable series of EULAs, ToS’s and other lengthy legalese-ridden agreements just to access the now basic utilities that enable our lives. Experts refer to these as “contracts of adhesion” or “click-wrap,” as a way of connoting the “obvious lack of meaningful consent.” (Zuboff)
The “bubble effect” — the internet allows one to surround oneself completely with like-minded opinions and avoid ever being exposed to alternative points of view. This has existential implications for being able to inhabit a shared reality, as well as a deleterious effect on public discourse, civility, and the democratic process itself.
The extreme commercialization of almost all of our information sources is problematic, especially in the age of the “Milton Friedman-ification” of the economic world and the skewing of values away from communities and individuals, towards a myopic view of shareholder value and all the attendant perverse incentives that accompany this philosophical business shift over the past 50 years. He notes that the original public-spiritedness of new communication technologies has historically been co-opted by corporate lobbyists via regulatory capture — a subject Tim Wu explores in-depth in his excellent 2011 book, “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.“
Is it all bleak, Don?! His answer is clear: “yes, maybe, no.” He demurs on positing a definitive answer to all of these issues, but he doesn’t really mince words about a “hunch” that it may in fact involve burning it all down and starting over again.
Pointing to evolution, Norman notes that we cannot eke radical innovation out of incremental changes — and that when radical change does happen it is often imposed unexpectedly from the outside in the form of catastrophic events. Perhaps if we can’t manage to Marie Kondo our way to a more joyful internet, we’ll have to pray for Armageddon soon…?! 😱
Did Russia hack the 2016 US election? Most certainly. The FBI, CIA, and entire intelligence community is in agreement on this point. Russian information warfare has been infamous the world over for decades — with a recent flare up starting with the Brexit vote as an obvious canary in a larger coalmine, and extending to the proliferation of right-wing movements around the world: particularly in Eastern Europe on Putin’s doorstep.
The following list is an attempt to demystify the language surrounding Russian interference in the election of Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin’s efforts to undermine the Western order — in retaliation for the fall of the Soviet Union which happened under his watch as a young KGB agent stationed in Dresden, Germany.
See also: the RussiaGate Bestiary which lists the individuals involved in the Russian 2016 election interference investigation of Trump campaign conspiracy and fraud. Please note: both of these resources are works in progress and are being updated frequently.
Term
Definition
4chan
A notorious internet message board with an unruly culture capable of trolling, pranks, and crimes.
8chan
If 4chan isn't raw and lawless enough for you, try the even more right-wing "free speech"-haven 8chan, which is notorious for incubating a large swath of the Gamergate culture.
The Act
Las Vegas nightclub in the Palazzo, owned by Sheldon Adelson, under surveillance by the Nevada Gaming Control Board for obscene performances. Site of the Miss USA pageant party attended by Trump and the Agalarov's in June 2013.
active measures
information warfare aimed at undermining the West
Air Force One
The U.S. presidential plane.
AMS Panel
The GRU's "nerve center" through which they monitored the middle servers that monitored the DNC and DCCC networks. Housed on a leased computer located in Arizona.
art critic in civilian clothing
"joke" used by the KGB to refer to themselves while informing on dissidents under Soviet rule
attorney work product
backdoor
a method, often secret, of bypassing regular login authentication or encryption of a computer or server
Baku
capital of Azerbaijan
banana republic
politically unstable countries whose economies are monocultures controlled by an oligarchy; puppet states
Bank Secrecy Act
Legal statute requiring persons managing funds in excess of $10,000 in foreign banks disclose said accounts to the US Treasury.
bespredel
"limitless and total lack of accountability of the elite oligarchs"
blind trust
A financial trust in which the beneficiaries have no access to the holdings of the trust, or any knowledge of its investments and contents
Bolotnaya Square
The square was the site of the biggest protests in Russia since the Soviet era, in December 2011
Bolshevik
The majority faction within the Marxist revolutionary party led by Vladimir Lenin to power in Russia during the October Revolution of 1917, eventually becoming the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
bolt hole
A type of retreat or refuge for those in the survivalist subculture, to be absconded to in case of disaster or apocalypse.
BND
German foreign intelligence agency
bug-out location (BOL)
Another name for a bolt hole or survivalist refuge location.
