Reading Mueller: of social media and hacking

As an expression of regard for all the lawyers and other serious students of authoritarianism whose observations and dogged work have helped keep me sane since the election of Donald Trump, I'm reading the Mueller Report. Lawyers, pundits, and Robert Mueller himself seem to beg citizens to "just read it." So I am reading it. It will be slow going, not because it is hard to read, but because it is simply depressing. Look for occasional progress reports here.

Initially, here's what I gleaned from the first two sections; these describe activities for which Mueller entered indictments with bills of particulars during 2018, so much of their content has been thoroughly chewed over in the media.

"Russian Active Measures Social Media Campaign"
The Mueller investigation determined that a Russian public/private entity -- that is, it was fronted by one of Putin's oligarch buddies -- the Internet Research Agency:

... operated social media accounts and group pages designed to attract U.S. audiences. These groups and accounts, which addressed divisive U.S. political and social issues, falsely claimed to be controlled by U.S. activists.

Rubbing salt in our national wounds and our enduring shame,

the IRA created accounts in the names of fictitious U.S. organizations and grassroots groups and used these accounts to pose as anti-immigration groups, Tea Party activists, Black Lives Matter protestors, and other U.S. social and political activists.

Mueller confirms what Timothy Snyder hypothesized from looking around in The Road to Unfreedom; the fuel here was our own injustices and divisions.

Among the fake personas/accounts that Russian operatives created was something that called itself "Blacktivist." I vaguely remember material from Blacktivist floating through my Facebook feed; I also remember sensing that something was a little off there. But, I thought, lots of odd opinions float about.

Since I write in an opinionated way about contentious matters of race, gender and power, I would not be surprised if automated internet trawling looking for easy targets had picked me up. And I have some confirmation that is true. I seldom pay any attention to this blog's stats which, though rudimentary, give me a very rough sense of where traffic originates. I remember being surprised by the number of hits from Russia in the 2015-2017 period. I can't isolate and retrieve the numbers from that time (I really don't pay much attention); but I can report that over the blog's life nearly 14 percent of its traffic was identified by Google as originating in Russian. I have occasionally written about Russia long before Trump but nothing to really call attention .... WTF???

The Russians used the social media program to keep us inflamed. And they found a ready audience -- most especially among the Trump campaign and its hangers-on.

Among the U.S. “leaders of public opinion” targeted by the IRA were various members and surrogates of the Trump Campaign. In total, Trump Campaign affiliates promoted dozens of tweets, posts, and other political content created by the IRA.

Mueller treats the U.S. persons who disseminated Russian material as unwitting dupes; some ordinary citizens even organized pro-Trump rallies. Though it is painful to think of this "active measures campaign" as a successful foreign intrusion on our election, in truth the Mueller description reads exactly like what any well-resourced, ethically under-scrupulous, U.S. political campaign would likely attempt to organize, hopefully a little more transparently. There is no suggestion that the actual Trump for President campaign had the capacity to do anything this competent.

And by 2020, every campaign (and who knows how many countries) will probably have some more or less covert branch/offshoot trying to replicate this. Campaigns glom on to what worked in the last cycle ...

"Russian Government Links To And Contacts With The Trump Campaign"
The Mueller report summarizes this section:

Beginning in March 2016, units of the Russian Federation’s Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff (GRU) hacked the computers and email accounts of organizations, employees, and volunteers supporting the Clinton Campaign, including the email account of campaign chairman John Podesta. Starting in April 2016, the GRU hacked into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The GRU targeted hundreds of email accounts used by Clinton Campaign employees, advisors, and volunteers. In total, the GRU stole hundreds of thousands of documents from the compromised email accounts and networks.109 The GRU later released stolen Clinton Campaign and DNC documents through online personas, “DCLeaks” and “Guccifer 2.0,” and later through the organization WikiLeaks. The release of the documents was designed and timed to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election and undermine the Clinton Campaign.

Some observations:

• The hacking and email dissemination was a military operation. That's worth remembering; Russia is carrying on a covert war against the US political system.

• Much of the hacking was facilitated by "spearfishing" -- tempting people to click on phony emails which contained embedded code that gave the hackers access to their files and permissions. Such human social engineering is an awful lot of what makes hacking possible. It's not magic or the machines; it's us.

• The Report documents that this Russian military campaign used several internet personas to strategically release hacked Clinton and Democratic Party emails, ending up going through Wikileaks. I found myself wondering: was Wikileaks a preferred cut-out for the Russians because the organization retained some slight residual credibility from its early days as a rather cheerful, anti-authority, anarchist outfit?

• Going through Wikileaks meant going through Julian Assange, holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London while hiding out from rape charges in Sweden. Assange seems to be one of those characters whose "politics," perhaps once imaginative or even hopeful, has curdled into preening hatred of anyone who gets in his way. Mueller reprints a snippet of Assange's hatred for Hillary that starts as a species of analysis and goes off a frustrated, mysogynist, cliff.

