Category: Cyber Warfare

Putin’s War

The Daily Escape:

Rio Grande, near Taos, NM – February 2022 photo by Augustine Morgan

“God created war so that Americans would learn geography” ― Mark Twain

Yesterday we woke up to a new world order created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Details are still sketchy, but it seems that Russia attacked from the north, east and south. Cruise missiles hit targets even in western Ukraine. The NYT provided this early map of reported Russian attacks:

The shaded areas on the right are Donetsk and Luhansk, the Ukrainian provinces that Russia recognized a few days ago as independent republics. The smaller area inside is the area currently controlled by the Russian separatists.

This news and Putin’s kabuki play leading up to the invasion obscures the fact that we’re now seeing the revival of war as an instrument of statecraft. History shows that wars of conquest used to be common. In the 19th century, that’s what strong states did to their weak neighbors. Since the mid-20th century, wars of conquest are the exception not the rule. Russia has now brought wars of conquest back on the geopolitical stage.

Putin’s attack has the goal of regime change, plus the annexation of the breakaway provinces. While NATO and the US seem to have no real countermeasures, other than sanctions. That demonstrates another of Russia’s goals: exposing NATO’s impotence.

NATO’s late-stage impotence has many causes.

The collective defense provisions of Article 5 of the NATO Charter has held the alliance together. It provides that if a NATO ally is attacked, all members of the Alliance will consider it an armed attack against them and take action to assist the attacked ally.

For much of the Cold War, (including when Wrongo served in Europe) NATO had a standing army prepared to deter an attack by the Soviets and/or its Warsaw Pact allies. NATO also maintained significant air and naval forces to confront Soviet aggression. NATO’s forces were anchored by a massive US military presence in Europe, including hundreds of thousands of troops, tens of thousands of armored vehicles, thousands of combat aircraft, and hundreds of naval vessels.

All of this gave Article 5 teeth.

When the Cold War ended in 1990-91, this combat-ready military force was gradually dismantled. Now, if there were to be a conventional fight in Europe, the Russian military is much stronger. It would defeat any force NATO could assemble.

Today the ability to deter a potential adversary from considering military action against a NATO member is no longer a certainty. That means the notion of NATO providing European collective self-defense is questionable.

In the past, NATO planned on countering the Soviet Union’s weapons and manpower superiority with tactical nuclear weapons. But The Heritage Foundation says that we can’t do that because there’s an imbalance in our nuclear arsenals:

“While the US and Russia have a similar number of deployed strategic (i.e., high-yield) nuclear weapons as limited under New START, Russia has a 10:1 advantage over us in nonstrategic (i.e., low-yield) nuclear weapons—aka tactical or battlefield nukes.”

They report that Russia has about 2,000 nonstrategic nuclear weapons, while the US has about 200. Half of them are in the US and half are with NATO, so we have about 100 tactical nukes on the ground in Europe. You might say no one is ever going to use nukes in Europe, but on Wednesday Putin warned: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Anyone who tries to interfere with us, or even more so, to create threats for our country and our people, must know that Russia’s response will be immediate and will lead you to such consequences as you have never before experienced in your history.”

Putin’s threat could mean anything from cyber-attacks to nuclear war. But Global Security Review reports that the current edition of Russian military doctrine says that Russia:

“…reserves the right to use nuclear weapons to respond to all weapons of mass destruction attacks…on Russia and its allies.”

That significantly lowers the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons. The idea is Russia might employ tactical nuclear weapons during a conventional conflict with NATO forces to prevent a defeat, to consolidate gains, or to freeze a conflict in place without further fighting. The last two could happen in Ukraine.

Given that the disparity between Russian and European tactical nuclear weapons is so large, Moscow probably thinks any potential NATO nuclear response to their threat of using nukes isn’t credible.

This means NATO today can no longer stave off a Russian threat in Europe without using strategic nuclear weapons, a major escalation. That would be a very unlikely scenario if Russia is taking small bites of Western territory, as in Ukraine:

(hat tip, Monty B.)

Since World War II, the US has reserved the right to the “first use” of nuclear weapons should the need arise. But in January, several Democrats urged Biden to promulgate a “no-first-use” policy for US nuclear weapons. Eleven Senators and 44 House members signed a letter urging Biden to accept the policy. Imagine the consequences if a policy of no-first-use was in place, given what’s happening in Ukraine. Or what might happen if the fight was with a NATO member.

We’re now in a place where the West either accepts Russia’s new European order, or we gear up to make them recalculate Putin’s strategy.

