The Cold War is back: US 'bot'tled by Russia
The Times of India, Chidanand Rajghattal, Feb 18, 2018
WASHINGTON: The Cold War between the United States and Russia is back - except it is now digitized, although driven by humans, bots have taken the place of agents, and the IRA has replaced the KGB as the new American bogey.
The Trump administration on Friday broadly acknowledged that Russian meddling in the US Presidential election of 2016 is "beyond dispute" after the FBI Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities with conspiracy to defraud the United States.
In the focus of US attention is IRA, which stands for Internet Research Agency, and is said to be a "troll farm" based in St Petersburg, Russia that employed scores of people to deploy bogus social media postings to influence the elections in favor of Trump and against Hillary Clinton.
The indictment described the IRA as an organized bureaucracy backed by an annual budget of millions of dollars, employing hundreds and boasting of several departments dedicated to specific projects like search-engine optimization and graphics.
"I created all these pictures and posts, and the Americans believed that it was written by their people," wrote one of the defendants, Irina Kaverzina, in an email to a family member obtained by investigators. The charges also describe Russians in the US who helped organize pro-Trump rallies in battleground states.
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Russia scoffed at the indictment even as the US establishment across the board tried to grapple with the news of FBI essentially saying Moscow had pulled off a coup in Washington by installing a president of its choice.
"I have no response. You can publish anything, and we see those indictments multiplying, the statements multiplying," Lavrov said at the Munich Security Conference. "Until we see the facts, everything else is just blabber."
But US National Security Advisor H.R.McMaster said at the same conference that the FBI indictment showed "the evidence is now really incontrovertible," even though his boss had repeatedly referred to reports of Russian interference as a "hoax."
On Friday, with the FBI indictment showing it was not a hoax after all, Trump and his blindsided supporters only focused on the Bureau's use of the word "unwitting" while charging that Russian defendants "communicated with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump campaign." This, to them, showed there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
"Russia started their anti-US campaign in 2014, long before I announced that I would run for President. The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong - no collusion!" Trump tweeted.
But the indictment’s disclosure of Russia’s use of shell corporations and stolen IDs, deployment of virtual private networks to avoid detection, and payments to "unwitting" Americans, ensured that there is now an institutional mistrust and breakdown of faith between Moscow and Washington.
The largely US-centric social media companies such as Facebook, which said it "pro-actively" disclosed to US authorities last year foreign interference in US election, are now wising up to the new form of information warfare in which they are tools.
Facebook said in a statement that it is doubling its security staff to 20,000 and actively working with the FBI to stop election interference by Russians and others.
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