The Grayzone Project
Information Wars December 25, 2018
Senate Report on Russian Interference Was Written By Disinformation Warriors
Behind Alabama False Flag Operation
Hailed by Congress and the media as defenders of democracy, high-tech
Russiagate hustlers Jonathon Morgan and Ryan Fox have been exposed for
waging an elaborate false flag operation to swing the 2017 Alabama
senate race.
By Dan Cohen
On December 17, two reports detailing ongoing Russian interference
operations commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee were made
public. They generated a weeks worth of headlines and sent members of
Congress and cable news pundits into a Cold War frenzy. According to the
report, everything from the Green Partys Jill Stein to Instagram to Pokemon
Go to the African American population had been used and confused by the
deceptive Facebook pages of a private Russian troll farm called the Internet
Research Agency.
Nevermind that 56% of the troll farms pages appeared after the election,
that 25% of them were seen by no one, or that their miniscule online
presence paled in comparison to the millions of dollars spent on social
media by the two major presidential campaigns and their supporters to sway
voters. This was an act of war that demanded immediate government action.
According to Sen. Mark Warner, the Democratic chair of the Senate
Intelligence Committee, the reports were a wake up call and a bombshell
that was certain to bring long-overdue guardrails when it comes to social
media. His Republican counterpart on the committee, North Carolina Senator
Richard Burr, hailed the research papers as proof positive that one of the
most important things we can do is increase information sharing between the
social media companies who can identify disinformation campaigns and the
third-party experts who can analyze them.
But the authors of one of the reports soon suffered a major blow to their
credibility when it was revealed that they had engaged in what they called a
Russian style online disinformation operation aimed to swing a hotly
contested special senate election. The embarrassing revelation has already
resulted in one of the authors having his Facebook page suspended.
The well-funded deception was carried out by New Knowledge, a private cyber
intelligence firm founded by two self-styled disinformation experts who are
veterans of the Obama administration: Jonathon Morgan and Ryan Fox.
It may be designed to manipulate you
Morgan began his career as a product manager at AOL before founding a series
of start ups, some with funding from the United States Agency for
International Development and Silicon Valley billionaire Pierre Omidyars
Omidyar Network. Once a Brookings Institution researcher and special advisor
to the Obama White House and State Department, Morgan founded Data for
Democracy, a volunteer organization said to use public data to monitor the
election system for signs of fraud. Morgan also developed technology for
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the arm of the
Department of Defense created for basic, applied technological research, and
futuristic war toys.
Rising through the ranks of the national security apparatus, Morgan
ultimately emerged as a go-to source for credulous reporters seeking to
blame Hillary Clintons loss to Donald Trump on Russian disinformation.
In an interview with the local CBS affiliate in Austin, Texas, Morgan told
viewers that feelings of discontent were telltale signs that they had been
duped by Russian disinformation. If it makes you feel too angry or really
provokes that type of almost tribal response, then it may be designed to
manipulate you
People should be concerned about things that encourage them
to change their behavior, he warned.
Fox, for his part, is a 15-year veteran of the National Security Agency and
was a computer analyst for the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC)
military unit. JSOC is notorious for its spree of atrocities across the
Middle East including digging their bullets out of dead pregnant womens
bodies in Afghanistan. Comparatively little information is available about
Foxs background.
Since receiving an $11 million investment from venture capital firm, GGV
Capital, in August 2017, New Knowledge has positioned itself as one of the
leading private intelligence firms taking on the scourge of Russian
disinformation. The outfit made its biggest splash on December 17th when it
published one of the two Senate Intelligence Committee-commissioned reports.
The report, titled The Tactics and Tropes of the Internet Research Agency,
was oversseen by Renee DiResta, a former Wall Street trader and tech
specialist who was recruited by Obamas State Department to devise
strategies for combating online ISIS propaganda. The New York Times
described DiResta as one among a small group of hobbyists who
meticulously logged data and published reports on how easy it was to
manipulate social media platforms.
The hobby lobby of online obsessives converged at New Knowledge this year to
sound the alarm on supposed Russian disinformation. In a New York Times
op-ed published as Americans went to cast their votes in the midterm
elections, Morgan and Fox alleged that the Kremlin was secretly running
hundreds of propaganda websites in an effort to swing the outcomes. That
assertion ran counter to the narrative the two operatives had been spinning
out just months before.
