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I am so happy the worst center-leftists in America picked Russia as a boogeyman. by When Alternet is a voice of reason. 11/15/2017, 11:18am PST
McCarthyism Inc: Introducing the Counter-Terror 'Experts' Hyping Russian Threats and Undermining Our Civil Liberties

ASD researchers and advisors have become go-to pundits for mainstream reporters seeking expert opinions on Russian online meddling. They have been endorsed by John Podesta, the founder of the Center for American Progress and chief of staff for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Julia Ioffe, the Atlantic’s Russia correspondent, has also weighed in to promote the ASD’s efforts. Both highlighted the ASD’s Hamilton 68 Dashboard as a scientific barometer of Kremlin influence over the American social media landscape.

According to the New York Times, the ASD is a “public policy research group in Washington,” and a “bipartisan initiative” with no apparent agenda other than scrubbing the stain of subversion out of American democracy. Hosted by the German Marshall Fund, one of the most respected think tanks in Washington, the ASD has been granted the patina of credibility.

However, an investigation by AlterNet’s Grayzone Project has yielded a series of disturbing findings at odds with the established depiction. The researchers behind the ASD’s “dashboard” are no Russia experts, but rather a collection of cranks, counterterror retreads, online harassers and paranoiacs operating with support from some of the most prominent figures operating within the American national security apparatus.


Andrew Weisburd, an ASD fellow who inspired and helped design its Hamilton 68 dashboard, has been solicited by the New York Times and Washington Post for expert quotes on Russian meddling. Neither outlet bothered to mention Weisburd’s well-documented history of online vigilantism, including his founding of a one-man, anti-Palestinian web monitoring initiative that specialized in doxxing left-wing activists, Muslims and anyone he considered “anti-American.” Weisburd’s murderous and homophobic fantasies about Glenn Greenwald, the editor of a publication the ASD has flagged without explanation as a vehicle for Russian influence operations, have also passed without notice by reporters promoting his findings.

In recent days, the ASD’s master Kremlinologists have branded major American online outlets including the Intercept, Antiwar.com, ESPN, and even the U.S. military newspaper Stars and Stripes as vehicles for Kremlin propaganda. ASD researchers emphasized that the outlets they placed within Russia’s supposed influence network were merely “relevant to Russian messaging themes.” But they failed to explain how they became relevant, making it almost impossible to know why the outlets listed on the dashboard were being amplified by any Russian influence operation, or whether they were at all.


The ASD appears to have only one figure on its board of advisors who could be described as a Russia specialist—Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia under the Obama administration. In the early days of his tenure. McFaul invited tensions with Moscow by hosting a series of meetings inside the American embassy with protest leaders and internal opponents of the country’s leadership. The former diplomat has become a human factory for quotes on Russiagate, serving reporters with a reliable stream of soundbites reinforcing the narrative of Russian interference. He is currently housed at the Hoover Institution, a right-wing think tank that has provided a place for fellow militarists like Condoleeza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld to cool their heels, while sponsoring neoconservative initiatives like the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.


Virtually any theme that emanates from Russian news services like RT and Sputnik is grounds for monitoring by ASD, even when they are based in fact and have little connection to any Russian foreign policy initiative. As Carden documented in the Nation, ASD researchers have a penchant for labeling factual reporting featured on RT and Sputnik’s Twitter accounts as “Russian propaganda” purely on the grounds that it casts the US and its allies in a negative light. The ASD openly states on its dashboard that it considers any “content attacking the U.S. and Europe” to be Russian propaganda.

More curiously, ASD has explicitly refused to name the Russian bot accounts that it claims to track. The group explained, “We are not willing to publicly attribute even one specific account incorrectly.” This makes it impossible to know if the group has attributed any accounts correctly.

In perhaps the only case in which the ASD named one of the “Russian” Twitter accounts it was tracking, the group fingered a Twitter user named Marcel Sardo, branding him as the possibly robotic ringleader of a sinister Kremlin-driven influence operation. But when the New York Times' Scott Shane investigated Sardo’s identity, he discovered that the account in question belonged to an actual human—a 48-year-old computer programmer from Zurich with no ties to the Russian government. Indeed, Sardo was a private individual who openly sympathized with Russian foreign policy.


By 2011, Weisburd had transformed himself from solo maverick to a respected cybersecurity expert called to testify before Congress. In December of that year, Rep. Patrick Meehan introduced Weisburd to a hearing of the House Committee on Homeland Security as an expert who had overseen “training and briefings to the FBI and CIA” and supposedly authored a textbook “comparing jihadi and street gang videos on YouTube” for the FBI Counterterrorism Division.

The hearing was dedicated to the danger of online jihadist messaging and was held two months after President Obama authorized the assassination of Al Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki and his 15-year-old son, Abdelrahman, both American citizens. According to a congressional transcript, Weisburd’s anti-Muslim Internet Haganah was profusely promoted during the hearing.

