Quotes of the Day:

"I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less we use our power the greater it will be." 

- Thomas Jefferson

“It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.” 

- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

"When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty."

 - George Bernard Shaw

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 25, 2023

2. China sends aircraft and vessels toward Taiwan days after U.S. approves $500-million arms sale

3. U.S. denies reports claiming it considered canceling F-16 sale to Taiwan

4. Newly declassified US intel claims Russia is laundering propaganda through unwitting Westerners

5. China’s Problems Are Real

6. Mystery land buyers around California Air Force base revealed

7. Pacific islands warn US over Chinese threat and urge Biden to increase aid

8. The US needs a stable Chinese economy. Will Biden’s commerce secretary offer help?

9. Analysis | Without Prigozhin, expect some changes around the edges on Russian influence operations

10. Building a digital army: UN peacekeepers fight deadly disinformation

11. UN advisor says AI may have ‘massive’ impact on voters: 2024 will be the ‘deepfake election’

12. Are Your Ads Funding Disinformation?

13. What China’s Economic Woes May Mean for the U.S.

14.  Ukraine Is Still Grappling With the Battlefield Prigozhin Left Behind

15. How a small-town feud in Kansas sent a shock through American journalism

16. Pentagon protested false Fox News report about fallen Marine, emails show

17. China Proposes Permanent, Unique ID for Everyone in the Metaverse

18. With Prigozhin Presumed Dead, What Happens to the Wagner Group Now?

19. Women in SOF resort to buying their own armor and equipment - SOAA

20. Following Elon Musk’s lead, Big Tech is surrendering to disinformation

21. Ukraine Doesn’t Need Armchair Generals

22. John McCain’s warning of the authoritarian threat should be heeded

23.  China Wants to Run Your Internet

24. Royal Thai Army, US Soldiers Participate in Historic All-Female Airborne Course

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 25, 2023

Maps/graphics/citations: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-25-2023

Key Takeaways:

• Russian President Vladimir Putin’s August 24 remarks about Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death established the Kremlin-approved narrative on the issue, and Russian government officials, Kremlin affiliates, and the Russian information space continued to toe this line on August 25.
• Some prominent voices in the Russian information space notably deviated from Putin’s established narrative, however.
• Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko issued a statement on Prigozhin’s death on August 25 that likely aimed at balancing his relationship with the Kremlin with maintaining domestic control, but that also directly contradicted his previous statements concerning the deal he brokered between the Kremlin and Prigozhin.
• The Financial Times reported on the bleak future of the Wagner Group’s operations in Africa following Prigozhin’s death.
• Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations near Robotyne in western Zaporizhia Oblast and reportedly advanced on August 25 as Russian milbloggers expressed concern over a lack of reinforcements and troop rotations in the area.
• Reports of a Russian unit suffering significant losses with inadequate support on an unspecified island in the Dnipro River delta sparked outrage against the Russian military command in some parts of the Russian information space.
• Ukrainian drones likely struck a Russian duty station in occupied Crimea on August 25.
• Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, near Bakhmut, along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, and in western Donetsk Oblast on August 25 and advanced.
• Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations in at least two sectors of the front on August 25 and reportedly advanced in western Zaporizhia Oblast.
• Russian authorities are likely setting conditions to falsify the results of the September 2023 regional elections in occupied Ukraine. 

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 25, 2023

Aug 25, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Grace Mappes, Riley Bailey, Angelica Evans, Christina Harward, and Frederick W. Kagan

August 25, 2023, 7:55pm ET 

Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.

Click here to access ISW’s archive of interactive time-lapse maps of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These maps complement the static control-of-terrain map that ISW produces daily by showing a dynamic frontline. ISW will update this time-lapse map archive monthly.

Note: The data cut-off for this product was 1:00pm ET on August 25. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the August 26 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s August 24 remarks about Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death established the Kremlin-approved narrative on the issue, and Russian government officials, Kremlin affiliates, and the Russian information space continued to toe this line on August 25. Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov lambasted suggestions and claims that Putin was involved in the death of Prigozhin, calling them “an absolute lie.”[1] Peskov stated that there are no official forensic details on Prigozhin’s death yet and claimed that Putin had not met with Prigozhin in the Kremlin in recent days.[2] Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov mirrored some of Putin’s language about Wagner and Prigozhin by stating that Prigozhin “undoubtedly made a great contribution” to the Russian war effort in Ukraine.[3] The Russian information space largely followed the Kremlin-approved narrative and continues to refrain from linking the Kremlin to the plane crash.[4]

Some prominent voices in the Russian information space notably deviated from Putin’s established narrative, however. Former Putin bodyguard and current Tula Oblast Governor Alexey Dyumin stated that it is possible to “forgive mistakes and even cowardice, [but] never betrayal,” and claimed that Prigozhin and Wagner Group founder Dmitry Utkin were not “traitors.”[5] Dyumin’s statement implies that the Wagner June 24 rebellion was not actually a rebellion. Some Russian sources floated Dyumin as a possible replacement for Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu after the rebellion, and Putin made a public point that Shoigu retains a dominant position.[6] Russian ”Vostok” Battalion commander Alexander Khodakovsky stated on August 25 that some groups of sources, excluding imprisoned ardent nationalist Igor Girkin, are trying to use Prigozhin’s death to discredit Russian authorities to sow instability and argued that these claimed discreditation campaigns are a sign of instability within Russia.[7] Khodakovsky called for Girkin‘s release following Prigozhin‘s death on August 23 on the grounds that more (presumably good) people were needed to defend Russia.[8] Girkin’s official Telegram account published a statement from him via his lawyer on August 24, wherein Girkin claims that Prigozhin’s plane crash is indicative of deepening unrest within Russia - mirroring Khodakovsky’s complaint.[9] Girkin also claimed that the ”[19]90s are back,” implying that Putin’s broad effort to restore order to Russia following the chaos and gangsterism following the fall of the Soviet Union has failed — a direct attack on a central tenet of Putin’s claimed legitimacy.[10]

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko issued a statement on Prigozhin’s death on August 25 that likely aimed at balancing his relationship with the Kremlin with maintaining domestic control, but that also directly contradicted his previous statements concerning the deal he brokered between the Kremlin and Prigozhin. ISW incorrectly forecasted yesterday that Lukashenko would refrain from publicly speaking about Prigozhin’s death to avoid exacerbating his tenuous position with the Kremlin.[11] Lukashenko’s likely desire to maintain the appearance of being a sovereign leader appears to have outweighed any such concerns. Lukashenko asserted that Wagner would continue to operate within Belarus according to a system that he and Prigozhin had built in recent months and that 10,000 Wagner personnel will be in the country within a few days.[12] The Wagner contingent in Belarus has been reportedly declining in recent weeks, likely due to the Kremlin’s and Russian Ministry of Defense‘s (MoD) apparently successful effort to weaken Wagner.[13] Lukashenko directly responded to satellite imagery showing that up to a third of the tents at the Wagner camp in Tsel, Asipovichy, Belarus had been dismantled in the previous month and claimed that Wagner and Belarusian officials had only dismantled unnecessary tents not needed for the expected number of Wagner fighters.[14] It is extremely unlikely that 10,000 Wagner fighters will arrive in Belarus, nor are that many Wagner personnel needed as advisors and trainers to help Lukashenko build an unspecified Belarusian ”contract army.”[15] Lukashenko has routinely attempted to portray himself as a sovereign leader despite Russia’s current de-facto occupation of the country, and he likely hopes to prevent his domestic audience from viewing Putin’s almost certain assassination of Prigozhin as the Kremlin’s unilateral cancellation of agreements that he had made with Wagner.[16]

Lukashenko also expanded on his role in the negotiations that led to the agreement that ended Wagner’s June 24 rebellion.  Lukashenko stated that over a series of several calls he warned both Prigozhin and Utkin that pressing the rebellion would result in their deaths, portraying himself again as the one who convinced Prigozhin to end the rebellion.[17] Lukashenko likely hoped to underscore the initial deal and Wagner’s arrival in Belarus as examples of his ability to make high-level security decisions outside of the Kremlin’s dictates. Lukashenko endorsed the Kremlin narrative line that Putin had absolutely nothing to do with Prigozhin’s “accident,” dismissed assertions that a missile brought down the plane, and even claimed that he had warned Prigozhin via Putin about an unspecified assassination attempt.[18] Lukashenko notably tried to absolve himself of any responsibility for failing to protect Prigozhin by claiming that safety guarantees were never a part of the conversations he had with Wagner and the Kremlin.[19] Lukashenko had indicated on June 27, however, that Putin “promised” both Lukashenko and Prigozhin that Prigozhin and the Wagner would enjoy unspecified “security guarantees” in Belarus.[20]

The Financial Times reported on the bleak future of the Wagner Group’s operations in Africa following Prigozhin’s death. The Financial Times (FT) cited people familiar with the matter as saying that Prigozhin’s recent trip to Africa may have aimed to prevent the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) from taking control of Wagner’s operations in Africa.[21] This report is consistent with ISW‘s previous assessment that Prigozhin was likely attempting to counter efforts by the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) and the Kremlin to weaken and destroy Wagner following the rebellion.[22] FT reported that a longtime acquaintance of Prigozhin stated that Wagner’s operations in Africa will likely struggle without Prigozhin’s leadership.[23] An FT source close to the Russian MoD stated that it is unlikely the Russian military would be able to fully replicate Wagner’s operations in Africa under Prigozhin if the Russian MoD did take over Wagner.[24]

Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations near Robotyne in western Zaporizhia Oblast on August 25 and reportedly advanced as Russian milbloggers expressed concern over a lack of reinforcements and troop rotations in the area. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces achieved unspecified successes in the directions of the Novodanylivka-Novopokropivka (5-13km south of Orikhiv) line and the Mala Tokmachka-Ocheretuvate (9-25km southeast of Orikhiv) line.[25] A prominent Russian milblogger expressed concern about the ability of battle-weary Russian forces to defend against possible future renewed Ukrainian attacks near Robotyne (10km south of Orikhiv) amid claims that fighting shifted to southern Robotyne.[26] The milblogger claimed that many of the Russian servicemen fighting near Robotyne have been on the frontline since the start of the Ukrainian counteroffensive and that these units struggle with a shortage of frontline reinforcements.[27] This claim supports ISW’s assessment that Russian forces fighting in the western Zaporizhia Oblast area have been defending against Ukrainian attacks since the start of the counteroffensive without rotation or significant reinforcement.[28]

Reports of a Russian unit suffering significant losses with inadequate support on an unspecified island in the Dnipro River delta sparked outrage against the Russian military command in some parts of the Russian information space. Russian milbloggers amplified a complaint allegedly from personnel of the Russian 205th Motorized Rifle Brigade (49th Combined Arms Army, Southern Military District) claiming that elements were suffering significant casualties under Ukrainian artillery fire on an island in the Kherson direction and that commanders were ignoring the personnel’s calls for artillery fire.[29] The personnel claimed that a company commander tried to evacuate his unit from the island, but senior commanders stopped the evacuation, sent away the commander, and dismissed two other commanders who supported the withdrawal.[30] Russian milbloggers quickly jumped to criticize the Russian military command for failing to solve systemic issues among Russian forces on the Kherson frontline, including a lack of supplies and frontal assaults against Ukrainian east-bank positions under heavy artillery fire and with no support.[31] Milbloggers heavily criticized Russian commanders for failing to take accountability and for not resolving these issues.[32] The Russian information space previously eviscerated the Russian military command for similar failures combating a limited Ukrainian presence near the Antonivsky Bridge on the Kherson frontline in late June, and some milbloggers claimed that this widespread criticism was the only factor that compelled the Russian military command to fix the issues at the time.[33] The current round of criticism follows recent complaints about the failure to adequately respond to a limited Ukrainian presence on the east bank of the Dnipro River and criticism that Russian authorities never provided promised boats to Russian forces in the area.[34]

Ukrainian drones likely struck a Russian duty station in occupied Crimea on August 25. Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Representative Andriy Yusov stated that Ukrainian drones targeted the base of the Russian 126th Guards Coastal Defense Brigade (Black Sea Fleet) near Perevalne, Simferopol Raion.[35] Crimean Tatar Resource Center Head Eskander Bariev also stated that residents reported explosions throughout occupied Crimea, particularly near Perevalne.[36] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Ukrainian forces launched 42 drones at targets in Crimea but that Russian air defense and electronic warfare (EW) systems downed all 42 Ukrainian drones.[37] A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that this was the largest Ukrainian drone strike in recent months.[38] GUR Chief Major General Kyrylo Budanov reiterated on August 24 that Ukrainian forces have the ability to strike any part of occupied Crimea.[39]

Russian forces conducted an unsuccessful missile and drone strike against targets in Odesa Oblast overnight on August 24-25. Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces launched two Kh-59 missiles, two Kalibr missiles, and one Shahed-136/131 drone and that Ukrainian air defenses shot down all five projectiles.[40] The Ukrainian Southern Operational Command reported that the Russian missiles targeted Odesa City and a port in Odesa Oblast.[41]

Key Takeaways:

• Russian President Vladimir Putin’s August 24 remarks about Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death established the Kremlin-approved narrative on the issue, and Russian government officials, Kremlin affiliates, and the Russian information space continued to toe this line on August 25.
• Some prominent voices in the Russian information space notably deviated from Putin’s established narrative, however.
• Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko issued a statement on Prigozhin’s death on August 25 that likely aimed at balancing his relationship with the Kremlin with maintaining domestic control, but that also directly contradicted his previous statements concerning the deal he brokered between the Kremlin and Prigozhin.
• The Financial Times reported on the bleak future of the Wagner Group’s operations in Africa following Prigozhin’s death.
• Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations near Robotyne in western Zaporizhia Oblast and reportedly advanced on August 25 as Russian milbloggers expressed concern over a lack of reinforcements and troop rotations in the area.
• Reports of a Russian unit suffering significant losses with inadequate support on an unspecified island in the Dnipro River delta sparked outrage against the Russian military command in some parts of the Russian information space.
• Ukrainian drones likely struck a Russian duty station in occupied Crimea on August 25.
• Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, near Bakhmut, along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, and in western Donetsk Oblast on August 25 and advanced.
• Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations in at least two sectors of the front on August 25 and reportedly advanced in western Zaporizhia Oblast.
• Russian authorities are likely setting conditions to falsify the results of the September 2023 regional elections in occupied Ukraine. 

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and the Ukrainian population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

• Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis
• Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
• Activities in Russian-occupied areas

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Luhansk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast)

Russian forces continued offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line on August 25 and advanced. Geolocated footage published on August 25 indicates that Russian forces advanced west of Kovalivka (14km southwest of Svatove).[42] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Novoyehorivka (17km southwest of Svatove).[43] Ukrainian Ground Forces Commander Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi stated that Russian forces are transferring newly formed brigades and divisions to the Kupyansk and Lyman directions after a month of fierce fighting and significant Russian losses in order to resume active offensive operations in these directions.[44] ISW has not observed evidence of new Russian units or formations arriving in this sector of the front, however.

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted ground attacks along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line on August 25 but did not advance. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian attacks near Synkivka (8km northeast of Kupyansk) in Kharkiv Oblast and Serhiivka (12km southwest of Svatove) and Kuzmyne (4km southwest of Kreminna) in Luhansk Oblast.[45] Russian Western Grouping of Forces Press Officer Yaroslav Yakimkin claimed that Russian forces repelled four Ukrainian counterattacks in the Kupyansk direction.[46] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces repelled two Ukrainian armored assaults near Torske (15km west of Kreminna) and an attack near the Serebryanske forest area (11km south of Kreminna).[47]

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations in the Bakhmut area but did not make any claimed or confirmed advances on August 25. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations south of Bakhmut.[48] Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces attacked near Kurdyumivka (14km southwest of Bakhmut) and Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut).[49] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian ground attacks near Zaliznyanske (12km northwest of Bakhmut) and Klishchiivka.[50] A Ukrainian commander reported on August 24 that Russian forces are transferring “fresh” units to the Bakhmut direction from other areas of the front due to heavy fighting in the Bakhmut area.[51] ISW has not yet observed visual confirmation of this report; ISW last observed new Russian units transferring to the Bakhmut area in early-to-mid-July, including the 98th Airborne (VDV) Division, Akhmat Spetsnaz units, and an unspecified BARS (Russian Combat Reserve) unit.[52]

Russian forces continued limited offensive operations in the Bakhmut area and reportedly made marginal advances on August 25. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Klishchiivka.[53] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces attacked near Vesele (19km north of Bakhmut), and another Russian source claimed that Russian forces advanced in the area.[54]

Russian forces continued limited offensive operations on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line but did not advance on August 25. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful operations south of Avdiivka, near Pervomaiske (11km southwest of Avdiivka), near Marinka (27km southwest of Avdiivka), and northeast of Novomykhailivka (36km southwest of Avdiivka).[55]

Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)

The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that elements of the Russian Eastern Grouping of Forces repelled a Ukrainian assault near Solodke (17km southwest of Donetsk City) in western Donetsk Oblast on August 25.[56]

The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Vuhledar (30km southwest of Donetsk City) in western Donetsk Oblast on August 25.[57]

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted unsuccessful limited ground attacks along the administrative border between Donetsk and Zaporizhia oblasts on August 25. Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Pryyutne (15km southwest of Velyka Novosilka) and Urozhaine (9km south of Velyka Novosilka) and in the direction of Staromlynivka (14km south of Velyka Novosilka).[58] Russian sources, including the “Vostok” Battalion operating in the area, continue to express concerns about Russian vulnerabilities to possible future Ukrainian offensive operations in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area.[59]

Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast and reportedly advanced on August 25. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in the Melitopol (western Zaporizhia Oblast) direction and achieved unspecified success in the direction of Novodanylivka to Novopokropivka (5-13km south of Orikhiv) and Mala Tokmachka to Ocheretuvate (9-25km southeast of Orikhiv).[60] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) reported that Russian forces repelled five Ukrainian assaults in unspecified areas in western Zaporizhia Oblast.[61] Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations east of Robotyne (10km south of Orikhiv) and in the direction of Russian “rear” lines of defense west of Verbove (18km south).[62] Russian milbloggers widely claimed that fighting within Robotyne has moved closer to the southern outskirts of the settlement, and several milbloggers claimed that there was fighting south of Robotyne.[63] One Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces are entrenched in Robotyne and are conducting attacks on Novopokropivka to the south.[64] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces maintain positions in southern Robotyne as of the evening of August 25, however.[65] Another Russian milblogger amplified footage on August 25 purporting to show Russian forces repelling a small Ukrainian assault with armored vehicle support in an unspecified part of the Polohy area (35km southeast of Orikhiv) on an unspecified date.[66]

A Russian milblogger claimed on August 25 that Russian forces repelled a small Ukrainian landing attempt on an island in the Dnipro River south of Veletenske, Kherson Oblast (15km southwest of Kherson City).[67]

Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on August 25 requiring members of Russian volunteer formations and other state-run security entities to swear allegiance to Russia and to obey the Russian military chain of command.[68] Russian authorities will require soldiers in volunteer formations and personnel of the state-run security entity “Okhrana,” which reportedly guards infrastructure and strategic assets in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast, to swear an oath of allegiance to Russia and the Russian Constitution and to “strictly follow the orders of commanders and superiors.”[69] The Russian military has recently suffered from multiple public instances of insubordination, and ISW has previously assessed that the Russian military chain of command is deteriorating.[70]

Activities in Russian-occupied areas (Russian objective: Consolidate administrative control of annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian citizens into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)

Russian authorities are likely setting conditions to falsify the results of the September 2023 regional elections in occupied Ukraine. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on August 25 that Zaporizhia Oblast occupation authorities will allow voters to vote both at polling stations and at home, and occupation authorities will begin visiting residential areas on August 30 to collect votes for the September 8-10 regional elections.[71] The Ukrainian Resistance Center stated that Russian occupation authorities are allowing voters to vote from home in order to explain low turnout at polling stations.[72] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian authorities are resettling Russians to abandoned residences in occupied Ukraine, and the Resistance Center reported that Russian authorities are automatically entering civilians in occupied Ukraine into the voter registration system to increase the claimed voter turnout.[73]

Significant activity in Belarus (Russian efforts to increase its military presence in Belarus and further integrate Belarus into Russian-favorable frameworks and Wagner Group activity in Belarus)

A Ukrainian official stated that Wagner Group forces are leaving Belarus, supporting ISW’s prior assessment that the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) effort to weaken Wagner may have resulted in Wagner personnel leaving Belarus.[74] Ukrainian State Border Service Spokesperson Andriy Demchenko stated on August 25 that Ukrainian border guards began observing a gradual decline in the number of Wagner personnel in Belarus prior to the Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death on August 23. Demchenko stated that the number of Wagner personnel in Belarus has also continued to decline since August 23.[75]  

ISW will continue to report daily observed Russian and Belarusian military activity in Belarus as part of ongoing Kremlin efforts to increase their control over Belarus and other Russian actions in Belarus.

Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.

2. China sends aircraft and vessels toward Taiwan days after U.S. approves $500-million arms sale

China sends aircraft and vessels toward Taiwan days after U.S. approves $500-million arms sale​

Taiwan's defense ministry said in a statement that 32 aircraft from the People’s Liberation Army and nine vessels from the navy were detected.

NBC News · by The Associated Press

Taiwan’s defense ministry said Saturday that China sent dozens of aircraft and vessels toward the island, just days after the United States approved a $500-million arms sale to Taiwan.

The defense ministry said in a statement that 32 aircraft from the People’s Liberation Army and nine vessels from the navy were detected in the 24 hours between 6 a.m. Friday and 6 a.m. Saturday.

Of these, 20 aircraft either crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait or breached Taiwan’s air defense identification zone. In response, Taiwan tasked its own aircraft, vessels and missile systems to respond to the activities, the defense military said.

China sees self-ruled Taiwan as a renegade province to be taken by force if necessary. In the past year, Beijing has stepped up military drills around the island in reaction to Taiwan’s political activities.

The Chinese military launched drills around Taiwan last week as a “stern warning” after Taiwan’s Vice President William Lai stopped over in the U.S. while on an official trip to Paraguay.

China launches military drills around Taiwan after VP visit to U.S.

Aug. 19, 202300:50

The State Department said Wednesday it had signed off on the sale of infrared search and track systems for F-16 fighter jets and other related equipment to Taiwan worth half a billion dollars.

Chinese Defense Ministry spokesperson Zhang Xiaogang said Friday that China opposed the arms sale, calling it a “gross interference” in China’s internal affairs and describing it as a “heinous act” that violates its “One China” principle, as well as three Sino-U.S. joint communiques.

Zhang added that China urged the U.S. to fulfill its commitment of not supporting the independence of Taiwan.

NBC News · by The Associated Press

3. U.S. denies reports claiming it considered canceling F-16 sale to Taiwan

U.S. denies reports claiming it considered canceling F-16 sale to Taiwan - Focus Taiwan

focustaiwan.tw · by Link

Washington, Aug. 24 (CNA) The U.S. State Department on Thursday denied reports claiming Washington had considered canceling its sale of F-16 fighter jets to Taiwan.

The denial came following a claim by US-Taiwan Business Council (USTBC) President Rupert Hammond-Chambers that the Biden Administration "took a hard look" last year at cancelling Taiwan's F-16V sale package announced in 2019 because it was not compatible with the U.S.' "so-called 'asymmetric approach'" regarding Taiwan's defense.

According to the USTBC president, the sale was allowed to proceed because the legal barriers to canceling it were too great.

He added that, aside from the F-16vs, the Biden administration's security assistance has focused "on munitions and sustainment of legacy systems."

In a statement emailed to CNA, however, a U.S. State Department spokesperson said the reports claiming the U.S. government had considered canceling the sale to Taiwan of F-16 Block 70 fighter jets were "false," and reiterated its strong support for Taiwan updating its aging F-16 fleet and acquiring new aircraft, "in line with our longstanding policy to help Taiwan maintain a sufficient self-defense capability."

"This policy has remained consistent across eight different U.S. administrations and contributes to the maintenance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait," the spokesperson added.

In August 2019, the U.S. government announced the program to sell 66 F-16 C/D Block 70 fighter jets, known as the F-16V, to Taiwan in a potential US$8 billion package, a move that shows "better than ever" bilateral ties despite the two ending official diplomatic relations 40 years ago.

According to the estimate made at the time of announcement of the fighter jet sale to Taiwan, the first two F-16Vs under the program would be delivered to Taipei in 2023, and the completion of the delivery of the 66 F-16Vs was scheduled for the end of 2026.

But, the U.S. Air Force said in a statement in May that the delivery of the first two F-16 fighter jets has been delayed as "complex developmental challenges" had been encountered.

It added the U.S. Air Force said the American government, Taiwan and Lockheed Martine Corp. "are actively working to mitigate these delays."

Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense said the delays of the first two F-16s were down to U.S. efforts to improve the software used in the fighter jets, and that the delivery of the first batch was now scheduled for the third quarter of next year.

However, all of the 66 F-16s were still set to be delivered by the end of 2026, as originally scheduled, the ministry said.

On Wednesday, the United States government approved a proposed US$500 million sale of infrared search and track (IRST) systems and other related equipment for the F-16 fighter jets to Taiwan, marking the 11th U.S. arms sale to the country since President Joe Biden took office in 2021.

The last time the U.S. sold Taiwan fighter jets was in 1992, when then-President George H.W. Bush announced the sale of 150 F-16 A/B jets.

Since then, the jets have served as the backbone of the nation's air force.

(By Chiang Chin-yeh, Christie Chen, Joseph Yen and Frances Huang)

Enditem/kb

focustaiwan.tw · by Link

4. Newly declassified US intel claims Russia is laundering propaganda through unwitting Westerners

"Laundering propaganda" is a phrase for me. But it does seem to make sense in this context.

And of course another name for "unwitting westerners" might be useful idiots. Hopefully if we heed this report we can reduce our chances of remaining idiots (or at least we may not be useful)

Excerpt:

US intelligence agencies believe that the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) is attempting to influence public policy and public opinion in the West by directing Russian civilians to build relationships with influential US and Western individuals and then disseminate narratives that support Kremlin objectives, obscuring the FSB’s role through layers of ostensibly independent actors.

Newly declassified US intel claims Russia is laundering propaganda through unwitting Westerners | CNN Politics

CNN · by Katie Bo Lillis · August 25, 2023

Washington CNN —

Russian intelligence is operating a systematic program to launder pro-Kremlin propaganda through private relationships between Russian operatives and unwitting US and western targets, according to newly declassified US intelligence.

US intelligence agencies believe that the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) is attempting to influence public policy and public opinion in the West by directing Russian civilians to build relationships with influential US and Western individuals and then disseminate narratives that support Kremlin objectives, obscuring the FSB’s role through layers of ostensibly independent actors.

“These influence operations are designed to be deliberately small scale, the overall goal being US [and] Western persons presenting these ideas, seemingly organic,” a US official authorized to discuss the material told CNN. “The co-optee influence operations are built primarily on personal relationships … they build trust with them and then they can leverage that to covertly push the FSB’s agenda.”

The campaigns have sometimes been effective at planting Russian narratives in the Western press, according to the intelligence. Maxim Grigoriev, who heads a Russian NGO, made multiple speeches to the UN presenting a false study that claimed the humanitarian group the White Helmets – which operates in Syria – was running a black market for human organs and had faked chemical attacks by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, with whom Russia is allied. Those claims eventually found their way into a television report on the far-right OANN in the United States, according to open-source materials provided by the official.

CNN has reached out to Grigoriev and OANN.

But the official stressed that the Western voices that eventually became mouthpieces for Russian propaganda were almost certainly unaware of the role they were playing.

“At the end of the day, this unwitting target is disseminating Russian influence operation, Russian propaganda to their target public,” the US official said. “Ultimately, a lot of these are unwitting people — they remain unaware who is essentially seeding these narratives.”

The intelligence provides several examples of Russian civilian “co-optees” doing the bidding of the FSB.

One man, Andrey Stepanenko, founded a media project in 2014 that sponsored journalists from the US and the West to visit eastern Ukraine and learn “the alleged truth” about what was happening in the region. In fact, the FSB directed his efforts and “almost certainly financed the project,” according to the declassified intelligence.

CNN was not able to locate Stepanenko to ask for comment.

The US official also cited Natalia Burlinova, the founder of a Russian NGO who routinely coordinated FSB-funded public diplomacy efforts aimed at influencing Western views. In 2018, she visited, had meetings and hosted events at multiple US think tanks and universities in New York, Boston and Washington – work that was funded by the FSB, according to the intelligence. Her conduct was already public: She was indicted earlier this year on charges of conspiring with an FSB officer to act as an illegal agent of Russia inside the United States, although she remains at liberty in Russia.

CNN has reached out to Burlinova.

The official declined to offer specifics to back up the intelligence community’s assertions that the FSB is funding this kind of operation but noted that once officials were able establish FSB backing, it is easy to trace the narratives they are pushing in open-source materials.

“Once you’re aware of who these people are and their association with the FSB, by nature of what they’re doing, they have very, very public personas,” the official said. “And so I would just say it’s not really difficult to kind of follow the strings.”

The US official declined to say whether Russia has used these same tactics to try to influence US elections.

The FSB does use similar tactics to influence political opinion within Russia, according to the intelligence. In one instance, a Russian media figure named Anton Tsvetkov organized protests outside of embassies in Moscow — including the US Embassy — at the FSB’s behest. The protests pushed Russia’s narrative of the war in Ukraine, “promoting the ‘Ukrainian Nazi’ narrative and blaming the U.S. and its allies for the deaths of children in the Donbass,” while hiding the Russian government’s role, according to the declassified intelligence.

“The purpose of those protests really was … designed to sell it to the Russian people,” the US official said.

CNN · by Katie Bo Lillis · August 25, 2023

5. China’s Problems Are Real

China’s Problems Are Real

The New York Times · by David Leonhardt · August 25, 2023

Newsletter

The Morning

Making sense of the country’s economic trouble.

Construction in Nantong, China.Credit...Qilai Shen for The New York Times

By

Aug. 25, 2023, 6:44 a.m. ET

China’s economic problems can seem sudden and surprising. Just a few years ago, its economy inspired worldwide envy. Today, signs of trouble appear to be everywhere.

The real estate market is in a serious slump. Consumer spending is weak. Unemployment among young adults has surged above 20 percent — and the government has responded by suspending the release of that statistic.

“The most terrifying thing is that everyone around me is at a loss of what to do next,” Richard Li, the owner of an auto parts business who has closed two of his four stores, told my colleague Li Yuan. “I used to believe that our country would become better and better.”

Today’s newsletter is intended to help you make sense of the turnabout. My main argument is that China’s problems are not, in fact, new. They have been building for years, and Chinese leaders have long vowed to address them. So far, though, they have mostly failed to do so. That failure is catching up to them.

The only story

China’s ascent over the past half-century has been remarkable, producing an arguably unprecedented decline in poverty. Even so, the country’s economic model has been familiar: investing in physical capital and education to become more productive and lure residents of rural areas to cities where they work in factories.

In previous eras, England, Germany, the U.S., Japan and South Korea all followed the same model. So did the Soviet Union, after World War II. The economist Gregory Clark called it the only story of economic development.

An unfinished apartment complex in Suzhou, China.Credit...Qilai Shen for The New York Times

After countries achieve rapid growth for several decades, they can come to resemble unstoppable forces, destined to dominate the globe. People made such predictions about the Soviet Union in the 1960s, Japan in the 1980s and China in recent years. But you’ll notice a pattern of disappointment in those examples, as Paul Krugman, the Times columnist and Nobel laureate economist, has pointed out.

Thirteen years ago, I visited China to report a story for The Times Magazine and wrote the following:

To continue growing rapidly, China needs to make the next transition, from sweatshop economy to innovation economy. This transition is the one that has often proved difficult elsewhere. Once a country has turned itself into an export factory, it cannot keep growing by repeating the exercise. It can’t move a worker from an inefficient farm to a modern factory more than once. It cannot even retain its industrial might forever. As a country industrializes, workers will demand their share of the bounty, as has started happening in China, and some factories will start moving to poorer countries. Eventually, a rising economy needs to take two crucial steps: manufacture goods that aren’t just cheaper than the competition, but better; and create a thriving domestic market, so that its own consumers can pick up the slack when exports inevitably slow. These steps go hand in hand. Big consumer markets become laboratories where companies know that innovations will be tested and the successful ones richly rewarded.

I did not predict China’s current problems, to be clear. I was agnostic about whether its leaders would take the steps to build a more advanced economy. But I did describe the consensus, both inside and outside China, about what those steps were.

China’s current problems stem from not having taken them. Its leaders have instead doubled down on the same strategies that worked in past decades, like the construction of more apartment buildings and factories. It’s not working.

China still does not have a thriving consumer economy to replace its smokestack economy. It has neglected to build a safety net strong enough to give ordinary workers the confidence to spend more. Health insurance is spotty. “Government payments to seniors are tiny,” Keith Bradsher, The Times’s Beijing bureau chief, wrote this week. “Education is increasingly costly.”

Why hasn’t China taken the necessary steps? Change is hard. The bureaucrats who run legacy industries like construction have more political influence than those who run nascent industries. President Xi Jinping also seems concerned that a robust consumer economy might undermine the ruling party’s authority.

‘At least 5 or 10 years’

Any article about China’s economy tends to include the caveat that it could turn around soon. So consider this newsletter caveated. But telling a coherent story about why and how China would boom again is becoming harder.

Xi is resisting changes that even Chinese experts have long advocated. The country’s population is shrinking, with the biggest declines ahead. And other countries have become warier of working with China, for geopolitical reasons.

In that 2010 Times Magazine article, I included the following paragraph of caveat. It feels a little different 13 years later:

None of this means China is on the verge of running out of steam. It probably has at least 5 or 10 years of rapid growth ahead, even if it simply doubles down on its current growth strategy, because it can still take more industrial market share from other countries. In a way, though, the country’s short-term strengths in manufacturing and exporting may be another reason to wonder what the future holds. Those strengths will make it harder for China to summon the urgency to remake itself.

For more

• “China’s 40-year boom is over,” The Wall Street Journal proclaimed in a front-page headline this week. The editors of The Economist agreed: “China’s economy won’t be fixed.”
• The country has accumulated enough empty apartments to meet seven years’ worth of demand.
• “China is already a superpower, and its current stumbles aren’t likely to end that status,” Krugman wrote recently. “China’s domestic problems make it more, not less, of a danger to global security.”

6. Mystery land buyers around California Air Force base revealed

Hmmm.... which would be worse: China buying the land or a bunch of silicon valley tech wizards trying to create their utopian village?

Excerpts:

The Air Force’s Foreign Investment Risk Review office is currently investigating Flannery Associates. Garamendi says there are valid concerns that Flannery’s land acquisitions could be tied to foreign enemies.

“Wherever the money is coming from,” he said. “The underlying problem of securing Travis Air Force Base remains.”

Garamendi also said the “organization has been just playing nasty,” referring to farmers in the area being targeted in a lawsuit from the group.

“Please understand that this group spent five years secretly and in my estimation, using strong-arm techniques that would best be associated with monsters to acquire the land,” he said.

​Here is the link to information about Travis Air Force Base: https://www.travis.af.mil/Units/

60TH AIR MOBILITY WING 

What makes today's Travis Air Force Base different from other U.S. Air Force bases is the diversity of the units assigned here, as we have a wide variety of missions occurring simultaneously. This unique relationship requires constant coordination and teamwork​.

The links below will provide you background information on the organizations at Travis Air Force Base.

https://www.travis.af.mil/Units/

Mystery land buyers around California Air Force base revealed

• Flannery Associates invested more than $800 million on agricultural land
• Reports: Land buyers are a group of ultra-wealthy Silicon Valley investors
• Rep.: 'The underlying problem of securing Travis Air Force Base remains'

newsnationnow.com · by Tom Palmer · August 26, 2023

(NewsNation) — New reports shed light on nearly $1 billion in land purchases by a mysterious company near a California Air Force base that raised national security concerns.

Since 2018, a group called “Flannery Associates” invested more than $800 million on almost 54,000 acres of agriculture-zoned land surrounding the Travis Air Force base in Solano County, California, public records show.

Despite early speculation China was behind the purchases and as companies with ties to China have been ramping up efforts to buy American farmland, legal representation for Flannery has maintained the group is controlled by U.S. citizens, with 97% of its capital coming from U.S.-based investors.

However, after eight months of investigation, federal officials were not able to confirm or deny this to be true and were not able to determine exactly who was backing the company.

Now, reports from The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle reveal Flannery is comprised of a group of ultra-wealthy Silicon Valley investors acquiring vast parcels of land northeast of San Francisco with the mission to build a new California city “from scratch.”

Street gangs, inmates and thousands of others stole COVID funds: DOJ

According to the reports, the investors’ plan for the land involves creating a new urban center that could accommodate the growing demands of the tech industry and provide a fresh environment for innovation and economic growth.

The goal, according to the reports, is to establish a new city that caters to the needs of Silicon Valley tech companies and professionals, potentially alleviating some of the challenges posed by congestion, housing shortages and high costs of living in the Bay Area.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that these land acquisitions have been met with a mix of excitement and concern from local communities and government officials.

Democratic California Rep. John Garamendi called developments around Travis Air Force Base a critical national security issue.

“The fact they chose to buy all three sides of the Travis Air Force Base even raises immediate questions about national security,” Garamendi said.

To pull off the project, according to the Times, the company will have to use the state’s initiative system to get Solano County residents to vote on it.

Used car market is ‘unusual’ right now: Expert

Garamendi said utilizing an initiative means they’re going to override the local protections that are in place for Travis Air Force Base.

According to Garamendi, the area is “heavily impacted by some very severe restrictions that prevent development and other kinds of activities that would somehow degrade or harm Travis Air Force Base.”

The Air Force’s Foreign Investment Risk Review office is currently investigating Flannery Associates. Garamendi says there are valid concerns that Flannery’s land acquisitions could be tied to foreign enemies.

“Wherever the money is coming from,” he said. “The underlying problem of securing Travis Air Force Base remains.”

Garamendi also said the “organization has been just playing nasty,” referring to farmers in the area being targeted in a lawsuit from the group.

“Please understand that this group spent five years secretly and in my estimation, using strong-arm techniques that would best be associated with monsters to acquire the land,” he said.

Garamendi said he’s been in contact with the families of farmers who handed over their land to Flannery, saying they didn’t want to sell in the first place.

