RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
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God, I hate these guys. They aren't trying to be discreet anymore.
:ALERTRED:
Twitter may well be SUPER fukked:
Twitter Sidestepped Russian Account Warnings, Former Worker Says
Twitter Sidestepped Russian Account Warnings, Former Worker Says
In 2015, a manager discovered a trove of accounts with Russian and Ukrainian IP addresses
More stories by Selina WangNovember 3, 2017, 6:00 AM EDT
In early 2015, a Twitter employee discovered a vast amount of Twitter accounts with IP addresses in Russia and Ukraine. The worker, Leslie Miley, said most of them were inactive or fake but were not deleted at the time. Miley, who was the company's engineering manager of product safety and security at the time, said efforts to root out spam and manipulation on the platform were slowed down by the company's growth team, which focused on increasing users and revenue.
"Anything we would do that would slow down signups, delete accounts, or remove accounts had to go through the growth team," Miley said. "They were more concerned with growth numbers than fake and compromised accounts."
Leslie Miley
Photographer: Steve Jennings/Getty Images
Congress grilled social media companies this week about Russian interference on their platforms in the 2016 U.S. elections. Lawmakers scolded them for how long it took to recognize the seriousness of the manipulation. Twitter has revealed that more than 36,000 Russian-linked accounts generated about 1.4 million automated, election-related Tweets. It identified almost 3,000 accounts associated with the Russian pro-Kremlin Internet Research Agency, more than 10 times the number it had disclosed a few months before. But few people believe this is a definitive tally.
Throughout Twitter's history, security took a backseat to free speech and growth, according to ten former employees who asked not to be identified. In the early days of Twitter, which was founded in 2006, a small handful of workers manually handled requests from users to take down abusive or spam content, according to former staff. Though the number of teams and people dedicated to security dramatically increased over the years, engineering resources remained scarce.
Twitter has rotated through more than half a dozen product chiefs in the past several years, making it difficult for the company to set a consistent strategy around user security and safety policies, they said. For many years, dealing with activity from trolls, fakers and abusers was a game of whack-a-mole -- not a problem to try to prevent. Twitter declined to make simple changes that would've mitigated the problem -- like requiring a phone number to make an account or labeling bot accounts with a digital marker, according to some of the employees. Those efforts to prevent manipulation often came up against the growth team, whose chief concern was growing the monthly active users, the most important metric for Wall Street's valuation of Twitter. This, said Miley and other former employees, set the stage for potential interference by more malicious actors.
"For many years, Twitter has fought a high volume of spam and spam accounts originating from Russia and Ukraine. The numbers of suspensions and other enforcement actions on such accounts number in the millions per week,” a Twitter spokeswoman said in an emailed statement. Bloomberg LP is developing a global breaking news network for the Twitter service.
More recently, Twitter has doubled down on security. In its testimony, the company’s general counsel said that it was dedicating all its engineering, product and design teams to rooting out Russian manipulation on its platform. It also said it's improved algorithms to actively block suspicious logins and spam accounts. Yet experts are less than impressed. When Congress asked Clint Watts of the Foreign Policy Research Institute to grade how the tech companies are responding to malicious actors on its platform, he said: "All have improved in recent years. Facebook is the best based on my experience. Google is not far behind. Twitter would be last and always resists."
Miley joined Twitter in 2013. He started the product safety and security team in 2014. In 2015 he became a manager on the accounts team where he was responsible for the infrastructure that handled user log-ins.
Miley was dismissed during a round of job cuts at the end of 2015. But as the only African-American engineer in a leadership position at Twitter, he said he had already told the company he planned to leave because of his frustrations with management and the company's lack of diversity. He also said he declined the severance package so he could speak about his experiences at the company. Miley recently left Slack as the head of engineering to work with Venture for America, a non-profit that encourages entrepreneurship. Before Miley left Twitter, he became increasingly concerned about the proliferation of malicious accounts on the platform.
In 2015, researchers from the University of California at Berkeley approached Twitter, asking for help, Miley said. They had found that Twitter had a significant amount of fake accounts, but wanted more data to further their research. Three employees on the product safety and security team, including Miley, met with them. They declined to give the academics data, but the meeting made them curious.
Afterward, the employees ran an analysis on Twitter's accounts. Miley said he was stunned to find that a significant percentage of the total accounts created on Twitter had Russian and Ukrainian IP addresses. According to Miley's recollections, he brought the information to his manager, who told him to take the issue to the growth team. Miley said that he doesn’t have records of the tallies.
"When I brought the information to my boss, the response was 'stay in your lane. That's not your role'," Miley said.