  “[w]e believe it would be much better for GOP to win . . . Dems+Media+liberals woudl [sic] then form a block to reign in their worst qualities. . . . With Hillary in charge, GOP will be pushing for her worst qualities., dems+media+neoliberals will be mute. . . . She’s a bright, well connected, sadisitic sociopath.”

  This stuff was in the leftish, mostly male, air we breathed. I wrote about it a week before the 2016 election. Though it starts from realities, it easily degenerates into venomous stupidity. The Russians used our weaknesses to break our system; was Assange just another dupe?

• Mueller reproduces some of Donald Trump Jr.'s messages about (not to) Wikileaks. These snippets support the pundit theory that the younger Trump was simply too stupid to charge with any witting crime.

In general, though the hacking and email releases through cut outs were Russian military operations, for me the Mueller report confirms what those who know Russia better than we do, such as Masha Gessen, have been trying to tell us: “[Putin's] not actually so scary.”

These sections of the Mueller Report left me believing that the Russian social media manipulation and the cyber attack got very, very, very lucky through exploitation of a cluster of clowns -- of whom the most cretinous became President -- whether or not Trump is actively guilty of anything. To be continued as I read further ...

On hating Hillary

Can "the left" please get clear on what we have against Hillary Clinton? It probably doesn't matter -- as "the left" we're pretty puny. But as objects among the targets of the right wing noise machine, sometimes articulate ones, we might matter a little during the coming Clinton presidency.

So it wouldn't hurt to do a practice run by deconstructing our reaction to James Comey's vacuous disclosure of something indistinct about emails involving Anthny Weiner, Huma Abedin, and the prospective president. It seems to have come about because an FBI director knew the wingers in his department would blow it open if he didn't speak up and then Republicans would beat up on him. Comey's a self-seeking coward apparently. This is significant to us? Really now!

Substantively, it's hard to imagine we, "the left," give a shit. I mean come on, this axis is just tabloid gossip fodder (consensual fodder, unlike Mr. Trump's sexual assaults on women within his reach).

And we have no need to jump in with the media firestorm. In any Hillary Clinton media pile on, we can be tempted to participate -- hey, we the ignored get to spend a few minutes on the side of the noise machine. How satisfying ... and the right will offer endless opportunities during a Clinton presidency.

That's more bullshit. Unlike the right, we don't hate Hillary Clinton for being an uppity woman whose life has been about desacralizing the works of that loathsome old huckster Ronald Reagan. (Good oped by Susan Faludi on this point.)

We don't hate Hillary Clinton because she is "crooked." Like most all people who enjoy privilege at whatever level, she is almost certainly guilty of bending and warping the rules for her personal and family benefit. (Not of course on the scale of Mr. Trump, but that goes without saying.) In this, she's just normal in a society in which we're taught it is every person for themselves. Law constrains most people at least somewhat, including Clintons. We think it should constrain everyone equally, don't we?

Unlike the right, we don't hate Clinton for her domestic policies. She could always be better. But if she has her druthers (likely she won't) she'd implement measures that materially benefit poor women of all races and ethnicities. That should matter. And, perhaps even more than Mr. Obama whose own race has forced him to keep his head down, she'll be open to pressure from communities of color on justice issues because these communities will have elected her. She needs to defend immigrants in any way she can within the law. That's not a reason to hate her.

A wiser left would largely avoid hating politicians at all. They do what they do in response to incentives we should seek to understand - and to influence. Some of them may seem congenial human beings and many do not, but that is just how it is.

We will be properly and intensely critical of Clinton because 1) unless constrained, she'll bend toward the interests of financiers and corporations that gouge ordinary people and 2) she's historically a war hawk, inclined toward military adventures in the face of increasing imperial impotence. "Jail the bankers!" and "No more wars" are slogans for "the left." "Crooked Hillary" and "Jail the bitch" are the calls of people who are as much our enemies as Clinton's enemies.

Let's try to remember that, lest a Hillary Clinton presidency confuse we, "the left," about who we are.

So we don't have to hate Hillary. Spewing Clinton-hate is the right's tactic. And we certainly don't have to adopt right wing memes as we respond to another President Clinton.

Clinton rules: getting ready to live with them

A week or so ago, Ezra Klein of Vox offered a thoughtful aside on his excellent podcast to the effect that liberals have worked so hard on imagining the horrors that a Trump presidency would bring that we haven't put enough thought into imagining what a Hillary Clinton presidency would be like.

I won't entirely cop to Klein's critique: I've been calling out Clinton's enthusiasm for imperial war making since October 2013. Here's a completely plausible current campaign on that front.

But it would be accurate to say that I've put little energy into thinking about what, unless something changes drastically, will be one of the core consequences: we'll be living in a national media environment in which Clinton Rules rule. And we better start thinking about how to keep from drowning in this swamp of dubious muck.