Since no California laws require them to sell, the land was bargained for by both parties at a much higher price. But now, Flannery is suing those families for $510 million, accusing them of conspiring together to inflate the value of the land.

“It’s a suit designed to force the farmers to lawyer up, spend tens of thousands of dollars on lawyering and maybe at the end of the day, bankrupt themselves,” Garamendi said. “In fact, that has happened to at least one family that I know of and I’ve heard rumors that another family simply said, ‘We can’t afford the lawyers.’”

NewsNation correspondent Emily Finn contributed to this article.

newsnationnow.com · by Tom Palmer · August 26, 2023

7. Pacific islands warn US over Chinese threat and urge Biden to increase aid

The Pacific islands want and need more than just protection against Chinese influence.

​Excerpts:

“Unresolved problems from the nuclear tests and radioactive waste is a serious irritant in our relations, and has the potential for being exploited by China,” said Ading, who claimed that the effects from US nuclear detonation on the Marshall Islands was equal to “1.7 Hiroshima bombs every day for 12 years.”

Ading said the compact agreement would not solve the nuclear issue but would be an important step toward doing so.

While much of the panel’s questions focused on countering China’s influence, non-voting delegates and island officials also sought to raise issues of labor and housing shortages in their communities, as well as ask for additional resources to support education, build hospitals and protect the environment.

Island leaders also emphasized the need for more US engagement to effectively counter the power of Chinese investment.

“How do we address that? I think the federal agencies need to become more involved, not just in regulations, but become more involved in the development,” said Arnold Palacios, the governor of the Northern Mariana Islands, an independent.

Pacific islands warn US over Chinese threat and urge Biden to increase aid

GOP-led House committee convenes on Guam as officials say Beijing working to ‘fill perceived voids in America’s assistance’

The Guardian · by Mary Yang · August 25, 2023

Countering China and bolstering national security dominated the conversation in a Hilton hotel on Guam, 15 hours before and oceans away from the Milwaukee arena hosting the first Republican primary debate.

Nine members of the GOP-led House committee on natural resources convened in the US-governed Pacific island territory for a rare field hearing – during the summer recess – on countering China’s influence in the region.

At a time when Democrats and Republicans view China as an economic and global security threat, island nations who offer the US military proximity to China in exchange for aid emphasized they are especially vulnerable to Chinese cyber-attacks and economic exploitation as they struggle to recover from the pandemic.

Endless fallout: the Pacific idyll still facing nuclear blight 77 years on

Read more

“Less than 2,000 miles away lies a threat to America and our allies. The People’s Republic of China under the tyranny of the Chinese Communist party not only seeks to challenge American leadership but is aggressively working to undermine the Democratic values and institutions we cherish,” said the Republican chairman, Bruce Westerman, of Arkansas, in his opening remarks.

Westerman pointed to a security breach in May, in which US officials and Microsoft found that a Chinese government-sponsored hacking group had targeted critical US infrastructure on Guam, as an example of CCP aggression in the region.

Westerman said there was “a distinct difference between the PRC’s leadership and the many Chinese citizens who long for that same freedom that we as Americans enjoy”.

The Biden administration has moved to expand its diplomatic presence in the Pacific islands as part of its national security strategy against China. Last spring, the Solomon Islands signed a security pact with China, raising alarm bells that the CCP was seeking to establish a permanent military presence in the region. Last fall, Joe Biden hosted a first-ever summit of Pacific islands leaders in Washington, and he is set to host another this September.

At the Thursday hearing, Pacific island officials testified that while they welcome deepened ties with the US, China could exploit any gaps in that relationship.

“The CCP moves aggressively to fill perceived voids in America’s assistance and to capitalize on social and economic vulnerabilities of the Pacific island communities,” said Kaleb Udui Jr, the finance minister of Palau, citing land grabs, expanding fisheries and other forms of political interference. He also said there was “clear influence” on government officials as China has offered trips to Beijing and hosted in-country events, “where we later found out the connections to organized crime or the CCP”.

“If the US does not engage actively, China will,” said Lou Leon Guerrero, the Democratic governor of Guam.

All three non-voting congressional delegates of the US’s Pacific island territories – Democrat Gregorio Kilili Camacho Sablan of the Northern Mariana Islands and Republicans Jim Moylan of Guam, and Amata Coleman Radewagen of American Samoa – are members of the natural resources committee and attended the field hearing. Westerman specifically thanked Moylan, a freshman delegate, for inviting the panel to visit Guam.

Earlier this year, the Biden administration finalized negotiations with three island nations – the Marshall Islands, Palau and the Freely Associated States of Micronesia – to renew power-sharing agreements known as the Compacts of Free Association (Cofa), which give the US military access to strategic areas in the Pacific Ocean in exchange for economic aid.

The US appointed a special envoy for the compact negotiations, Joseph Yun, who secured renewed deals with all three island nations after a holdout from the Marshall Islands.

“The sad fact is that the US has fallen far short of treating us equally, fairly and consistently with the compact,” testified Jack Ading, the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, who earlier called for more US compensation for nuclear testing after the second world war.

“Unresolved problems from the nuclear tests and radioactive waste is a serious irritant in our relations, and has the potential for being exploited by China,” said Ading, who claimed that the effects from US nuclear detonation on the Marshall Islands was equal to “1.7 Hiroshima bombs every day for 12 years.”

Ading said the compact agreement would not solve the nuclear issue but would be an important step toward doing so.

While much of the panel’s questions focused on countering China’s influence, non-voting delegates and island officials also sought to raise issues of labor and housing shortages in their communities, as well as ask for additional resources to support education, build hospitals and protect the environment.

Island leaders also emphasized the need for more US engagement to effectively counter the power of Chinese investment.

“How do we address that? I think the federal agencies need to become more involved, not just in regulations, but become more involved in the development,” said Arnold Palacios, the governor of the Northern Mariana Islands, an independent.

The Guardian · by Mary Yang · August 25, 2023

8. The US needs a stable Chinese economy. Will Biden’s commerce secretary offer help?

Is this the CHinese paradox: Some people want China to fail but we need the Chinese economy to be stable. Is strategic competition win or lose or win-win?

Video at the link: https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/24/economy/us-china-economy-raimondo-visit-intl-hnk/index.html

The US needs a stable Chinese economy. Will Biden’s commerce secretary offer help?

By Laura He, CNN

Published 9:51 PM EDT, Thu August 24, 2023

Hong KongCNN — 

US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo will travel to China next week, a visit that coincides with a worsening slowdown in the world’s second largest economy.

While China’s troubles might give Raimondo greater leverage to pursue better market access for American companies, she is also likely to face calls from Beijing to help stabilize its faltering economy by easing some of the pressure Washington has recently applied.

“In terms of Raimondo’s trip, Beijing’s principle objective will be securing a reprieve, however temporary, from the onslaught of US export controls and other restrictions being levied on China’s economy,” said Craig Singleton, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a non-partisan think tank based in Washington.

Raimondo will travel to Beijing and Shanghai from Sunday through Wednesday, and discuss the US-China commercial relationship, challenges faced by US businesses and areas for potential cooperation, according to the Commerce Department.

China’s growth forecasts for this year are being marked down as exports and foreign investment slump, a real estate crisis deepens and worries about its financial health spread. For Beijing, Raimondo plays a key role in a number of areas that have been the source of mounting friction between the world’s top two economies.

Gina Raimondo, US commerce secretary, speaks during the SelectUSA Investment Summit in National Harbor, Maryland, US, on Tuesday, May 2, 2023.

Ting Shen/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Her department helps set America’s global trade policy — a sticking point in US-China relations since the Trump administration increased tariffs on a range of Chinese goods.

The secretary is responsible for supporting American businesses abroad, and also administers a series of US export controls that are aimed at cutting China off from advanced technologies that could be for military use.

Whether the Biden administration is willing to ease up on Beijing remains to be seen, but an announcement that coincided with news of Raimondo’s visit suggests Washington is trying at least to create the conditions for a useful conversation.

China's economy is in trouble. Here's what's gone wrong

The Commerce Department announced on Monday that it was removing 27 Chinese companies from US export controls. China’s Ministry of Commerce welcomed the decision, saying it was conducive to trade and reflected the interests of both sides.

“[This] may have helped grease the wheels for Raimondo’s trip,” Eurasia Group analysts said in a note this week. “It also suggests that the Biden administration is making modest but measurable progress with Beijing in reestablishing limited government-to-government communication and cooperation.”

Still a vital relationship

For the United States, a stable Chinese economy is also in its interest.

China remains the biggest source of imports into the US, and last year trade in goods between the two countries hit an all-time high of $690.6 billion. US imports from China totaled $536.8 billion, accounting for about 17% of its total imports. Exports to China were $154 billion, 7.5% of total US exports to the world.

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American companies have huge manufacturing networks in China and rely on Chinese consumers.

Tesla, which opened a factory in Shanghai in 2018, now makes half of its electric cars in China. Apple still makes many of its iPhones there. Others consumer brands like Starbucks and Nike have a large customer base in China. Intel, Microsoft and General Motors derive a sizable portion of their revenues from the country.

China is also the No. 2 foreign creditor to the United States. It held $835.4 billion of US Treasuries at the end of June, according to most recent data from the US Treasury Department. That’s second to Japan’s official stash of $1.11 trillion.

Pain points

The key friction points in the vital relationship currently center on the US export controls and “de-risking” measures it has taken against China in the past year.

In October, the US government banned Chinese companies from buying advanced US chips and chip-making equipment without a license. The move strikes at the heart of Beijing’s tech ambitions. Washington has persuaded Europe and Japan to take similar measures.

That was followed earlier this month by President Biden signing an executive order that limits US investment in certain tech sectors of the Chinese economy, including AI and quantum computing.

China accused the US of “politicizing and weaponizing” tech and trade issues.

Then there are the long-standing trade curbs on the two countries imposed by each other.

A trade war erupted between the two countries in 2018, when President Donald Trump imposed additional tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Chinese goods. China retaliated with tariffs on more than $100 billion worth of US imports.

Most of the tariffs still remain under the Biden administration. They are under review, but it’s still unclear whether the review will result in any tariffs being removed.

Ball in US court?

Raimondo might also express concern about Beijing’s recent crackdown on Western consulting firms, which has unnerved US businesses.

On Tuesday, China fined the Mintz Group, a New York-based corporate due diligence firm, about $1.5 million for allegedly conducting unapproved statistical work in the country. The fine came to light months after authorities closed the firm’s Beijing office and detained five of its local employees.

It’s just part of China’s broader crackdown on consulting firms in the name of national security.

In late April, Beijing tightened its counterespionage law and expanded the list of activities that could be considered spying. Around the same time, police questioned staff at the Shanghai offices of consulting giant Bain & Company.

A few weeks later, state media released details of multiple raids on the offices of Capvision, an international expert network firm with headquarters in Shanghai and New York, by state security forces.

“[Chinese President] Xi Jinping’s moves … indicate a willingness to face the risks associated with reduced integration with the Western-led global economy,” said Singleton, adding that he doesn’t expect US-China relations to “meaningfully improve” anytime soon.

But the Chinese leader’s current challenge is “striking a balance” between his willingness to risk relations with the US, and the West, and the Chinese Communist Party’s general aversion to instability in any form, Singleton said.

To avoid social instability, the Chinese leadership is likely to embrace piecemeal or sector-specific measures to partially alleviate economic pressures.

“Those efforts may include adopting a more conciliatory approach towards Washington on a narrow set of issues in which China stands to benefit,” he said.

And with that, the ball might be in Washington’s court.

— Kylie Atwood and Jeremy Diamond contributed to reporting.

9. Analysis | Without Prigozhin, expect some changes around the edges on Russian influence operations

Analysis | Without Prigozhin, expect some changes around the edges on Russian influence operations

Analysis by Tim Starks

with research by David DiMolfetta

August 24, 2023 at 7:28 a.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Tim Starks · August 24, 2023

Welcome to The Cybersecurity 202! We’re about to go on a little more than a week-long break. We’ll be back Sept. 5. Bye for a minute!

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Below: The Tornado Cash founders are charged, and the United Nations forges ahead on a new cybercrime framework. First:

Without Prigozhin, expect some changes around the edges on Russian influence operations

Yevgeniy Prigozhin, who ran Russia’s Internet Research Agency and had an important role in developing the nation’s modern digital influence operations — most notably, interference in the 2016 U.S. elections — was reportedly on board a deadly plane crash Wednesday.

(Follow the latest on the questions surrounding his fate here.)

A failed mutiny diminished Prigozhin’s status in Moscow after once being known as “Putin’s chef” for his catering business and closeness with the Russian president, and the Internet Research Agency had declared that it was shutting down. So it’s possible he wouldn’t have had a major impact on Russian disinformation and misinformation campaigns going forward if he was/is alive.

Nevertheless, the Wagner Group boss was a formative figure, and his Internet Research Agency serves as a model for autocratic regimes for a quasi-state-connected-entity without leaving definitive fingerprints, an expert on Russian information warfare told me.

But successors within Russia could exhibit diminished effectiveness, said the expert, Gavin Wilde, who served on the National Security Council as director for Russia, Baltic and Caucasus affairs.

“Prigozhin was for Russian information operations kind of what Kurt Cobain was for grunge music,” said Wilde, now a senior fellow in the technology and international affairs program for the Carnegie Endowment for Peace. “The guy ushers in a certain era and perfects a certain craft, but now that he’s gone, what’s likely to follow is a saturated market of copycats, and that will probably end up falling far short of the kind of heyday or the prominence of what it once was.”

• That said, nobody should expect Russian information warfare to go away.

Prigozhin’s possible death "while maybe a temporary setback for the Wagner Group, doesn’t preclude the GRU and other entities in Russian intelligence and security services from continuing operations all over the globe,” David Salvo, senior fellow and managing director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund, told me. “With Russia likely setting sights on the 2024 election here, there’s plenty of time to get their ducks in a row.”

(I conditioned my questions to Wilde and Salvo on the presumption that Prigozhin is actually dead, but as my colleagues write this morning: “Russian officials and the Wagner Group have yet to officially confirm" his fate. What we know is that his name was on the passenger list for a plane traveling Wednesday from Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport to St. Petersburg that crashed, killing all 10 on board, according to Russia’s civil aviation agency.)

Origins and accomplishments

In blustering fashion, Prigozhin has claimed credit for all of the Internet Research Agency, after once denying any connection.

“I’ve never just been the financier of the Internet Research Agency. I invented it, I created it, I managed it for a long time,” he said this year. “It was founded to protect the Russian information space from boorish aggressive propaganda of anti-Russian narrative from the West.”

The first known signs of the Internet Research Agency emerged in 2013, when it registered with the Russian government as a 2018 indictment of Prigozhin and affiliated figures by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III showed. My colleague Philip Bump had a fully detailed timeline following that indictment, and in it, Prigozhin is intertwined from the beginning.

Efforts to influence the 2016 election began not long after then-candidate Donald Trump entered the race, according to the indictment.

A 2017 intelligence community analysis outlined the overall influence effort in the 2016 presidential campaign, of which the Internet Research Agency was but one part. Furthermore, the interference included hack-and-leak operations, not just disinformation, misinformation and attempts to manipulate social media.

“Russia’s state-run propaganda machine — composed of its domestic media apparatus, outlets targeting global audiences such as RT and Sputnik, and a network of quasi-government trolls — contributed to the influence campaign by serving as a platform for Kremlin messaging to Russian and international audiences,” that analysis reads.

While the 2016 influence operation drew major attention in the West, the United States is far from the first alleged target of Russian disinformation and wasn’t the last of the Internet Research Agency’s either. Ukraine had been a point of focus as of late.

U.S. hostilities

As might be expected, the activity of the Internet Research Agency and Prigozhin drew the enmity of the U.S. government, and not just with the 2018 indictment.

The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control detailed the offenses of the troll factory, Prigozhin and affiliates when issuing sanctions against them, also in 2018.

“The Internet Research Agency LLC (IRA) tampered with, altered, or caused a misappropriation of information with the purpose or effect of interfering with or undermining election processes and institutions,” the statement reads. “The IRA created and managed a vast number of fake online personas that posed as legitimate U.S. persons to include grassroots organizations, interest groups, and a state political party on social media. Through this activity, the IRA posted thousands of ads that reached millions of people online.”

Later in 2018, U.S. Cyber Command blocked internet access for Prigozhin’s shop, per this story by my colleague Ellen Nakashima.

“They basically took the IRA offline,” according to one individual familiar with the matter who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified information in the story. “They shut them down.” Trump later acknowledged the cyberattack on the Internet Research Agency during an interview with Post columnist Marc A. Thiessen.

It’s possible all of that and other responses had an impact on the Internet Research Agency’s effectiveness. If Prigozhin has indeed died, there might be other comparisons to fallen rock stars, per Wilde.

“His own legacy, as far as the information operations game, is probably cemented now that he’s dead in a way that would have probably only diminished had he stayed alive because … particularly in the West, I think governments and NGOs and platforms are wise to the gig in a way,” Wilde said. “I just don’t know that he ever would have been able to recapture what he had done in previous years or improve upon it.”

Both Wilde and Salvo also said they could see the Kremlin wanting to exert more control over quasi-governmental operations but that they’re still important tools for Russia.

The keys

Tornado Cash crypto firm founders charged with laundering $1 billion

U.S. law enforcement have arrested one founder of the Tornado Cash cryptocurrency service and charged another, and the Treasury Department sanctioned the latter.

Authorities announced on Wednesday they had unsealed an indictment that charged founders Roman Storm and Roman Semenov for operating the service and money laundering, saying Tornado Cash facilitated the laundering of hundreds of millions for the North Korean hackers the Lazarus Group, among other infractions.

• Additionally, they said Storm was arrested in Washington on Wednesday.
• Also on Wednesday, Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned Semenov.

The developments arrive one week after a court ruling that awarded the Treasury Department a summary judgment against a group of individuals who contended that prior sanctions against Tornado Cash exceeded the department’s authorities and posed First Amendment and Fifth Amendment problems.

“Roman Storm and Roman Semenov allegedly operated Tornado Cash and knowingly facilitated this money laundering,” said Damian Williams, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. “While publicly claiming to offer a technically sophisticated privacy service, Storm and Semenov in fact knew that they were helping hackers and fraudsters conceal the fruits of their crimes.”

A lawyer for Storm, Brian Klein, said in a statement to Reuters, “We are incredibly disappointed that the prosecutors chose to charge Mr. Storm because he helped developed software, and they did so based on a novel legal theory with dangerous implications for all software developers. Mr. Storm has been cooperating with the prosecutors’ investigation since last year and disputes that he engaged in any criminal conduct.”

The firm representing Semenov didn’t respond to a request for comment in the Reuters story by Christopher Bing and Zeba Siddiqui.

Court finds teenagers carried out Lapsus$ hacking spree

A court found two teenagers connected to the Lapsus$ group responsible for hacking major tech companies in 2021 and 2022, the BBC’s Joe Tidy reports.

18-year-old Arion Kurtaj “was a key member of the Lapsus$ group which hacked the likes of Uber, Nvidia and Rockstar Games,” Tidy writes. He allegedly also leaked clips of an unreleased Grand Theft Auto game while on bail.

• Kurtaj is autistic and was considered not fit to stand trial and did not appear to give evidence. An accomplice, a 17-year-old who is also autistic, was involved but could not be named due to their age. Both are expected to be sentenced at a later date.

