Russian Attack on Our Democracy

An Online Publication of The Anonymous Anything Society - May 22, 2019

PART ONE OF "A RUSSIAN ATTACK ON OUR DEMOCRACY" by Phil Richardson

Last week (May 15, 2019), we mentioned Yevgeny Prigozhin, a prominent Russian businessman and longtime crony of Putin's. He is noted for owning restaurants and catering services and became known as "Putin's Chef," due to the many times Putin availed himself of his catering services for affairs where the the Russian President presided.

Prigozhin also heads a Russian firm with a very different different sort of mission, called the Internet Research Agency (IRA). According to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Report, the IRA began its USA operations in 2014, two years before the 2016 election by employing Russian operatives adept in sowing discord in our society via social media. In mid 2014, they sent spies to the United States on an intelligence gathering mission This helped them when posing as American activists, using fictitious names. The Russian IRA assault was massive and expensive by any measurement— (Take it from a person who spent a lifetime selling advertising).

Page 14, Paragraph 3, Mueller Report: "The IRA later used media accounts and interest groups to sow discord in the U.S. political system through what it termed 'information warfare.' The campaign evolved from a generalized program designed in 2014 and 2015 to undermine the U.S. electoral system, to a targeted operation that by early 2016 favored candidate Trump and disparaged candidate Clinton. The IRA's operation included the purchase of political advertisements on social media in the names of U.S. persons and entities, as well as the staging of political rallies inside the United States. (we definitely were not aware of that -Phil)

From page 24 Paragraph 4, Mueller Report: "By the end of the 2016 election, the IRA had the ability to reach million of U.S. persons through their social media accounts. Multiple IRA-controlled Facebook and Instagram accounts had hundreds of thousands of U.S. participants. IRA-controlled Twitter accounts separately had tens of thousands of followers including multiple U.S. political figures who retweeted IRA-created content. In November 2017, a Facebook representative testified that Facebook had identified that 470 IRA-controlled accounts collectively made 80,000 posts between January 2015 and August 2017. Facebook estimated that the IRA reached as many as as 126 million persons through its Facebook accounts. In January 2018, Twitter announced that it had 3,814 IRA-controlled Twitter accounts and notified approximately approximately 1.4 million people Twitter believed may have been contacted with an IRA-controlled account."

This is only a small part of the Russian Attack. Next Week, Phase Two of the Attack on Our Democracy: "Russian Hacking Operations by the Main Intelligence Directory of the General Staff of the Russian Army (The GRU)"

- Phil Richardson, Storyteller and Observer of the Human Condition.

"He goes doddering on into his old age, making a public nuisance of himself."—Joseph Menchen

Our unending thanks to Jim Bromley, who programs our Archive of Prior Commentaries

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