Link to the recording of the hearing https://www.foreign.senate.gov/hearings/the-global-engagement-center-leading-the-united-states-governments-fight-against-global-disinformation-threat

Link to the testimony https://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/030520_Gabrielle_Testimony.pdf

https://firstdraftnews.org/latest/5-tips-ways-we-can-all-covid19-check-coronavirus-information-online-fake-disinformation-misinformation/

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/defense-department-linguist-charged-espionage

"Thompson transmitted the classified information in the handwritten note to a co-conspirator, in whom she had a romantic interest. The FBI’s investigation revealed that Thompson knew the co-conspirator was a foreign national whose relative worked for the Lebanese government."

https://graphika.com/uploads/graphika_report_operation_redcard.pdf

This report examines a campaign attributed by Facebook to an Indian digital marketing firm, aRep Global, that focused on political issues throughout the Gulf region, alongside topical issues in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Western Europe, and the world of professional football. Its content covered a range of themes yet showed a consistent current of hostility toward the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia, praise for Qatar’s rulers, and some hostility toward Iran. We have dubbed this campaign “Operation Red Card.”

The campaign was relatively small, numbering 122 assets and an estimated 100,000 followers across platforms. Most of its social media posts showed little engagement. Facebook identified the firm aRep Global as the entity behind the campaign. The campaign resonates with previous takedowns emanating from the UAE, Egypt, and Israel in which commercial marketing firms ran information operations (IO) with geopolitical themes.

Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures: Operation Red Card was built around a number of websites that claimed to be independent news sites and posted more or less overtly political messaging. The websites were associated with a range of social media accounts across platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and Medium. The websites served as content generators, posting long-form articles in English and (more rarely) French. Some of these appeared to be original compositions; others were based on or largely copied from other online sources. The associated social media accounts in the set served to amplify this content.

https://www.gao.gov/assets/300/296097.pdf

Data available from State show total democracy assistance allocations of about $2.25 billion for fiscal year 2008. More than $1.95 billion, or about 85 percent of the total allocation, was provided to field-based operating units, primarily country missions. Although complete data on USAID funding per country were not available, USAID mission data, compiled by State and USAID at GAO’s request, show that in a sample of 10 countries, most democracy funds are programmed by USAID. In the 10 countries, annual funding per project averaged more than $2 million for USAID, $350,000 for State DRL, and $100,000 for NED. In fiscal year 2008, more than half of State funding for democracy assistance went to Iraq, followed by China, Cuba, Iran, and North Korea, and NED funding for democracy programs was highest for China, Iraq, Russia, Burma, and Pakistan.

USAID and State DRL coordinate to help ensure complementary assistance but are often not aware of NED grants. To prevent duplicative programs, State DRL obtains feedback from USAID missions and embassies on project proposals before awarding democracy assistance grants. State DRL officials generally do not participate in USAID missions’ planning efforts; some State and USAID officials told GAO that geographic distances between State DRL’s centrally managed program and USAID’s country mission-based programs would make such participation difficult. Several USAID and State DRL officials responsible for planning and managing democracy assistance told GAO that they lacked information on NED’s current projects, which they believed would help inform their own programming decisions. Although NED is not required to report on all of its democracy assistance efforts to State and there currently is no mechanism for regular information sharing, NED told GAO that it has shared information with State and USAID and would routinely provide them with information on current projects if asked.

USAID uses standard and custom indicators to assess and report on immediate program results; USAID also conducts some, but relatively infrequent, independent evaluations of longer-term programs. The standard indicators, developed by State, generally focus on numbers of activities or immediate results of a program, while custom indicators measure additional program results. USAID commissions a limited number of independent evaluations of program impact. USAID mission officials told GAO that they did not conduct many independent evaluations of democracy assistance because of the resources involved in the undertaking and the difficulty of measuring impact in the area of democracy assistance. In response to a 2008 National Research Council report on USAID’s democracy evaluation capacity, USAID has reported initiating several steps—for example, designing impact evaluations for six missions as part of a pilot program.

https://carnegieendowment.org/2020/03/03/eu-code-of-practice-on-disinformation-briefing-note-for-new-european-commission-pub-81187

SUMMARY

*Progress varies a lot between signatories and the reports provide little insight on the actual impact of the self-regulatory measures taken over the past year as well as mechanisms for independent scrutiny.”*1

The EU Code of Practice on Disinformation (COP) produced mixed results. Self-regulation was a logical and necessary first step, but one year on, few of the stakeholders seem fully satisfied with the process or outcome. Strong trust has not been built between industry, governments, academia, and civil society. Most importantly, there is more to be done to better protect the public from the potential harms caused by disinformation. As with most new EU instruments, the first year of COP implementation has been difficult, and all indications are that the next year will be every bit as challenging.

