The Great Cyber War: Part 2

Brexit 2016

The Great Cyber War stumbled into Western Europe and opened its Western Front when a bit of careless politicking by David Cameron opened up a small scratch that was perfect for information warfare in the age of social media to wrench open into a gaping wound.

What you have to understand is that hybrid warfare is reactive. It doesn’t necessarily break open cracks in the unity of its enemy, but when a slither of doubt emerges, it jumps in to amplify that into the widest chasm possible. When David Cameron promised a referendum on whether to remain in the EU, that tiny chink of light caught the eye of the magpies circling around, waiting for shiny things to peck at.

Brexit also saw the Great Cyber War open up its Western Front. Whilst billionaire Russian Vladimir Putin wanted to undermine the rule of law and Western liberal order so he could continue to drain Russia of money, billionaire American Robert Mercer also sought a world in which regulation, order, and the strength states gain through unions like the EU were weakened so he and his allies could make and hoard more money.

Robert Mercer, along with the company he helped found, Cambridge Analytica, is now acknowledged to have backed both Brexit and Trump. A victim of both Mercer and Putin, Hillary Clinton has warned that this cyber war is real and is aimed at breaking up the unions that have kept peace in the West since World War II and stood against kleptocrats and dictators.

Both Mercer and Putin, and their groups of supporters and allies, realized they could use the internet and social media to manipulate people at a countrywide level. We had seen social media apparently used to trigger the Arab Spring. Back then, it was seen as a valuable tool for the people and for freedom, helping to unify people out of sight of oppressive regimes, allowing them to organize, protest, and overthrow their dictators. Far from just frightening the likes of Putin, it led to the creation of businesses like Cambridge Analytica, whose former employees say was making large amounts of money using manipulation of social media for “psych-ops”and military-style interventions in less-open countries around the world. The UK military describe psych-ops as “a way of getting the enemy, or other target audience, to think and act in a way which will be to our advantage.”

Putin also took this new tool and turned it to his advantage, opening up state-funded “Facebook factories,” like the now well-known Internet Research Agency, based at 55 Savushkina Street in St. Petersburg, Russia.

And so Brexit happened. Not only did a vicious campaign sow discord and anger in the UK, but the outcome of the vote divided the country over a stupidly phrased question that left no room for compromise.The yes-no nature of the Brexit vote left no room for compromise or accommodations; you were either in or out, and the campaign language, appealing to passion rather than reason, was about “taking back control,” about “sovereignty,” immigration, and “them and us” arguments. Both sides of the campaign behaved badly and misled voters, but the Leave campaign was later revealed to have campaigned on blatant lies, like the £350 million they promised would be taken back and given to the NHS.

These lies, and the passion-inducing stories they were wrapped up in, were amplified with very targeted use of social media, supported by the psych-ops machine Cambridge Analytica built, and lent for free to the Leave campaign. The British government and security agencies have revealed that hundreds of fake Twitter accounts run from the so-called Internet Research Agency in Russia were tweeting heavily in favor of Brexit.

Public inquiries in the UK are beginning to look at the real source of funds that supported the Leave campaign. What is being called “dark money” was given to the UK-based Leave campaigns by the Democratic Unionist Party from Northern Ireland, the extreme right-wing, Christian fundamentalist party that is now the coalition partner of the ruling Conservative Party. Because of an exception in electoral law in Northern Ireland, they were able to receive £425,000 in foreign donations without having to declare the source, though suggestions now point to that money coming from the Saudi secret service. This money was spent on social media ads that received up to a billion views in the days leading up to the vote.

Carole Cadwalladr wrote in the Guardian about the links between Russia, Brexit, Mercer, and Trump, and about what the U.S. investigations are bringing to light. She points, for example, to the ties between Russia and Matthew Elliott, head of the official Brexit campaign, of which Boris Johnson was the main figurehead:

In 2012 — or possibly earlier — Matthew Elliott was targeted by a man the Home Office now believes was a Russian spy. Sergey Nalobin was the first secretary in the Russian embassy’s political section in London when Elliott met him — a man who, according to a Daily Telegraph report, “was tasked with building relations with MPs [and] a regular fixture on the Westminster drinks circuit and at political party conferences.”