“The gang — thought to mostly be teenagers — used con-man like tricks as well as computer hacking to gain access to multinational corporations such as Microsoft, the technology giant and digital banking group Revolut,” the report adds.

• The attacks prompted a recent review of the Lapsus$ group by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
• Several members of the group are still expected to be at large. Brazilian police in October arrested an individual who is alleged to have worked with Lapsus$ to target Brazilian and Portuguese companies.

U.N. works to finalize cybercrime treaty in New York

U.N. delegates are in New York this week and next to finalize negotiations on a new international convention for cybercrime ahead of a major 2024 vote the intergovernmental body will take that’s aimed at preventing global cybercrimes, the Record’s Alexander Martin reports.

Martin writes: “Diplomatic sources told Recorded Future News that the ultimate text wasn’t expected to be especially ambitious — or to dramatically transform law enforcement’s approach to ransomware — but that producing anything capable of getting a vote at the General Assembly next year would be seen as a win.”

• The first form of an international cybercrime treaty was established in 2001, though it was not a U.N. document and did not include nations like China or Russia that Western cybersecurity officials have viewed as major hosts for contemporary cybercrime groups, according to the report.
• Delegates have viewed the negotiations as needed but have disagreed on what they should include. “In January, during negotiations in Vienna, the Chinese delegation proposed a redefinition of cybercrime to include the ‘dissemination of false information’ online. The proposal was seen as contentious and removed from the draft,” Martin writes.

10. Building a digital army: UN peacekeepers fight deadly disinformation

I am sure this will be challenged by some member states. But I wonder if we can learn something from this effort.

Building a digital army: UN peacekeepers fight deadly disinformation

With smartphones, editing apps, and innovative approaches, some UN peacekeeping operations across the world are building a “digital army” aimed at combating mis- and disinformation on social media networks and beyond.

news.un.org · August 19, 2023

Designing ways to fight back against falsehoods that can trigger tensions, violence, or even death, the UN has been monitoring how mis- and disinformation and hate speech can attack health, security, stability as well as progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

“It has become clear that business as usual is not an option,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a policy brief launched in June on information integrity on digital platforms.

“The ability to disseminate large-scale disinformation to undermine scientifically established facts poses an existential risk to humanity and endangers democratic institutions and fundamental human rights,” he wrote in the brief.

Countering deadly disinformation

Soundcloud

Disinformation can be dangerous in other ways. Several UN missions have reported social media campaigns in recent years targeting their peacekeeping work.

In 2019, the UN mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), known by its French acronym MONUSCO, raised grave concerns about social media disinformation campaigns calling for violence against peacekeepers during an Ebola epidemic and following a deadly attack by an armed group in the restive eastern region.

By 2022, the Security Council had adjusted the mandates of its four largest peacekeeping operations – DRC, Central African Republic (CAR), Mali, and South Sudan – and added the task of preventing disinformation campaigns aimed at undermining a mission’s credibility

“This is a war that is going on through social media, the radio, and traditional news outlets,” said Bintou Keita, who heads MONUSCO. Fighting deadly disinformation has been a “painful curve” to learn of this new battlefield, but the mission has now become proactive on social and other media platforms, to help stop its spread, she added.

Digital army fights fake news

UN Photo/Martine Perret

Weapons and ammunition is collected during a demobilization process in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

To fight back against disinformation, UN peacekeepers are putting new tools into the hands of civilians of all ages, including 15-year-old Blessing Kasasi in DRC.

An activist advocating for the rights of women and children, Ms. Kasasi readily joined a workshop in the capital city of Kinshasa, with 30 young people who learned about detecting “fake news” and countering it with the most effective weapon: the truth.

Guillaume Kingh-Farel, one of the workshop trainers, said disinformation is “used as a weapon of war to undermine MONUSCO’s peace efforts in the DRC”.

As such, the MONUSCO-supported workshop to train “a digital army capable of detecting false information” by producing content with the help of a smartphone and editing software and simultaneously spreading objective, credible information through “relay clubs” that disseminate these messages through their networks.

“From a smartphone, I will produce videos to echo good information,” Ms. Kasasi said after the workshop.

Setting the stage

For UN peace operations, some communities they engage are welcoming the new approaches this summer.

In Mali, where a transitional Government has been in power since a coup in 2021, the UN mission, MINUSMA, hosted the first of its kind blogger festival, attracting nearly 400 participants in Mopti in early June.

“With the advance of technology, digital media is increasingly being used to spread misinformation,” said a popular local blogger who attended the event. “A festival to combat misinformation is an innovative approach to overcome this challenge, a useful means for deconstructing hate speech and fake news.”

By the end of June, at the Malian Government’s request, the UN Security Council terminated the mission, which is slated for a complete withdrawal from the country by 1 January 2024.

Other efforts are unfolding elsewhere. In early August, in Abyei, a contested zone straddling Sudan and South Sudan, the UN mission there, UNISFA, launched Voice of Peace, an internet radio station aimed at countering hate speech, and fake news.

Meanwhile, in DR Congo, MONUSCO’s initiatives continue to reach communities plagued by disinformation-triggered tensions. This includes recruiting digital experts, building multimedia products, and reaching out to communities, especially social media savvy youth, mission chief Ms. Keita said.

With these tools, she said MONUSCO has been trying to “beef up our capacity to monitor and to be present on digital platforms in such a way that we are not going to always be in a reactive mode, but in an anticipatory mode”.

UNESCO MIL CLICKS – 10 Points to Detect Disinformation

How can you spot and counter disinformation online?

The UN Verified initiative launched a free online course on how to stay safe from dangerous disinformation circulating on social media. Here are some of the lessons covered:

Recognize disinformation and why it spreads.

Recognize emotional, dramatic, and provocative content.

Understand the danger of fabricated claims and selective evidence.

Protect yourself from bots and trolls.

Spot hacked accounts and protect your own accounts.

news.un.org · August 19, 2023

11. UN advisor says AI may have ‘massive’ impact on voters: 2024 will be the ‘deepfake election’

Because a "UN advisor" provided this assessment, I am sure we will have conspiracy theorists ginning up allegations at the UN for interfering in the 2024 election. Wait for a QAnon repsonse.

UN advisor says AI may have ‘massive’ impact on voters: 2024 will be the ‘deepfake election’

Neil Sahota said if a deepfake is released just before the election there may not be enough time to undo the damage

 By Nikolas Lanum Fox News

Published August 23, 2023 6:00am EDT

foxnews.com · by Nikolas Lanum Fox News

Video

UN AI advisor: Not much can be done right now to stop AI deepfake impact on voters

Neil Sahota discussed the potential impact of artificial intelligence on future elections and people's ability to make informed decisions when choosing political candidates

Artificial intelligence (AI) generated deepfakes are likely to have a "massive" impact on voters in future elections and there isn't much that can be done right now to stop it, according to an AI advisor for the United Nations (UN).

Speaking with Fox News Digital, Neil Sahota said his sources warned the growing use of deepfake advertisements may very well be "the greatest threat to democracy."

"A lot of people—and I think those in the media too, are calling the 2024 election 'the deepfake election' that is probably going to be marred by tons and tons of deepfakes," Sahota said. "Not much can be done right now to stop any of that."

While the UN and various other organizations and corporations are working quickly to roll out software that can detect deepfakes, Sahota noted that common verification tools, such as watermarks, are relatively easy to circumvent in their current iterations.

HOUSE DEMOCRATS LAUNCH 'WORKING GROUP' ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

ChatGPT logo and AI Artificial Intelligence words are seen in this illustration taken, May 4, 2023. (REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration)

Furthermore, the chance of successfully detecting AI-generated content varies greatly depending on the medium. For example, deepfake videos often leave several markers for identification.

An analyst can look at the person's body language in the video. They can determine if the audio syncs correctly with the individual's mouth and monitor changes in lighting and shadows and potential artifacts in each still frame. Unfortunately, this analysis takes time and resources in an age where things can go viral overnight.

"If someone releases a very damaging deep fake video two days before the election, that may not be enough time to counteract it and prove it and get people to believe that," Sahota said.

Deepfakes have already had an impact on the political system worldwide. In April, The Republican National Committee (RNC) created the first fully AI-created political ad targeting the Biden administration on China and crime. Sahota said the Democratic National Committee (DNC) refuses to say whether they have made similar AI content.

AI has also impacted the recent elections in Turkey. Sahota said over 150 deepfake videos were captured and debunked on social media.

WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)?

This illustration photo taken on January 30, 2023 shows a phone screen displaying a statement from the head of security policy at META with a fake video (R) of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky calling on his soldiers to lay down their weapons shown in the background, in Washington, DC. (Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images)

"People need to have information to be informed voters. If you don't know what to trust, then you have these AI systems that, well, they know you like a best friend and can send you a very specific targeted fake ad. What do you do?" he added.

For years various organizations and individuals have been working to teach AI in psychology, behavioral science and linguistics. These AI systems get to know an individual's opinions, hobbies and interests. Sahota said it even knows what words will sway you, connect with and persuade you.

While many researchers are always looking for the big "homerun" deepfake, such as Volodymyr Zelenskyy telling Ukrainian troops to surrender, bad actors are also "micro-targeting" people to sway certain subsets of the population.

A recent deepfake of Hillary Clinton showed the former presidential candidate saying she liked Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and would endorse him if he ran for president. Sahota said these videos are manipulating people's decisions on a smaller scale that is often overlooked.

WHITE HOUSE GETS SEVEN AI DEVELOPERS TO AGREE TO SAFETY, SECURITY, TRUST GUIDELINES

The hyper-realistic image of Bruce Willis is actually a deepfake created by a Russian company using artificial neural networks. (Deepcake via Reuters)

Although AI videos are of valid concern, Sahota said the use of psychological AI tools has already been "perfected" in marketing, where people can create a kind of "echo chamber effect.

If a person is subscribed to someone's newsletter or sees something on their feed, the AI algorithm reinforces this over time. This begs the question, is a person choosing to vote for someone because it's their own idea, or has it been swept into their consciousness?

"It's like the movie Inception," Sahota said. "Someone's actually planted that in your mind. And the best way to create buy-in is for you to think it's your own idea. And that's what a lot of these, unfortunately, AI tools are being used for."

Perhaps the most significant concern to the UN is what happens when someone claims they were the victim of a deepfake but are attempting to brush off a legitimate video, picture or audio recording.

CRUZ SHOOTS DOWN SCHUMER EFFORT TO REGULATE AI: ‘MORE HARM THAN GOOD’

Reporters watch an AI-generated news anchor named "Fedha," which the Kuwait News service recently debuted. (YASSER AL-ZAYYAT/AFP via Getty Images)

"Somebody say something a little bit something off, okay, we can kind of get that. But someone that actually said something now is trying to spit it off as a deepfake. How do you disprove the negative? There's no way to do a real analysis to do that. And even if you do the real analysis, some people will still be suspicious about the results," Sahota said.

According to Sahota, the Federal Election Committee (FEC) is deadlocked on what to do about deepfakes because they are uncertain if it is even their domain to regulate machine content. With misinformation and misleading claims reaching "epic proportions," Sahota said a shift in mentality may be necessary.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

"That kind of cultural shift takes time, and it's a big change," he added. "There will be a lot of resistance to that. And unfortunately, that spin game of 'oh, I didn't actually say that.' That, for sure, is going to happen. We've already, well, we've seen like 100-plus years of the spin already in U.S. politics. So, that's the biggest challenge."

For more Culture, Media, Education, Opinion, and channel coverage, visit foxnews.com/media.

Nikolas Lanum is an associate editor for Fox News Digital.

foxnews.com · by Nikolas Lanum Fox News

12. Are Your Ads Funding Disinformation?

Conclusion:

Marketing is not just about reach and click-throughs. It is about who we associate with, and how we show up in the world. As marketers we spend a lot of money to promote our brands, and that gives us a lot of power — and it’s now time to use it. Demand control of your own ad campaigns to advertise better. It will not only improve your brand, it might just save democracy.

Are Your Ads Funding Disinformation?

https://hbr.org/2023/08/are-your-ads-funding-disinformation

by Claire Atkin

August 21, 2023

HBR Staff; Makrushka/oxygen/Getty Images; Unsplash

Summary.   

The global digital advertising industry is estimated to be $600 billion and growing. While Facebook and other social media sites are popular for advertising, much of the campaign spend dedicated to the internet is distributed across millions of websites and apps, and there’s little oversight and moderation from the adtech companies that monetize them. As advertisers handed off day-to-day operations to a bewilderingly complex digital advertising supply chain, companies often don’t know where their ads are ending up — including on sites that spew disinformation and hate-speech. This represents an acute reputational risk at a time when consumers are increasingly making buying decisions based on personal values and brand associations. Companies need to take three steps: check your ad campaigns, avoid brand safety technology, and demand cash refunds.close

How much of your company’s ad budget funds disinformation? You might believe the answer to be “none.” After all, most reputable brands don’t actively seek to run ads alongside conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, and troll farms. Unfortunately, that’s no guarantee. If you’re not routinely auditing your programmatic ad buys or partnering directly with the websites you want to run ads on, it’s highly likely that — by default — your brand is directly contributing to the disinformation economy.

The global digital advertising industry is estimated to be $600 billion and growing. While Facebook and other social media sites are popular for advertising, much of the campaign spend dedicated to the internet is distributed across the “open web” — the millions of websites and apps available to us through a quick Google search. With little oversight and moderation from the adtech companies that monetize them, this landscape is far murkier for advertisers.

This is the result of trade-offs that marketers have made over the past decade while pursuing the promise of programmatic advertising: more scale, more reach, and lower costs. As advertisers handed off day-to-day operations to a bewilderingly complex digital advertising supply chain, those middlemen have become gatekeepers of their clients’ information — and often deny access to key data they need to audit their campaigns. This represents an acute reputational risk at a time when consumers are increasingly making buying decisions based on personal values and brand associations.

Advertisers need to take back control over their own advertising. They need to demand access to their own granular data from third-party ad exchanges, audit their ad campaigns, and clarify for themselves where on the internet they really want to be. If they don’t, they will continue to put themselves at brand risk. Even more seriously, they will continue to send money to the people who financially benefit the most from publishing disinformation on the internet.

How Adtech Funds the Global Disinformation Crisis

This lack of oversight and accountability has left advertisers in the dark around their own ad campaigns. It has also opened up a thriving industry for disinformation operatives and fraudsters. The World Federation of Advertisers says they expect digital advertising to be “second only to the drugs trade as a source of income for organized crime” by 2025.

Digital advertising not only allows bad actors to generate profits, it also provides them with an invaluable set of tools to manipulate public opinion. At the Check My Ads Institute, the watchdog organization I co-founded, we see this as a triple threat: Propaganda thrives on money, ads, and data. Ad revenue helps propagandists multiply their efforts across networks of content across the web. Data enables propagandists to develop detailed user profiles that help them target people who are susceptible to lies and bigotry. Finally, the ads themselves — particularly those from blue-chip advertisers — lend signals of legitimacy to visitors to disinformation websites.

This business model is sustainable only because it’s built on the backs of unwitting advertisers. The fallout of these unexpected ad placements ends up on the brand, whose communications teams are often forced to address an ad placement they neither approved nor were aware of.

In 2021, Warby Parker learned that it was sponsoring Daily Wire, an outlet whose hosts openly promote harassment and bullying toward transgender people, and even floated the idea of their “eradication.” Warby Parker pulled their ads within hours, confirming that they were “working to actively stop these types of ads from being placed. We do not condone this.”

In August 2022, Check My Ads found ads for household brands appearing during commercial breaks for War Room, the livestream show hosted by Steve Bannon. Bannon, whose on-air monologues included calls for the beheading of Dr. Fauci, was sponsored by advertisers including Procter & Gamble, Nissan, and Audi.

The Slow-Burning Chaos of the Digital Ad Industry

Most ads on the web are placed through programmatic advertising. In other words, they are placed algorithmically, through billions of lightning-fast auctions with dozens of factors, with little to no human oversight.

In theory, this process is hyper-efficient and allows advertisers to allocate their budgets and monitor the results of campaigns in real time. In reality, there are so many layers of companies that insert themselves into the supply chain that monitoring digital ad campaigns is more difficult than anyone outside the industry would expect.

A typical ad placement will involve:

• A demand-side platform (DSP) that brings advertisers to market
• Supply-side platforms (SSPs), a type of middleman that brings publishers to market
• Ad networks, brokers in the middle of the supply chain
• Data management platforms (DMPs), platforms used to collect and manage data about an advertiser’s audience

Unsurprisingly, the reality of too many opaque business relationships has led to disinformation outlets being pulled into the system. Self-serve application processes, coupled with the tendency of these middleman companies to turn a blind eye, has made it too easy for website owners to connect to the advertising system without any human review or even an after-the-fact audit.

To counter this problem, industry associations like GARM, the Global Alliance of Responsible Media — which include GroupM, Havas, and Procter & Gamble — have tried to stem the flow of money to what they call “brand unsafe” outlets by developing tighter definitions for its members to ratify. GARM’s brand safety framework prohibits advertising on “insensitive, irresponsible, and harmful treatment of sensitive social issues that demean a particular group or incite greater conflict.” A new layer of technology companies, distinct from those described above — known as ad verification and brand safety solutions — has emerged with promises to protect brands from this type of content.

Still, companies are often stuck in a game of whack-a-mole. Consider the fact that, years after every major advertiser dropped the fringe, right-wing news site Breitbart, advertisers still find themselves funding Bannon, its one-time editor in chief, all over again. But the current system makes it hard for brands to protect themselves.

Currently, advertisers have to rely on adtech companies to find out where their ads are being placed. But right now it is common practice for these companies and agencies to make it difficult for advertisers to access granular reports of ad placements that would allow them to audit the effectiveness of vendor technology and see who they’re giving money to. This happens for large and small advertisers alike. For example, leading brand safety technology companies tend to provide high-level performance reports by category. A Fortune 500 company tells us that they refused to provide granular details such as which URLs were blocked — unless they significantly increased spend.

This opacity can hide both bad actors and poor performance. For example, one ad re-targeting company typically provides high-level performance reports to its clients. When a client, Headphones.com, asked for detailed information about where their ads were placed, the company developed a custom dashboard and sent it to them. The client found dozens of disinformation outlets and thousands of inappropriate websites and apps, and blocked their ads from appearing on them. In doing so, the client decreased their ad spend from $1,200/day to $50/day. Their campaign performance stayed the exact same.

These are not isolated incidents, but a pattern. Adtech companies work in the dark and effectively keep advertisers locked out of these transactions. The lack of control and oversight has led to consequences that overwhelmingly harm advertisers and society at large.

So what can advertisers do?

How Advertisers Can Take Control of Their Data

As digital advertising budgets once again expand dramatically for the 2024 U.S. election season, the stakes are high. Advertisers must be able to check where their ads are appearing. To do this, they need to actively seek control of ad placement data from their vendors.

There are a few simple, impactful steps companies can take:

Check your ad campaigns. Forget high-level performance reports from ad tech companies. Instead, ask them for log-level data, which is the real source of truth of your ad placements, because it includes specific data about on which websites where your ad appeared. Supply chain research firms can help you audit your campaigns.Avoid brand safety technology. The leading ad verification companies only provide high-level reports, keeping you unaware of which websites your ads are being placed on and blocked from. As we mention above, this isn’t sufficient for ensuring that your company’s ads aren’t supporting bad actors. If you are using brand safety technology, ensure that that data, too, gets audited regularly — brand safety technology is often ineffective, and sometimes even harmful.Demand cash refunds. There will often be a discrepancy between your log-level data and the campaign standards you were promised. When this happens, demand a cash refund — not a make-good. You are entitled to your money back and an explanation of how the discrepancies will be avoided in the future. If not, ditch the vendor.

