Bots Against US Read online

  Little did I know then that my early tweets were the actual canary in the coal mine, digitally speaking. Back then I was tweeting this stuff because I saw it as a threat, just not necessarily pointed at the United States.

  In 2015, the US saw a hack on the then-director of the CIA, publicly attributed to a 14-year-old kid, though some cyber security experts suggest that the “teenager” was a cover for something else.

  Also, in 2015, the US Office of Personnel Management got hacked. This was and remains a terrible national security incident for the US, with the subsequent exfiltration of the most private records of those who serve the United States government with security clearances. More than 22 million people were affected in this hack.

  Every individual (employees and their families) connected to the information that was stolen in this OPM hack are susceptible to hostile foreign intelligence agencies trying to mess with them. Plain and simple.

  The hacked materials would also show who could be compromised and/or used. Additionally, this material could lead the way to psychometric and other digital profiling.

  Someone wanting to find out who would be susceptible to extortion/blackmail or be forced to help a hostile foreign power, might just need to ping whatever database was made of that exfiltrated data. It has never been released, so it is still being held, most likely by China, but could also be Russia.

  This could easily be one part of the prism of people who might have, inadvertently or on purpose, helped Russia target their hacking and psychometric psyops.

  While this hack of the OPM was almost definitely done by the Chinese, it is entirely possible it was both connected to the CIA hack and the later hacks of the DNC, other Democratic groups, think tanks, and other players in Washington, DC, done by Russia.

  Russia and China cooperate sometimes with their intelligence services, and this seems like, in my opinion, one of those times.

  The years 2014 and 2015 appear to have been the real training/testing time period for seeing which US systems were vulnerable to attack by Russia and Russian government-linked hackers.

  By this, I mean that in addition to all the “regular” hacking done by Russia, this was special. This was probing to see what election systems, vendors, machines, and entities could be hacked, broken into, socially engineered, and/or hit with information warfare and psyops.

  So much personal information was stolen during the OPM hacks that it could quite easily have found its way from China to Russia, to be repurposed to craft highly personal phishing and social engineering-based attack campaigns.

  While the Chinese are highly suspect and most likely are the original hackers of the OPM, given the sometimes close relationship between Chinese and Russian intelligence services, it does not seem implausible at all that this occurred, at least on some level.

  This link has not been found and may never be, if only because the data was laundered in multiple digital ways to obfuscate where it may have originated.

  However, more information is emerging in 2019 about how Russia and China may have collaborated on some parts of the election interference.

  (Since these are emergent revelations, I am not covering this specifically in this book.)

  Additionally, there was a hack attempted on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and this hack would later be directly tied to those behind the subsequent hacking of the DNC.

  Also, there was tremendous penetration and exploration of the vulnerability of state election databases and vendors, which led to subsequent successful hacks of the election.

  The Republican National Committee (RNC) was also hacked, and most likely their data was exfiltrated, but it has not been released publicly.

  DCLEAKS appears to have been used to release information from the Democrats, as well as some benign information from the Republicans that had been hacked.

  It is my contention that DCLEAKS played a dual role: (a) Supporting the GRU efforts with Guccifer 2.0 and Wikileaks, (b) acting as the platform for the release of a limited number of benign hacked emails from the GOP to prove they, too, were compromised.

  Many experts speculate this is why so many elected Republicans were too quick to dismiss the idea that the Russians hacked the elections to favor the Republicans, because they had heard that the Russians not only successfully hacked the DNC, and associated groups, but also the RNC and associated groups. Former FBI Director James Comey acknowledged this in his public testimony to Congress in 2017.

  Which, of course, leaves lots more questions unanswered in 2019.

  But the basic answer points to some degree of blackmail/extortion of Republicans through Russian control of information they threaten to release.

  This is not yet proven, so it’s only speculation on my part at this time. But, obviously, speculation shared by many others as well.

  Chapter 2.

  Early Warnings

  “I, AB, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”

  The above is the constitutional oath that anyone who serves in the US military, Civil Service, or appointed office swears. It is only a few words different from the oath of office administered to any US president or vice president.

  It is a simple oath, ironically, crafted originally for people who were in process of emigration to the US, and in 1929; it became formalized with the text we use today. New immigrants to the US also swear this oath when they become citizens.

  I swore to this oath several times, in different positions with the US Senate, the US White House and the US National Archives. Millions and millions of people have sworn to this oath as well. I always thought that the challenges to this would come from outside the US. I never thought that a real challenge to the meaning of this oath might also come from within.

  During the run up to Election 2016 in the US, there was tremendous noise and cacophony, in part because of the candidates and a riled-up media.

  Also, in part, because of the digital stuff right under the surface tension level that was actually in front of all of us 24 hours a day. The election of 2016 was NOT normal.

  The interactions among all of us were manipulated, and thus we were all manipulated in ways obvious and overt, and also obtuse and covert.

  This was the result of the combination of computational propaganda, psychological operations (psyops), and weaponized information warfare through bot-driven amplification of messaging 24 hours a day.

  It affected any US citizen online during the election and offline too, as we all had to have conversations in real life with people amped up on bot-fed misinformation/disinformation.

  Most people, that is to say 99.99% of the population that was paying attention, thought they were hearing and seeing all the noise, all the news.

  But what was happening just below that surface?

  (Twitter snapshot of my account in one moment of time, thanks to MentionMapp) It is this type of analysis I refer to later in the book, Social Network Analysis, otherwise known as (SNA).

  In 2019, the news about how Cambridge Analytica scraped Facebook data of over 120 million US citizens through various methods erupted and permanently altered many people’s vision of their own privacy and social media use.

  The shock of learning we were manipulated has resulted in millions changing how they use Facebook, with many dropping it as platform as a result.

  If you would like to learn more about the details about the Cambridge Analytica/ Facebook fiasco, I highly suggest using this 2019 Guardian piece as the starting point.

  It is extremely well researched, and deeply verified with facts, interviews and testimony in front of Parliament committees. https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/cambridge-analytica-files
r />   However, the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook aspect is in actuality just one tiny part of the overall weaponized information and media campaign that was used as part of an act of war by Russia against the United States.

  This was executed by interfering with our elections and election systems plus hacking and using stolen (sometimes also faked) information as weaponized warfare. The election hacks that occurred in 2016 by Russia against the US were multi-level, multi-lateral, cross-platform attacks.

  The Russians, using both military, intelligence and non-governmental resources went after everything, from social media to election systems, election databases, election vendors, and socially engineered attacks against people and institutions.

  This was all combined with weaponizing the stolen information and repackaging it right back to us in different, wrong, and abusive ways.

  All of this was occurring with a backdrop of weaponized information warfare being conducted by bot armies controlled both directly and indirectly by Russian intelligence agencies.

  The bot armies were conducting psychometric and computational propaganda efforts against all of us, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

  These bot armies were highly influential in changing dialogue between regular people, as well as distorting messaging sent by campaigns and news media alike.

  Some examples:

  It is estimated that Twitter was dealing with 20% of accounts being bots during the 2016 elections.

  Facebook and Twitter have admitted to millions of fake accounts, since deleted.

  Instagram, YouTube, Google, Reddit all were affected by bot armies as well. Now, in 2019, there are still varying degrees of transparency on this issue from these companies.

  The hard truth is that we will never know the full extent of the bot armies that were deeply involved in every online aspect of the 2016 election.

  In later chapters I am going to walk through how these bot armies changed online dialogue, and real-world interactions as well, for millions of Americans.

  The 2016 Elections mark the first real large-scale effort to use computational propaganda and targeted psychometrics in a highly targeted and executed information warfare act against the United States.

  It may also be the first real time that Americans were exposed to actual real-time propaganda flowing through multiple media outlets.

  Definition of Computational Propaganda:

  How bots, algorithms and other forms of automation are used by political actors

  Computational propaganda involves learning from and mimicking real people so as to manipulate public opinion across a diverse range of platforms and device networks. Bots, the automated programs integral to the spread of computational propaganda, are software intended to perform simple, repetitive, robotic tasks. (Oxford Internet Institute)

  Merriam Webster Definition of Psychometrics

  : the psychological theory or technique of mental measurement

  While many peoples in Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America have long had to deal with propaganda coming through media, this is only a recent experience for most modern Americans.

  The combination of the full digital assault with the propaganda flowing through traditional media channels as well basically hit a country singularly not prepared to deal with such information warfare.

  The US most certainly was not prepared in any comprehensive way—or really at all.

  So, while we were digitally attacked in what may actually have been an act of war by Russia, we were also not prepared to defend ourselves.

  Unfortunately, Russia had already known we were not prepared to deal with this sort of “soft” attack. That is slowly starting to change.

  I had been steadily tweeting for a few years about the dangers that Putin posed to Western countries through information warfare. I also had been avidly reading both technical descriptions and media descriptions about the use of both hackers and artificial intelligence by Russia.

  However, it was actually an old-school article emailed to me by a colleague in Finland that really got me focused on the notion that Russia may try to interfere with the US elections.

  The article he sent was in Finnish and I had to use Google Translate to read it. It was about the ongoing cooperation between Russian motorcycle gangs, who are known to be financially supported by, and are a tool of Putin, and close to or part of Russian Intelligence. The story talked about their cooperation with hard-core right-wing motorcycle gangs in the United States.

  They were combining forces online to make sure Hillary Clinton would not win in 2016.

  The article was about how these two groups were using the internet to talk to each other and apparently may have had some dark web or hidden group forums.

  I do not have that original article now; however, that led me to start looking into this question of why in the world these groups might be working together with such a goal in mind.

  For more on the relationship between Putin-backed motorcycle gangs in Russia and right-wing motorcycle gangs in the US, I suggest reading this article on Spetznaz MC, a motorcycle gang based in Florida that fits the description to the T.

  “Spetznaz” is a part of Russian special forces. Just ask yourself now, why would a supposed American motorcycle gang name themselves like this, unless there was a reason?

  However, my digging led me to this article about Russian motorcycle gangs being involved as a forward source of soft power abroad for Russia. Again, this just really got the alarm bells going off for me. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/putins-angels-inside-russias-most-infamous-motorcycle-club-20151008

  Once I read this article, I was concerned but not yet freaking out, as it was still 2015 at this point, and Trump had not won the primaries yet. We had not really seen the Bernie Bros (bots) and Jill Stein bots in action yet. So, it was in the back of my mind but not something I was engaged in directly—yet. The idea that Russians were using US citizens to help interfere in an election just was not yet obvious, even to me.

  Again, it’s one of the things I feel I could have dug more deeply on and published more information about this relationship. But hindsight is 20/20.

  What is a bot?

  Bot definition, a device or piece of software that can execute commands, reply to messages, or perform routine tasks, as online searches, either automatically or with minimal human intervention (http://www.dictionary.com/browse/bot)

  As 2016 started coming closer, I started noticing a huge number of bots following me on Twitter.

  Almost all were supposedly for Bernie Sanders, pretending to be part of his “Bernie Bros” group of vocal supporters.

  I pay attention to who follows me on Twitter and usually block bots.

  But this time I just let them accumulate, as I wanted to see what was going on.

  Chapter 3

  Bots amongst us.

  Bots are small bits of artificial intelligence used to change digital conversations, offering automated replies and other usually trivial things. Most people deal with bots when calling your bank, credit card, insurance companies and, sometimes now, health care companies or engaging with them online.

  But you may not realize you are dealing with a bot, and instead call it “automated response.”

  However, in the 2016 US Presidential election, bots were the tip of the spear of weaponized media that was being spewed 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

  In fact, during this election, more Americans came into contact with bots in real time, probably than ever before.

  It was not just confined to Twitter, but clearly Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, and many other companies.

  Hundreds of thousands if not millions of bots were deployed to be used against the US by Russia and their US-based co-conspirators, every minute of every day.

  These bots were programmed both to amplify messages and also to act as anti-messengers, and were used heavily to attack candidate social media accounts, as if they were real citizens concerned about th
e election, when, in reality, they were being commanded to act in these ways.

  Bots function by being deployed tied to a command and control server (Cnc) and require a network of digital agents, solid internet connections, and some level of initial programming.

  They do not just float around and learn by themselves, although some are taught to learn along the way.

  The way any bot gets started is with someone (or many someones) programming the CnC to articulate what the programmer wants the executable actions to be.

  It requires human input to get started (almost always), especially on a mass scale.

  Once on, they stay on until turned off or when a bot network gets taken offline by law enforcement. Depending on how the bots are programmed, they will respond to certain key words, certain users or both.

  This is a picture of the headline from Raw Story on March 30, 2017, obviously after the election of 2016.

  However, during the early part of 2016, this information was not widely known yet, and only a few cyber security geeks and perhaps some people in the US intelligence community were aware of this.

  But the majority of US citizens at the time had no clue they were being influenced by bots (artificial intelligence) that were bought and paid for in rubles, bitcoin, and ethereum and controlled and commanded by Russians.

  We all have to ask, how would the election have been different if these bots manipulating our online lives, our email, and, thus, our real-world interactions with one another were not in use?

  Could Donald Trump still have won? More and more experts are starting to doubt that he could have won without this direct assist from Russia.

  These bots were directed against US citizens through both psychometric and computational propaganda methods and were repeated ad nauseum by both members of the media and citizens on social media.

  A totally contrived, totally fake world of weaponized bots armed with computational propaganda and psychometric analysis hit us.

  They hit us again and again and again until we were overwhelmed by bot armies, controlled and commanded by Russia.