If we choose to oppose the new Russian order, the US and Europe will incur costs. It will hurt our economies, since while sanctions will hurt the Russians, we’re hoping they will not hurt us as much, or more. Russian cyber-attacks may seriously hurt our infrastructure. The West will be forced to provide large levels of military and humanitarian support to a damaged and smaller Ukraine, possibly for years.

We will see increased defense spending. Our military will once again be deployed to Europe where they will serve as a tripwire against Russian aggression like they did in the Cold War.

This will require a unified NATO to work together for many years. Is that a realistic plan, given that different US presidents, like Trump, may not support the goals of this new NATO?

We’re in a different world now. This war will almost certainly be transformative for Europe and the world. The full effects of Russia’s attack on Ukraine will play out not just for years, but for decades.

Let’s close with the Beatles “Back in the USSR”:

Lyrics:

Well the Ukraine girls really knock me out,
They leave the West behind
And Moscow girls make me sing and shout
That Georgia’s always on my mind

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – February 6, 2022

According to Worldometer data, the US Covid death toll is now at 924,000. Last year, on June 1, 2021 the US death toll was 615,000. That’s the minimum number of deaths we could have suffered prior to the widespread availability of Covid vaccines in the US.

That 600,000± pre-vaccine death toll is comparable to the deaths that occurred in the Civil War. We’ve studied the Civil War for generations, although it’s doubtful that the Republican Right wants America to study all that much about Covid. On to cartoons.

As someone (?) once said, it takes a village, and we don’t have one:

The Olympics are on TV. Should we watch? Views differ:

Supreme Court nominations of women through time:

Biden’s alternate nominating strategy:

Trump doesn’t care who knows:

Putin and Biden ridin’ around the Ukraine speedway:

The NYT said on Saturday that portions of the Russian army near Ukraine have reached full combat strength. No one knows what will happen next, but there seem to be two likely outcomes. First, that any conflict is limited to Ukraine territory or second, that it moves beyond Ukraine to other parts of Europe.

If it goes beyond Ukraine’s borders, we could quickly find ourselves again on the threshold of nuclear war, since that’s a red line for NATO. But Russia also has other cards to play. They could launch massive cyber-attacks on the US, attacking and disabling our power grids, communications systems, and/or our financial system.

We would try to do the same inside Russia.

Wrongo isn’t trying to spread fear. He’s expressing the hope that we can get past all of the hollow political posturing and take a cold, hard look at what we’re truly trying to achieve if we decide on military intervention on behalf of Ukraine.

In a sense, the world changed on Friday when China’s Xi and Russia’s Putin met in Beijing. Their joint statement is unequivocal. China & Russia are now explicitly willing to at least challenge or possibly replace, Pax Americana, in Eurasia.

Borrowing from ancient history, in 560 BC, King Croesus was considering war on Persia. He consulted the Oracle at Delphi. Famously, the Oracle’s forecast was “If you make war on the Persians, you will destroy a great empire”. Let’s hope that Biden is receiving less ambiguous advice.

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Monday Wake Up Call – May 24, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Sun, clouds and Saguaros, North Scottsdale AZ – photo by rayredstonemedia61

After three decades of digital technology development, it’s evident that cybersecurity isn’t being adequately ensured by Mr. Market’s “invisible hand.” In remarks at the White House last Thursday, Biden said:

“…private entities are in charge of their own cybersecurity…and we know what they need. They need greater private-sector investment in cybersecurity.”

Wrongo’s last assignment was as CEO for a division of a F500 defense contractor. We were targeted by Chinese and other hackers thousands of times per day. By 2005, the parent company was investing tens of millions annually on cybersecurity. Most non-defense firms have come to investing in cybersecurity slowly and without large funding.

We again became painfully aware of the issue when hackers shut down the Colonial pipeline on Mother’s Day, bringing back gas shortages and long conga lines of cars trying to fill up. We subsequently heard that Colonial paid the hackers $4.4 million in Bitcoin to regain control of their networks.

From the New Yorker:

“…we are a country that has seen nearly a thousand reported ransomware attacks on our critical infrastructure since 2013. This includes transportation services, wastewater facilities, communications systems, and hospitals. The average recovery cost of a ransomware attack for businesses is around two million dollars.”

Even though private companies are most vulnerable to counterattacks, they continue to set their own cybersecurity standards largely based on operational and economic priorities, even if their negligence exposes the public to risks. So why won’t companies fix their mess?

Most in the private sector think that cybersecurity regulations will cost too much, which they do not want to pay, or may be incapable of paying. Many in the private sector also consider requirements for better cybersecurity to be yet another form of government regulation.

