
Successfully Countering Russian Electoral Interference - mpweiher
https://www.csis.org/analysis/successfully-countering-russian-electoral-interference
======
tomohawk
From the US side, it appears that interference in other countries elections is
coming more from the political parties and NGOs than from the government
itself, although the NGOs do attempt to get funding for these activities from
the government. Consider the recent case of foreign meddling in Israel's
elections.

[http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=66198](http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=66198)

[http://thehill.com/policy/international/236565-netanyahu-
pol...](http://thehill.com/policy/international/236565-netanyahu-pollster-
obama-role-in-election-larger-than-reported)

~~~
EGreg
But there is an axiom: it is OK for the US to do to others what it complains
about when done to itself.

Anyone see this? How is that not election interference?
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nm-50K-XELY](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nm-50K-XELY)

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amai
This was probably the most effective countermeasure:

"Knowing that they would be hacked, the campaign forged emails and fake
documents themselves to confuse the hackers with irrelevant and even
deliberately ludicrous information. By placing false flags, the campaign
wished to inundate, confuse, and impede the work of the hackers with false
information and slow them down. The campaign’s strategy of “counter-
retaliation for phishing attempts”11 is known as cyber or digital blurring. It
worked by turning the burden-of-proof tables on the hackers. The Macron
campaign staff did not have to explain potentially compromising information
contained in the Macron Leaks; rather, the hackers had to justify why they
stole and leaked information that seemed, at best, useless and, at worst,
false or misleading. The whole thing made the population doubt the
authenticity of any of the leaked material."

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flatfilefan
How about successfuly proving there was any, for starters?

~~~
paulgb
I'll play. Which of these claims do you think haven't been sufficiently
demonstrated?

1\. There was social media interference in the 2016 US elections through the
spreading of propaganda on social media.

2\. Some of that campaign originated (geographically) from Russia.

3\. The Kremlin (whether or not through the Internet Research Agency) was
behind some of this propaganda.

Separately, I'm curious whether you believe:

4\. The Kremlin is involved in social media-based election interference in
countries other than the USA.

~~~
sigfubar
I’m a Russian citizen living in the US, and here’s what I think is true.

1\. Social media was constructed for all sorts of parties to influence the
American consumer as a set of bought & sold “audiences” (in adtech speak).
Some of these audiences are defined using political parameters. Some
advertisers targeting these audiences via social media are politically
motivated. The whole thing - all of social media - is a form in interference
in the way people think.

2\. Some advertisers are based in Russia. Most are not. Anyone can buy ads
targeting a specific audience on any number of platforms.

3\. I’m surprised they bothered to create a shell org to do this. Russia -
like many other countries - has vested interests in US policy. Consider this a
form of lobbying: just like American corporations go to Washington in order to
lobby (“have undue influence over”) elected officials, so do countries “lobby”
the American electorate come election time, because the public is seen as
susceptible to such influence. In fact America even built platforms for this:
social media.

4\. Probably, but so is the US, and everyone else. I cannot believe Americans
are so upset about something they themselves made possible.

~~~
paulgb
I appreciate your perspective.

I've seen allegations that Kremlin-backed interference went as far as
organizing opposing protests from afar. If this is true, would you consider it
to fall under "lobbying" or would you say a line has been crossed?

Re. 4, OP said that the interference was unproven. The extent to which the US
has interfered with other elections is a separate discussion worth having, but
it's not the issue here.

------
olivermarks
All first world foreign entities attempt to influence the electoral process of
other nation states - wouldn't a better approach by the EU be to discuss this
reality and solutions than just accusing 'Russia' of this while being holier
than thou?

~~~
threeseed
Please provide evidence of this.

There is widespread, documented evidence of Russian interference in the US and
French elections as well as Brexit. Which when you throw in state sponsored
doping demonstrates a pattern for “not following the rules”. And I don’t see
why that even if what you say is true why Russian interference can’t be
investigated also.

Countries can do more than one thing at once.

~~~
harshreality
You're genuinely unaware that the U.S. has done the same thing for decades?

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/sunday-review/russia-
isnt...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/sunday-review/russia-isnt-the-
only-one-meddling-in-elections-we-do-it-too.html)

One point the NYT briefly tries to make — which is all I'm addressing in the
rest of this comment — is that the U.S. in (very) recent years has mainly
interfered to support more democratic candidates, and oppose more
authoritarian candidates. And Russia, NYT claims, interferes to support
totalitarian candidates and sow chaos. Implying subtly that Trump couldn't
possibly be anything other than a strong-man or chaos candidate. That there
couldn't possibly be any legitimate democracy-respecting reasons to support
him over Hillary (campaign donor influence apparently is perfectly democratic,
when it's your candidate receiving the donations aka bribes). Trump may be
many things: A nationalist, a pathological liar, in need of a fitness regime
and a better diet, and a not very nice person (by most accounts)... but I have
not seen any attempt by him to subvert democracy or separation of powers. I
have not seen him act particularly chaotically, either. (Weren't Democrats
afraid he would start a nuclear war the second he got the nuclear football?)
To the extent he's a horrible president, that's the fault of the 2-party
system and his catastrophically awful opposing candidate.

So, The NYT basically says, yeah, the U.S. interfered in a lot of elections,
but _recently_ we've been doing it for the good of democracy. Russia,
meanwhile, interferes to the detriment of democracy.

First, that doesn't change the fact that it's intervention, and intervention
itself is anti-democratic. If another country wants to democratically elect a
strong man, that's not so good, but do other democratic countries have a right
to interfere? Maybe the populations of those countries understand something
intuitively about their politics that we don't, and the candidate that looks
more authoritarian is really the better of two evils?

Second, when we have interfered — in Libya, in Iraq, in Syria — and it turns
out that the "democratic" "freedom fighter" opponents of the existing strong-
man leader are terrorists or aligned with terrorists, or the country simply
devolves into chaos and faction warfare in the absence of that more
totalitarian leader, what then? Is interference justified to support a more
freedom-loving candidate when we have no idea (or we know perfectly well, but
don't care) that the country is not currently viable as a more open democracy,
and needs either a totalitarian ruler or to go through the cleansing fire of a
long civil war to cement the concept and importance of democracy in the
people's minds?

~~~
freeflight
A lot of US interference is way less visible and often quite entrenched in
established structures.

In Germany, US NGO's hold a lot of influence, especially on news media. [0]

In 2014 the political satire show "Neues aus der Anstalt" made these
connections a topic of one of their shows, showing links between
organizations, people, and political players.

Which resulted in them getting sued, by one of the people on their chart, and
being forced to take the video down.

3 years later a German court ruled nothing about the video was wrong, so it
wouldn't even have been needed to take down. But taken down it was and the
whole topic quickly buried under other themes, like the Syrian civil war and
the resulting refugee crisis.

Finding any English language sources on this is extremely difficult, and even
a lot of the German sources often delve off into the far too deep ends of
conspiracy theories with this. So it's not an easy topic to explore.

[0] [https://denkeselbst.wordpress.com/category/das-
netz/](https://denkeselbst.wordpress.com/category/das-netz/)

