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Clint Watts Profile picture
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26 Jan, 5 tweets, 3 min read
"How Russia Divides America" The Selected Wisdom team's second episode. Today's topic is Kremlin information warfare and how to target America with propaganda and disinformation in the lead up to an election. Hint: It's not Dems vs GOP #TrustButVerify
Lots of references inform this analysis. See this entire research stream @FPRI #FIE2020 project where we show how Russia discusses the candidate, this mirrors the social media shutdowns of Kremlin troll farm activity past 5 years fpri.org/research/fie20…
Chapters 4 & 6 of Messing with the Enemy also give a long breakdown of this targeting strategy amazon.com/Messing-Enemy-…
Or if you want the 3.5 hour version instead of the 3.5 minute version, I'd recommend Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, March 30, 2017 c-span.org/video/?426227-…
And if you want a graphic, here’s the PPT version

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More from @selectedwisdom

Clint Watts Profile picture
26 Jan
“After Capitol riot, a call to protect veterans from disinformation - Roll Call” - lots to unpack here, in sum, influence of current & former military via information confluence of several streams, RU disinfo a factor, but rides the wave of internal tide rollcall.com/2021/01/26/aft…
Yes, Kremlin has under discussed line of influence targeting military, RU pitch was straightforward to US military. “We’re white, you’re white, We’re Christian, you’re Christian, you like guns, we like guns, you kill terrorists, we kill terrorists - let’s do it together”
But RU propaganda & disinfo minor compared to US & military influencing itself. War on Terror conducted by only few Americans, largely disconnected from US population with each year after 9/11. Successive, endless tours to AFG/IZ led development separate warrior class sentiment
Read 11 tweets
Clint Watts Profile picture
16 Jan
“Extremism: When Should We Worry?” Selected Wisdom team got together this week & filmed short clip, reboot of discussions we used to have about international terrorism but now we are worried about it at home. #TrustButVerify
If you like these short clips, please subscribe to the Selected Wisdom channel “Trust but Verify” as we’ll have new segments coming out on the next few weeks youtube.com/channel/UChEI1…
For those that remember the GWOT days, I stole the chart concept from this classic report by @will_mccants “Militant Ideology Atlas- Executive Report” ctc.usma.edu/app/uploads/20…
Read 4 tweets
Clint Watts Profile picture
7 Jan
No one should be surprised about what happened with Trump supporters storming the Capitol yesterday, but why yesterday, and not on election day or some other day since the election, several reasons......
1 – on election day, Trump campaign needed people to vote, they still thought they could win and almost did, so they couldn’t lead supporters to a specific time & place, by Jan 6, Trump had lost & DC/Capitol became a place where all could be directed for chaos
2 – Yesterday's insurrection was completely foreseeable, lead up election day, we saw many groups (militias, white supremacists, anti-government) calling for mobilizations to violence. The same groups have set about planning this mobilization to DC for weeks.
Read 20 tweets
Clint Watts Profile picture
20 Dec 20
“ideas included commandeering voting machines, with Powell as a special counsel to inspect the machines” as dumb as this sounds, this is key to success Trump reality distortion machine: employing physical actions to drive virtual conversations axios.com/trump-official…
Seizing voting machines will be a PR stunt, filming removal machines for nonsensical inspection, when the machines data has already been counted elsewhere and backed by paper ballots. It’s all a show from the start
I’m worried for incoming admin trying to counter nonsense, dumb as these schemes sound, they work & dry podium speeches will not be effective in dispelling the disinformation
Read 4 tweets
Clint Watts Profile picture
13 Dec 20
But I thought Russia was our friend?
A lot of interesting bits (bytes) in this likely Russian hack of Treasury/Commerce, suspected connection to SVR (RU foreign intelligence) makes sense as targets are political & economic espionage rather than just campaign related episodic hacking nytimes.com/2020/12/13/us/…
Timing is curious, question will be did they focus on Commerce/Treasury deliberately as a weak spot while U.S. worried about election, or was this when the opportunity revealed itself through the insertion and deployment of SolarWinds code?
Read 6 tweets
Clint Watts Profile picture
7 Dec 20
Vaccine conspiracies are overtaking election disinformation, but we can & we must preempt this next wave of nonsense, new post- “COVID-19 Vaccine Conspiracies & the Next Wave of Disinformation” ⁦@FPRI⁩ fpri.org/fie/covid-19-v…
Most dangerous potential vaccine disinformation scenario near term. PizzaGate style acute mobilization or attack on a vaccine distribution point targeting health care workers, medical facilities. This can be anticipated & possibly disrupted if we prepare like we did election2020
Second less likely, but definitely harmful scenario would be vaccine disinfo inspired attack on supply lines for vaccines. Some unique vulnerabilities for deploying vaccines (cold temps, storage, scale, etc) will require different security than we'd normally consider
Read 8 tweets

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