Mostly, it’s about money and secondarily, about a shortage of IT skills. Some argue that the incentive structure is backwards. Companies often think the costs of adding robust cybersecurity to be higher than their likely losses from a cyber theft. In a way, they are self-insuring, but that ignores the harm to their customers that occurs when personal information is stolen, or when you can’t buy gasoline.

CEOs are concerned primarily with the short-term profits and stock prices of their corporations. Companies have regularly absorbed losses incurred by security breaches, rather than reveal weaknesses in their internal cybersecurity systems, all in the name of protecting management reputations.

In 2015, Obama’s DHS designated dams, defense, agriculture, health care, and twelve other sectors of the economy as “critical infrastructure,” meaning that they:

“…are so vital to the US that their incapacity or destruction would have a debilitating impact on our physical or economic security or public health or safety.”

But while the DHS issued cybersecurity guidelines to those sectors, most companies operating critical infrastructure (like Colonial) are privately owned, and they ignored them. That includes 80% of the energy sector, including pipelines, power generation, and the electricity grid. DHS said in 2015 that those industries needed to develop a common vision and framework to deal with cyber threats.

But corporate America never developed that vision and framework.

In 2019, a European cybersecurity researcher using open-source tools available to anyone, identified and mapped the location of twenty-six thousand industrial-control systems across the US whose internet configurations left them exposed and vulnerable to attack. But you know, they would be prohibitively expensive to fix.

On May 12th, Biden issued an executive order that directed federal agencies and their contractors to abide by a host of stringent new cybersecurity regulations and reporting requirements. The order also required IT service providers and companies that operate industrial-control systems, to inform the government about cybersecurity breaches that could affect American networks.

Biden’s order is a significant workaround for the lack of government control of cybersecurity in the private sector. Many of the cloud services and software packages used by government agencies are also used in the private sector. So, Biden is creating the likelihood that those standards and requirements will be more broadly adopted. That would be similar to auto-emissions standards: When California raised its standards, 12 other states decided to adopt those requirements, and five automakers agreed to design all their new cars to meet them.

Something similar could occur with cybersecurity. Like with Covid, we’re again learning that there’s a very good reason for a robust central government that has the will to write and enforce 21st Century regulations.

Time to wake up America! Corporations aren’t your friends. From sending jobs abroad, to out-of-control share buybacks, to failing to invest in cybersecurity, they need much closer scrutiny. To help you wake up, let’s dust off Depeche Mode with their 1989 hit “Personal Jesus”:

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – December 20, 2020

Many lawmakers have already gotten their first vaccine shots. Good for them! Most of us would take it on the first day they could get it too. But it’s wrong that they’re getting shots while (at least at the time of writing this) they haven’t passed a COVID relief bill. And is there a better metaphor for Trump’s presidency than this story from NPR?

“For….six years, the ghost of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino has haunted the boardwalk in Atlantic City, N.J…..But not for long: The…eyesore is scheduled for demolition late next month, and the city is offering…the opportunity to bring it down….”

From Bodnar’s Auction House:

“We are selling the experience to push the button to implode Trump Plaza…”

There will be a bidding war for the right to implode Trump’s failed casino, just nine days after Trump leaves office. Atlantic City mayor Marty Small:

“…on his way out, Donald Trump openly mocked Atlantic City, saying he made a lot of money and then got out….I wanted to use the demolition of this place to raise money for charity.”

Trump persuaded the Republican Party and enough Americans that he was a genius businessman based on hype and his stupid TV show. While Trump was pretending to be a real estate big shot with a game show, his Atlantic City three-casino empire died. Information about his business failures was out there. But people didn’t want to believe it. Now after four years, America’s imploding. Pathetic. On to cartoons.

Will help arrive in time?

Will the new gifts for the season arrive on time?

Trump fails transitions:

Republican wish list for Santa:

The new hackers will control everything:

Mitch goes back to what he does best:

It didn’t take long for a chorus of Republicans to find a stupid non-issue to sing about:

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Trump Failed to Protect Government Networks

The Daily Escape:

Old cabin in winter – photo by Julie Williams

Various thoughts about US cyber security: First, along with the news about the cyber hack of the US government, comes news that Trump’s twitter account was hacked in October:

“Dutch prosecutors have confirmed that Donald Trump’s Twitter account was hacked in October despite denials from Washington…. The hacker…Victor Gevers, broke into Trump’s account @realDonaldTrump on 16 October by guessing the US president’s password…”

The password? MAGA2020. Gevers told the Dutch paper De Volkskrant that the president was not using basic security measures, like two-step verification:

“I expected to be blocked after four failed attempts. Or at least asked to provide additional information,”

The current US government-wide hack is a true disaster. The cyber security firm FireEye working with the FBI, has reported that the hack was caused by an infiltration of its network security via a software product made by the firm, Solar Winds. Reuters reported:

“On Monday, SolarWinds confirmed that Orion – its flagship network management software – had served as the…conduit for a sprawling international cyberespionage operation. The hackers inserted malicious code into Orion software updates pushed out to nearly 18,000 customers.”

