The Rise of Weaponized Flak in the New Media Era. Brian Michael Goss

The Rise of Weaponized Flak in the New Media Era - Brian Michael Goss


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since 1988. During the 2016 electoral debates, for example, Trump’s talking points consists of rote concatenation of already established flak memes toward Hillary Clinton—in contrast ←11 | 12→with Bush in 1988 who ran on rarefied rhetoric and largely left the flak to subordinates and PAC players. Moreover, flak has been fully intertwined with the ongoing “communications revolution” of new media platforms. Along with its quantity and higher profile, flak is also more globalized at present than in 1988 in ways that will quickly become apparent.

      Deep-context accounts of the 2016 election have already arrived via journalism (Harding, 2017) and academic investigation (Snyder, 2018) that pull together a wider narrative than I am attempting here. For the eager student of contemporary flak, the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on the 2016 election is an original source of interest. The report was released in January 2017, two months after the 2016 election and weeks before Trump’s team assumed office. The report collates the judgments of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and National Security Agency (NSA). I do not take it as my “job” to valorize the work of the alphabet-soup agencies as I work in the (more transparent, if disorderly) environment of a university—but am mindful of the agencies’ research acumen, their formidable tools and workforce. In this case, their work clearly previewed the more elaborate findings of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s full report in 2019.

      ICA’s report opens with blunt statements about the stakes around its investigation:

      Russian efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow’s longstanding desire to undermine the U.S.-led liberal democratic order, but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations.

      We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments. (original emphasis; Intelligence Community Assessment, 2017, p. ii)

      These are bracing statements about the ambition of Russian activities and objectives. It bears further mention that Russia is not Canada; the MI6 intelligence service of the United States’ closest ally, the United Kingdom, recently “reclassified Russia as a ‘tier one’ threat, alongside Islamic terrorism” by 2017 (Edwards, 2017, para. 1).

      Had Clinton prevailed in the November 2016 election, Russia was also prepared to pour high-octane fuel on any brushfires of discontent in the United States over the result. Russian intelligence had already prepared the #DemocracyRIP hashtag to look like the work of indignant Americans, for the purpose of mobilizing doubts about Clinton, in particular—and the probity of U.S. electoral results, in general (2017, p. 2). Toward these strategic ends, Russian intelligence endowed its activities with the façade of being organic, U.S. domestic opposition, and not the work of a hostile foreign government.

      Mueller’s GRU(e)some Indictment

      A year-and-a-half later in 2018, The United States of America versus Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, et al. presents further interesting reading for the student of flak around the 2016 election. A product of the Robert S. Mueller III special ←13 | 14→counsel investigation, the indictment provides operational detail about the activities flagged in the ICA’s report in 2017. Mueller (2018) mainly focuses on the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, known in the west by the acronym GRU; a notoriously severe outfit even by the standards of military intelligence. However, in this episode, GRU was more concerned with killing campaigns and reputations via flak than people.

      According to Mueller’s indictment, GRU operatives hacked email accounts “of volunteers and employees of the U.S. presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton,” including her campaign chair John Podesta (2018, p. 2). Once email accounts were compromised, Russian military intelligence stole documents, logged keystrokes, and made screen shots of Clinton campaign workers’ computers. All of this was undertaken by a “tier one” threat, eager to weaponize the information it was gathering to flak against its disfavored candidate. Toward this strategic end, “By in or around June 2016,” Russia’s GRU had “gained access to approximately 33 DNC [Democratic Party National Committee] computers” (Mueller, 2018, p. 10).

      In line with a flak strategy, the stolen communications were subjected to “stage releases” for political impact at crucial intervals of the 2016 campaign. The objective was “to interfere” with the election—and to do so in ways that flaked Clinton to Trump’s advantage (Mueller, 2018, p. 2). Document dumps of the pilfered materials were made through “fictitious online persons”—Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks—in order to conceal Russia’s hand. Mueller’s indictment notes that GRU agents “created the online persona Guccifer 2.0” that was “falsely claimed to be a lone Romanian hacker” (2018, p. 14). DCLeaks, launched in June 2018, was proclaimed with similar speciousness to have been “started by a group of ‘American hacktivists’ when it was in fact started by the [GRU] Conspirators” (2018, p. 13). In both cases, the GRU fronts were designed to exude the “white hat” prestige of being concerned (h)ac(k)tivists. DCLeaks’ hashtag was subsequently used to organize flash mobs against Clinton as well as to post images from #BlacksAgainstHillary in an attempt to demobilize a core Democratic Party constituency.

      GRU also employed these fronts to recruit other players to spread the hacked booty and damage Clinton’s campaign: “the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, transferred approximately 2.5 gigabytes of data stolen from the DNCC [Democratic Party National Congressional Committee] to a then-registered state lobbyist and online source of political news” (2018, p. 16). Through the Guccifer 2.0 persona, GRU shared its ill-begotten wares with ←14 | 15→two reporters and “a person who was in regular contact with senior members of the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump” (2018, p. 16). The stolen booty was also shared with an organization named in the indictment as “Organization 1,” understood to be WikiLeaks. In turn, Mueller’s indictment cites communications between GRU/Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks about how to make the pilfered material “have a much a higher


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