. . .

Marketing is not just about reach and click-throughs. It is about who we associate with, and how we show up in the world. As marketers we spend a lot of money to promote our brands, and that gives us a lot of power — and it’s now time to use it. Demand control of your own ad campaigns to advertise better. It will not only improve your brand, it might just save democracy.

• CA
• Claire Atkin is CEO and co-founder of Check My Ads, the adtech industry’s first watchdog. She also writes the popular newsletter BRANDED, which has broken major stories about the advertising industry’s ties to disinformation and hate groups. As a brand safety advocate, her work centers around building new sustainable standards in digital advertising while dismantling the ad-funded disinformation economy.

13. What China’s Economic Woes May Mean for the U.S.

What China’s Economic Woes May Mean for the U.S.

By Lydia DePillis

Aug. 26, 2023, 5:01 a.m. ET

The New York Times · by Lydia DePillis · August 26, 2023

The fallout is probably limited — and there may be some upside for American interests.

The Port of Oakland in California. China only accounted for 7.5 percent of U.S. exports in 2022.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Aug. 26, 2023, 5:01 a.m. ET

The news about China’s economy over the past few weeks has been daunting, to put it mildly.

The country’s growth has fallen from its usual brisk 8 percent annual pace to more like 3 percent. Real estate companies are imploding after a decade of overbuilding. And China’s citizens, frustrated by lengthy coronavirus lockdowns and losing confidence in the government, haven’t been able to consume their way out of the country’s pandemic-era malaise.

If the world’s second-largest economy is stumbling so badly, what does that mean for the biggest?

Short answer: At the moment, the implications for the United States are probably minor, given China’s limited role as a customer for American goods and the minor connections between the countries’ financial systems.

In a note published Thursday, Wells Fargo simulated a “hard landing” scenario for China in which output over the next three years would be 12.5 percent smaller than previous growth rates would achieve — similar to the impact of a slump from 1989 to 1991. Even under those conditions, the U.S. economy would shave only 0.1 percent off its inflation-adjusted growth in 2024, and 0.2 percent in 2025.

That could change, however, if China’s current shakiness deepens into a collapse that drags down an already slowing global economy.

“It doesn’t necessarily help things, but I don’t think it’s a major factor in determining the outlook in the next six months,” Neil Shearing, the chief economist at Capital Economics Group, an analysis and consulting firm, said in a recent webinar. “Unless the outlook for China becomes substantially worse.”

A potential balm for inflation, but a threat to factories.

When considering the economic relationship between the two countries, it’s important to recognize that the United States has played some role in China’s troubles.

The United States is well past a boom in consumption during the pandemic that pulled in $536.8 billion worth of imports from China in 2022. This year, with home offices and patios stuffed full of furniture and electronics, Americans are spending their money on cruises and Taylor Swift tickets instead. That lowers demand for goods from Chinese factories — which had already been weakened by a swath of tariffs that former President Donald J. Trump started and the Biden administration has largely kept in place.

How Much America Buys From (and Sells to) China

Monthly goods imports have fallen since a pandemic-era boom.

Source: Census Bureau

By The New York Times

For years, China’s leaders have said they want to rely more on the country’s households to drive economic growth. But they have taken few steps to support domestic consumption, such as shoring up safety net programs, which would persuade residents to spend more of the money they now save in case of emergencies.

That’s why some are concerned that China could again fall back on encouraging exports to foster growth. Such a strategy might succeed since the Chinese currency, the renminbi, is very weak against the dollar, and it’s possible to evade tariffs on most items by assembling Chinese parts in other countries — like Vietnam and Mexico.

An export surge would have countervailing effects. It could lower prices for consumer goods, which — along with falling Chinese demand for commodities like gasoline and iron ore — would help lower inflation in the United States. At the same time, it could counteract efforts to resuscitate American manufacturing, raising the political temperature as the presidential election approaches.

“My fear is that an export-based Chinese recovery will run up against a world that is reluctant to become ever more dependent on China for manufactures, and that becomes a source of tension,” said Brad Setser, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

And what about goods flowing the other way, from the United States to China? It’s not a huge volume — China accounted for only 7.5 percent of U.S. exports in 2022. American businesses have long sought to further develop the Chinese market, especially for agricultural products such as pork and rice, but success has been underwhelming. In 2018, the Trump administration negotiated a compact under which China would buy billions more dollars in products from U.S. farmers.

Those targets were never met. With appetite fading in China, they may never be. That could mean lower food prices globally, but farmers would be hurt.

“If their demand for corn and soybeans is rising, that’s good for everybody who produces corn and soybeans around the world,” said Roger Cryan, the chief economist with the American Farm Bureau Federation. “It is something to be concerned about down the road.”

Insulation for American institutions and investors.

So much for general trade dynamics. But the U.S. economy is composed of millions of companies with particular concerns, and some may have more to worry about as China’s economy flounders.

Tesla, for example, had made inroads in the Chinese market, but its sales there have tumbled in recent months in the face of tough competition from local brands with lower-cost models. Apple generates about 20 percent of its revenue in China, which could also take a hit as residents choose cheaper products.

American banks that do business globally have noted slowing growth; Citigroup’s chief executive, Jane Fraser, said on the company’s second-quarter earnings call that China had been its “biggest disappointment.”

Chinese tourists also pour money into U.S. cities when they visit, which they might do less of going forward. Glenn Fogel, the chief executive of Booking Holdings — which includes travel websites such as Booking.com and Priceline — said in his earnings call that their outbound business from China had been anemic.

“I don’t expect a recovery in China for us for some time, significant time probably,” Mr. Fogel said.

Those effects, however, are likely to be muted. Even if the economic picture darkens, the American and Chinese banking systems are separate enough to insulate U.S. institutions and investors, aside from the few who might have invested in property developers like Evergrande or Country Garden.

“There aren’t realistic channels for financial contagion from China to the U.S.,” Dr. Setser said. While China’s central bank may hold off on buying U.S. Treasury bonds, he noted, any impact on the overall market could be contained. “There’s no real scenario where China disrupts the bond market in a way that the Fed cannot offset.”

On the contrary, there may be some upside for American companies if Chinese investors, lacking domestic opportunities, move more of their money into the United States. China’s direct investment in U.S. assets is relatively low and could face new obstacles as states seek to erect barriers to Chinese purchases of U.S. real estate and commercial enterprises. But places that welcome it could benefit.

“Given that the U.S. seems to be doing relatively well, you could have money coming to the U.S., both in search of higher yield and in search of safety,” said Eswar Prasad, a professor of trade policy at Cornell University.

The wild card of geopolitics.

Aside from any direct financial and economic spillovers, it’s worthwhile to consider whether a faltering China meaningfully alters geopolitical dynamics and American interests.

Washington has long fretted that a China-dominated trading bloc could limit market access for American companies by setting rules that, for example, contain weak protections for intellectual property. Such a trade agreement came into force in early 2022 after the United States abandoned its push to form the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

But if China appears less mighty, it may lose its attractiveness in a fracturing world. Countries that eagerly took loans from China for large infrastructure projects may turn back toward international lending institutions like the World Bank, despite their more stringent requirements.

“The fact that the Chinese economy is seen as being in a rough spot, in addition to more aggressive outreach in Asia and elsewhere by the Biden administration, that has shifted the balance a little bit,” Dr. Prasad said.

Could China’s economic condition affect its willingness to undertake any military adventures, such as an invasion of Taiwan? While the Communist Party leadership might seek to stir up patriotic spirits through such an attack, Dr. Prasad thinks a shaky economy would in fact make the use of military force less likely, given the resources required to sustain that kind of engagement.

One thing to keep in mind: While China appears to be going through a rough patch, the outlook is uncertain. There’s a debate in think-tank circles about whether the country’s economic structure will be durable over the longer term or fundamentally unsound.

Heiwai Tang, an economics professor at HKU Business School in Hong Kong, said it would be unwise to consider China the next Japan, on the brink of prolonged stagnation.

“I remain optimistic that the government is still very agile and should be responsive to a potential crisis,” Dr. Tang said. “They know what to do. It’s just a matter of time before they come to some kind of consensus to do something.”

Ana Swanson and Jason Karaian contributed reporting.

Lydia DePillis is a reporter on the Business desk who covers the changing American economy and what it means for people’s lives. More about Lydia DePillis

The New York Times · by Lydia DePillis · August 26, 2023

14. Ukraine Is Still Grappling With the Battlefield Prigozhin Left Behind

Ukraine Is Still Grappling With the Battlefield Prigozhin Left Behind

By Paul Sonne

Aug. 26, 2023

Updated 5:24 a.m. ET

The New York Times · by Paul Sonne · August 26, 2023

He shored up Russian forces at their most vulnerable and drew Ukraine into a costly fight for Bakhmut, giving Moscow time to build defenses that are slowing Ukraine’s counteroffensive.

A makeshift memorial for Yevgeny V. Prigozhin in Saint Petersburg, Russia, on Friday.

Aug. 26, 2023Updated 5:24 a.m. ET

As the Russian military reeled on the battlefield in Ukraine last autumn, a foul-mouthed, ex-convict with a personal connection to President Vladimir V. Putin stepped out of the shadows to help.

Yevgeny V. Prigozhin for years had denied any connection to the Wagner mercenary group and operated discreetly on the margins of Russian power, trading in political skulduggery, cafeteria meals and lethal force.

Now, he was front and center, touting the Wagner brand known for its savagery and personally recruiting an army of convicts to aid a flailing Russian war operation starved for personnel.

The efforts that Mr. Prigozhin and a top Russian general seen as close to him, Gen. Sergei Surovikin, would undertake in the subsequent months would alter the course of the war.

Both men have since been taken out of action.

Mr. Prigozhin is presumed to have died in a plane crash on Wednesday, an incident that came two months after he launched a failed mutiny, and which U.S. and Western officials believe was the result of an explosion on board. Several said they thought Mr. Putin ordered the plane destroyed, suggestions the Kremlin on Friday dismissed as an “absolute lie.”

A military column of the Wagner group drives along the highway linking Russia’s southern cities with Moscow during the rebellion on June 24.Credit...Reuters

General Surovikin, who U.S. officials have said had advance knowledge of the mutiny, hasn’t been seen in public since the day of the revolt, and according to Russian state news media was formally dismissed from his post leading Russia’s aerospace forces this week.

On the battlefield, Ukrainian forces are still grappling with their impact.

Mr. Prigozhin led the brutal fight in Bakhmut through the winter and into the spring, relying on unorthodox recruitment of prison inmates to quickly bolster Russia’s badly depleted frontline forces. The battle, one of the bloodiest of the war, sapped Kyiv of trained soldiers ahead of the counteroffensive, while Russia lost personnel Moscow saw as largely expendable.

“When the Russian military was at its most vulnerable, he provided an important reserve force to buy time for them,” Dara Massicot, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, said of Mr. Prigozhin.

And Wagner, she added, was “taking the most casualties and losses at a time when the Russian military was still reeling and trying to cope with mobilization.”

An Orthodox priest gave funeral rites for Wagner group mercenaries in February on the outskirts of Bakinskaya, a village in Russia’s Krasnodar region.Credit...Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times

He effectively helped turn Bakhmut into a symbol beyond its strategic importance, one where Kyiv continues to devote extensive resources. And Russia is now building out its own army with convicts, adopting his strategy.

The long-fought battle for Bakhmut also gave the Russian military, initially under the leadership of General Surovikin, a chance to flow in newly mobilized personnel and establish what became known as the “Surovikin line” of defense. The wall of mines, trenches and other fortifications has proved difficult for Ukrainian forces to penetrate in the counteroffensive.

Mr. Prigozhin’s forces eventually took a devastated Bakhmut. And his contribution to the Russian war effort at an important moment, coupled with a newfound public stature owing to scores of expletive-laden comments and videos on social media, fed his ego.

“Prigozhin would have you believe they were the only thing saving the Russian military. In reality they were out front, but they couldn’t do what they did without the Russian Ministry of Defense,” said Ms. Massicot.

The grisly battle stoked his hatred of the Russian military to such a degree that he ultimately mounted a shocking uprising to eliminate its leadership, running gravely afoul of the unspoken rules of Mr. Putin’s system in the process.

“Prigozhin over time developed a kind of main character syndrome,” Ms. Massicot said. “And in Russia, there is only one main character. He sits in the Kremlin.”

The mutiny came after Mr. Prigozhin’s usefulness on the battlefield had faded.

Mr. Prigozhin in an image taken from video posted on the Telegram account of his company, Concord, with Wagner mercenaries in Bakhmut, Ukraine, in May.

Russia’s shift to defense had stabilized the lines. The personnel crisis became less acute. In late May, Wagner left the battlefield.

“Wagner’s strategic utility likely peaked during the winter and spring,” said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “After that, it is difficult to see how Wagner would have proven decisive in this war. Their greatest utility was not in defending but in fighting for cities.”

Mr. Prigozhin’s presumed death at the age of 62 capped the life of a man who rose from a Soviet prison to Moscow’s most elite circles of power, ultimately erecting a private empire that fed off Mr. Putin’s increased appetite for confrontation and desire to reassert Russia on the world stage.

While amassing a personal fortune from government catering and construction contracts, Mr. Prigozhin crafted a role for himself at the tip of Russia’s geopolitical spear, his stature growing alongside Mr. Putin’s willingness to take risks.

He thrived in the secretive space between formal Russian power and its targets. Russia’s invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014 popularized the concept of “hybrid warfare” and “gray zone tactics,” which Mr. Prigozhin adopted as his freewheeling outfit’s specialties.

“With the creation of Wagner in 2014 and all of the deployments we have seen since, he established a way to really revolutionize how a private military company could be used in this targeted, coordinated way to advance Russian geopolitical interests,” said Catrina Doxsee, an associate fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Wagner assault teams helped Moscow execute a final land grab in eastern Ukraine in 2015. For years, the mercenary group carried out select missions in Syria, relieving the Russian military of the need to deploy large numbers of ground troops so it could achieve its goals with air power and a limited footprint.

Mr. Prigozhin attracted global renown when his St. Petersburg troll factory intervened in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and helped stir up right-wing populism in Europe. Later, he expanded his security services into Africa, all the while finding business opportunities, from mining to oil, that came easily to a person operating a private army with the Kremlin’s imprimatur.

A Russian gold processing plant in the desert outside al-Ibediyya, Sudan. Wagner commanders often extracted lucrative mining concessions from African leaders in exchange for providing security. Credit...Abdumonam Eassa for The New York Times

“The opportunity grew from a more interventionist policy by Russia,” Mr. Kofman said. “If Russia and Putin weren’t interested in a revived Russian role in the Middle East, if they weren’t interested in prospecting in Africa for influence and resources, those opportunities wouldn’t have been there.”

“The Kremlin was interested in those who could deliver on that expanded vision,” Mr. Kofman added. “And Prigozhin, ever an opportunist, sensed those prospects.”

Mr. Putin’s full-fledged invasion of Ukraine would become as existential for the Kremlin as it would for Mr. Prigozhin, bringing the risk-taking to extremes that tested the system and the individuals within it.

At first, Mr. Prigozhin seemed to thrive. But as his ego grew, his usefulness to the Russian military waned, an unstable blend that exploded in the June mutiny, rupturing a relationship with Mr. Putin that went back to the 1990s in their mutual hometown, St. Petersburg.

The tycoon had spent nearly a decade behind bars in the 1980s, having been found guilty by a Soviet court of robbery and other crimes, including one incident in which prosecutors alleged he choked a woman into unconsciousness before making off with her gold earrings.

While he made inroads with Mr. Putin after the Soviet Union’s collapse, he didn’t come from the world of former KGB associates who would rise along with the Russian leader to dominate the country’s levers of power. Mr. Putin seemed to emphasize that on Thursday when he noted that Mr. Prigozhin was a “talented person” who in life made many mistakes.

“I think some of these miscalculations came from believing that he was part of the system,” Ms. Doxsee said. “But I don’t think Putin ever stopped believing that he was anything other than a useful outsider.”

Part of the crashed private jet that reportedly carried Mr. Prigozhin, near the village of Kuzhenkino, Tver region, Russia, on Thursday.Credit...Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press

Paul Sonne is a foreign correspondent for The Times, focusing on Russia and Ukraine. More about Paul Sonne

The New York Times · by Paul Sonne · August 26, 2023

15. How a small-town feud in Kansas sent a shock through American journalism

Regardless of how people feel about the media and the fake "fake news" we all should be fighting for all of our rights especially our first Amendment rights including especially freedom of the press. If we value our republic (our federal democratic republic) then we must ensure freedom of the press. The press must hold the government accountable and inform the people. And I know these statements will be challenged by those who think the press has been compromised but despite the criticisms we must still fight for freedom of the press (and freedom of speech, religion, and right to assemble among others)

How a small-town feud in Kansas sent a shock through American journalism

A police raid without precedent on a weekly newspaper alarmed First Amendment advocates. The real story of how it happened, though, is rooted in the roiling tensions and complex history of a few key community members.

By Jonathan O'Connell, Paul Farhi and Sofia Andrade

The Washington Post · by Jonathan O'Connell · August 26, 2023

August 26, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

MARION, Kan. — The phone conversation between the journalist and the town’s newly hired police chief quickly turned contentious.

Tipsters had been telling Deb Gruver that Gideon Cody left the police department in Kansas City, Mo., under a cloud, supposedly threatened with demotion. So now she was asking him difficult questions on behalf of the weekly Marion County Record about the career change that had brought him to this prairie community of 1,900 people.

The chief bristled.

“If you’re going to be writing bad things about me,” they both recall him telling the reporter, “I might just not take the job.”

He also advised Gruver that he had hired a lawyer.

Cody later said he had been on guard during the conversation, having been warned by longtime residents that the Record could be overly aggressive in its reporting.

“If you live in Marion, you understand,” he told The Washington Post. “If you don’t live in Marion, you don’t understand.”

Gruver wouldn’t publish any of her reporting on Cody for months to come. But their confrontation in April marked an escalation in long-running tensions between a group of local journalists and the officials and community members they cover that would boil over through the summer.

The small-town intrigue might have stayed in a small town, though, had Cody not initiated a dramatic step earlier this month. Responding to a local businesswoman’s allegation that the paper had illegally accessed her driving record, Cody obtained search warrants from a magistrate judge and led half a dozen officers on an Aug. 11 raid of the Record’s offices and the home of its editor and publisher — seizing computers, servers, cellphones and other files.

The raid was so unusual, and so alarming in its implications for the news media, that it quickly exploded into an international story. Press-advocacy organizations universally condemned the raid as a breach of state and federal laws that protect the media from government intrusion. Within days, a caravan of TV news trucks was rumbling through Marion’s business district, a modest collection of low-slung brick buildings.

The emotional response to the raid was heightened by the sudden death of the editor’s 98-year-old mother, who had railed furiously at the officers sorting through her belongings at their home and collapsed a day later. The Record blamed her death on her agitation over the raid.