Reuters earlier had reported that a researcher informed SolarWinds last year that he had uncovered the password to SolarWinds’ update mechanism, the vehicle through which its 18,000 customers were compromised. The password was “solarwinds123.”

That isn’t even as strong as Trump’s password. Right now, the damage is uncertain, but it seems extensive. NYT reported:

“…the Treasury and Commerce Departments, the first agencies reported to be breached, were only part of a far larger operation…. About 18,000 private and government users downloaded a Russian tainted software update…that gave its hackers a foothold into victims’ systems, according to SolarWinds, the company whose software was compromised.”

FireEye’s analysis shows that once the virus had infected the targets, it started ‘phoning home’ within 14 days. Sounds like quite a few people in the Trump administration were asleep at the switch: (brackets by Wrongo)

“Two of the most embarrassing breaches came at the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security….[who] issued an obfuscating official statement that said only: ‘The Department of Homeland Security is aware of reports of a breach. We are currently investigating the matter.’”

Tom Bossert, Trump’s original Homeland Security advisor in 2017, has an op-ed in the NYT that claims the hack was the work of the Russians. Whether that’s true or not, he’s correct about what has happened since:

“The magnitude of this ongoing attack is hard to overstate. The Russians have had access to a considerable number of important and sensitive networks for six to nine months….For those targets, the hackers will have long ago moved past their entry point, covered their tracks and gained what experts call “persistent access,” meaning the ability to infiltrate and control networks in a way that is hard to detect or remove.”

It will take years to know for certain which networks the hackers are monitoring. Politico reports that Trump has tried to gag the administration’s intelligence community leaders from reporting on the extent of the breach to Congress:

“During a National Security Council meeting on Tuesday night, national security leaders were instructed not to reach out to Capitol Hill for briefings on the massive hack without explicit approval from the White House or ODNI, according to people familiar with the episode.”

This is more dereliction of duty by the Trumpers.

We shovel money at the NSA, the CIA, and Homeland Security, but rarely ask what we get in return. How much compromise of our systems will it take to get accountability from these bureaucrats? It’s staggering that we continue to spend on a bloated military when the most crippling attacks we’ve faced in the past 20 years involve box cutters and computer hackers.

It’s hard to know which was worse: That the federal government was blindsided by a state controlled intelligence agency, or that when it became evident what was happening, White House officials said nothing.

This much is clear: While Trump was busy complaining loudly about the voter hack that didn’t happen in an election that he clearly lost, he’s been silent about the fact that someone was hacking our government. He can hide from this for another five weeks, and after that Biden will doubtless dig into it.

Republicans have spent six weeks crying fraud about the presidential election. But for this? Absolute silence. If this had happened during a Democratic administration, we’d have Republican hearings and talking points for the next 10 years. Where’s their outrage?

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Grading Wrongo’s 2018 Predictions

The Daily Escape:

Military parade in Kremlin – October, 2018 photo by Wrongo

Wrongo dusted off his 2018 predictions and took a look at how he did. In the 23 categories, Wrongo had 16 substantially correct, and 7 incorrect for a 69.5% average. That would have been a “D” at his university. Of course, some grades could have been weighted more heavily than others, but we’re not grading on a curve here at Wrong U.

What follows are the 2018 prediction, followed by the 2018 result:

The US economy as measured by GDP will grow at greater than 2% for 2018.

  • Wrongo wins! The economy grew at an average rate of 3.65% in the four quarters through Sept. 30, 2018.

The US stock market as measured by the S&P 500 Index will end 2018 with little or no growth over year-end 2017.

  • Wrongo loses. Heading into Friday’s trading session, the Dow was down 6.4% in 2018, and the S&P 500 was off 6.9% for the year.

The Trump tax cuts will increase the deficit, and despite Paul Ryan’s best (or worst) efforts to push the country into austerity, that can will be kicked down the road for a few more years.

  • Wrongo wins! The Trump tax cuts increased the deficit to $1 trillion on an annual basis. Paul Ryan leaves office without destroying the social safety net.

The Democrats will not take control of either the House or the Senate in the 2018 mid-term elections.

  • Wrongo happily loses. The Dems took the House by winning 40 seats. They lost a net of two seats in the Senate to the Republicans.