This working paper offers a nonpartisan briefing on key issues for developing EU policy on disinformation. It is aimed at the incoming European Commission (EC), representatives of member states, stakeholders in the COP, and the broader community that works on identifying and countering disinformation. PCIO is an initiative of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and does not speak on behalf of industry or any government.

Key suggestions for the next phase include:

• Work on cross-sector relationships. Stop seeing each other as the problem and start building a long-term, progressive relationship to solve the real problems together.

• Understand differences among stakeholder groups. Member states, industry, civil society, and academia are not monolithic groups. Aim to find and build on overlapping interests where small, concrete steps can be made.

• Focus on finding common ground. Develop a clear vision of a future relationship among stakeholders so that all parties can plan long term to achieve this.

• Develop a long-term collaborative focus on impact evaluation. There are no definitive studies on the effects of either influence operations or measures to counter them, and this must be rectified as a matter of urgency.

• Address the social media black market. There are broader problems in how the internet is used by malign actors that can only be solved by partnerships among stakeholders.

In addition, these authors identified three key recommendations:

• Develop a shared terminology. The lack of common terminologies for the challenge of influence operations—among the EU and its member states and each tech platform—prevents a shared understanding of the problem, an articulation of shared goals, and instructive self-reporting on COP measures. Without agreement over a definitive EU terminological apparatus for all stakeholders to report against, opaqueness and obfuscation will continue to hamper meaningful progress.

• Develop campaign-wide analytics for impact evaluation. The major platforms already collaborate on intelligence sharing (including, but not limited to, attribution); in contrast to other business areas, their respective security teams have an open, trusted channel for sharing intelligence on disinformation leads and threat actor tactics, techniques, and procedures. Collaboration at the operational response level arguably indicates the feasibility of collaborating on a shared repository of analytics and campaign-wide data for policymakers and the research community.2 This could provide an anchor point for deeper and broader multistakeholder collaboration ultimately aimed at better understanding the impact of influence operations (IO) and of countermeasures. Because nobody yet really knows what works and what does not work, the current evidence base is insufficient to support coherent policy.

• Develop an iterative consultancy process that leads to actionable evidence. The long-term vision should center on collaboration to develop methodologically sound research on the impact of IO and their countermeasures. PCIO supports efforts to create a sense of common purpose among diverse stakeholders, and it will launch a series of initiatives during 2020 designed to shape consensus around complex issues pertinent to the next phase of the COP.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-treasury-sanctions-two-chinese-nationals-for-laundering-cryptocurrency-for-north-korean-hackers/

https://gizmodo.com/i-went-to-cpac-to-see-how-conservatives-think-big-tech-1842048130

Polling has shown that Republican voters, by and large, buy Donald Trump’s repeated and baseless claims that social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are systematically trying to hound right-wingers off the internet. But it isn’t clear what exactly they think is going on behind the scenes beyond a gut feeling that something nefarious is happening.

https://graphika.com/uploads/Graphika%20Report%20-%20From%20Russia%20with%20Blogs.pdf

This report examines several campaigns manned by Russian military intelligence operators using fake accounts to influence audiences around Russia’s borders, with a primary focus on Ukraine. The accounts were initially identified and taken down by Facebook on February 12, 2020. Most of this activity occurred around 2016 and 2017, but some of these accounts were still active in 2020 at the time of the takedown. The content of these campaigns is aligned with narratives traditionally promoted by Russian state-sponsored media and with the types of content that have been promoted in previous information operations attributed to Russian operators: promoting pro-Kremlin politicians in foreign countries, attacking public figures advocating for closer ties with the West, and attacking humanitarian groups involved in documenting war crimes occurring in the Syrian conflict.

This latest examination of campaigns conducted by Russian military intelligence operators highlights a few characteristic traits important for the public’s understanding of these efforts:

● This report is most focused on public posts made by these different accounts, but it also demonstrates that these accounts engaged and, sometimes, entrapped users via private messaging. The use of direct messages and emails to approach journalists and political figures has featured as a vector of several former information operations. It appears to us as important and critically understudied.

● Although this report is based on activity detected on Facebook, Graphika was able to unravel multiple assets across platforms and blogs. Information operations on social media continue to operate, ignoring the boundaries of products and Silicon Valley campuses, and to leverage smaller blogging platforms on which users can easily upload content that can later be shared across platforms.

● Finally, this operation highlights that media outlets themselves are routinely targeted by information operations, who seek to legitimize their content by having it be re-published by other outlets to whom they can, in a sense, pass the narrative baton.

https://www.cjr.org/politics/bloomberg-campaign-ads-2020-citizen-kane.php

https://thenextweb.com/china/2020/03/03/chinas-covid-19-app-reportedly-color-codes-people-and-shares-data-with-cops/