“Get out of my house!” Joan Meyer had shouted at Cody from behind her walker before calling him an expletive, home surveillance video revealed. “Don’t you touch any of that stuff!”

Yet parsing the events that led to the search — and understanding its larger implications for a free press in the United States — comes down to untangling the complex interrelationships and tortured history of a small group of people coexisting in a single small town.

At the center of everything were a business owner, a police chief and a newspaper.

Almost everyone knows everyone else in Marion, a town formed at the end of a railroad spur in 1860 in the rich Flint Hills grazing lands an hour’s drive northeast of Wichita.

“A lot of us have chosen to live in a small town because that’s what we want,” said Zach Collett, 34, a Marion City Council member and manager at a security company who helped lead the efforts to hire a new police chief. “We want to be able to go to the grocery store and see people that we know there. And driving down the street and knowing dang near everybody you pass by.”

It’s the town where Eric Meyer, 70, grew up in a family of dedicated journalists — his late father, Bill Meyer, a Record staffer from 1948 onward, and his mother, Joan, a copy editor and longtime columnist, who bought the paper in 1998. And it’s the town to which Eric Meyer chose to return to take over the family business during the pandemic after a long career as a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal and a journalism professor at the University of Illinois.

In many ways, the Marion County Record has been an astonishing success. While local newspapers have been shuttering by the hundreds every year — victims of changing readership habits and plunging ad sales — Meyer’s paper boasted 4,000 print and digital subscribers before the raid, an impressive number in a county of only 12,000 residents.

Yet Bill Meyer’s tradition of aggressive reporting could rub some the wrong way — and Eric Meyer, in the view of some community members, took it up an unwelcome notch.

“People think things are emphasized [by the paper] from a certain perspective,” said Aleen Ratzlaff, a professor of communications at Tabor College in neighboring Hillsboro. “When there is an issue, they’re pretty aggressive about finding some news.”

One controversy occurred in June 2020, before Eric Meyer took over as editor, when the Record reported on the death of a teenager who was hit by a grain truck while riding his bike. The story ran with a photo of the boy’s cloth-draped body, sparking objections, according to one resident. Last November, the Record’s story about another teenager’s death in an ATV accident included a description of the victim’s body that struck some readers as too graphic.

The town’s mayor, David Mayfield, has frequently feuded with the paper and often criticizes it on Facebook. In one post, he accused Meyer of a telling an “outright lie” in a fiery Record editorial complaining that the council had held improper “secret sessions” to discuss allegations that led to the costly decision to fire a just-hired city administrator. As he often does, Meyer responded in Mayfield’s comments thread. (“What I’m really happy about is that the only thing you disputed in the long editorial was a relatively minor point.”) Some in Marion find Meyer’s editorials mean-spirited, especially for a town where everyone’s going to have to run into each other again.

Restaurateur Kari Newell developed a particular distaste for the Record — “It’s like Geraldo meets the National Enquirer,” she said — after a series of articles that she believed cast an unfair spotlight on a fellow businesswoman, the owner of a Marion day spa.

Some Record stories raised questions about whether the spa’s signage was legal. But the article Newell objected to most was the one that mentioned the spa owner in connection with someone else’s scandal.

The Record reported that the fired city administrator had been accused of misconduct after showing a woman’s provocative old modeling shots to another city official. The story included the identity of the woman in the photos: the day spa owner. It was an unnecessary detail, Newell told The Post.

“Her past was irrelevant to her business,” Newell protested.

Meyer defended the paper’s coverage of the spa. Its signage had been the subject of multiple city hearings, he said, and he believes it was important to clarify for readers that the photo being circulated by the fired official was of a local businessperson.

“We don’t want to make everything negative about the city of Marion,” he said. “It would be nice if the city of Marion did something positive for once. We would love to write about the city doing something nice.”

Newell found a chance to express her feelings about the Record. On Aug. 1, a gathering attended by the district’s congressman, Rep. Jake LaTurner (R), was held at her coffee shop, Kari’s Kitchen.

With several county commissioners present, it should have counted as an open meeting, the Record journalists believed — but when Meyer walked in with one of his reporters, Phyllis Zorn, Newell asked Cody, the police chief, to tell them to leave.

The journalists agreed to leave but wrote about the confrontation later, drawing an apology from LaTurner’s staff.

Deb Gruver’s reporting on Chief Cody never generated a story last spring — her tipsters wouldn’t go on the record, Meyer later said. But her interaction with Cody seemed to be a flash point.

“His answer [to Gruver’s questions about Kansas City] wasn’t that it wasn’t true,” Meyer said in an interview. “It was basically that, ‘If you print that, I will sue you.’”

Cody, 54, officially assumed his post in June. Shortly thereafter, he ordered his deputies to stop sending daily police activity logs to the Record.

Crime is infrequent in Marion, but the Record had consistently published these weekly reports — detailing every minor traffic accident police responded to, every report of wandering cattle — for decades. Cody told The Post that his review led him to believe these disclosures could violate privacy laws. In response, the paper began publishing a pointed notice where the reports had formerly appeared: “Chief Gideon Cody has ceased providing a weekly report of police activities.”

This month, after the national spotlight cast its glare on Marion, Cody acknowledged in an interview that he had been facing discipline and demotion when he ended his 24-year career with the Kansas City department, resigning from his role as captain in April to take a job paying barely half as much as a small-town chief. The Kansas City Star reported that he had been accused of berating a female officer with insulting comments. (Cody denied he made sexist comments.)

But Cody told The Post that his feelings about the Record and its inquiries into his time in Kansas City had no bearing on the actions he took toward it in August.

The Record, meanwhile, was investigating another community member: Kari Newell.

A couple of Marion residents — including Newell’s estranged husband — had circulated a screenshot of a page from a state database showing that the restaurateur had 15 years ago lost her driver’s license following a drunk-driving conviction. According to the people who shared it, the document landed in the hands of a Marion councilwoman, who declined to comment. A police affidavit later alleged that the councilwoman intended to use the document to challenge Newell’s attempt to renew a liquor license for the restaurant she operates in the town’s Historic Elgin Hotel, Chef’s Plate at Parlour 1886.

It also ended up with Zorn, one of the Record reporters.

Unsure whether the screenshot was legitimate, Zorn made a preliminary attempt to confirm Newell’s driving record. She went to the website for the Kansas Revenue Department and searched Newell’s name, plugging in certain personal information gleaned from the screenshot — Newell’s date of birth and driver’s license number — so she could access Newell’s record.

“It would have been irresponsible to just take the word of someone out there,” Zorn later told The Post.

Once again, the Record decided against publishing a story — just as it had taken a pass on the murky accusations about Cody last spring. Meyer said he was uneasy with how the newspaper’s original tipster had obtained Newell’s record. Instead, he said, he privately let the police chief know that he had received some information about Newell that the original sources may have accessed illicitly. He said he also volunteered to the chief his suspicion that Newell had been driving without a license.

At an Aug. 7 city council meeting, the tension among Cody, Newell and the Record exploded into public view.

During a hearing about her liquor license application, Newell furiously alleged to the room that the Record had illegally obtained her driving record.

The paper quoted her saying after the meeting that people all around Marion were high-fiving her for “finally standing up to the Record.”

Cody quickly took up the issue — but not in the way Meyer hoped. Three days later, the chief’s name and signature appeared on applications for warrants to search the Record’s office and the homes of Meyer, the councilwoman and another person who allegedly shared the Newell document. Cody argued in an affidavit viewed later by The Post that the Record could not have gotten Newell’s records without “either impersonating [Newell] or lying about the reasons why the record was being sought.”

The alleged crimes: unlawful use of a computer and identity theft — the latter charge a felony.

At 9:05 a.m. Friday, Aug. 11, Magistrate Judge Laura E. Viar approved Cody’s requests to search the Record, Meyer’s home and the councilwoman’s — setting in motion the raid that would make headlines around the world.

By day’s end, the story of how police swarmed the Record’s brick storefront offices and Meyer’s nearby home — walking off with computers, servers and a backup hard drive; injuring Gruver’s finger by yanking a phone out of her hands; even seizing Joan Meyer’s Alexa smart speaker — was major news in Kansas and drawing attention beyond the state.

“Police stage ‘chilling’ raid on Marion County newspaper” was the headline on a story by the nonprofit Kansas Reflector that same afternoon.

“Chilling” was Meyer’s word. The editor fretted to the growing crowd of journalists covering the saga that the Record would struggle to put out its next issue without its equipment — but he also crystallized the larger threat posed by the raid.

“It’s going to have a chilling effect on us even tackling issues,” Meyer told the Reflector in the hours after the raid, as well as “a chilling effect on people giving us information.”

In New York and Washington, word of a police raid on a small Midwestern newspaper caught the immediate attention of a cluster of organizations devoted to asserting First Amendment rights and promoting the safety of journalists around the globe. Over the years, these groups have stood up for reporters detained by police while covering stories or pressured by prosecutors to reveal their sources, they’ve gone to court to challenge government officials over access to public records, and they’ve raised concerns about an overt strain of antipathy toward the media increasingly displayed by some politicians and public officials since the dawn of the Trump era.

Yet an actual raid by police represented a kind of government intrusion on media operations that none could remember seeing in this country. Federal law generally protects journalists from search warrants or raids, requiring law enforcement investigating a crime that reporters may have information about to use subpoenas or voluntary cooperation instead.

“I think everyone realized how much of an existential threat this was,” said Gabe Rottman of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. The group spent the next two days marshaling the support of 35 news outlets — including The Post, New York Times and CNN — to sign a letter to Cody condemning the raid as “significantly overbroad, improperly intrusive” and potentially illegal.

“We wanted to articulate just how extraordinary and significant this was,” Rottman explained, “not just in Marion but for all of the news media.”

The Reporters Committee also found a Kansas City lawyer, Bernard Rhodes, to represent the Record. A Washington-based official with another group, the Committee to Protect Journalists, flew to Kansas to monitor the situation and assist the Record in its efforts to regroup. A company started selling “Kansas Needs Reporters” T-shirts and encouraging donations to journalism nonprofits in the name of the Record.

But it was an interview that Meyer gave to a Brooklyn-based journalist barely 24 hours after the raid that helped the story go viral nationally.

Meyer revealed to freelance writer Marisa Kabas the until-then secret fact that the Record had been investigating Cody’s career in Kansas City and implied a possible connection to the raid.

“The allegations [about Cody] — including the identities of who made the allegations — were on one of the computers that got seized,” he told Kabas. “I may be paranoid that this has anything to do with it, but when people come and seize your computer, you tend to be a little paranoid.”

This detail from Kabas’s scoop was highlighted and shared by some of the most prominent media figures on X, formerly known as Twitter. Some of them asserted — more strongly than Meyer seemed to delicately imply — that Cody’s raid may have been triggered by the paper’s investigation of him.

Was it? Cody largely avoided media questions in the immediate aftermath of the raid. He issued a short statement that weekend about his inability to comment on an active criminal investigation, adding, “I believe when the rest of the story is available to the public, the judicial system that is being questioned will be vindicated.”

In an interview with The Post a week later, though, he firmly denied that he was motivated to investigate the Record because of its probe of him.

“I have no vendetta against them,” he said.

He insisted that he had simply investigated an alleged crime at a citizen’s behest. “How am I supposed to look the other way when I have a victim who says, ‘Are you going to do anything about this?’” he said. And he noted that he had no unilateral power to launch the raid, which he said was approved by a county attorney and a local judge.

“There’s no way someone can conduct a search warrant on their own without going through our series of checks and balances,” Cody said.

Judge Viar, whose decision to approve the search warrant has been criticized by press advocates, has declined to comment.

Cody added that he doubted the raid would have attracted attention if the target had not been a newspaper. “If they were any other Joe Citizen, no one would think twice,” he said. “But because they’re journalists, I am being attacked everywhere.”

Newell was also stunned to find herself the focus of national attention.

Sitting in Kari’s Kitchen with her eldest daughter a week after the police raids, she showed a reporter more than 500 angry Facebook messages, some of them threatening her or accusing her of killing Joan Meyer. Negative reviews of her two restaurants have poured in from strangers who never patronized them. She and her daughter had to cancel more than 100 fake online reservations for that night.

“I had high reviews across the board,” she said through tears. “And I worked very hard to get there.”

As for the Record, the newspaper took no small measure of relief and vindication when Marion County Attorney Joel Ensey announced five days after the raid that he would withdraw Cody’s warrant and return the seized items to Meyer and his staff.

The announcement seemed to amount to an admission that the now-infamous raid had been a mistake. Ensey said in a statement that there had been “insufficient evidence” to justify a raid on the searched locations or to connect the sought-after items with an alleged crime.

The sworn affidavits that Cody filed in his effort to secure his search warrants had presented the Record as an imperfect martyr for the First Amendment.

The documents noted that the database Zorn tapped into while investigating Newell’s driving history is based on records deemed confidential under state law. Outsiders can access it, but only for a limited number of permissible reasons, the affidavit said — such as being a licensed private detective, a statistical researcher who will not disclose individual data, or a person looking up her own data.

Later, though, a spokesperson for the state agency that maintains the database contradicted the affidavit in part, telling the Associated Press it’s legal for a reporter or anyone else to check the status of another person’s license.

“Even if it was illegal for us to do that,” Meyer told The Post, “the police response was like bringing the SWAT team out for jaywalking.”

After the raid, the Record received more than 4,300 new requests for subscriptions, many from far-flung boosters eager to show their support, its editor said. Volunteers showed up at the office to help answer the stream of phone calls. Meyer spent several days toggling between making plans for his mother’s memorial service and sitting for high-profile interviews with the likes of CNN, MSNBC and NPR — while also scrambling to put out the first post-raid issue of the Marion County Record.

The banner headline: “SEIZED … but not silenced.”

The Record continued its work as usual — or perhaps a little emboldened.

Gruver finally began publishing the reporting she had gathered about Cody’s Kansas City tenure last spring, including blistering, subjective and highly personal criticism attributed to sources who remained anonymous.

It was the kind of reporting that previously gave the Record ethical hesitations — but that it now was going ahead with because “other news organizations have begun publishing similar accounts from unnamed sources,” she wrote. Cody, the paper wrote, declined to comment.

As Meyer welcomed a Post reporter to the Record’s office a week after the raid, another visitor walked in, using a wooden cane for support. Sporting cowboy boots and a red Donald Trump ball cap, the man eagerly shook Meyer’s hand.

“Don’t stop!” he urged the editor. “Keep going!”

On the sidewalk out front, a spontaneous memorial had popped up, surrounded by flowers. In the middle sat a framed photo of Joan Meyer.

The Washington Post · by Jonathan O'Connell · August 26, 2023

16. Pentagon protested false Fox News report about fallen Marine, emails show

And despite my calls for supporting freedom of the press and the criticism of fake "fake news" here is an example of the press being irresponsible. It seems the Pentagon was right to push back but the reports did contain important criticisms of the bureaucracy but I think in an attempt to sensationalize the issue (and gain clicks online) they only partially reported the facts that supported their agenda.

But this does highlight the need for the adversarial relationship between the press and the government. Even reading this report I think there is a certain amount of "spin" to bring negative vews twoard the other news outlet. This is why we need to read all news reports objectively and with a very critical eye.

Pentagon protested false Fox News report about fallen Marine, emails show

The network quietly removed the story based on false claims from a congressman but did not apologize or run a correction

By Paul Farhi

August 26, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Paul Farhi · August 26, 2023

The U.S. Marine Corps went up to the highest levels of Fox News last month to challenge a story that falsely claimed a fallen Marine’s family had to cover the cost of transporting her remains, emails obtained by The Washington Post show.

Fox quietly amended the digital story and then removed it from its website following more complaints from the Marines but still has not apologized or corrected the erroneous report, which had been based on a false claim quickly retracted by a congressman.

The Marines’ communications with Fox were first reported by Military.com, which obtained the emails this week under a Freedom of Information Act request.

The July 25 FoxNews.com story relied on an account from freshman Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.), who stated that the family of Sgt. Nicole L. Gee had shouldered “a heavy financial burden” of $60,000 to retrieve her body from Afghanistan. Gee, 23, was one of 13 U.S. service members killed in a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport in the frantic final days of the U.S. withdrawal.

The story’s reporter, Michael Lee, quoted Mills calling the family’s supposed expenditures an “egregious injustice.” Neither Pentagon officials nor Gee’s family were quoted in the original story.

Marine Corps officials say the family did not face any financial burdens to have Gee’s body shipped to Arlington National Cemetery. They disputed the story in a series of emails to Fox executives — including Fox News president and executive editor Jay Wallace and editor in chief Porter Berry — shortly after the story was published.

“The allegations originally published turned out to be false, which I suspect Mr. Lee knew in the first place, and was the reason he did not seek comment from the Marine Corps,” wrote Marine Corps spokesman Maj. James Stenger in an email to the Fox executives.

Two days after his original comments to Fox, Mills walked back his claims in a statement in which he seemed to blame the Pentagon and the Gee family for being “in their time of grief, confused” about the costs associated with the transportation of Sgt. Gee’s remains. He said the Department of Defense “was able to provide clarification” about the matter.

Fox News and its reporter did not reply to multiple requests for comment. Lee also did not reply. Stenger declined to comment.

After Stenger’s first email, Fox added a statement from the Marines to the story and changed its headline. The original headline read: “Family forced to pay to ship body of Marine killed after Pentagon policy change; ‘Egregious injustice.’” The new version said: “Family shouldered burden to transport body of Marine killed in Afghanistan, GOP Rep says.”

Fox gave no indication that it had amended the article, a common practice for news organizations.

Stenger emailed executives again to say that the new headline and story were still false. “Using the grief of a family member of a fallen Marine to score cheap clickbait points is disgusting,” he wrote.

Fox then removed the story from its website altogether, ignoring Stenger’s request for a correction, retraction or an apology to Gee’s family.

In 2017, Fox News removed a story that suggested a link between the hacking of Democratic National Committee emails and the murder of Seth Rich, a young contractor who had worked there — a conspiracy theory heavily promoted on-air by Fox personalities but later debunked by a special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The network replaced the Rich story a week after publication with a statement conceding that the story “was not initially subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require” and said it would investigate and “provide updates as warranted.”

District police have said Seth Rich’s still-unsolved murder appeared to be a result of a botched robbery. In 2020, Fox settled a lawsuit filed by Rich’s parents on undisclosed terms. But it never published further explanation about the retracted story.

The Washington Post · by Paul Farhi · August 26, 2023

17. China Proposes Permanent, Unique ID for Everyone in the Metaverse

Again my thesis: China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, and displace democratic institutions.

This is an obvious attempt to export one capability of an authoritarian system.

But we also need to be wary of all governments (and international organizations) who want o use these capabilities for "benevolent" purposes to include for law enforcement.  Security versus privacy, freedom, and individual liberty. We are going to have to examine our social contract and determine what kind of and how much liberty we want to give up in return for enhanced "security."

Excerpts:

Although China's system is likely to be rejected by the ITU, Interpol is urging law enforcement to embrace virtual reality tech and "get in early" on the metaverse to stay one step ahead of lawbreakers, scammers, and terrorists who may try and take advantage of it.

China Proposes Permanent, Unique ID for Everyone in the Metaverse

PCMag

Every person would be uniquely identifiable and therefore easy to punish for bad behavior.

Matthew Humphries

Updated August 22, 2023

(Credit: Getty Images/Just_Super)

China thinks its real-world social credit system, where every person has a unique ID that's easy to track and shared with law enforcement, would work well for all online worlds and metaverses.