Calexit
Movement to split the state of Californnia into East and West states
capital flight
Refers to the massive ongoing exodus of both legitimate and illegitimate funds of Russian oligarchs and their state cronies to "safe havens" in foreign banks and offshore accounts outside of Russia
28 C.F.R. 600.8(c)
"at the conclusion of the Special Counsel's work, he...shall provide the Attorney General a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions the Special Counsel reached"
Charter 77
Informal Czech resistance movement against the communist regime, named after a document that was deemed a political crime to distribute.
Chekism
Loyalty to the concept of an unbroken chain of Russian security services, all the way from Lenin's Cheka to the KGB to the FSB
Chronicle of Current Events
Soviet dissident periodical (samizdat) from 1968 to the early 1980s that reported on the human rights violations in the Soviet Union
Cold War
Color Revolutions
computational propaganda
cooperating witness
CPAC
Conservative Political Action Conference
CPSU
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Crimea
territory in eastern Ukraine invaded and "annexed" by Putin in 2014; unrecognized and condemned by the international community
criminal investigation
Crocus City Hall
7000-seat theater complex in Moscow built by Aras Agalarov; site of the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow
Cuban Missile Crisis
cut out
cyberspies
cyberwarfare
Cyprus
DACA
dacha
country estate
Dark Web
data transfer
deep state
Networks of opposition within governments who undermine the official regime
demoshiza
short for ‘democratic schizophrenics’
deposition
détente
strategy of easing geopolitical tensions between nations; used in particular to describe attempts to "cool off" antagonism during the Cold War
dezinformatsiya
Russian information warfare
diaspora
directories
The file folder organizational structure on your computer
disinformation
DIOG
The FBI's Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide
document theft
Donbas
Territory in eastern Ukraine where Russian aggression has resumed as of Jan 29, 2017 following two years of Minsk Two ceasefire agreement
Doomsday Clock
doxing
researching and broadcasting personally identifiable information about an individual
Duma
the lower house of the Federal Assembly, Russia's Parliament
Eastern Bloc
Echo Moskvy
Democratic radio station in Moscow seminal is thwarting the KGB-led coup against Gorbachev in 1991
encryption
"Eternal Rome"
ideology positing Russia as a geopolitical bulwark of conservatism against a weak-kneed West (part of Alexander Dugin's reformulation of Eurasianism theory)
Evening Internet
the first blog in Russia, founded by Anton Nossik
executive privilege
exfiltration
The removal or copying of data from one server to another without the knowledge of the owner
fake news
fallout shelter
false flag
covert operations designed to deceive by appearing as though they are carried out by other entities, groups, or nations than those who actually executed them
FAPSI
One of the agencies spun out from the former KGB to head Govt Comms & Info (modeled after the NSA) — this division was instrumental in controlling the unfolding of the Russian internet
Federal Assembly
Russian Parliament
fifth column
fifth world war
non-linear war; the war of all against all
Financial Crimes Enforcement NEtwork (FinCEN)
Department within the Treasury that handles and maiontains FBAR filings from US persons holding in excess of $10,000 in foreign banks.
FISA Court
FISA warrant
Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA)
Legal statute requiring those persons lobbying on behalf of a foreign government or other entity to register such with the U.S. government.
foreign bank account report (FBAR)
Required disclosure to the US treasury by persons holding in excess of $10,000 in funds in foreign banks.
forensics
FreedomFest
Conservative evangelical event annually in Las Vegas
frozen conflict zones
term for several unrecognized pseudo states within former Soviet territories who have broken away from the national government and are operating as Russian protectorates
FSB
the Russian Federal Security Service
GamerGate
Gazeta.ru
Gazprom
Russia's energy monopolgy and largest gas company
Georgia
Ghost Stories
FBI operation allowing a sleeper cell of 10 KGB spies to operate in the U.S. for 10 years, to reverse engineer their methods. At the end of the sting, FBI Director Robert Mueller rounded them all up and expelled them from the country.
glasnost
"increased government transparency" or openness — a slogan employed by Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet leader in the 1980s
Glavplakat
"global cabal"
euphemism in far-right Russian discourse to refer to a perceived "Jewish conspiracy" behind the international order of institutions like NATO and the EU
globalization
Grand Jury
16 to 23 people impaneled to hear evidence from a legal prosecution, and decide if said prosecution has a caseworthy set of evidence to bring charges.