What are Clinton Rules? Jonathan Allen has outlined how journalists routinely frame every story which includes the Clintons.

• Everything, no matter how ludicrous-sounding, is worthy of a full investigation by federal agencies, Congress, the "vast right-wing conspiracy," and mainstream media outlets.

• Every allegation, no matter how ludicrous, is believable until it can be proven completely and utterly false. And even then, it keeps a life of its own in the conservative media world.

• The media assumes that Clinton is acting in bad faith until there's hard evidence otherwise.

• Everything is newsworthy because the Clintons are the equivalent of America's royal family.

• Everything she does is fake and calculated for maximum political benefit.

Why does the press adopt this posture? According to Allen,

... I've done a lot of research about the Clintons' relationship with the media, and experienced it firsthand. As an author, I felt that I owed it to myself and the reader to report, investigate, and write with the same mix of curiosity, skepticism, rigor, and compassion that I would use with any other subject. I wanted to sell books, of course. But the easier way to do that — proven over time — is to write as though the Clintons are the purest form of evil. The same holds for daily reporting. Want to drive traffic to a website? Write something nasty about a Clinton, particularly Hillary.

Republicans and their compatriots on the far right can be counted on to amplify Clinton Rules journalism -- and the Clintons usually react defensively which doesn't help.

And, as Bill demonstrated throughout his Presidency, both Clintons are given to parsing, speaking with overanalyzed specificity in a way that obscures the plain meaning of words. No, Bill "didn't have sex with that woman" -- if by "sex" you mean intercourse rather than receiving a blow job. Maybe whatever conduct or inaction being questioned by the usual obnoxious subjects -- Republicans and media -- wasn't illegal. But all too often, Clintons do seem to think they can risk staying right at the edge of legality.

Neither Clinton seems to have an inner instinct that flashes a warning signal when they might give the appearance of impropriety, even if their conduct includes no substantial wrongdoing. And their enemies, and a giddy, frustrated press, will stand ready to jump them.

We haven't had this kind of atmosphere of late. The Obama administration has been close to scandal free. Republicans have tried -- you probably blinked and missed it, but there was the Solyndra. But this sort of stupid stuff has only stuck in far right circles.

With Hillary Clinton, the muck will be back. The New York Times seems particularly addicted to the narrative of the always dirty Clintons -- odd since they are also touting her as a necessary President. Guess a smeared Clinton is good for business.

Clinton herself tried to talk with reporters on her plane in the last few days. The hungry scandal beast is unlikely to be appeased.

So how should the rest of us ordinary, progressive citizens approach the atmosphere of all-the-time-all-Clinton-muck we might expect to live in? I for one intend to tune Clinton Rules reporting out. In fact, I already do. I don't click on articles about putative Clinton scandals unless I know enough about the topic to think I can evaluate them. Something will have to be pretty darn large and enduring to break through my screen. This worked in her husband's time: I never bothered to clutter my brain with Travelgate, Filegate, Whitewater, etc. And I don't have any reason to think I missed anything substantive.

Now if she goes and does "stupid shit," if/when she bombs someone ... that would be scandalous and worth attending to.

More on the hawkishness of Hillary Clinton

We may see less of this than we fear.

Harvard Professor Stephen Walt is a scholar of international relations who finds reason to hope that U.S. imperial pretensions have exhausted their run:

... assuming Trump loses, are we stuck with the same strategy of liberal hegemony that has performed so poorly for the past 25 years? Hillary Clinton and her vast team of advisors are strongly committed to the familiar nostrums about America’s “indispensable” role, and her administration may keep trying to roll the stone uphill and remake the world in America’s image. Indeed, some insiders think she’ll be quick to abandon Obama’s somewhat more cautious attitude and take a more interventionist approach to trouble spots like Syria.

Maybe, but I’m not so sure. The days when the United States could manage most of the globe simultaneously are behind us; the federal budget will be tight no matter who wins; China is getting stronger and more ambitious; and the next president will have to make some hard choices and set priorities among Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and other global issues. You might also recall that former president and potential first gentleman Bill Clinton was exceedingly cautious about using military force — and especially U.S. ground troops — and he once told aide George Stephanopoulos that “Americans are basically isolationist.” That insight is even truer today: Because the United States presently faces no existential threats, public support for a costly foreign policy remains paper-thin. Clinton may try to run the world as her predecessors have, but she’ll have to try to do it on the cheap.

So even if Trump goes down in a resounding defeat and a President Hillary Clinton enters the Oval Office accompanied by a phalanx of liberal interventionists and unrepentant neoconservatives, I wouldn’t be all that surprised if she behaves with more restraint than her hawkish past might suggest.

That strange book, The Clinton Tapes, does bear out the image of Bill Clinton as a cautious commander in chief.

And reality is stubborn; U.S. rulers can no longer even pretend to make their own.