A proposal of a "Digital identity System" for anyone using a virtual online world or metaverse has been drafted by state-owned telecom company China Mobile and reviewed by Politico.

The proposal suggests creating a unique digital ID for every person that includes a range of "identifiable signs, natural characteristics, social characteristic," and personal details. The ID would be stored permanently and shared with law enforcement to allow for swift action to be taken when bad behavior occurs within these virtual worlds.

China Mobile includes an example in the proposal of how a user named Tom could be promptly identified and punished after he "spreads rumors and makes chaos in the metaverse."

If this sounds familiar, it's because China already has such a system in place in the real world called the Social Credit System. Under that system, every individual, business, and government institution has a record created that can be tracked and evaluated for trustworthiness. There are currently many different forms of this system being used within China, but eventually a unified version operating on a national scale is expected to roll out.

China Mobile's proposal is under discussion at the United Nations' telecom agency, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which created a metaverse focus group in December. Within the group, regulators, academics, non-governmental organizations, and tech companies review ideas and vote on them. China Mobile submitted this idea on July 5 at the second metaverse focus group meeting held in Shanghai. The proposal is expected to be voted on at the group's next meeting in October.

As you'd expect, the idea of a unique identifier and permanent storage of such information is raising concerns over potential privacy and freedom violations online. Within China, that may be acceptable, but for other nations not under the rule of a communist government, it won't be.

Although China's system is likely to be rejected by the ITU, Interpol is urging law enforcement to embrace virtual reality tech and "get in early" on the metaverse to stay one step ahead of lawbreakers, scammers, and terrorists who may try and take advantage of it.

TRENDING

About Matthew Humphries

Senior Editor

I've been working at PCMag since November 2016, covering all areas of technology and video game news. Before that I spent nearly 15 years working at Geek.com as a writer and editor. I also spent the first six years after leaving university as a professional game designer working with Disney, Games Workshop, 20th Century Fox, and Vivendi.

I hold two degrees: a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and a Master's degree in Games Development. My first book, Make Your Own Pixel Art, is available from all good book shops.

Read Matthew's full bio

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18. With Prigozhin Presumed Dead, What Happens to the Wagner Group Now?

Excerpts:

Nevertheless, whether Wagner is demobilized, rebranded or left to resume business as usual, it will matter to Moscow. Without a PMC capable of taking its place, Putin’s objectives in Ukraine and worldwide remain questionable, along with its ability to bring vital liquidity to Putin’s heavily sanctioned regime. The FSB and the GRU also line their pockets and keep their institutional budgets afloat, courtesy of Wagner wheeling and dealing. Hence, there is a lot at stake for many inside and outside Putin’s shrinking inner circle.

“The true mark of a leader has nearly always been whether an organization or entity can continue to thrive after the founder has moved on,” Day added. “We will have to wait to see how Wagner does in the coming weeks and months to get an idea how prepared, or brittle, Prigozhin made Wagner.”

With Prigozhin Presumed Dead, What Happens to the Wagner Group Now?

AUGUST 25TH, 2023 BY HOLLIE MCKAY | 

thecipherbrief.com · · August 25, 2023

CIPHER BRIEF REPORTING — The news was perhaps as unsurprising as it was shocking: Russian officials say that a plane that crashed northwest of Moscow on Wednesday had on board Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Russian mercenary group Wagner.

Of the reported seven passengers and three crew members, there were no survivors. Top Wagner commanders and Prigozhin associates Dmitry Utkin and Valeriy Yevgenyevich Chekalov were also on the ill-fated passenger list.

The incident occurred exactly two months after Prigozhin led a brief and ultimately aborted rebellion against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rule, revealing deep cracks in the Kremlin’s war apparatus.

So, what happens to Wagner from here?

“Prigozhin commanded particular loyalty and had a wider following, which is the main reason why Putin had to eliminate him after the mutiny but the Wagner structure, logistics and, most importantly, payroll, remain intact,” Edward P. Joseph, Senior Fellow and Lecturer at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), told The Cipher Brief. “Let’s remember, by definition, mercenaries operate for money. Wagner can roll on, albeit with the same constraints due to the catastrophic invasion of Ukraine.”

Nonetheless, taking out the leadership will feasibly bring further complications for Putin, who for almost a decade, has relied on the notorious private military company (PMC) for military and material gains around the world.

Once an organization steeped in obscurity, the Wagner Group – long accused of mass human rights atrocities against civilians in the countries where it operates – emerged from the shadows to become a frontline force following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, complete with Telegram channels and a social media presence. While the Russian military fumbled and flailed in the war effort, Wagner proved much more combat-ready and productive, making the outfit pivotal to Russia’s mission.

“Prigozhin was the heart and soul of Wagner, and his loss, especially coupled with the reported loss of founder and operational commander Dmitry Utkin, can’t help but be a significant blow to the organization. How serious, or whether fatal, will only be known in time,” said Daniel Davis, Senior Fellow and Military Expert at Defense Priorities. “But many pro-Wagner Telegram channels were reporting yesterday that Prigozhin always knew he was a target for assassination and thus already had an organizational leadership transition plan in place should he be killed.”

Other potential outcomes could be that the Kremlin maneuvers to keep Wagner intact with a more controllable chief, bolsters another PMC for international operations, or folds what remains of the force under the Russian MoD. Alternatively, Wagner could rise as a lateral power to the Russian State or splinter into several smaller bands scattered in various hot spots across the globe, diminishing the group’s firebrand stature.

However, such scenarios all pose problems for Wagner’s heavy footprint abroad. This footprint generates immense wealth and influence for the Russian Federation, procuring highly profitable contracts for prized commodities such as oil, gas, gold and diamonds. Such profits have helped Putin’s government push back against painful Western sanctions.

Daniel Hoffman, a former CIA Moscow Chief-of-Station and a Cipher Brief Expert, pointed out that this week’s events are very interesting for the intelligence community to keep track of but are unlikely to ignite any major schisms.

“Ultimately, they (mercenaries) are carrying on the fight. They’re getting paid, and there aren’t many other options for them. If you turn around, you will get shot in the face,” Hoffman stressed. “Russians, historically, are going to carry on. They did the same thing when they were fighting for Uncle Joe Stalin. That is just what they do. Putin did this (presumed assassination) because he needed to show he is still in charge. But he needs (Wagner) in the Central African Republic, Syria and Libya. So, for them to keep fighting the wars, he had to orchestrate a purge.”

First appearing in 2014 amid Russia’s swift annexation of Crimea, the PMC is broadly perceived to be the creation of Russia’s military intelligence service GRU, with the leadership and financing heralded by St. Petersburg-born convicted criminal turned Putin’s private caterer and businessman, Prigozhin, as a means to ensure Russia’s deniability of covert operations undertaken on foreign soil.

Over the past nine years, the group has cemented a solid presence far beyond Ukraine. Wagner entered the Syrian war theater in late 2015 to bolster Bashar al-Assad’s rule in a trade for a portion of the proceeds gleaned from production fields taken back from ISIS’s territorial control and the ability to establish a strategic base for recruitment and extended regional operations.

According to a recent report by analysis and crisis mapping non-profit The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), Wagner mercenaries have solidified a vast existence backing warlords, military factions and despots across Africa, from the Central African Republic (CAR), Mozambique and Libya, to Mali and Sudan. This is in addition to an unconfirmed habitation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, extensive logistical and smuggling associates in the United Arab Emirates, and commodity extraction and shell companies in numerous more locations.

“If (the Wagner Group) is taken over by a more compliant and pro-Russian leader, it will likely sustain the types of activities for which it gained initial infamy,” noted David Ucko, a Professor at the College of International Security Affairs, National Defense University (NDU). “In Africa, this will involve supporting desperate governments and shadowy warlords against internal security threats, typically in return for lucrative concessions and loot. This helps the Russian government dismantle Western influence in these countries, something that remains a global aspiration for the Kremlin.”

Some analysts have also indicated that while several states employ Wagner to cripple and dispel Islamic militant groups in the Sahel, its merciless reputation has only led to higher recruitment levels and more instability, spelling even greater security concerns for the United States and its allies.

However, Wagner’s most visible impact has emanated over the past eighteen months amid the ongoing war in Ukraine. With Russian soldiers and conscripts struggling with morale and shockingly high casualty rates, Wagner proved a pivotal lifeline for Putin, which included Wagner leading the charge to capture the eastern city of Bakhmut in late May.

“Wagner provides a service to the president in far-flung areas, and that’s why I think he wants to keep it,” said Kamran Bokhari, Senior Director for Eurasian Security and Prosperity at the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy. “Now the question is, can the leadership be replaced to where Wagner is effective infectivity?”

Bokhari pointed to the U.S.-ordered assassination of Qasim Soleimani, the leader of the shadowy Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), in early 2020. The wing did not collapse and goes on under a new commander, but without such a “strong personality at the top,” its gravitas appears diminished.

And inside Russia, Wagner’s downgrade or collapse could cause even bigger headaches for the President. Purporting to dismantle or rebrand the Wagner Group could also induce sizeable domestic consequences. The PMC, perhaps in a similar vein to Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces militia units, are highly revered in Russia as victorious fighters and a source of pride for patriotic nationals as the most famous – or infamous depending on where you stand – mercenary tradename on the planet.

There is also a scenario in which mercenaries aghast at Prigozhin’s demise take revenge on the Kremlin. According to some Ukrainian officials tracking Wagner-linked social media accounts, calls for reprisal immediately ignited after news of the crash broke, which could unleash more unrest and inner turmoil for Putin to contend.

In the weeks following Prigozhin’s nullified dissent, scores of exiled Wagner fighters reportedly already defied Putin’s orders by departing Belarus, where they were supposed to remain – with many seemingly headed to seek work in known areas such as Africa.

ACLED data also shows that skirmishes between Russian units and Wagner militants are nothing new, with clashes breaking out in the days before the June 2023 march to Moscow. Moreover, in 2018, long-simmering tensions between Wagner and the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) hit a high point after the U.S. bombed Wagner mercenaries in Syria, which led to the group’s leadership pointing fingers at the Russian forces for deliberately “throwing them under the bus.”

Nonetheless, Bokhari emphasizes that it is not so much a cause for concern if Wagner mercenaries retaliate but what happens to critical figures who work directly for the President.

“The people that Putin has been removing from within the Ministry of Defense, people who are formally part of the Russian state, what happens to them? We can’t rule out the possibility that Putin faces potential trouble within his own ranks,” he conjectured.

Yet from Ucko’s lens, Prigozhin’s presumed assassination is likely a robust deterrent.

“In Ukraine, where the Wagner Group has relied less on former soldiers and more on recently released prisoners, it may continue to provide cheap infantry – cannon fodder, effectively – to withstand the Ukrainian counteroffensive,” he surmised. “This far less attractive role, for far less capable fighters, has the potential to cause renewed tension between Wagner and the Russian state, but the attack on Prigozhin will likely deter any renewed attempt to challenge Putin’s writ.”

But Day also warned that outside officials and analysts should only be so quick to assume Putin took down his newly perceived enemy with formidable proof.

“The biggest reason to doubt Putin as the killer is that Prigozhin was doing lots of work that benefitted Putin, such as training Belarussian soldiers for possible Kremlin employment later and expanding Russian influence in Africa,” he explained. “It doesn’t seem probable that Putin would have rejected the easier paths to killing Prigozhin in a quiet and easy way, done so messily over Moscow airspace, and cost himself the use of one of the most effective military and foreign policy tools he had.”

And if Putin wasn’t behind the plane crash, that signals a new level of Russian instability.

“If Putin were not the culprit, he might be more concerned because someone was able to breach Russia’s security at the highest levels,” Day emphasized.

However, whether Prigozhin’s death and the uncertain future of Wagner impacts U.S. policy remains to be seen.

“The Prigozhin killing seems to have confirmed the accurate U.S. perception of Putin as the leader of a criminal regime reliant on institutionalized corruption,” Joseph asserted. “The whole Wagner mutiny-jet ‘crash’ episode is a reminder of the inherent instability of the Putin-fear-based regime, revealing Putin’s own fears. That, potentially, can influence U.S. policy.”

The U.S. Treasury Department deems Wagner a “brutal” transnational criminal organization and has sanctioned it under the umbrella of a global criminal organization. The Biden administration has thus far resisted bi-partisan calls to slap the PMC with a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) designation, putting it on the same footing as the likes of ISIS and al Qaeda.

It’s not just for the President anymore. Cipher Brief Subscriber+Members have access to their own Open Source Daily Brief, keeping you up to date on global events impacting national security. It pays to be a Subscriber+Member.

The news of the eponymous plane crash was met with a unified shrug in Washington on Wednesday. President Biden told reporters, “there’s not much that happens in Russia that Putin’s not behind.” For weeks, top officials have emphasized Putin’s perchance for payback, with Biden cautioning last month that he would “be careful” what he ate if in Prigozhin’s shoes.

Nevertheless, whether Wagner is demobilized, rebranded or left to resume business as usual, it will matter to Moscow. Without a PMC capable of taking its place, Putin’s objectives in Ukraine and worldwide remain questionable, along with its ability to bring vital liquidity to Putin’s heavily sanctioned regime. The FSB and the GRU also line their pockets and keep their institutional budgets afloat, courtesy of Wagner wheeling and dealing. Hence, there is a lot at stake for many inside and outside Putin’s shrinking inner circle.

“The true mark of a leader has nearly always been whether an organization or entity can continue to thrive after the founder has moved on,” Day added. “We will have to wait to see how Wagner does in the coming weeks and months to get an idea how prepared, or brittle, Prigozhin made Wagner.”

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

thecipherbrief.com · · August 25, 2023

19. Women in SOF resort to buying their own armor and equipment - SOAA

Another view based on the USASOC report that was released last week.

There is no byline on this article. It is from the Special Operations Association of America of which I, and a number of others, are members # I support this essay.

Excerpts:

During my time in SOF, I had the privilege of witnessing firsthand the impact women make down range in critical moments, the courage they exhibit, and the strengths they bring to the table. It was not just about their physical abilities—but the unique perspectives and skills they contributed to the mission. Our success as a team was built on diversity and inclusivity. This must always be so.

As we move forward, let’s celebrate the women who refuse to be held back by outdated norms. Let’s also recognize that it’s up to all of us to ensure that future generations of female warriors don’t have to face the same challenges. From veteran voices to policymakers, each of us has a role to play in breaking down the barriers and ensuring that our military stands as a beacon of equality and strength. We, your female operators, need you to support us! You can do just that by supporting SOAA and this movement. I also encourage you to share this article with your community to increase awareness.

So, here’s to the women who buy their own armor, who carry the weight of tradition while forging a new path, and who inspire us all to demand better. It’s an honor to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with you, my sisters. And mark my words, your strength and determination will rewrite history and pave the way for a more inclusive and formidable future for the US Military.

Women in SOF resort to buying their own armor and equipment - SOAA

soaa.org ·· August 23, 2023

Did you see the recent Military Times article that’s been making waves and resonating with those of us who’ve been part of the Special Operations Forces (SOF) family? If not, as a female Army SOF (ARSOF) Veteran, I urge you delve in. Check it out here. The article highlights a glaring issue: the lack of properly fitting and suitable body armor and equipment for female soldiers. Strap in, because despite the challenges they face, we’re going to explore the unwavering determination and unbreakable bonds that define the women in our elite ranks.

Before diving into my thoughts, let me provide a bit of background. I served in ARSOF as a member of Cultural Support Teams (CSTs). For those who aren’t familiar with the roles CSTs played during operations primarily in the Middle East, let me break it down. CSTs were made up of women warriors who embedded with special ops teams to provide cultural insights, gender intelligence, and assistance on direct action missions in environments where traditional male-lead teams would encounter cultural barriers. We operated as soldiers, diplomats, and bridge-builders rolled into one. The integration of women into SOF units has been an evolutionary process—one that’s been met with a mixture of progress and obstacles. In recent years, we’ve witnessed unprecedented changes as women have taken on roles that were once considered exclusive to men. While these changes demonstrate marked progress, there is still much work to be done to address the unique needs of women in this demanding field.

I’ve been in their boots, navigating a male-dominated world where uniform sizes, protective gear, and equipment weren’t designed to meet the diverse needs of women. This isn’t solely an ARSOF issue, but women serving in all branches of the military, and even first responders face the same challenges. ARSOF has taken some positive, practical steps to help female soldiers overcome lack of access to proper gear. For instance, in my unit, I was provided with an allowance for gear reimbursement. While not an ARSOF-wide practice, this was a step in the right direction. However, despite ARSOF’s efforts, the supply chain for female combat-related equipment is sorely lacking. Just a few years ago, if a female soldier wanted to purchase gear to properly fit her frame, she either had to find a rare female specific vendor, or special order it. With women now comprising more than 17% of the active-duty force and 21% of the National Guard, it is more important than ever for the military at-large to prioritize the design and production of female-specific gear.

I felt a mixture of pride, frustration, and determination while being reminded these seemingly easily solvable issues continue to persist. Pride, because these women continue to take matters into their own hands, refusing to let obstacles deter them from their mission. Frustration, because it’s 2023, and we’re still talking about women in SOF having to buy their own protective gear and equipment. And finally, determination, because it’s our collective responsibility to ensure that future women SOF warriors have the tools they need to excel. This isn’t just about armor; it’s about breaking down barriers that undermine the strength and capabilities of our female warriors.

Imagine being a woman committed to serving this nation at the highest level of military excellence, only to find that your gear doesn’t even properly fit. But these women haven’t succumbed to frustration. Instead, together, they are sending a message that they belong, they’re resilient, and they’re not willing to settle for the status quo. They’ve shown incredible resilience by sourcing their own armor and equipment – armor that fits, armor that provides protection, and equipment that doesn’t diminish their performance. They continue to demonstrate the true essence of a warrior spirit: adapting, overcoming, and never giving up. These women are a stark reminder that meaningful progress is often slow, but we must keep pushing for positive change.

My purpose is to highlight the resilience of my SOF sisters, but let’s not overlook the systemic issues that this situation underscores. It’s high time for changes at every level – from procurement and supply chain, to policy and leadership. We’ve made significant strides, yes, but we can’t stop until our female warriors have access to gear and equipment that not only fits, but is designed with their unique needs in mind. Inclusivity isn’t the only goal: this is about operational effectiveness and success. To those who might question the need for tailored equipment, let me remind you that in high-stakes operations, the tiniest detail can make all the difference. Ill-fitting armor isn’t just uncomfortable; it can hinder mobility, slow reaction times, and put lives at risk.

During my time in SOF, I had the privilege of witnessing firsthand the impact women make down range in critical moments, the courage they exhibit, and the strengths they bring to the table. It was not just about their physical abilities—but the unique perspectives and skills they contributed to the mission. Our success as a team was built on diversity and inclusivity. This must always be so.

As we move forward, let’s celebrate the women who refuse to be held back by outdated norms. Let’s also recognize that it’s up to all of us to ensure that future generations of female warriors don’t have to face the same challenges. From veteran voices to policymakers, each of us has a role to play in breaking down the barriers and ensuring that our military stands as a beacon of equality and strength. We, your female operators, need you to support us! You can do just that by supporting SOAA and this movement. I also encourage you to share this article with your community to increase awareness.