Miley said he advised the growth team to delete most of the accounts they had surfaced from Russia and Ukraine, since the analysis suggested that most were inactive or fake. The growth team didn’t take any action on the Russian and Ukrainian accounts after he presented the data to them, according to Miley.
Many pro-Trump bots that were active during the 2016 U.S. elections were long-dormant accounts, according to researchers. These profiles give the illusion that they’re legitimate, and not created for the sole purpose of spreading propaganda during a campaign, according to Samuel Woolley, research director of the Digital Intelligence Lab at Institute for the Future, a non-profit research organization.
During Twitter's testimony this week, multiple congressmen pressed the company about the percentage of fake or spam accounts. Twitter says it's less than 5 percent, while outside research has found the number to be closer to 15 percent.
@DonKnock @SJUGrad13 @88m3 @Menelik II @wire28 @smitty22 @Reality @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Blessed Is the Man @THE MACHINE @OneManGang @dtownreppin214 @JKFrazier @tmonster @blotter @BigMoneyGrip @Soymuscle Mike @Grano-Grano @.r. @GinaThatAintNoDamnPuppy!
Twitter may well be SUPER fukked:
Twitter Sidestepped Russian Account Warnings, Former Worker Says
Twitter Sidestepped Russian Account Warnings, Former Worker Says
In 2015, a manager discovered a trove of accounts with Russian and Ukrainian IP addresses
More stories by Selina WangNovember 3, 2017, 6:00 AM EDT
In early 2015, a Twitter employee discovered a vast amount of Twitter accounts with IP addresses in Russia and Ukraine. The worker, Leslie Miley, said most of them were inactive or fake but were not deleted at the time. Miley, who was the company's engineering manager of product safety and security at the time, said efforts to root out spam and manipulation on the platform were slowed down by the company's growth team, which focused on increasing users and revenue.
"Anything we would do that would slow down signups, delete accounts, or remove accounts had to go through the growth team," Miley said. "They were more concerned with growth numbers than fake and compromised accounts."
Leslie Miley
Photographer: Steve Jennings/Getty Images
Congress grilled social media companies this week about Russian interference on their platforms in the 2016 U.S. elections. Lawmakers scolded them for how long it took to recognize the seriousness of the manipulation. Twitter has revealed that more than 36,000 Russian-linked accounts generated about 1.4 million automated, election-related Tweets. It identified almost 3,000 accounts associated with the Russian pro-Kremlin Internet Research Agency, more than 10 times the number it had disclosed a few months before. But few people believe this is a definitive tally.
Throughout Twitter's history, security took a backseat to free speech and growth, according to ten former employees who asked not to be identified. In the early days of Twitter, which was founded in 2006, a small handful of workers manually handled requests from users to take down abusive or spam content, according to former staff. Though the number of teams and people dedicated to security dramatically increased over the years, engineering resources remained scarce.
Twitter has rotated through more than half a dozen product chiefs in the past several years, making it difficult for the company to set a consistent strategy around user security and safety policies, they said. For many years, dealing with activity from trolls, fakers and abusers was a game of whack-a-mole -- not a problem to try to prevent. Twitter declined to make simple changes that would've mitigated the problem -- like requiring a phone number to make an account or labeling bot accounts with a digital marker, according to some of the employees. Those efforts to prevent manipulation often came up against the growth team, whose chief concern was growing the monthly active users, the most important metric for Wall Street's valuation of Twitter. This, said Miley and other former employees, set the stage for potential interference by more malicious actors.
"For many years, Twitter has fought a high volume of spam and spam accounts originating from Russia and Ukraine. The numbers of suspensions and other enforcement actions on such accounts number in the millions per week,” a Twitter spokeswoman said in an emailed statement. Bloomberg LP is developing a global breaking news network for the Twitter service.
More recently, Twitter has doubled down on security. In its testimony, the company’s general counsel said that it was dedicating all its engineering, product and design teams to rooting out Russian manipulation on its platform. It also said it's improved algorithms to actively block suspicious logins and spam accounts. Yet experts are less than impressed. When Congress asked Clint Watts of the Foreign Policy Research Institute to grade how the tech companies are responding to malicious actors on its platform, he said: "All have improved in recent years. Facebook is the best based on my experience. Google is not far behind. Twitter would be last and always resists."
Miley joined Twitter in 2013. He started the product safety and security team in 2014. In 2015 he became a manager on the accounts team where he was responsible for the infrastructure that handled user log-ins.
