Bots Against US

  Bots Against Us

  The Ongoing Information War Against

  the United States of America

  By

  Alan W. Silberberg

  Copyright © 2019 Alan W. Silberberg All Rights Reserved

  Silpress 1st Edition 2019

  I would like to thank my parents, my brother, my sons, Sharon, Adrienne, Lovisa, and everyone who pushed me to write this and who put up with my incessant yammering about the “Rusher thing.” A special note of thanks to Ruth Greenwood, who patiently edited my writing.

  The release of the Mueller Report came at the very end of my writing this, so I have only included cursory mentions, plus links and some of the summaries.

  The Mueller Report and this book, which I started writing in early 2018, eerily match up.

  May 15, 2019 Kindle Version

  August 5, 2019 Paperback Edition

  Author Biography for Alan W. Silberberg

  Alan is a cyber security expert, founder of a cyber security company, and an advisor to two others. The expertise of his company revolves around defending against socially engineered attacks. He served on the California Governor’s CyberSecurity Task Force from 2014 to 2019.

  He was the subject matter expert to the US. Small Business Administration for cybersecurity and rewrote the “Cybersecurity for Small Business” training program currently found on their website.

  He is a former White House staff person under President Clinton and a former member of the JFK Task Force at the US National Archives. Alan was also an executive at Paramount Pictures, handling government relations.

  He has spoken about cyber issues on four continents. He spoke at the US Holocaust Museum and Memorial about the dangers of social media being used for propaganda and has written dozens of articles about weaponized information.

  More on this later in the book:

  This is a tweet posted by the Russian Embassy, London, October 25, 2016. The original version contained my name and 5 others “tagged” in the bottom of this tweet. The tags on Twitter in this tweet have since been removed by the Russians.

  Introduction

  We were attacked by Russia in 2016 on multiple levels.

  All of us.

  Not just Democrats.

  Cyber warfare. It focused on multiple levels of information, politics, and technology—all to psyche us out. Information warfare that dropped a massive bomb on us.

  Your house did not get blown up, but your rights, your free country and your democracy just did. For sure.

  It happened on many platforms, in many states and at many technological levels. It is not just one hack, but rather a group of hacks, information warfare efforts, and propagandistic manipulation of the media.

  It is vitally important to remember how many people were actually indicted by Robert Mueller. At least 34. (So far, that the public knows about in 2019.)

  Thirty-four people. Guess how many are directly relevant to this story you are about to read?

  At least 12. The twelve Russians indicted are/were GRU (English version of the Russian acronym ГРУ, which means Main Intelligence Directorate. The GRU is Russia's largest foreign intelligence agency) agents of the Russian Government.

  GRU is one of their military intelligence agencies. Add Konstantin Kilimnik, who is known to be a close associate of Vladimir Putin.

  Also, it is vitally important to remember that the Democratic National Committee sued the Russian government over the 2015/2016 hacks.

  In this ongoing US federal lawsuit, the Russians have tried to defend themselves by suggesting that if such a hack were done by them, it would have been done by the GRU, which is a military organization. This means it would be covered under “Sovereign Immunity” and thus could not be sued. See this group of tweets and links.

  A little backstory:

  As one of the few people in 2009 who caught Iran using weaponized media (Twitter) to push propaganda during the so-called “Green Revolution,” I found it extremely disconcerting to see a highly evolved and much more methodical approach being used by Russia now, six or seven years later, against the US.

  During the Green Revolution of 2009, I was so deeply immersed in calling out Iranian propaganda that I was successful in getting over 400 accounts run by Iranian Intelligence agents taken off Twitter. This led to me being invited to give a talk to the United States Holocaust Museum and Memorial in Washington, DC at the end of 2009 about the dangerous uses of social media in propagating propaganda.

  So when I started seeing Russian Twitter accounts looking very similar, I paid apt attention. Especially when these Russian accounts started attacking US politicians, US political entities and US individual people.

  As a cyber-security and weaponized information expert, and a former White House staff member, what happened to the United States during the 2016 Presidential Election was a severe shock to me personally.

  I know this to be true for many in the United States.

  My background is that I was fortunate to be able to work for President Clinton in the White House and as a traveling advance aide. I have worked for two US Senators, the US National Archives and a Governor.

  I know politics and know cyber security deeply, and started and run a cyber security company, Digijaks. I have been a cyber advisor to US Federal agencies, large corporations, and many politicians and Hollywood celebrities.

  This experience, combined with doing presidential and vice-presidential advance as an “on-call” advance person, taught me much about international relations, as well as the dangers of espionage and attempted espionage from abroad. Especially from hostile foreign nations.

  When I worked in the Clinton White House and later as an on-call advance aide, the constant warnings by the consummate professionals in the US Secret Service and the White House Communications Agency were daily. This served as a hard backstop to the news, and the weird people around every trip.