Grenadines
hashtag
Helsinki Accords
honeypot
hybrid warfare
IC (Intelligence Community)
iMessage
Apple's version of SMS
information warfare
interlocuter
IRC
Iskra
The main Bolshevik newspaper in the early 20th century
Jackson–Vanik amendment to the Trade Act of 1974
kakistocracy
keylogging
Technique that enabled the GRU to record passwords, internal communications, banking info, and sensitive personal info from compromised DCCC and DNC employees
KGB
The Soviet secret service, renowned for ruthlessness and duplicity
kleptocracy
form of government in which the leaders harbor organized crime rings and often participate in or lead them; the police, military, civil government, and other governmental agencies may routinely participate in illicit activities and enterprises.
Kommersant
Long-respected business newspaper purchased by pro-Kremlin oligarch Alisher Usmanov
kompromat
compromising material on a head of state or other important figure; typically used for blackmail purposes
Komsomol
Leninist Youth League organization for Communists aged 14 to 28 in the late 80s & early 90s
The Kremlin
Kuchino
the oldest top-secret research facility of the KGB, 12 miles east of Moscow
Kurchatov Institute
Preeminent Soviet nuclear research facility still in operation today in the far north of Moscow
Latvia
Lenta.ru
liberalism
Political and ethical framework based on individual liberty via human rights and equal protection
Logan Act
lords on the boards
Mafia state
A systematic corruption of government by organized crime syndicates.
Magnitsky Act
Maidan revolution
Student protests that ousted the Ukranian President Viktor Yanukovych, that started Nov 21, 2013.
malware
Marxism
maskirovka
war of deception and concealment
Menatep
Menshevik
middle servers
Intermediary sets of servers used by the GRU to communicate with their malware implants in infected U.S. computers and networks -- for an arm's length, plausible deniability strategy
Mimikatz
Piece of malware whose function is a hacker credential harvesting tool
Minsk Two
Colloquial name of the 2015 ceasefire agreement between Russia & Ukraine following the annexation of Crimea
Mitrokhin Archive
Mokhovaya Square
well-known landmark in front of the Kremlin
MSK-IX
The main Internet exchange point in Russia
MVD
Ministry of Internal Affairs; supervises all police, prisons, and "public order militias"
nationalism
National Prayer Breakfast
neutralize
Never-Trump
Newsru.com
NKVD
a forerunner to the KGB under Stalin
non-linear warfare
NotPetya
novichok
military-grade nerve agent developed by Russia and used in the poisoning of former FSB agent turned Putin critic Andrei Skripal and his daughter in Lonson in March, 2018
Novorossia
region of eastern Ukraine occupied by Russian separatists
October Revolution
the Nov 7, 1917 Bolshevik revolution and armed overthrow of the government, leading to the creation of the USSR
October Surprise
oligarchy
one-party state
open source intelligence
operating system
operatives
oppo
short form of opposition research
opposition research
OSINT
open source intelligence
Ostankino
Russia's TV network
Ozero Cooperative
perestroika
policy of restructuring or rebuilding the Soviet government, employed by Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s
plausible deniability
plea deal
plead the Fifth
Plovdiv, Bulgaria
Safe "bolt hole" identified for Eastern European hackers paid by Trump and the Kremlin if things went south
ponyatiya
an unwritten understanding about how things must be done
populism
postmodernism
"post office boxes"
Secret Soviet military and security research facilities, known only to the public by their P.O. Box number
post-truth
power grid intrusions
Prague, Czech Republic
proizvol
Russian word for "arbitrariness"
Project Lakhta
Internal name for the operation that Prigozhin's IRA was running to interfere in elections across the Western world, according to the Mueller indictments.
Project Ripon
propaganda
provokatsiya
rar.exe
A hacker tool used to compile and compress materials for exfiltration to GRU servers from the DNC and DCCC networks
Reddit
American social network inhabited by numerous denizens of the alt-Right and hosting notoriously grotesque subreddits.
