
Understanding Foreign Interference [pdf] - physicsgraph
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0717_cisa_the-war-on-pineapple-understanding-foreign-interference-in-5-steps.pdf
======
nimbius
I appreciate how absolutely sophomoric and naive this propaganda is. The US
has played this game in Italy, Iran, Guatemala, Brazil, Viet Nam, and Iraq
just to name a few of the literally dozens of foreign victims of US coups and
regime changes bought about by their "foreign influence." Now the DHS, an
agency thats only 17 years old, thinks a pictograph about pizza is going to
somehow help bolster Americans from other nations doing the same thing?

It wont. This tactic worked for the Tobacco industry in the seventies, it
worked for the cola industry in 2006, and it continues to serve diligently for
oil and energy companies during climate change. This model of disinformation
has also helped spread measles throughout the developed world through the
anti-vax movement.

The problem is American education. You cannot spend 40 years cutting public
education to the bone and turning colleges into profit mills without some sort
of brain-drain. We've arrived in 2020 with a nation of citizens that lack the
capacity for intelligent argument and critical analysis of ideas. This is also
in large part due to the nature of how we get our information, namely as a
"bleeds and leads" info-tainment format where our opinions are cultivated as a
product of either 0 or 1, red or blue, liberal or conservative. The american
opinion is largely an accessory of corporate advertisement in 2019.

~~~
scottlocklin
> .... You cannot spend 40 years cutting public education to the bone

The US spends more on public education than any OECD country other than
Norway.

[https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp](https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp)

Americans are kind of morons; pretty sure it has nothing to do with the amount
of money we spend on education.

~~~
alamortsubite
Yeah, but the absolute numbers in that table are misleading. Any society whose
budget for education is far outpaced by its budgets for mind-numbing
entertainment and propaganda is sure to be full of morons. Rewrite those
expenditures as a percentage of GDP and you'll paint a wildly different
picture.

~~~
scottlocklin
I guess you didn't scroll down far enough to notice they did put those
expenditures as a percentage of GDP and it doesn't paint a wildly different
picture.

~~~
alamortsubite
No, it lists them a percentage of GDP <i>per capita</i>. Education doesn't
scale like infotainment and advertising.

~~~
scottlocklin
You misread the chart: it plots GDP/capita vs $$ spent per student. You have
to normalize it with your eyeball. And it doesn't matter; you can normalize it
any way you want: the US spends more than almost any other industrialized
country per student, whether raw or by % GDP.

If you think the US is a nation of dumbasses because of infotainment expenses
and advertising, perhaps you have some evidence for this?

------
Hitton
I think that blaming Russians for everything is doing more harm than good.
Sometimes it's not Russia, sometimes it's just ideological opponents,
conspiracy theorists or 4channers who like to watch the world burn, sometimes
all of them at the same time (think Pizzagate).

~~~
jessaustin
Pizzagate was so dumb. Just imagine, the possibility that lots of powerful
elite dudes would be implicated in a carefully organized long-running practice
of pedophilia. So conspiratorial! Definitely not realistic...

~~~
leetcrew
the problem with conspiracy theories isn't that they never turn out to be
true; it's that they are usually not the most plausible explanation of the
available facts. "a broken clock is still right twice a day".

~~~
jessaustin
It's not productive to generalize about conspiracy theories. It has been 2.5
years, and RussiaRussiaRussia ain't been right yet. Meanwhile the Orange
Menace's poll numbers are as high as they've been since this theory was
popularized.

------
moksly
What is surprising to me is how poorly prepared western society has been to
deal with this, considering we’ve been doing it ourselves for so many years
through various NGOs.

The EU funds so many pro-democratic programs around the world, many have been
especially focused in the Russian influence sphere. How have we been caught so
completely off guard when our non-democratic adversaries started doing it to
us?

/edit I didn't mean to put NGOs trying to spread democracy on par with
staterun propaganda, I'm just wondering why noone saw it coming in time for
our systems to prepare.

~~~
zapita
Western NGOs are not even remotely comparable to the propaganda operations the
US and Europe are dealing with at the moment. This faulty comparison is itself
a common talking point of Russian and Chinese propaganda.

A better comparison would be US operations against the communist bloc during
the Cold War. However... The US intelligence community has spent the last 25
years focusing on the Middle East. The previous generation of spies and
counter-spies have mostly retired, and those who are still active haven't
worried about the KGB in a long time. Meanwhile, the KGB has never gone away,
and has been obsessed with the US the whole time. And now the former head of
the KGB/FSB runs Russia... What we are dealing with is the same KGB playbook,
with some 21st century upgrade. Russia knows US citizens better than they know
themselves, which is how they managed to brainwash 1/3d of our population
through domestic assets like Manafort, Barr, Mcconnell and of course the
Trumps. It's no surprise that the are running circles around us at the moment.
Hopefully our institutional immune system will kick in and we will adapt
before the rot sets in too deep.