Cyber and other forms of meddling by people who wish our democracy harm will continue in the 2018 elections, to broader effect than in 2016.

  • Wrongo loses. There is no real evidence that cyber meddling had a greater effect on the 2018 election.

Facebook and Google will be held to account for their failure to tamp down disinformation.

  • Wrongo wins! Both are under scrutiny for both their actions and failures to act in 2018.

Trump will continue to flounder as the leader of the Free World, while his “frenemies” in the GOP will continue to try to thwart him on domestic economic legislation.

  • Wrongo loses. The Trump tax cut was a big deal for Republicans, despite the fact that few of them felt that they could run on it in the mid-terms.

There will be some form of bi-partisan accommodation on DACA.

  • Wrongo lost, and so did the nation.

Trump’s public-private infrastructure deal will not pass the Senate.

  • Wrongo wins!

The House will pass legislation that messes with Medicaid, but the Senate will not.

  • Wrongo loses. Trump’s 2019 budget proposal called for a $1.5 trillion cut in Medicaid, but it didn’t pass.

Trump will have the opportunity to appoint another Supreme Court Justice.

  • Wrongo wins, but America lost. We got Kavanaugh ‘ed.

Trump will have a serious medical issue in 2018, but will not leave office, or be temporarily replaced by Pence.

  • Wrongo loses. Trump’s health seems unchanged.

Mueller: By March, MAGA will mean “Mueller Ain’t Going Away”. The storm will crest, a Russiagate conspiracy will be exposed, and crud will fly everywhere. This could lead to the Democrats taking control of one or both Houses.

  • Wrongo wins! It looks like conspiracy, not the collusion Trump talks about.

A few additional Trumpets will go to jail, or be tied up in court. Trump will not be impeached by the 2018 Republicans. 2019 might bring a different calculus.

  • Wrongo wins! Mueller’s team has indicted or gotten guilty pleas from 33 people and three companies that we know of.

Tillerson and possibly other cabinet members will resign to “spend more time with family”.

  • Wrongo wins! At least 40 senior people including 18 who were cabinet-level, resigned.

Middle East:

Syria – by this time next year, the war will be essentially over. Assad will still be in power, and the US will be out of the picture. The Syrian Kurds will switch sides, and collaborate with the Assad regime.

  • Wrongo Wins! We’re pulling out, and the Kurds have switched sides.

Iran – the current protest movement will fizzle out. Neo-cons in Trump’s administration will try to bring us close to war with Iran, but cooler heads at the Pentagon will prevail.

  • Wrongo wins! The protest movement did fizzle. Trump ended our participation in the Nuclear Deal and we re-introduced sanctions. We’re no longer on speaking terms with Iran.

Famine and death in Yemen will continue to be ignored by everyone in the US.

  • Wrongo won, but the Yemenis and world lost.

Russia, China, and Iran will have a “come together” moment, possibly resulting in an agreement for mutual economic cooperation.

  • Wrongo wins! Russia and China are indeed closer together, what with Trump as a common enemy.

Russia will continue to face ongoing battles with the US, but Putin will persist.

  • Wrongo wins! Putin persisted.

Ukraine: The US delivery of anti-tank missiles to the Ukrainian army will not cause them to begin military operations in the east.

  • Wrongo wins! We provided the weapons, they avoided attacks in the east.

Europe: The right-wing authoritarian movements in the Eurozone and England will become a larger factor in their domestic politics. Brexit will occur, and no one in the UK will be happy about the outcome.

  • Wrongo wins! Right-wing political parties are a bigger threat than ever throughout Europe. Brexit happened, with the final outcome still unclear, but no one is happy.

Will there be a war or “incident” with North Korea? Despite the scary politics, the Seoul Winter Olympics will keep the situation from escalating through June. The second half of 2018 could lead to some kind of incident between the US and NorKo, but will not be a nuclear incident.

  • Wrongo wins! There was no scary incident, in fact, relations have been slightly improved.

The year is almost ended, and we can’t pretend that America slid by with more than a D itself. Early in the New Year, we will make a series of predictions for 2019.

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Cohen, Manafort and Facebook

The Daily Escape:

The Moses Bridge, Netherlands – photo via @archpics. The bridge, which crosses a moat, is made from waterproof wood.

We’re all busy trying to figure out what the twin “guilty” findings about Manafort and Cohen really mean, but Steve Breen nailed it:

Michael Cohen clearly put Trump in trouble by saying that Cohen had worked in coordination with Trump to silence the two women that Trump had affairs with, in order to influence the 2016 election.

Republicans say that finding two of Trump’s inner circle guilty has nothing to do with Russia, or with Trump, and Wrongo remains skeptical about what Mueller will actually prove.