refuseniks
Term given during the Soviet era, particularly under Stalin, for Jews who had been denied permission to emigrate
reiding
Relcom
One of the first private companies or "collectives" formed under Gorbachev's glasnost reforms, it brokered the first proto-Internet within the Soviet Union and first connection to the outside world — playing a key role in thwarting the attempted coup against Gorbachev by the KGB in August, 1991
rent-a-peer
retweet
When a Twitter user amplifies the tweet of another, by "retweeting" it out to her or his network
Rodina
extreme nationalist party in Russia c. 2003 that hinted at ethnic cleansing; The Guardian reported it had actually been set up as a prop by Putin & cronies, to draw votes away from the other far-right Communist Party
Rosatom
Russian company building Turkey's first nuclear plant
Rose Revolution
Peaceful protest-driven pro-Western transfer of power in the former Soviet state of Georgia in Nov 2003
Rosneft
Russia's state oil company
Rossiiskaia Gazeta
Russia's official government newspaper
RT.com
state-owned Russian news service
Rublevka
billionaire's row in Moscow
Russian Imperial Movement
part of the far-right coalition within Russia seeking to build an international consensus, this group advocates "Christian Orthodox imperial nationalism"
Russophobia
Popular hysteria against Russia and Russians perceived to be the case by Russia and Russians
samizdat
in the Soviet era, the creation by hand and distribution of copies of literature and other material banned by the state
Sberbank
Russia's largest bank
SDNs (specially designated nationals)
Individuals against whom secondary sanctions have been applied
The Seychelles
shadow profiles
Data that Facebook collects on people who are not members of Facebook, via association with their friends who are
shestidesiatniki
"Sixties' Generation" in the Soviet Union, who shared a lot in common with the American New Left. Advocated for political reform.
Siemens AG
siloviki
Russian term for those who have backgrounds and employment in security services, the military, and police; more specifically a reference to Putin's security cabal
Signal
sistema
Russian term to denote "how the government really works" (as opposed to via formal state institutions)
SJW
Social Justice Warriors, a term which has somehow been wielded as a pejorative by alt-righters and other radical right cadre, energing out of Gamergate culture.
SMS
Aka "texting"
Snow Revolution
popular protests beginning in Moscow in 2011, demanding the reinstatement of free elections & the ability to form opposition parties
sockpuppet accounts
Fake social media accounts used by trolls for deceptive and covert actions, avoiding culpability for abuse, aggression, death threats, doxxing, and other criminal acts against targets.
Solidarity
Polish workers' party confronting Communism in the late '80s
SORM
System of Operative Search Measures — the system in use by the FSB to eavesdrop on the Russian internet
South Stream pipeline
Gazprom project through Balkans and Central Europe
"sovereign democracy"
system in which democratic procedures are retained, but without any actual democratic freedoms; brainchild of Vladislav Surkov
sovereign wealth fund
spasitelnii
Russian word for "redemptive"
spearphishing
An email designed to appear as if from a trusted source, to solicit information that allows the sender to gain access to an account or network, or installs malware that later enables the sender to gain access to an account or network
specialists
Moniker given to the IRA employees assigned to operate the social media accounts in the U.S., including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Tumblr.
Sputnik
Russian news wire proffering fake news
Stasi
Nickname for the Ministry of State Security in East Germany during the Cold War
Steele dossier
stochastic terrorism
Stoleshnikov Lane
pedestrian street in Moscow lined with designer boutiques
St. Petersburg
Location of the headquarters for the IRA, Internet Research Agency, aka Putin's troll farm, at 55 Savushkina Street.
Strana.ru
subpoena
SUP Media
Russia's largest blogging service via acquisition of LiveJournal from Six Apart
SVR
Russian foreign intelligence service
swatting
hoaxed reports to emergency services intended to provoke a SWAT team response at the target's home; a form of Internet-based attack used by Gamergate, the alt-Right, and other groups and individuals
tax returns
The Thaw
Brief period of reform under Nikita Khrushchev between 1956 and 1964, when Khrushchev takes over from Stalin and is replaced by Leonid Brezhnev
tradecraft
"translator project"
trial balloon
Information put out or leaked to the media to gauge public reaction.
Trump Tower Moscow
Then-candidate Trump signed a letter of intent to move forward with this project in 2015, while at the same time denying its existence publicly, repeatedly.
truthiness
Turkish Stream
Proposed gas pipeline allowing Russia to extend its control over Turkey and European energy markets
Ukranian occupation
unmasking
Intelligence protocol redacting American identities from transcripts of foreign intercepts
USPER
Velvet Revolution
vertical of power
reference to the tightly controlled power cabal structure Putin has amassed around himself
vKontakte
Russian social network; equivalent analog to Facebook
vlast
power
VPN
VTB
Russia's largest commercial bank
wag the dog
watering hole
hacker attacks that infect entire websites
whataboutism
Classic debate tactic of old Soviet apologists to deflect criticism of Soviet policy; whenever an American would levy a critique, the response would be, "What about the bad things America does?"