In an interview earlier in the year, Ryan Fox suggested that despite the
Trump administrations multiple rounds of sanctions against Russia, Vladimir
Putin was so satisfied with the state of U.S. affairs that the Kremlin had
actually cut back on its supposed interference. Strategically, are they
content with the way things are? Does it play in their favor to do anything
right now? Thats a valid question, Fox said. Keep up the momentum, keep
poking away. But do they have to implement drastic measures like hacking the
DNC and exposing thousands of emails? Probably not.
More recently, Fox claimed to have identified hundreds of Russian-controlled
Facebook and Twitter accounts active in Frances Yellow Vest movement, which
has raged against the countrys neoliberal leadership and sparked anxiety
among centrist elites across the Atlantic.
However, Fox produced no evidence to support his incendiary accusation,
prompting reporters to qualify his assertions as very likely and write
that he merely believes Russian interference took place.
Drafting the dubious bot dashboard
Morgan is also one the developers of the Hamilton 68 dashboard, an online
project dedicated to inflaming public outrage over online Russian bots.
Funded by the German Marshall Funds Alliance for Securing Democracy which
is itself backed by NATO and USAID Hamilton 68 claims to track hundreds of
accounts supposedly linked to Russian influence operations. The effort has
largely succeeded in drawing positive media attention despite one of its
founders, Clint Watts, admitting that the Twitter accounts it follows may
actually be real people who are not Russian at all.
When Morgan was asked what techniques Hamilton 68 uses to identify Russian
influence operations, he offered a confident-sounding but ultimately empty
answer: We developed some techniques for determining who matters in a
conversation
Using some of those techniques, weve identified a subset of
accounts that were very confident are core to furthering the Russian
narrative in response to mainstream events.
Because Morgan and his colleagues have explicitly refused to name the
accounts monitored by Hamilton 68, his claims can never be proven.
In a lengthy profile of the musicologist-turned-New Knowledge online
detective Kris Shaffer, Foreign Policy described the supposed methodology
he employed to identify Russian disinfo operations: By working with massive
datasets of tweets, Facebook posts, and online articles, he is able to map
links between accounts, similarities in the messages they post, and shared
computer infrastructure.
The article added an extraordinarily revealing disclaimer: This method of
analysis is in its infancy, remains a fairly blunt instrument, and still
requires human intervention. It sometimes mistakes real people who post
anti-imperialist arguments about U.S. foreign policy for Kremlin trolls, for
example.
It may have been that New Knowledge had no knowledge at all of Kremlin
botnets, but their reports were nonetheless treated as gospel by droves of
credulous reporters eager to make their name in the frenzied atmosphere of
Russiagate.
We orchestrated an elaborate false flag operation
According to an internal New Knowledge report first seen by the New York
Times, the firm carried out a multi-faceted influence operation designed to
undermine a 2017 bid by right-wing Republican former state supreme court
judge Roy Moore for an open Alabama senate seat. By its own admission, New
Knowledges campaign capitalized on the the sexual assault allegations
against Moore to enrage and energize Democrats and depress turnout among
Republicans.
To accomplish this, the New Knowledge team created a Facebook page aimed at
appealing to conservative Alabamians by encouraging them to endorse an
obscure patio supply salesman-turned-write-in candidate named Mac Watson.
They hoped the subterfuge would peel votes away from Moore. It was precisely
the kind of tactic that New Knowledge claims Russian troll farms carry out
to sow divisions among the American electorate.
Morgan told the New York Times the effort stopped there. But the New
Knowledge report says the Facebook page boosted Watsons campaign and even
arranged interviews for him with The Montgomery Advertiser and the
Washington Post. At the same time, Watsons Twitter following mysteriously
jumped from 100 to about 10,000.
One of the articles New Knowledge took credit for during its disinformation
campaign.
Of the dozens of conservative Alabamian Facebook pages the Watson campaign
messaged, the New Knowledge-run page was the only one that responded to it.
You are in a particularly interesting position and from what we have read
of your politics, we would be inclined to endorse you, they wrote. New
Knowledge then asked Mr. Watson whether he trusted anyone to set up a super
PAC that could receive funding and offered advice on how to sharpen his
appeal to disenchanted Republican voters.