OTOH, Cohen worked on a Trump Tower project that was supposed to be built in Moscow. He worked on that project during the 2016 presidential campaign. You may remember that in 2017, Trump said that no such relationship with Russia ever existed.

Manafort was convicted of tax evasion. The taxes Manafort didn’t pay were on income from Russian proxies, one of whom, the president, was running Ukraine for the Kremlin. Manafort’s conviction on bank fraud was related to bank loans he tried to get at least in part, to pay back $20 million he owed to a buddy of Vladimir Putin. His business also employed a Russian intelligence officer for years, and once Manafort was the Trump Campaign Manager, he offered that intelligence officer private briefings on the Trump campaign.

So, there are links to Russia for both men. But, the big ugly shoe to drop is whether Michael Cohen can corroborate what McClatchy journalists Peter Stone and Greg Gordon said a few months ago:

The Justice Department special counsel has evidence that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and confidant, Michael Cohen, secretly made a late-summer trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign…

No real proof has emerged that ties Cohen to a visit to Prague, or to meeting Russians. Cohen could tell Mueller whether the trip took place, and if Cohen strategized while there with Russians about the Kremlin’s playing a role in the US election.

Wrongo is again, skeptical. He doubts that the Trump organization would have Cohen undertake such a mission. But, if true, It would prove that the Trump campaign and the Kremlin worked together to help Trump win the White House.

Let’s turn briefly to a related idea: Facebook’s role as a platform for the spread of both disinformation, and as a rallying site for angry groups. In under the radar item at the NYT, a landmark study about violence against refugees in Germany shows that the most significant variable among towns with instances of violence was use of Facebook.

The work by Karsten MĂŒller and Carlo Schwarz, researchers at the University of Warwick, shows:

Their reams of data converged on a breathtaking statistic: Wherever per-person Facebook use rose to one standard deviation above the national average, attacks on refugees increased by about 50 percent.

The researchers scrutinized every anti-refugee attack in Germany, 3,335 in all, over a two-year span. In each case, they analyzed the local community by all relevant variables. One thing stuck out. Towns where Facebook use was higher than average reliably experienced more attacks on refugees.

That held true in virtually any sort of community — big city or small town; affluent or struggling; liberal haven or far-right stronghold — suggesting that the link applies universally. From the NYT:

The uptick in violence did not correlate with general web use or other related factors; this was not about the internet as an open platform for mobilization or communication. It was particular to Facebook.

This has huge implications: Does social media scramble users’ perceptions of outsiders, of reality, even of right and wrong?

We all believe that Facebook has had an impact on amplifying division in our society. We all are dimly aware that Facebook uses algorithms to determine what appears in each user’s newsfeed. That algorithm’s mission is to present content that maximizes user engagement.

Posts that tap into primal emotions, like anger or fear, perform best, studies have found, and so proliferate. Wrongo said this a few days ago:

…fake news spread on social media has been proven to have a bigger impact, and to spread further and faster than real news.

There are two powerful forces within Facebook’s algorithms: A combination of fear of social change, and the “us-versus-them” rallying cries. Everybody knows that they are common on Facebook.

What should we as society, do about it?

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Alex Jones Spews Fake News. Should He Be On Facebook?

The Daily Escape:

Nizina Glacier, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska. Melting ice formed a lake in 2000. 2018 photo by Nathaniel Wilder for Smithsonian Magazine

Should fake news be protected under the First Amendment? Should private companies be able to ban the toxic stuff that people like Alex Jones spew? Spew like his denial that the Newtown shootings happened, or his speculation that Brennan Gilmore, a former State Department official who attended last summer’s violent far-right rally in Charlottesville, VA was really with the CIA.

Earlier this week, Facebook, Google, Apple, Spotify and Pinterest, within hours of each other, banned Alex Jones and his Infowars web site. Does losing his place on these platforms abridge his freedom of speech?

When someone says that something we otherwise believe is fake, it stirs deep emotions. Consider the immunization scam when Andrew Wakefield published in the Lancet that the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine may predispose to autism in children. Although false medical science, it circulated widely, and was widely believed. Today, communities are at risk, because kids are not being vaccinated by their parents, and regional outbreaks of these diseases which were largely extinct, are occurring again. So, despite the best efforts by the medical community to educate parents that the MMR vaccine is safe, the fake news outran any efforts to contain the lie.