Within three years, after earning a living at the intersection of the counterterror and Islamophobia industries, Weisburd expanded his repertoire to encompass the Russian menace. Once an admirer of Vladimir Putin, whom he bizarrely hailed as a “tough Jew,” Weisburd now mocked the Russian president as a gay “queen” who “will slay you in the outhouse.” Weisburd also speculated that Putin had personally recruited journalist Glenn Greenwald, who is openly gay, as his personal concubine.

Greenwald had earned international attention when he oversaw the release of confidential National Security Agency files provided to him by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. Published at the Guardian and Intercept, the damning revelations of a Big Brother-style surveillance state sent national security hardliners like Weisburd into a petulant frenzy. On Twitter, Weisburd openly fantasized about the murder of Greenwald, whom he branded as a "traitor."

“When Glenn Greenwald accidentally drowns in 2" of water it will not be the slightest bit surprising,” Weisburd commented. Upon hearing that Greenwald was set to testify before Congress, he wrote, “I wonder if The Greenwald has lined up a... bodyguard yet for this trip?” (Weisburd has appeared to fantasize about poisoning Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.) In another instance, Weisburd mocked Greenwald’s sexuality and imagined deploying a “honeytrap” operation to compromise the journalist’s integrity.

Though this sort of blood-curdling banter is hardly unfamiliar in the halls of America’s national security state, where even Hillary Clinton was accused by State Department sources of proposing a drone strike to kill Assange, what made Weisburd’s vendetta against Greenwald significant was the way it revealed ASD’s Hamilton 68 Dashboard as a de facto political blacklist.

On September 28, Greenwald published a factual report on how a widely disseminated story alleging that Russian government hacked voting machines in 21 states was debunked. Hours later, Weisburd took to Twitter to proclaim, “The Kremlin's minions are pushing Greenwald's latest at the Intercept hard tonight. Is it permissible yet to say Glenn is a Kremlin tool?”

That same day, Weisburd boasted that ASD had listed the Intercept on its Hamilton 68 Dashboard as a top platform for Kremlin influence. He thus revealed the censorious agenda behind the ASD’s methodology. As with the leftist and Islamic-oriented websites Weisburd had targeted for destruction in his halcyon days, he and his colleagues were seeking to suppress outlets that deviated too sharply from the official American line on “Russiagate”—and to punish any journalist that rankled their sensibility.

Kelsey Glover, the public relations manager of the German Marshall Fund, did not respond to specific questions regarding Weisburd’s violent fantasies about Greenwald, or his apparent use of the Hamilton 68 Dashboard as a vehicle to settle scores with the journalist. The George Washington University Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, where Weisburd is housed as a senior fellow, also did not respond to a list of questions sent by email.


But behind both PropOrNot and the ASD lies a censorious agenda that aims to deter news consumers from dissident sources of information. This was made clear when the most prominent figure attached to the ASD, Clint Watts, lobbied Congress to impose a social media rating system of all online media, and with a specific eye on “Russian influence.” Citing an op-ed he wrote with Weisburd, Watts called for a “Consumer Reports for news.” To counter “Russian disinformation specifically,” Watts urged Congress to support a social media rating system. His plan called for news to be given a “score” for accuracy and political “orientation,” describing the system as “the equivalent of a nutrition label for information.”

Watts’ proposal might have seemed novel, but it was not unprecedented. Back in the early 1990s, as white suburbanites fretted over the impact of rap music on their children, ultra-conservative moral crusader William Bennett and former civil rights leader C. Dolores Tucker lobbied Congress to obstruct the sale of gangsta rap. Though Bennett and Tucker failed to realize their most censorious goals, they managed to pressure the music industry to apply labels to music containing explicit content. Sales of rap music continued to skyrocket despite the warning labels, or perhaps because of them.

The congressional hearings convened this month on Russian social media meddling presented a liberal analog to the conservative freakout over Snoop Dogg and Too Short’s lascivious lyrics. Cries for the suppression of “Russian disinformation” reverberated from Capitol Hill, as lawmakers called for driving Russian-backed media like RT and Sputnik off American airwaves and demanded YouTube ban their material from its platform solely on the basis of its foreign source. The U.S. Department of Justice recently demanded that RT’s American bureau register as a foreign agent, an unprecedented request from a credentialed news agency, while pressure from Congress prompted Twitter to ban advertising from RT.

To justify its seemingly arbitrary decision, Twitter cited a widely panned U.S. intelligence agency report that accused RT of “promoting radical discontent.” According to the report, RT’s transgressions included “alleg[ing] widespread infringements of civil liberties,” hosting a third party presidential candidates’ debate, and “opposing Western intervention in the Syrian conflict.”

As the government’s crusade against Russian meddling widens, it appears increasingly like a pretext for online surveillance, ramped up securitization of social media and the suppression of dissent. In such a paranoid environment, the labeling of online news with a “nutrition value” may not be far off. Wherever the meltdown leads, Americans can rest assured it will all be justified in the name of preserving our democratic freedoms, while ASD’s Watts calls on the government to “quell information rebellions” with censorious measures imposed from above.
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I am so happy the worst center-leftists in America picked Russia as a boogeyman. by When Alternet is a voice of reason. 11/15/2017, 11:18am PST NEW
 
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