While Watson communicated with the deceptive Facebook page, the New
Knowledge operators never revealed their identity, and the page disappeared
the day after the vote. It was weird, Watson commented to the New York
Times. The whole thing was weird.
New Knowledge then sought to manufacture a link between Roy Moores campaign
and the Kremlin by claiming thousands of his Twitter followers were Russian
bots. Mainstream media outlets credulously ran with the narrative,
insinuating that the Christian theocrat Moore was secretly backed by Russia.
The Montgomery Observer first reported the alleged link: Russian invasion?
Roy Moore sees spike in Twitter followers from land of Putin. From there, it
was picked up by Mother Jones, whose headline read: Russian Propagandists
Are Pushing for Roy Moore to Win. But there was no proof of any Russian
connection to the accounts. To bolster its evidence-free claim, Mother Jones
simply turned to Hamilton 68, the highly suspect Russian influence
monitoring system that Morgan helped design.
Today, as can be seen below, Mother Jones is using a bogus story generated
by a disinformation campaign to raise funds for more Russiagate coverage.
As the Russian bot narrative peaked, Moore blamed the Jones campaign for
manufacturing the scare. Its not surprising that theyd choose the
favorite topic of MSNBC and the Fake News outlets the Russia conspiracy.
Democrats cant win this election on the issues and their desperation is on
full display.
Moores opponent, Jones, said he had no knowledge of the operation.
Moore was roundly mocked in liberal circles as a conspiratorial crank, but
New Knowledges internal report contained a stunning omission: We
orchestrated an elaborate false flag operation that planted the idea that
the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet, its
authors revealed.
While the New York Times says the internal report does not confirm that New
Knowledge purchased the bot account themselves, the accounts flagrant use
of Cyrillic language and profile pictures of famous singers including
Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Avril Lavigne strongly suggest that
whoever bought them went to extreme lengths to leave the appearance of a
Russian hand.
Disinfo ops to strengthen American democracy
The Alabama disinformation campaign was carried out through a network of
Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs and former Obama administration officials
who have joined the private sector to leverage liberal anti-Trump outrage
into profits.
Billionaire Reid Hoffman, who co-founded the employment networking site
LinkedIn, provided $100,000 for the black ops campaign. The money was then
pipelined through American Engagement Technologies, which is headed by Mikey
Dickerson, a former Google engineer who founded the United State Digital
Service. Dickerson is also Executive Director of the New Data Project, an
organization dedicated to testing new approaches and serving as an
advanced technology research lab for progressives.
A colleague of Hoffmans claimed the purpose of his investments was to
strengthen American democracy.
Since the New York Times exposé, Facebook released a statement announcing
its suspension of five accounts run by a multiple individuals for engaging
in coordinated inauthentic behavior, including Morgans account. The social
media platform has opened an investigation, though it has not revealed what
the other pages are or who operated them.
The headline of the New York Times story about the Facebook suspensions
appeared to have been crafted to keep the focus on Russia while deflecting
scrutiny from the group of Democratic Party-linked hustlers that
orchestrated the disinformation operation. It read: Facebook Closes 5
Accounts Tied to Russia-Like Tactics in Alabama Senate Race.
For his part, Sen. Jones has demanded an investigation. I think weve all
focused too much on just the Russians and not picked up on the fact that
some nefarious groups, whether theyre right or left, could take those same
playbooks and start interfering with the elections for their own benefit,
he said. Id like to see the Federal Election Commission and the Justice
Department look at this to see if there were any laws being violated and, if
there were, prosecute those responsible.
Facing an inquiry for possible violations of election laws, Morgan issued a
mealy-mouthed statement claiming he did not participate in any campaign to
influence the public and any characterization to the contrary misrepresents
the research goals, methods and outcome of the project.
While the impact of the disinformation campaign on the Alabama senate race
may never be quantified, the cynicism behind it is hard to understate. A
group of Democratic Party operatives with close ties to the national
security state waged a cynical campaign of online deception against the
American public, while presenting marketing themselves as the guardians
against from foreign interference. Few, if any, Russian hackers could have
done as much damage to the already worn fabric of American democracy as they
have.
dan cohen
Dan Cohen
Dan Cohen is a journalist and filmmaker. He has produced widely distributed
video reports and print dispatches from across Israel-Palestine. Dan is a
correspondent at RT America and tweets at @DanCohen3000.