Miley was dismissed during a round of job cuts at the end of 2015. But as the only African-American engineer in a leadership position at Twitter, he said he had already told the company he planned to leave because of his frustrations with management and the company's lack of diversity. He also said he declined the severance package so he could speak about his experiences at the company. Miley recently left Slack as the head of engineering to work with Venture for America, a non-profit that encourages entrepreneurship. Before Miley left Twitter, he became increasingly concerned about the proliferation of malicious accounts on the platform.
In 2015, researchers from the University of California at Berkeley approached Twitter, asking for help, Miley said. They had found that Twitter had a significant amount of fake accounts, but wanted more data to further their research. Three employees on the product safety and security team, including Miley, met with them. They declined to give the academics data, but the meeting made them curious.
Afterward, the employees ran an analysis on Twitter's accounts. Miley said he was stunned to find that a significant percentage of the total accounts created on Twitter had Russian and Ukrainian IP addresses. According to Miley's recollections, he brought the information to his manager, who told him to take the issue to the growth team. Miley said that he doesn’t have records of the tallies.
"When I brought the information to my boss, the response was 'stay in your lane. That's not your role'," Miley said.
Miley said he advised the growth team to delete most of the accounts they had surfaced from Russia and Ukraine, since the analysis suggested that most were inactive or fake. The growth team didn’t take any action on the Russian and Ukrainian accounts after he presented the data to them, according to Miley.
Many pro-Trump bots that were active during the 2016 U.S. elections were long-dormant accounts, according to researchers. These profiles give the illusion that they’re legitimate, and not created for the sole purpose of spreading propaganda during a campaign, according to Samuel Woolley, research director of the Digital Intelligence Lab at Institute for the Future, a non-profit research organization.
During Twitter's testimony this week, multiple congressmen pressed the company about the percentage of fake or spam accounts. Twitter says it's less than 5 percent, while outside research has found the number to be closer to 15 percent.
@DonKnock @SJUGrad13 @88m3 @Menelik II @wire28 @smitty22 @Reality @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Blessed Is the Man @THE MACHINE @OneManGang @dtownreppin214 @JKFrazier @tmonster @blotter @BigMoneyGrip @Soymuscle Mike @Grano-Grano @.r. @GinaThatAintNoDamnPuppy!
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Some straight slave owner, Frederick Douglas type shyt. Dude would wake up beat his slaves, then go eat his breakfast without breaking stride...Cac ain't eeem brush his dirty ass yellow teeth yet
Gaetz's twitter mentions :damnanimated:
Solving the Mystery of the Maltese Professor
Solving the Mystery of the Maltese Professor
By John R. Schindler • 11/03/17 11:20am
Opinion
Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Alex Wong/Getty Images
This week began with the bombshell legal news that Special Counsel Robert Mueller brought charges against members of Team Trump relating to their illicit ties to Moscow. As I explained, this fundamentally changes the game in our nation’s capital, and the White House is struggling to cope with this new environment, which finds the president on the defensive, awaiting further indictments of his associates.
No aspect of this week’s news is more mysterious than the saga of “the Professor”—in reality, Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese national—who served as the hush-hush go-between for the Trump campaign and the Kremlin in the spring of 2016. Notably, he acted as Moscow’s cut-out for contacts with George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy advisor hired by the Trump campaign in the late winter of 2016.
Mifsud’s role is crystal-clear to anyone versed in Russian espionage tradecraft, what the Kremlin calls konspiratsiya (yes, “conspiracy”). He is a secret operative of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, as I elaborated:
Papadopoulos met “the Professor” in Italy in mid-March 2016, then again in London later that month; on the latter occasion “the Professor” brought along a Russian female, allegedly Putin’s niece, to help facilitate the engagement. Papadopoulos emailed the campaign about the success of this meeting, which responded enthusiastically about what had transpired and on March 31, he participated in a national security meeting in Washington that included campaign principals, with Trump himself present.
But Misfud’s role soon moved into even darker territory:
Crucially, “the Professor” introduced Papadopoulos to a senior official of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs or MFA. In May and June 2016, the two had multiple discussions via Skype and email about cooperation between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign—all with the approval of senior campaign officials. Just as important, in late April, “the Professor” boasted to Papadopoulos that Moscow was in possession of juicy “dirt” on Hillary, including “thousands of emails.”
Here the “Russian MFA” is the SVR, which customarily masquerades as diplomats when outside Russia. Mifsud’s role in the Trump campaign’s espionage manqué raises numerous questions that Mueller and his investigators need to answer to fully understand the odd saga of how Team Trump sought the Kremlin’s help to harm Hillary Clinton and win the White House.