Each day 100 million+ stories hit the internet, so we can’t possibly vet even a fraction of them. Fake news will get through, and spread. In the midterm elections, and in the presidential election in 2020, technology will build on what was learned in the 2016 presidential campaign: (brackets by Wrongo)

Trump ran 5.9 million different versions of ads during the presidential campaign and rapidly tested them [and]…spread those that generated the most Facebook engagement…. Clinton ran 66,000 different kinds of ads in the same period.

The next iteration of the technology will bring each of the 156 million registered voters in the US a stream of personalized messages. That’s because nearly everyone has a social media presence, and their information and preferences will be shared by the platform companies with the campaigns.

People who have influence on social media utilize these new technologies extremely well. Alex Jones uses it well, and is on the toxic end of the fake news spectrum. And there’s Trump, master of the continuous Twitter falsehood. He turns the lie around, accusing his detractors of spreading fake news. With the GOP in power, there will not be any government crackdown on misinformation. Here’s why: the Daily Beast reports on a disturbing poll by Ipsos:

43% of self-identified Republicans said that they believed “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior”…..48% of them said they believed “the news media is the enemy of the American people”.

If you trust what Alex Jones says, fine. But now, your ability to amplify his toxic brand of fake news has been hampered by the platform companies throwing him off. Parsing what is considered free speech is a slippery slope, and we won’t know just how slippery it is, until we start sliding down.

Case law says we’re able to protest, saying whatever we want, within some limits. We used to do that in town squares. A big question is: Are Facebook, Google, Instagram and Twitter the town squares of today?

That’s a question that hasn’t yet been decided. It is why who gets to sit on the Supreme Court is so damn important, particularly if Republicans agree that the president should decide which news outlets are allowed to publish.

Democracy requires conflicting opinions. Anybody can build a platform, and appeal to a niche audience. Today, you can spew falsehoods, like Alex Jones or Trump, who do just that every day.

We live in an era of doublespeak. Automobiles that get higher mileage kill their drivers. Fires are raging in California because there’s not enough water. When the president is an unreliable source of information, fake news carries the same importance as real news. But, legal scholars remind us that:

false news doesn’t serve the public interest in the way that true speech does.

Social media holds the potential of democratizing information, making it universally available. OTOH, fake news spread on social media has been proven to have a bigger impact, and to spread further and faster than real news.

Should the platform companies be able to ban someone, or some messages, even if they do not reflect a clear and present danger? Maybe. Jones and his ilk have other outlets for their spew. And they can build others, and their followers will find them.

This is the beginning of a pushback against fake news, and it’s only the beginning of a revitalized free speech debate pitting the main stream media against those who spew fake news.

If you only want to look at kittens online, go for it. It shouldn’t be all that our Constitution allows, but, where should we draw the line?

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Republicans Vote Against Funding Election Security

The Daily Escape:

Palacio del Segundo Cabo, Havana Cuba. Built in 1772, it was the royal post office. 2018 photo by Nestor Marti for Smithsonian Magazine

Are Republicans committed to free and fair elections? Maybe not. Republicans in the Senate had a chance to say “yes” on August 1st, when an amendment adding funding for election security failed to pass.

With all the cross talk about election meddling, you could be forgiven if you think that our very democracy may be under threat. But when given a chance to take a concrete step, adding $250 million to help confront this challenge, the Republican majority in the Senate said no. From The Hill:

Senators voted 50-47 against adding an amendment from Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) that would have provided the funding. Sixty votes were needed to include the proposal in the appropriations legislation under Senate rules. Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) was the only GOP senator who voted in support of the amendment to an appropriations measure. The proposal, spearheaded by Leahy, would have provided $250 million for state election security grants.

How is this a partisan issue? Doesn’t every American want to protect our electoral system? Republicans argued that more funding wasn’t needed, that states haven’t yet spent the $380 million previously approved by Congress. Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) said it was “far too early” for the Senate to sign off on more money:

We don’t know how the first $380 million has even been spent, and the intelligence committee did an extensive research on how much money was needed and the $380 million amount was what was needed for the moment.

Sounds reasonable. If only there were some sort of accounting system that allowed you to find out how much was spent, and what the remaining need might be. And yet, not knowing where the Pentagon spends its money hasn’t stopped Congress from giving them even more than they asked for.

Surprising what expenditures cause the GOP to develop fiscal responsibility. They just gave $12 billion to bailout America’s farmers. They happily voted to create a $1 trillion deficit with their corporate tax cuts. Trump wants to add another $100 billion in tax cuts, because more has to be better.

But with an expenditure designed to head off a possible vote heist, that’s when America needs more fiscal accountability.

We’ve learned that Russian cyber warriors already have targeted the re-election campaign of Sen. Claire McCaskill, (D-MO), and that Facebook closed 32 accounts because they exhibited behavior similar to that of accounts belonging to Russian hackers. Facebook said that more than 290,000 accounts followed at least one of the fake pages.