  There were constant requests for my phone number and/or email wherever I went as an advance aide. One constant warning when traveling with a president or vice president was to be extra wary of foreigners asking lots of questions or trying to get me to introduce them to key people, or people trying to connect me to foreigners.

  Chapter 1

  Fast forward to the present, 2019

  So why was it such a shock that Trump won instead of Hillary? Especially by such narrow margins in only a few states that mattered for the electoral college. The margins were so thin as to be questionable on their own, and, in fact, this has raised concern about vote hacking or other manipulation of election systems in those states.

  There is much speculation about the same type of low margin win in three states, each with almost exactly the same statistical spread, which is extremely improbable in US elections. (That is probably stuff for another book. If you want to examine this issue more carefully, please look at this article from 2019 by 538, the political polling company. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-much-did-russian-interference-affect-the-2016-election/. )

  There are still more questions than answers about these razor-thin margins.

  Also see this deeply detailed report by the American Association for Public Opinion Research, which goes into depth about the same questions. https://www.politico.com/f/?id=0000015b-d46e-da30-a3db-fefe45b50002.

  I was not just upset that Trump won because I am a registered Democrat who worked for President Clinton at one time.

  No.

  It wasn’t because of my previous experience. Something more immediate concerned me about Trump’s “win.”

  The cyber world has taught me many lessons, but Lesson Number One? When a pattern is not right, it is almost always indicative of something more serious going on. There are few ex
ceptions to this learned experience.

  Indeed, it was mostly because I had been directly tracking Russian interference in the election since early in 2016 and had been sending warnings about such a problem as early as 2014.

  As I have learned, now that the Mueller Report is out in a redacted fashion, Russian interference in US elections began as early as 2012. What I was seeing was not even the first layer of their attacks!

  I tweeted it, wrote about it but did not actually think they would attempt to manipulate the US elections through a combination of computerized propaganda, aggressive psyops on millions of Americans and full blown, multilateral, multichannel information warfare.

  It will forever bother me that I did not see so clearly in 2014. But by 2015, it was becoming clear.

  There are many emails that I sent to US government officials during this timeframe that I will not be publishing.

  But I was yelling and screaming about the US being attacked by Russia—to everyone and anyone I could. Members of the press, people in Homeland Security, people at the Pentagon, the US Department of Justice, and elsewhere inside the US government all got these types of frantic emails from me in 2016.

  Not to mention I that used Twitter, Facebook, and other social media to warn people and try to do my part to pick apart the fake news and fake websites from the real ones to help my friends and family.

  Some of the responses from trusted officials showed some concern. A few suggested they were “on it” and tracking it carefully, but most seemed to not understand or not care or both.

  The few who said they were on it seemed surprised that I was bringing the information to them.

  At the time, the hard knowledge of Russia attacking the US was mostly limited to a select few in the Obama White House and another select few in the US intelligence community.

  Plus, I had personal links to this election. in addition to my Clinton connections, I knew, loosely, two people on the Trump campaign on the 2016 election personally, via loose relationships with people I knew on the Trump camp.

  So, I am going to disclose these ties now, prior to anyone trying to launch a gotcha on me.

  I went to college for one year with Michael Cohen, President Trump’s now former personal lawyer. We knew each other socially, somewhat, through our fraternity, but not much beyond that. He was a senior when I was a freshman, and I have not seen him since.

  I met, and briefly began a dialogue with, Gen. Michael Flynn in 2015. His business partner, Bijan Kian, and he met me at an event in Washington, DC in late 2015.

  More on Flynn and Kian later in this book, but essentially Flynn, Bijan, and I briefly entertained the idea of their company white labeling some services from my company. However, we did not come to terms and ended the dialogue after only a few months.

  I walked away with much unease from my interactions with Flynn and Kian; this was reinforced by a meeting with an active senior US intelligence official following a speech I gave, who asked me, point blank, if I was “still involved with Flynn?”

  I truthfully said no, but this conversation kept coming back to me each time I saw Flynn on TV for Trump.

  My unease came from Flynn and Kian’s inability to answer, “Who would be using the services we would be licensing to them?” That should not have been a big deal to answer.

  What they were asking of us was to essentially license our services through them, using their name on it, to be sold in turn to end users they refused to identify.

  That refusal is really not normal in any kind of licensing, especially so for cyber security.

  At the time I had zero knowledge of Flynn’s connections to Russia/Turkey and would have walked away immediately if I had known.

  I am happy to say we walked. It was a tremendously correct decision, way before all the media broke against him in late 2016 and early 2017.

  Back to the past again:

  In 2011, Microsoft sent me to Moscow to give a speech about open government and civil society. The title of my speech was “From Glasnost to Open Government.”