They knew they were entering unethical and perhaps illegal territory with “the Professor.” At the campaign’s March 31, 2016 national security meeting in Washington where Papadopoulos explained he had Kremlin contacts—meaning Mifsud—who could facilitate a meeting between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Republican candidate expressed interest, while campaign principal Senator Jeff Sessions (now the attorney general) reportedly said“no one should talk about” this clandestine outreach to Moscow, perhaps sensing its legal danger.
Since this story broke a few days ago, Mifsud has gone to ground, admitting his role in Team Trump’s outreach to Moscow while stating he has a “clear conscience.” Nevertheless, he has disappeared from websites and acted like he has something to hide. His past is shadowy, though it’s clear he’s made many trips to Russia, leading some in London to ask who Mifsud is really working for, since his official biography makes little sense.
Then we have the fact, revealed by the Washington Examiner, that Mifsud traveled to the United States in 2014, where he extolled his London Academy for Diplomacy, which has since closed and appears to have been an SVR front that existed mostly on paper. His “academy,” Mifsud boasted to students at American University in our nation’s capital in the autumn of 2014, offered “funds for scholarships” to anyone “interested in diplomacy.” How Mifsud’s barely extant “academy” afforded such largess, and who was paying for his regular international travels, are questions that need to be answered.
To anyone versed in Russian spies and their ways, Mifsud was in America looking for potential agents for the SVR; this is called “spotting and assessing” in the espionage trade. Mifsud’s exact relationship with Russian intelligence remains unclear, though his ability to reach out to top players in Moscow was evident in the Papadopoulos case. He appears to combine disseminating Kremlin propaganda with actual spy recruitment—or at least serving as a cut-out for it.
That Mifsud is Maltese may not be coincidental, given the little island’s outsized role in shady financial dealings and money laundering, much of it Russian. The recent car-bomb assassination of a Maltese journalist who was digging into the country’s financial crimes and corruption has focused attention on the island, not least because murdering journalists is something that’s routine in Putin’s Russia, not in the European Union.
All the same, Mifsud is not a one-off. Poland recently expelled a Russian spy very much like him, as I reported. Last month, Warsaw announced it had evicted Dmitry Karnaukhov, a Russian researcher who was really a Kremlin spy. Like Mifsud, he was an academic of sorts, which gave him access to conferences and related professorial venues, but Karnaukhov’s actual job was serving as an SVR operative charged with disseminating Kremlin propaganda plus spotting and assessing potential agents of Russian intelligence.
This breed of Russian spy—ostensibly a private citizen who’s able to masquerade as an academic or think-tank denizen—isn’t exactly new, but they have appeared in impressive numbers across the West over the last decade. Several were expelled from the United States in 2010 in Operation Ghost Stories, in which the FBI booted 10 SVR Illegals from our country. However, others like them continue to ply their clandestine trade in Western capitals, attending conferences looking for “new friends” who might be interested in a free junket to Moscow.
Given his key role in the Papadopoulos case and the Trump campaign’s outreach to Moscow, Joseph Mifsud is someone that the FBI and Team Mueller need to talk to. Let’s hope they can track him down before the Russians do. Regardless, it’s naïve to think “the Professor” is one of a kind. There are more like him out there, spying for the Kremlin, attempting to subvert our democracies from within. Knowing they exist is the first step to pushing back against Putin’s Special War.
John Schindler is a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer. A specialist in espionage and terrorism, he’s also been a Navy officer and a War College professor. He’s published four books and is on Twitter at @20committee.
Gaetz is a an opportunistic scumbag. This man represents my district and people here love him.
He's got a big future in D.C.He won by 38 pointsGaetz is a an opportunistic scumbag. This man represents my district and people here love him.
Brehs and brehettes, never knew how fukked up Putin was 
Dude is an even bigger sociopath than trump, if that's even hard to conceptualize.
This woman basically breaks down how sick and twisted Putin is, along with how Russia basically "influenced" our election
It's long watch but definitely worth it. I kept it on the background while getting ready and some of the shyt I heard was cringe-worthy and gut wrenching, when you think about how 45 stans Putin like a god....
Dude is an even bigger sociopath than trump, if that's even hard to conceptualize.
This woman basically breaks down how sick and twisted Putin is, along with how Russia basically "influenced" our election
It's long watch but definitely worth it. I kept it on the background while getting ready and some of the shyt I heard was cringe-worthy and gut wrenching, when you think about how 45 stans Putin like a god....
Hood Critic
The Power Circle
"...the bag is on the way..." - Birdman
Took over from his daddy.He won by 38 points