It is also now clear from the American investigations into Russian intervention in Trump’s election that the same Kremlin-run Twitter accounts involved there were firing out targeted propaganda in the last days of the Brexit vote. Academic researchers from the University of London so far identified 13,500 Twitter bots promoting Brexit during the campaign. Their findings concluded the following:

• 13,493 users deleted themselves or were suddenly blocked or removed by Twitter
• An additional 26,538 suddenly changed their username
• 5% of all EU referendum tweeters were either deleted or recycled with a new name
• 31% of bot messages included the word “leave,” compared with 17% containing “remain”
• Bots were eight times more likely to tweet leave slogans than other Twitter users; 63% of URLs in bot tweets no longer exist or do not work

Wired published their research into Russian social media activity around Brexit, concluding that “Russia-based Twitter accounts that targeted the U.S. presidential election also used divisive and racist rhetoric in an attempt to disrupt politics in the UK and Europe.”

As the scale of the Great Cyber War is beginning to dawn on some people, partly thanks to Robert Mueller’s investigations in America, the UK is also starting to investigate it. However, it is awkward for Theresa May’s government to admit to any of this, as May was home secretary and therefore responsible for security during the period in question, and her current foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, is wrapped up in the complex world of Mercer and Putin from his time campaigning for Brexit.

In her masterpiece article on the subject, “The Great British Brexit Robbery: How Our Democracy Was hijacked,” Carole Cadwalladr, writing about Mercer’s involvement in the Brexit campaign, concluded:

This is Britain in 2017. A Britain that increasingly looks like a “managed” democracy. Paid for by a US billionaire. Using military-style technology. Delivered by Facebook. And enabled by us.

Beyond Brexit, Russia is continuing to chip away at the UK, which appears to be more vulnerable because of the existing social divisions of Brexit and the inflammatory Murdoch Press. It is easier to create a story that will then get regurgitated unquestioningly by the media and will immediately inflame one or both sides of what is now a very partisan political discourse.

The head of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre recently took on Russia openly, stating that:

“Russia is seeking to undermine the international system. That much is clear.”

He confirmed that since October 2016, the UK had seen more than 600 cyberattacks against government, business, and critical infrastructure, attempting to breach national security and steal intellectual property.

America: Pizzagate and Beyond

Having realized they could get away with it, and having used Brexit to perfect their weaponry, Mercer and Putin then turned their attention to the U.S. elections. It seemed audacious, taking on the world’s biggest democracy and the election of the most powerful person on earth. It looks now like Russia’s original intention was simply to cause divisions and perhaps undermine the democratic mandate of Hillary Clinton, if she won. As Trump surprised everyone by looking like he had a chance of winning, the information warfare on both fronts started to amplify Trump, while drowning out Clinton.

Fake news, the core weapon in the psych-ops armory, churned out entirely made-up stories about Clinton, like the tragic and now-infamous “Pizzagate” episode, which led a duped idiot with a gun to turn up at a pizza restaurant to rescue children he believed Hillary Clinton was holding prisoner in the basement. Pro-Trump and anti-Clinton messaging were amplified and targeted, using a mixture of Cambridge Analytica’s powerful tools to focus messaging to specific individuals and Russia’s bots and Facebook factories to push out fake news, confuse the reality, and sow doubts in the minds of people who were already conflicted about whom to vote for.

This information war became audacious. As well as operating online, the Russians started to act on the ground. American activists of all types were paid and encouraged by Russia to take to the streets in the United States; street protests in America were paid for by Russia and coordinated by Russians pretending to be Americans. The useful idiots on the ground were none the wiser and started to act on Russian propaganda and make real the fake divisions and stories created by the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency in Russia.