  It was a bit dangerous for me to be on stage with this thesis, but I decided to go ahead despite any risk.

  This picture is from a few minutes before my speech in Moscow, 2011, as people were filling in. If you look carefully, you can see both the Russian flag and the Russian lettering on the screen facing me.

  To this day, I have no idea if my speech was translated correctly and what the response really was.

  I could use Twitter Live from the wifi at the event, but it did not seem like the Russians in the audience were live-tweeting.

  In fact, I did see tweets about my speech appear on Twitter in Russian, but the day after my speech. This was because my phone had not been sold in Russia and I was not using any Russian telecom or ISP software, so their ability to choke the internet did not affect me as much.

  I did notice some websites were not accessible, but I could use Twitter Live without filters, or at least without the ones imposed on Russians.

  While in Moscow, I was also interviewed by several media outlets, all Russian. It is possible some of the journalists who interviewed me had other agendas, as I never saw the interviews in print.

  Laugh. Go ahead. Many did then. I am pretty sure my speech about open government got translated loosely to “…blah blah vodka will be served in the room next door as soon as this fool is over blah blah…”

  However, it was a very unique time to be in Moscow, even if I wasn’t the one giving a speech about how closed society was bad, open society good. It was the relative calm between the two chapters of Vladimir Putin’s presidency.

  While I was there, I got to meet many civil society leaders, as well as many in technology who were seeking to bring some sort of openness and more information to their country via social media and interactions from the West.

  However, at the same time, people were expressing real fear about what would happen to Russia when Putin became president again. Everyone knew he would win the election of 2012; it seemed a foregone conclusion No question he would win.

  They were terrified of the internet having more and more censorship and surveillance controls put back on it.

  This was combined with the expected evisceration of what little non-state-owned media there was to consume.

  Additionally, many people suggested to me that if/when Putin came to power again, he was going to put cyber and artificial intelligence first in the decades-old propaganda wars.

  Guess what? All of those things these people were worried about actually happened—and far worse.

  There were two back-to-back moves in early 2014.

  The first was that the president of the Russian equivalent of Facebook, called Vkontakte (VK), was fired, and VK was put under the control of President Putin:

  A little later in 2014, Putin put all the bloggers (read: hackers) in Russia under government control.

  While this was reported in the West, it barely got a mention, and definitely no one outside of government, national security, or cybersecurity circles paid any attention.

  It probably just seemed like yet another totalitarian move by this authoritarian president.

  Also. at the time, the US was consumed with its own midterm elections, as well as with Obamacare arguments, and the show trial Benghazi hearings.

  So it is quite possible these totalitarian moves by Putin, one after another in quick succession, simply passed under most journalists’ and government officials’ radar screens.

  See this: https://venturebeat.com/2014/05/07/putin-to-russian-bloggers-you-now-operate-at-my-discretion/

  Then, even later in 2014, President Putin made another significant announcement:

  This one was about how Putin was planning on investing heavily in artificial intelligence to be used in information warfare.

  Basically, he felt that the use of artificial intelligence (AI) would be how Russia would regain strength against the West. See this 2019 explanation from PHYS.org of how AI wi
ll lead to the next Cold War: https://phys.org/news/2019-01-artificial-intelligence-weapon-cold-war.html.

  Also see this World Economic Forum article from 2016 discussing Putin’s use of AI. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/06/should-we-embrace-the-rise-of-killer-robots/

  and please read this 2015 article discussing both Russia and China investing in AI killer robots. https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-and-china-are-building-highly-autonomous-killer-robots-2015-12.

  Finally, if you want to really dig into the use of AI and weapons technology by Russia, see this very in-depth research paper from the United States Defense Intelligence Agency. http://www.dia.mil/Portals/27/Documents/News/Military%20Power%20Publications/Russia%20Military%20Power%20Report%202017.pdf.

  Because of various sanctions and the overall degradation of Russian military capabilities, this was a lower-cost investment with an extremely high return for Putin and the oligarchs who prop him up.

  Again, these were basically back-to-back announcements from roughly March 2014 to September 2014.

  While I was capturing this information and subsequently tweeting about it, I do not believe any of these three things got much attention in the Western press.

  Also, it may not have been obvious to anyone who was not a computer expert how these events were linked. So, I (sort of) give a pass to those in the media for whom the story was too obtuse or too technical for clear understanding and/or reporting.

  However, looking back on these events, it is clear this was the point at which the capabilities to interfere with a US election through multiple electronic methods began to really come together.

  The years 2012, 2013, and 2014 were the targeting, research, and planning stages for the Russians to attack the US during the 2016 Presidential elections.

  The redacted Mueller Report released in April 2019, discloses that Russia was actually starting to interfere by 2012. (See last part of book for more.)