US Charges Russian Social Media Trolls Over Election Tampering (cnet.com)

The US Justice Department has filed charges against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian groups for interfering with the 2016 presidential election. From a report: In an indictment [PDF] released on Friday, the Justice Department called out the Internet Research Agency, a notorious group behind the Russian propaganda effort across social media. Employees for the agency created troll accounts and used bots to prop up arguments and sow political chaos during the 2016 presidential campaign. Facebook, Twitter and Google have struggled to deal with fake news, trolling campaigns and bots on their platforms, facing the scorn of Capitol Hill over their mishandlings. The indictment lists 13 Russian nationals tied to the effort.

Comments

Re:..and Mueller is just getting warmed up, folks

[Anonymous Coward]

Name a piece of information, known by Christopher Steele to be false, spread as if it were true.

But first off, let's back up. Who is Christopher Steele? From Wikipedia:

From 1990 to 1992, Steele worked under diplomatic cover as an MI6 agent in Moscow, serving at the Embassy of the United Kingdom in Moscow.[7][9] Steele was an “internal traveller”, visiting newly-accessible cities such as Samara and Kazan.[4]

Steele's identity as an MI6 officer was one of 115 names Her Majesty's Government attempted to suppress through a DSMA-Notice in 1999.[10][11] He returned to London in 1993, working again at the FCO until his posting to Paris in 1998, where he served under diplomatic cover until 2002.[9][12][13][14] In 2003, Steele was sent to Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan as part of an MI6 team, briefing Special Forces on "kill or capture" missions for Taliban targets, and also spent time teaching new MI6 recruits.[9] By 2006, Steele was heading the Russia Desk at MI6.[4][7][15]

Steele's expertise on Russia remained valued, and he served as a senior officer under John Scarlett, Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), from 2004 to 2009.[15] Steele was selected as case officer for Alexander Litvinenko and participated in the investigation of the Litvinenko poisoning in 2006.[9] It was Steele who quickly realised that Litvinenko's death "was a Russian state 'hit'".[15]

Not exactly some fly-by-night amateur. And rather amusing that you'd accuse someone whose job had been spying on Russia and later investigated the Litvinenko poisoning, determining it to be a Russian hit, of "spreading Russian propaganda"

Steele - again, the former head of MI6's Russia desk - had been an FBI source for years prior, where he had proved useful in a number of investigations unrelated investigations.

During the last election, Steele was hired - first by Republicans, then Democrats - to research Trump. And that he did. It's not even clear that he knew who was the source of his funding; he worked for Fusion GPS. The so-called "Steele Dossier" is not a curated/filtered "report", but rather a series of independent memos from varying sources - and was never presented as anything else. He was paid to collect information, not to analyze and curate it. Some of the information from the dosier that wasn't public at the time has since been independently confirmed. The vast majority has been neither confirmed or denied.

Concerning the Carter Page "memo" from Trump transition team member Devin Nunes (yes, he was part of Trump's own transition team... "Hey, let's investigate ourselves!") suggests that A) the Steele dossier was the foundation of getting a warrant on Page, B) it did not inform them that the dossier had been paid for by a political entity, and C) the fact that it had been noted that Steele made a statement about being worried about Trump becoming president disqualifies him as a biased source.

Except:

A) Page had been on the radar long beforehand, having previously been caught up in a Russian spy scheme and having not only made numerous statements condemning the US and supporting Russia (on Russian TV), but even claimed to be a Kremlin representative. (Seriously, if the FBI hadn't been spying on this guy they should all have been fired for incompetence)

B) The warrant application did state that the dossier had been paid for by a political entity; Nunes's complaint has now amusingly morphed into "the font size was too small".

C) Intelligence courts generally presume by default that sources have some sort of motive, because as a general rule, people who aren't motivated don't act as sources. Furth