Our electoral legitimacy crisis is real. We are witnessing a slow-moving insurrection driven by the Republicans, the Citizens United decision, Koch operatives, Evangelicals, Russian cyber hacks, along with determined vote suppression by Republican state legislatures. All are working to make your vote less valuable. Republicans have been trying for years to destroy the value of your vote with voter suppression and gerrymandering.

If the Russians want to help them, the GOP seems to be OK with that, too.

From Charlie Pierce: (emphasis by Wrongo)

The only reason to vote against this bill is because you don’t want the money spent to confront the crisis. States can’t do this alone—and too many of them are controlled by people who don’t want the job in the first place….The idea that we’re nickel-and-diming this particular problem as what can only be called an anti-democratic epidemic rages across the land is so preposterous as to beggar belief. We are febrile and weak as a democratic republic. Too many people want to keep us that way.

The only thing that can save us is TURN-OUT this fall.

Kiss our democracy good-bye if you stay home!

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Monday Wake Up Call – Fake News Edition

The Daily Escape:

On Facebook, this photo is said to be a view from 30,000 ft. of the California fires. But, it’s fake news. In reality, it’s a sunset over Albuquerque. The pic has been on the internet for months. Why would someone lie to their Facebook “friends”, about a picture of the fires?

What has happened to our society that lying about something like the CA fires seems worth the trouble?

Fake news has always been with us, but we’re reaching the point where we no longer can tell truth from fiction without considerable effort. The Atlantic had a story in March about an ambitious and first-of-its-kind MIT study published in Science: (emphasis by Wrongo)

The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.

The leader of the MIT study, Soroush Vosoughi, an MIT data scientist who has studied fake news since 2013, offered this:

It seems to be pretty clear [from our study] that false information outperforms true information…And that is not just because of bots. It might have something to do with human nature.

And the data are truly scary. According to the study, false stories reach 1,500 people six times quicker, on average, than a true story does. And while false stories outperform the truth on every subject—including business, terrorism and war, science and technology, and entertainment, it probably isn’t news that fake news about politics regularly does the best at outperforming real news:

Twitter users seem almost to prefer sharing falsehoods. Even when the researchers controlled for every difference between the accounts originating rumors—like whether that person had more followers or was verified—falsehoods were still 70% more likely to get retweeted than accurate news.

One of the more disturbing findings was that fake news consistently reaches a larger audience, and it tunnels much more deeply into social networks than real news does. Why do fake news tweets do so well? The MIT team settled on two hypotheses:

  • First, fake news seems to be more “novel” than real news. The study found that falsehoods are often notably different from all the tweets that have appeared in a user’s timeline 60 days prior to their re-tweeting them
  • Second, fake news evokes much more emotion than the average tweet. The researchers found that fake tweets tended to elicit words associated with surprise and disgust, while accurate tweets used words associated with sadness and trust.

The key takeaway is really that content that arouses strong emotions spread further, faster, more deeply, and more broadly, than real news on Twitter.

Most depressing is that users who share accurate information have more followers, and send more tweets than fake-news sharers. They are more likely to be verified Twitter users. In short, the most trustworthy users have every obvious structural advantage that Twitter can give its best users.

And they still fail to connect as efficiently.

We have to wake up. Social media is amplifying falsehood at the expense of the truth, and no one knows how to reverse the trend.  We are living in a dangerous moment for a political system that relies on truth as a knowable reality shared by all Americans.

To help you wake up, we have a tune dedicated to Paul Manafort, Bob Dylan’s “Leopard Pill-Box Hat”. Manafort’s trial is revealing his penchant for purchasing, and wearing wild articles of clothing. Many Trump supporters are saying that Manafort had nothing to do with the Russian hacking, and no matter, he’ll be acquitted.

Both of those ideas are fake news.

There are very few good videos of Dylan performing his work. This is from the Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary Concert in October, 1992. Here, John Mellencamp performs his best impression of Dylan:

We will have to wait and see if Manafort, or any others in the Trump administration go to jail. Wrongo hopes that’s the case. If it happens, it will be a novel event: We didn’t send Nixon to prison for his crimes, we didn’t send Reagan to prison for his crimes, and we didn’t send Bush or Cheney to prison for their crimes ─ so we ended up with Mr. Fake News himself, Donald Trump.

When there is no punishment for the crimes, the criminals see no reason to stop their behavior.

Sample Lyric:

Well I, see you got your
Brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
Yes I, see you got your
Brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
Well, you must tell me, baby how your
Head feels under somethin’ like that.

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

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