white knights
white nationalism
Wolf Creek Nuclear Operating Corporation
World National-Conservatism Movement (WNCM)
umbrella term for Russia's movement to unite an international extreme far-right coalition
X-Agent
Multifunction hacking tool that allowed Russian GRU Military Unit 26165 to log keystrokes, take screenshots, and gather other data about the infected computers
X-Tunnel
Hacking tool creating an encrypted connection between the victim DCCC/DNC computers and the GRU-controlled computers to facilitate a large-scale data transfer
Yes California
Movement to secede from the US entirely, run by Marcus Ruiz Evans, Louis J. Marinelli
Yukos
zakaz
news information that has been paid for by special interest
Dictatorships generally do not foster, or even tolerate, the kind of creative disruption of the status quo necessary to the existence of a dynamic free market. Plus, the economy of the Russian state can best be described as a mafia state, or kleptocracy. Thus Vladimir Putin needs to find other ways to shore up both the national finances and the support of his cronies (much less so, of his people, who are primarily afterthoughts in the Russian power structure).
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the rapid shift to capitalism was done with little oversight and many hands in the cookie jar. The Russian land’s rich stores of minerals, oil and gas, heavy metals, and other natural resources were rapidly privatized and newly-minted oligarchs flexed wealth and power in a way never before dreamed of in the former USSR.
The combination of powerful new gatekeepers who locked up the Russian economy early via capital flight and never let it go overshadowed the capitalistic transition and, in a very real way, hijacked it before it ever really got underway. The result is, some 30 years on, an unpopular creaking kleptocratic regime reviled around the world for its stubborn aggression, subversion of democratic processes around the world particularly in Europe and the United States, support for organized crime, and significant financial crimes on the part of the state itself.
Putin’s autocratic rule from dull to terrifyingly devious has a chilling effect on hope, self-determination, self-governance, and ultimately — on happiness, freedom, and creativity. Totalitarianism is capable of exerting control, but always fails to inspire anything except for eventual revolution against the oppressors.
Here is a granular look at major indicators of the economy of the Russian Federation.
While we wring our hands in the United States over whether or not such a strategy is even conceivable, the erstwhile President of Russia has been running this playbook out in the open in Ukraine and Eastern Europe for some time. With help from Propagandist-in-Chief Vladislav Surkov, Putin has leveraged the open secrets about the psychology of crowds we learned in the late 19th and early 20th century to stir up emotional antagonisms within the political spectrum — to predictable results.
It’s no accident that fascism is on the march in America. The conditions have been brewing for some time, predominantly since the Conservative movement began breaking away more militantly from democratic principles and towards authoritarian philosophy (elite rule by force: preferably invisible force via economic hegemony for the middle and upper classes, and violent force / the carceral state for The Undesirables) in the late 1970s and 1980s. All Putin had to do was make use of available prevailing conditions and tools — the rise of social media in the 2000s counterintuitively blew a gaping wide security hole in the American persuasion landscape that Cold War Soviet operatives of the 1960s would scarcely have believed.
Today, as in parts of Europe between the world wars, the U.S. has partisan gridlock within The Establishment sector of politics; this exacerbates the impatience with and contempt for the status quo (aka the Liberal world order) that in some sense naturally congeals at the far right and far left margins of the political spectrum as a simple consequence of the Normal Distribution (the Median Voter Theorem captures this tendency quite succinctly). Under such conditions, an influence campaign like the one Russia wielded against the United States during the 2016 election season was tasked merely with tilting the playing field a little further — a task that platforms like Facebook and Twitter were in some sense fundamentally engineered to accomplish, in exchange for ad revenue.
New World Order? Be careful what we wish for
“Both Italian and German fascists had done their best to make democracy work badly. But the deadlock of liberal constitutions was not something the fascists alone had brought about. ‘The collapse of the Liberal state,’ says Roberto Vivarelli, ‘occurred independently of fascism.’ At the time it was tempting to see the malfunction of democratic government after 1918 as a systemic crisis marking the historic terminus of liberalism. Since the revival of constitutional democracy since World War II, it has seemed more plausible to see it as a circumstantial crisis growing out of the strains of World War I, a sudden enlargement of democracy, and the Bolshevik Revolution. However we interpret the deadlock of democratic government, no fascist movement is likely to reach office without it.”