~~~
protomolecule
Immune system like Joseph McCarthy?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy)

~~~
zapita
No. Not at all like Joseph McCarthy.

~~~
protomolecule
Is it? You wrote: "which is how they managed to brainwash 1/3d of our
population", do you really think that over 100 million people you disagree
with are brainwashed by a foreign power?

In Russian political discourse nowadays liberals are all too often accused of
being on American embassy's payroll. You want this kind of talk in the US when
opponents are labeled as foreign government shills?

------
peterkelly
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change_in_Latin_America)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CIA_activities_in_the...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CIA_activities_in_the_Middle_East)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CIA_activities_in_Afr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CIA_activities_in_Africa)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CIA_activities_in_Asi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CIA_activities_in_Asia)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CIA_activities_in_Rus...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CIA_activities_in_Russia_and_Europe)

------
vigenutis
An interesting thought experiment is to look at all the "for-fun" online
communities that you've been a part of. For instance, game forums, enthusiast
subreddits, etc., and see how the discussion there varies from discussion on
political things. Of course it will be different, but I think I have started
to see factionization in the larger online communities that I am a part of.
However, it's hard to know whether this is human nature, or something learned
from other sources. (For example, a user who visits political subreddits and
then takes that attitude to the Hearthstone subreddit.)

------
linksnapzz
I'm not convinced that "the GRU has access to Facebook!" is a larger internal
security concern to the US than the fact that more than a third of the
residents of the most populous state could legally be considered citizens of a
separate country....

------
richmunk567
Social media bots are child's play. Here's how foreign interference really
works:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lSjXhMUVKE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lSjXhMUVKE)

~~~
DSingularity
This kind of bad-faith civil engagement that poses as grass roots is a bigger
threat to progress than misguided opposition. At least you have a hope to
convince or guide honest opposition. Groups like AIPAC are unswayable. They
exist solely to enable and advance Israeli agenda w.r.t Palestine. The
morality or validity of the agenda just doesn't matter. The IDF could commit
its biggest crimes yet and the AIPAC lobby is unlikely to lose funding or
human resources. Compare that to other groups, like the NRA for instance. The
NRA is cracking at its foundation. Who wants to work for them in this climate?
Who wants to take their money?

~~~
devoply
And they are succeeding and can't be stopped because American Jews are a
strong part of the political establishment and have strong family and business
ties with many other non-Jewish American elites. They whether whole heartedly
or due to tribalism support AIPAC unconditionally and it's not going anywhere.
And also you are not allowed to point out this fact for being labelled anti-
Semitic but as far as I can tell it's more or less true.

------
buraequete
Can't social media enforce a harder stance to eliminate fake accounts? Forcing
real info & phone number usage, constant re-validation on suspected accounts,
asking real photos, with real IDs, confirmation by others etc.. I think many
trolls would simply disappear if their identities are public. Maybe anonymity
shouldn't be a thing in social media?

Though such enforcements are also not the best, then the tech companies are
given too much power. Hard topic, but just asking people to be careful is
never going to be enough, so much passion out there, people will reply. Or
real discussion will be watered down when real people are called bots.

~~~
a3n
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymwars](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymwars)

There are arguably legitimate reasons not to use your real name online,
including "I don't wanna."

~~~
buraequete
I agree, anonymity is _really_ important online, but for social media, maybe
it should not be the case? One can go and be anonymous in different platforms
already, and if it is a really big concern, they can just evade social media
altogether.

Why allow fake account pollution in bigger networks, that are affecting so
much of our real life politics today? So much trolling and social engineering
are being done through fake accounts, the best solution is a very harsh
validation.

~~~
probably_wrong
Leaving aside the reasons mentioned above about why being anonymous is
_really_ important, there's another reason: money.

I think it is wildly accepted that major social networks are full of ghost
and/or inactive accounts. If companies cracked down on those, everyone would
see that their numbers are not accurate and their valuation would take a big
hit. Some CEOs would lose their jobs for sure. So it is not in the big
networks' self-interest to change that.

You could make a network from scratch, were identity is baked in from the
start. But who would sign up? If Google+ thought us anything it's that people
_really_ hate giving their real names (and rightfully so, IMHO). Sure, some
services managed it, but they are not as influential as the big ones.

So no new service has the network effects to pull it off, no big network wants
to lose money on doing it, and users don't want it.

~~~
coldcode
There needs to be anonymous accounts on the internet because of safety.
However someone you need to be able to derive a system that permits you to
validate you are an individual internally to the system, but also allow for
anonymity externally. This way the anonymous speaker is protected, but you
still know that it is a real person, just not for you to know who. Of course
the anonymous person could be a bad actor (whatever you define that to be) but
at least its not a bot.