It is now clear that Russia paid for adverts and controlled huge numbers of social media accounts across the internet that were used not just to promote Trump and damage Hillary Clinton, but also to divide American society. Google has handed over evidence of ads purchased by Russian troll factories to a congressional committee, and Twitter has shut down 201 accounts the company now says are linked to the Russian operatives who were blasting out propaganda during the American election. An Oxford University report, titled “Junk News on Military Affairs and National Security: Social Media Disinformation Campaigns Against U.S. Military Personnel and Veterans,” speaks for itself.

Quartz cites the business site RBC in discussing the Internet Research Agency in Russia:

Over two years the agency spent $2.3 million on its US operations. Most of that was spent on Russian staff — around 90 employees were working on the US at the height of the trolling campaign in 2016 — but it also paid for 100 US activists to travel around America, organizing 40 rallies in US cities, and spent $120,000 spreading their message on Facebook.

The Independent examined in more detail those 120 social media groups run by the Internet Research Agency. Here are some examples of these fake Russian ads from the American election campaign.

The impact and reach of Russian social media campaigns in the U.S. election are being researched by American academic Jonathan Albright. He points out that we should not be measuring the number of ads purchased, which in one case being investigated is just 3,000, but the reach of those ads, which can become huge due to the way social media is designed to create virality. Albright calculated that posts from just six fake Facebook sites designed to cause unrest and division were shared 340 million times. He is now one of the experts in this field and is in no doubt about the damage done:

“A lot of these posts had the intent to get people not to vote. This is a concerted effort of manipulation. Based on the engagement and reach and the outcome of the election…I’d say it’s been fairly successful, sadly.”

An example of Russian information warfare trying to open a chasm where initially only a slight fissure existed, if at all, was the #calexit social media campaign, which was hijacked and amplified by bots and fake memes, again produced by Russia’s Internet Research Agency:

The campaign for California independence is not the only American secession movement with links to Russia. Heart of Texas was for a time the most popular pro-Texas independence Facebook page, with more than 250,000 followers. But US Senate hearings on Wednesday revealed that the account was allegedly run by the Internet Research Agency.

All the known interactions between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia are listed here by the Washington Post, and before you dismiss that as “fake news” because you don’t trust the Washington Post, read this Vox article on America’s epistemic crisis by David Roberts (the longer version is here), in which he examines the collapse of truth in modern America:

The US is experiencing a deep epistemic breach, a split not just in what we value or want, but in who we trust, how we come to know things, and what we believe we know — what we believe exists, is true, has happened and is happening.

The primary source of this breach, to make a long story short, is the US conservative movement’s rejection of the mainstream institutions devoted to gathering and disseminating knowledge (journalism, science, the academy) — the ones society has appointed as referees in matters of factual dispute.

Roberts argues in depth about how part of American society, Trump’s base, has stopped believing the arbiters of truth that until now have been accepted across society and has replaced them with their own right-wing information ecosystem, which is highly partisan and not troubled by truth. This move is backed by the Mercer faction—Breitbart, Fox News, and the right-wing talk radio shows—and is aided and amplified by Russian social media manipulation.

And a worrying outcome of this, as Albright mentioned, is voter suppression. With the Trump election in particular, a lot of effort went into creating doubt among uncommitted Clinton voters. This was not intended to get them to vote for Trump, but just to encourage them not to vote at all. Making us doubt our democratic institutions, doubt our political leaders, and doubt the messaging they are trying to get across makes people apathetic or leads them to disengage with the process altogether. Initially blamed just on restrictive GOP electoral registration practices, the barrage of fake or manipulated messaging about Clinton, which Trump added to and amplified, was primarily aimed at that outcome, and voting patterns suggest it worked.

It is very important to take on board the subtlety of this. Information warfare isn’t just to make people vote for something or vote against it. Targeted social media manipulation is more likely intended to confuse people, to undermine the certainty they may have had in an idea, candidate, or party. That uncertainty, or those newfound doubts, can stop people from engaging with their democracy. It is possible to encourage one group to become angry and get out to vote and another group to become confused and disillusioned and not vote. Persuading people not to vote rocks democracy to the core.

The wars of the previous century, fought by our parents and grandparents, were ultimately about preserving our ability to vote.

Part I:

Part III:

Part IV: