Investigating the Russian intelligence operation to manipulate the 2024 presidential election in America, the FBI has discovered a series of internal documents from the Russian administration, partially revealing some of them, the gist of which is a bomb: The Russian operation in the United States is accompanied by another, parallel one, to weaken the Americans’ allies, in particular to manipulate politicians, businessmen, journalists and other influencers in Germany, France, Italy. The FBI and the Department of Justice are keeping the names to themselves. But they are revealing the whole picture, which is deeply disturbing.
Yesterday the United States government has indicted two Russian citizens and seized more than 30 Internet domains related to a campaign to influence the US elections, through a series of fake domains (including those of the Washington Post and Fox News), the creation of fake accounts and bots, a network of telegram channels, and active support for american politicians, who are not named in the indictment, it is only written that «there seems to be a political party more in favor of stopping support for Ukraine»: it is quite clear that we are talking about political figures and influencers linked to the republican right. The same manual is made for other countries, including Italy: painting the usa as «scum», supporting anyone, «even for their own reasons» who criticizes the sending of weapons to Ukraine or the use of western weapons in Russia.
Everything revolves – as is already partly known, but not with this wealth of detail – around the “Social Design Agency”, a pro-Russian, anti-Ukrainian, anti-Western engineering project, acting under the direct orders of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s deputy chief of staff, Sergey Kiriyenko. the campaign, which is called Doppelganger (we have partially written about it) is conducted by two entities, STRUCTURA and SDA, which act under the direction and control of KIRIYENKO, and according to the FBI «involves the creation of fake websites that mimic legitimate media outlets. Doppelganger places content on those fake websites that promote specific narratives identified by the Russian government to further the Russian government’s goals, such as influencing the U.S. electorate by targeting specific audiences in the United States and elsewhere. To evade detection, Doppelganger created sophisticated cybersquatted domains (which include SUBJECT DOMAINS) that appear to be the websites of legitimate media outlets such as Fox News, The Washington Post, and the Forward, among others». And also the Italians La Stampa and La Repubblica.
But that’s not all. The FBI documents now establish with certainty that the Social Design Agency – with its complex network of strategies – has acted and is also acting in Italy, although obviously Italy is not the focus of the FBI investigation. The US indictment establishes without equivocation: «Numerous SDA documents describe in detail the SDA’s strategy to implement its malign activity abroad influence campaigns. Among these documents is what appears to be an initial conceptual plan for the Doppelganger Campaign, which makes specific reference to GAMBASHIDZE [il capo operativo dell’operazione, un imprenditore di origini georgiane ormai famigerato e plurisanzionato] and observe: “if we can, we need a separate department for fakes: a factory!”. The document indicated that the campaign would be specifically targeted at England, Germany and Italy and would initially have two news sites: one in English and one in German.”
Lists of characters to be supported in various ways or negatively targeted
The SDA documents further reveal that Russia, through SDA, “extensively monitors and collects information on a large number of media organizations and social media influencers. One document revealed a list of more than 2,800 people on various social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Telegram, covering 81 countries, including Italy, whom SDA identified as influencers, including TV and radio hosts, politicians, bloggers, journalists with followings exceeding 60 thousand followers, ed.), businessmen, professors, think-tank analysts, veterans, professors, and comedians. When referring to politicians, the list often mentions which U.S. state and/or political party they represent and the position they hold in Congress.”
Influencers based in the United States accounted for about 21% of the accounts monitored by SDA. A very large portion are European – although the FBI obviously does not list them. The reasons are clear: one of the means by which Russia builds this network is payments in cryptocurrencies (and this is what made it possible to find at least the material authors of some payments to open domains and create fake factories)but also support and boosting.
In another list found by the FBI (and not made public) There is also a Russian-made list of over 1,900 “anti-influencers,” accounts that post content that SDA considers contrary to Russian goals. Accounts based in the United States comprised 26% of the total accounts monitored by SDA. The remainder are from 52 other countries, including Italy (with a significant number of those that Russia targets as “enemies”: with hate speech, trolls, bots, targeted campaigns).
There are several documents and practical examples of how to escalate ethnic conflicts in France. Acting on “pacifism” in Germany – very inclined, the Russians write. And in Italy on pacifism and criticism of weapons. We learn that an “online person” that the FBI calls “Kethorn”, linked to the SDA (in turn linked to Kiryenko, the deputy head of the Russian presidential administration), between June 26, 2022 and October 2, 2022, leased six domains from two American providers. The domains include cybersquat domains affiliated with the Doppelganger campaign that impersonated organizations such as Reuters, Der Spiegel, T-Online, Bild, Delfi, la Repubblica, and La Stampa. Others did the same with Le Monde, Le Parisien and other French media.
Zuckerberg’s company Meta revealed to FBI investigators that “Doppelganger articles often appeared on RRN (another network created by the Russians to manipulate European perceptions) after being published on cybersquat domains: “For example, the same article about Bucha was published on the same day in English on the fake Guardian site, in Italian on the fake ANSA site, and in German on the fake Spiegel site. It also appeared in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Chinese on RRN.” It is almost impossible to calculate its viralization.
Will it ever be possible to know the exact names of politicians, journalists, influencers, that Russia considered usable – willingly or unwillingly, some paid, some not? And, eventually, would it be appropriate for public opinion to know these names, perhaps of those who have not technically committed crimes?
The discussion on this is very open. Just this morning we also learned that RT was funding a Tennessee company (which is unnamed in the DoJ indictment) with at least $10 million, but CNN revealed it was “Tenet Media,” which is connected to American right-wing commentators with millions of followers. Two of the commentators from this company have issued statements to say that they are unknowing “victims” of this alleged Russian funding scheme for Tenet Media. Coincidentally, these commentators were frequently reposted from Musk’s account, which further increased their following.
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