While multiple formal investigations against the Trump family and administration continue to unfold, and Drumpf supporters weirdly deny the probable cause for concern, Putin’s troll army continues to operate out in the open on Twitter, Facebook, Medium, and other social media networks. The sheer scale of this operation started to become clear to me in the months leading up to Election 2016, having both spent a lot of time on social media both professionally and personally for over a decade as well as a hefty amount of time on political investigation during this presidential cycle: bots on Twitter had taken over.
Whatever your thoughts on the #RussiaGate corruption scandal may be, it should concern any citizen that an enormous group of bad actors is working together to infiltrate American social media, with a specific intent to sway politics. Media literacy is one part of the answer, but we’re going to need new tools to help us identify accounts that are only present in bad faith to political discourse: they are not who they claim to be, and their real goals are kept carefully opaque.
Cold War 2.0
We should consider our nation embroiled in a large international game of psychological warfare, or PsyOps as it is referred to in intelligence circles. The goal is to sow disinformation as widely as possible, such that it becomes very difficult to discern what separates truth from propaganda. A secondary goal is to sow dissent among the citizenry, particularly to rile up the extremist factions within America’s two dominant political parties in an attempt to pull the political sphere apart from the center.
We didn’t really need much help in that department as it is, with deep partisan fault lines having been open as gaping wounds on the American political landscape for some decades now — so the dramatically escalated troll army operation has acted as an intense catalyst for further igniting the power kegs being stored up between conservatives and progressives in this country.
Luckily there are some ways to help defray the opposition’s ability to distract and spread disinfo by identifying the signatures given off by suspicious accounts. I’ve developed a few ways to evaluate whether a given account may be a participant in paid propaganda, or at least is likely to be misrepresenting who they say they are, and what their agenda is.
Sometimes it’s fun to get embroiled in a heated “tweetoff,” but I’ve noticed how easy it is to feel “triggered” by something someone says online and how the opposition is effectively “hacking” that tendency to drag well-meaning people into pointless back-and-forths designed not to defend a point of view, but simply to waste an activist’s time, demoralize them, and occupy the focus — a focus that could be better spent elsewhere on Real Politics with real citizens who in some way care about their country and their lives.
Bots on Twitter have “Tells”
1) Hyper-patriotism
– Conspicuously hyper-patriotic bio (and often, name) – Posts predominantly anti-Democrat, anti-liberal/libtard, anti-Clinton, anti-Sanders, anti-antifa etc. memes:
2) Hyper-Christianity
– Conspicuously hyper-Christian in bio and/or name of bots on Twitter:
3) Abnormally high tweet volume
Seems to tweet &/or RT constantly without breaks — supporting evidence of use of a scheduler tool at minimum, and displaying obviously automated responses from some accounts. The above account, for example, started less than 2 years ago, has tweeted 15,000 more times than I have in over 10 years of frequent use (28K). Most normal people don’t schedule their tweets — but marketers and PR people do.
4) Posts only about politics and one other thing (usually a sport)
– Posts exclusively about politics and potentially one other primary “normie” topic, which is often a sport – May proclaim to be staunchly not “politically correct”:
5) Hates Twitter Lists
– Bots on Twitter have a strange aversion to being added to Lists, or making Lists of their own:
6) Overuse of hashtags
– Uses hashtags more than normal, non-marketing people usually do:
7) Pushes a one-dimensional message
– Seems ultimately too one-dimensional and predictable to reflect a real personality, and/or too vaguely similar to the formula:
8) Redundant tweets
– Most obviously of all, it retweets the same thing over and over again:
9) Rehashes a familiar set of memes
– Tweets predominantly about a predictable set of memes:
Mismatched location and time zone is another “tell” — and although you can’t get the second piece of data from the public profile, it is available from the Twitter API. If you know Python and/or feel adventurous, I’m sharing an earlier version of the above tool on Github (and need to get around to pushing the latest version…) — and if you know of any other “tells” please share by commenting or tweeting at me. Next bits I want to work on include:
Examining follower & followed networks against a matchlist of usual suspect accounts
Looking at percentage of Cyrillic characters in use
Graphing tweet volume over time to identify “bot” and “cyborg” periods
Looking at “burst velocity” of opposition tweets as bot networks are engaged to boost messages
Digging deeper into the overlap between the far-right and far-left as similar memes are implanted and travel through both “sides” of the networks