So, here’s to the women who buy their own armor, who carry the weight of tradition while forging a new path, and who inspire us all to demand better. It’s an honor to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with you, my sisters. And mark my words, your strength and determination will rewrite history and pave the way for a more inclusive and formidable future for the US Military.

Keep charging forward!

TAGS: ARMY, JACLYN "JAX" SCOTT, MILITARY TIMES, SOF, SPECIAL OPERATIONS FORCES, WOMEN IN ARMY SOF, WOMEN IN SOF, WOMEN SERVICEMEMBERS, WOMEN VETERANS, WOMEN WARRIORS

soaa.org · · August 23, 2023

20. Following Elon Musk’s lead, Big Tech is surrendering to disinformation

Maybe social media cannot be policed. Maybe it should not be. Maybe we will have to put on our big boy and big girl pants and live with what we have created (and reap what we have sown). I remain a believer in that the only way to combat this is through education, critical thinking, and remaining committed to our values and realizing that this kind of behavior will always exist and that we must learn to deal with it (not live with it but deal with it).

Following Elon Musk’s lead, Big Tech is surrendering to disinformation

The Washington Post · by Naomi Nix · August 25, 2023

Democracy in America

Facebook and YouTube are receding from their role as watchdogs against conspiracy theories ahead of the 2024 presidential election

By

and

Sarah Ellison

Updated August 25, 2023 at 7:34 a.m. EDT|Published August 25, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

Social media companies are receding from their role as watchdogs against political misinformation, abandoning their most aggressive efforts to police online falsehoods in a trend expected to profoundly affect the 2024 presidential election.

An array of circumstances is fueling the retreat: Mass layoffs at Meta and other major tech companies have gutted teams dedicated to promoting accurate information online. An aggressive legal battle over claims that the Biden administration pressured social media platforms to silence certain speech has blocked a key path to detecting election interference.

And X CEO Elon Musk has reset industry standards, rolling back strict rules against misinformation on the site formerly known as Twitter. In a sign of Musk’s influence, Meta briefly considered a plan last year to ban all political advertising on Facebook. The company shelved it after Musk announced plans to transform rival Twitter into a haven for free speech, according to two people familiar with the plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive matters.

The retrenchment comes just months ahead of the 2024 primaries, as GOP front-runner Donald Trump continues to rally supporters with false claims that election fraud drove his 2020 loss to Joe Biden. Multiple investigations into the election have revealed no evidence of fraud, and Trump now faces federal criminal charges connected to his efforts to overturn the election. Still, YouTube, X and Meta have stopped labeling or removing posts that repeat Trump’s claims, even as voters increasingly get their news on social media.

Trump capitalized on those relaxed standards in his recent interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, hosted by X. The former president punctuated the conversation, which streamed Wednesday night during the first Republican primary debate of the 2024 campaign, with false claims that the 2020 election was “rigged” and that the Democrats had “cheated” to elect Biden.

On Thursday night, Trump posted on X for the first time since he was kicked off the site, then known as Twitter, following the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol. Musk reinstated his account in November. The former president posted his mug shot from Fulton County, Ga., where he was booked Thursday on charges connected to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. “NEVER SURRENDER!” read the caption.

The evolution of the companies’ practices was described by more than a dozen current and former employees, many of them speaking on the condition of anonymity to offer sensitive details. The new approach marks a sharp shift from the 2020 election, when social media companies expanded their efforts to police disinformation. The companies feared a repeat of 2016, when Russian trolls attempted to interfere in the U.S. presidential campaign, turning the platforms into tools of political manipulation and division.

These pared-down commitments emerge as covert influence campaigns from Russia and China have grown more aggressive, and advances in generative artificial intelligence have created new tools for misleading voters.

Experts in disinformation say the dynamic headed into 2024 calls for more aggressive efforts to combat it, not less.

“Musk has taken the bar and put it on the floor,” said Emily Bell, a professor at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, where she studies the relationship between tech platforms and news publishers. For the 2024 presidential election, misinformation around races is “going to be even worse,” she added.

The social media platforms say they still have tools to prevent the spread of misinformation.

“We remove content that misleads voters on how to vote or encourages interference in the democratic process,” YouTube spokesperson Ivy Choi said in a statement. “Additionally, we connect people to authoritative election news and information through recommendations and information panels.”

Meta spokeswoman Erin McPike said in a statement that “protecting the U.S. 2024 elections is one of our top priorities, and our integrity efforts continue to lead the industry.”

Yet it is already changing what some users see online. Earlier this month, the founder of a musical cruise company posted a screenshot on Facebook appearing to show Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) falsely signing a bill that would allow undocumented immigrants to become police officers and sheriff’s deputies. “In Illinois American citizens will be arrested by illegals,” reads the post, which has been shared more than 26o times.

Fact-checkers at USA Today, one of dozens of media organizations Meta pays to debunk viral conspiracies, deemed the post false, and the company labeled it on Facebook as “false information.” But Meta has quietly begun offering users new controls to opt out of the fact-checking program, allowing debunked posts such as the falsified one about Pritzker to spread in participants’ news-feeds with a warning label. Conservatives have long criticized Meta’s fact-checking system, arguing it is biased against them.

Meta Global Affairs President Nick Clegg said the ability to opt out represents a new direction that empowers users and eases scrutiny over the company. “We feel we’ve moved quite dramatically in favor of giving users greater control over even quite controversial sensitive content,” Clegg said. McPike added that the new fact-checking policy comes “in response to users telling us that they want a greater ability to decide what they see.”

YouTube has also backed away from policing misleading claims, announcing in June it would no longer remove videos falsely saying the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump. Continuing to enforce the ban would curtail political speech without “meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm,” the company argued in a blog post.

These shifts are a reaction from social media executives to being battered by contentious battles over content and concluding there is “no winning,” said Katie Harbath, former director of public policy at Facebook, where she managed the global elections strategy across the company.

“For Democrats, we weren’t taking down enough, and for Republicans we were taking down too much,” she said. The result was an overall sense that “after doing all this, we’re still getting yelled at … It’s just not worth it anymore.”

The ‘big lie’ test

For years, many of Meta’s trust and safety teams operated like a university. Driven by curiosity, employees were encouraged to seek out the thorniest problems on the platform — issues such as fraud, abuse, bias and attempts at voter suppression — and develop systems to help.

But in the last year and a half, some workers say there has been a shift away from that proactive stance. Instead, they are now asked to spend more of their time figuring out how to minimally comply with a booming list of global regulations, according to four current and former employees.

That’s a departure from the approach tech companies took after Russia manipulated social media to attempt to swing the 2016 election to Trump. The incident transformed Mark Zuckerberg into a symbol of corporate recklessness. So the Meta CEO vowed to do better.

He embarked on a public contrition tour and vowed to devote the company’s seemingly infinite resources to protecting democracy. “The most important thing I care about right now is making sure no one interferes with the various … elections around the world,” Zuckerberg told two Senate committees in 2018, the same year a Wired cover depicted him with a bruised and bloody face.

In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, social media companies ramped-up investigative teams to quash foreign influence campaigns and paid thousands of content moderators to debunk viral conspiracies. Ahead of the 2018 midterms, Meta gave reporters tours of its so-called “war room,” where employees monitored violent threats in real-time.

Civil rights groups pressured the platforms — including in meetings with Zuckerberg and Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg — to bolster their election policies, arguing the pandemic and popularity of mail-in ballots created an opening for bad actors to confuse voters about the electoral process.

“These platforms were making all sorts of commitments to content moderation and to racial justice and civil rights in general,” said Color of Change President Rashad Robinson, whose racial justice group helped organize an advertising boycott by more than 1,000 companies including Coca-Cola, The North Face and Verizon following the police murder of George Floyd.

They instituted strict rules against posts that might lead to voter suppression. As Trump questioned the validity of mail-in ballots in 2020, Facebook and Twitter took the unprecedented step of attaching information labels such as, “This claim about election fraud is disputed” to scores of misleading comments. Google restricted election-related ads and touted its work with government agencies, including the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, to prevent election interference campaigns.

In early January 2021, rioters incited by Trump assaulted the U.S. Capitol after organizing themselves, in part, on Facebook and Twitter. In response, Meta, Twitter, Google and other tech companies suspended Trump, forcibly removing the president from their platforms.

The moment was the peak of social media companies’ confrontation with political misinformation.

But as the tech giants grappled with narrowing profits, this proactive stance began to dissolve.

In the summer of 2021, Meta’s Clegg embarked on a campaign to convince Zuckerberg and the company’s board members to end all political advertising on its social media networks — a policy already in place at Twitter. Meta’s decision not to fact-check politicians’ speech had triggered years of controversy, with activists accusing the company of profiting off the misinformation contained in some campaign ads. Clegg argued the ads caused Meta more political trouble than they were worth.

While Zuckerberg and other board members were skeptical, the company eventually warmed to the idea. Meta even planned to announce the new policy, according to two people.

By July 2022, the proposal had been shelved indefinitely. Internal momentum to impose the new rule seemed to plummet after Musk boasted of his plans to turn Twitter into a safe haven for “free speech” — a principle Zuckerberg and some board members had always lauded, one of the people said.

After Musk’s official takeover later that fall, Twitter would eventually rescind its own ban against political ads.

“Elon’s position on that stuff definitely shifted the way the board and industry thought about [policy],” said one person who was briefed on the board discussions about the ad ban at Meta. “He came in and kinda blew it all up.”

The Musk factor

Almost immediately, Musk’s reign at Twitter forced his peers to rethink other industry standards.

On his first night as owner, Musk fired Trust and Safety head Vijaya Gadde, whose job it was to guard the companies’ users against fraud, harassment and offensive content. Soon after, just days before the midterms, the company laid off more than half of its 7,500 workers, crippling the teams responsible for making high-stake decisions about what to do about falsehoods.

The cuts and the evolving approach to moderating toxic content prompted advertisers to flee. But while advertisers were leaving, other tech companies were paying close attention to Musk’s moves.

In a June interview with the right-leaning tech podcast host Lex Fridman, Zuckerberg said Musk’s decision to make drastic cuts to Twitter’s workforce — including by cutting non-engineers who worked on things such as public policy but didn’t build products — encouraged other tech leaders such as himself to consider making similar changes.

“It was probably good for the industry that he made those changes,” Zuckerberg said. (Meta has since laid off more than 20,000 workers, part of an industry-wide trend.)

Musk reinstated high-profile conservative Twitter accounts, including Jordan Peterson, a professor who was banned from Twitter for misgendering a trans person, and the Babylon Bee, a conservative media company. Musk also brought back Republican politicians including Trump and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), whose personal account was banned for violating the platform’s covid-19 misinformation policies. He simultaneously suspended the accounts of journalists including Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell, CNN reporter Donie O’Sullivan and others who reported on Musk.

A spike in hate speech on the site followed as users tested boundaries.

The political winds facing Silicon Valley were shifting, too. Trump’s 2020 election rigging claims had inspired a slew of Republican candidates to echo his rhetoric, cementing election denialism as a core Republican talking point. In a May poll by CNN, 6 in 10 Republican voters said they believed Trump’s falsehoods that the 2020 election was rigged.

Soon after Musk’s Twitter acquisition, scores of Republican candidates and right-wing influencers tested Meta, Twitter and other social media platforms’ resolve to fight election misinformation. In the months leading up to the midterms, far-right personalities and GOP candidates continued to spread election denialism on social media virtually unchecked.

Mark Finchem, the Republican candidate seeking to oversee Arizona’s election system as the state’s secretary of state, made a fundraising pitch on the eve of the 2022 election, falsely arguing on Facebook and Twitter that his Democratic opponent, Adrian Fontes, was a member of the Chinese Communist Party and a “cartel criminal” who had “rigged elections” before.

When Twitter, seemingly in response to journalists’ questions, appeared to restrict his account, Musk declared he was “looking into” complaints that Finchem was being censored. Later that evening, Finchem was back to tweeting his message. He thanked Musk “for stopping the commie who suspended me from Twitter a week before the election.”

Last year, Meta dissolved the responsible innovation team, a small group that evaluated the potential risks of some of Meta’s products, according to a person familiar with the matter, and simultaneously shuttered the much-touted Facebook Journalism Project, which was designed to promote quality information on the platform.

“What was once promoted as part of an essential component of Meta’s role in helping secure democracy, election integrity and a healthy information ecosystem, appears now to have been expendable,” said Jim Friedlich, executive director of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, which served for two years as a lead partner in helping execute Facebook’s journalism grantmaking.

Now, Meta is eyeing ways to cut down on having to referee controversial political content on its new Twitter-like social media app, Threads. Instagram head Adam Mosseri, who led efforts to build Threads, said earlier this year that the platform would not actively “encourage” politics and “hard news,” because the extra user engagement is not worth the scrutiny.

But even as it tries to retreat from the political culture wars, there’s no hiding from the coming election.

Soon after the company launched Threads, Meta started warning users who tried to follow Donald Trump Jr. on the new social network that his account has repeatedly posted false information reviewed by independent fact-checkers. Trump Jr. posted a screenshot of the message on rival Twitter, complaining that “Threads not exactly off to a great start.”

A Meta spokesperson responded by saying, “This was an error and shouldn’t have happened. It’s been fixed.”

After the incident was over, Clegg told The Post he hopes in the future such politically fraught debates will disappear.

“I hope over time we’ll have less of a discussion about what our big, crude algorithmic choices are and more about whether you guys feel that the individual controls we’re giving you on Threads feel meaningful to you,” he said.

The Washington Post · by Naomi Nix · August 25, 2023

​21. Ukraine Doesn’t Need Armchair Generals

Excerpts:

The ultimate damage, however, will be to the support of the American people for the noble mission of helping an independent people resist unprovoked authoritarian aggression. Americans have shown pretty robust support for Ukraine’s fight for freedom, which is important not only for the Ukrainian people but for NATO (to demonstrate to Putin that twentieth-century-style land grabs are unacceptable), to the American people (to demonstrate that in our-interconnected world unchecked aggression against our allies inevitably affects our own security), and to show Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un that we will resist their efforts to dominate their neighbors. Americans’ support for Ukraine is especially commendable considering the fact that President Biden has never made the public case for his own policy in a primetime Oval Office address or anything other than on-the-run comments to the media. This dereliction of presidential duty is becoming more glaring as time goes on.

Where the administration should be clear and loud, in the voice of the president from the seat of executive power, it has been silent. Where the administration should be silent, in anonymous whispers of doubt and criticism for allies, it has been logorrheic.

The only people who will be heartened by the verbal incontinence of this administration will be those in Moscow, Beijing, and other quarters who wish the United States ill. They are likely to conclude that no matter what the stakes, the Biden administration lack—or, more dangerously, the American people lack—the stomach for a protracted conflict. As history has demonstrated time and again, adversaries’ perceptions of American weakness inevitably invite attacks on our vital interests.

Ukraine Doesn’t Need Armchair Generals

Anonymous comments by Biden administration officials criticizing the Ukrainian armed forces don’t help anyone.

ERIC S. EDELMAN AND FRANKLIN C. MILLER

AUG 25, 2023

plus.thebulwark.com · by Eric S. Edelman

A Ukrainian soldier fires the RPG during a training as the Russia-Ukraine war continues in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine on August 18, 2023. (Photo by Diego Herrera Carcedo/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

—Ludwig Wittgentstein

IN WHAT BEARS ALL THE HALLMARKS of a concerted campaign of planted stories in the press, anonymous Biden administration officials have been talking down the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russian occupying forces. The judgments of these unspecified senior officials have been, in some cases, supported on the record by a bevy of nongovernmental experts whose own predictions in this war have been, simply put, wrong. The stories, which appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Financial Times, all emphasize different points but reach the same conclusions:

• the counter-offensive is failing;
• the Ukrainians are disregarding advice from United States, United Kingdom, and other allied military officials;
• they are not fighting the campaign as NATO allies have urged them to do, having eschewed the U.S. preference for decisive maneuver operations in favor of smaller unit actions supported by efforts to attrit Russian forces in hopes of breaking through at some point in the future;
• the Ukrainian leadership is too sensitive to casualties;
• they have misallocated their forces by continuing to contest Russian gains in the east, particularly in Bakhmut; and
• the war is now locked in a dead-end stalemate, with an implicit suggestion that a ceasefire along the current lines is the best option.

The Washington Post reported without comment unhelpful and irresponsible remarks by unnamed administration officials: “U.S. officials reject criticisms that F-16 fighter jets or longer-range missile systems such as ATACMS would have resulted in a different outcome. ‘The problem remains piercing Russia’s main defensive line, and there’s no evidence these systems would’ve been a panacea,’ a senior administration official said.” There is no such thing as a panacea in warfare—nor in any other human endeavor, for that matter. The administration official is dodging the question of whether fighter jets and longer-range artillery would have materially helped the Ukrainians, almost certainly because the official is too embarrassed to admit that they would have.

The criticisms reported by the New York Times were even more confusing and less coherent. A series of nameless American officials faulted the Ukrainians for using the wrong tactics at the wrong times in the wrong places with the wrong conversations. But when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, his British counterpart, and the top U.S. commander in Europe all “urged Ukraine’s most senior military commander, Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, to focus on one main front . . . according to two officials briefed on the call, General Zaluzhnyi agreed.”

Part of how we defend democracy is how we talk about defending democracy. If we don’t believe we can do it, we’re probably right. If you believe we can, join Bulwark+ today.

Perhaps most frustrating was the Financial Times’s reporting, which relied heavily on the analysis of RAND’s Samuel Charap to explain the views of yet more—or perhaps the same—U.S. officials. Charap has been one of the most reliably unreliable analysts of the war. Before the war, he argued that the Ukrainians stood no chance of stopping the Russian Army even with Western weapons. Later, between the astonishing liberation of Kharkiv and the equally impressive liberation of Kherson last fall, Charap suggested that a diplomatic settlement between the United States and Russia to end the war would be preferable to Ukrainian victory. He is therefore a poor choice to explain the war, and an even poorer choice to add context for the opinions and assessments of U.S. officials with whose policies he disagrees.

British military historian Lawrence Freedman has done an excellent job of putting these “criticisms” in context. Specifically, he notes that it was never likely that the Ukrainians would be able to make sweeping gains against deeply entrenched Russian defenses built up over many months—a situation which could have been avoided or mitigated if the United States and other allies had equipped Ukraine for deep strike and air superiority in a timely manner. Freedman points out that American critics have never themselves engaged in this type of warfare, and the United States would never attempt the kinds of operations these faultfinders advocate without massive air superiority, which the Ukrainians lack thanks to the administration’s persistent refusal to give them the means to achieve it. Finally, Freedman rightly observes that it is premature to reach a judgment on the outcome at this point.

Moreover, the attention that these stories generated forced National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan to state publicly that the administration does not assess that the conflict is stalemated. He effectively seconded the judgment that Freedman, the analysts at the Institute for the Study of War, and others have reached: that it is too early to make definitive statements about the relative success or failure of the Ukrainian armed forces. It should go without saying at this point that anonymous sniping at the Ukrainians in the press and literal armchair generalship, echoing to a drumbeat of defeatism that has extended throughout the course of the war, ill becomes an administration that has been slow to supply the Ukrainians with the wherewithal to conduct the very kind of operations that it now demands that the victims of aggression undertake at their peril.

But these stories aren’t mere matters of chutzpah and bad taste. They are disastrous examples of the administration’s seeming inability to understand the information environment in which the war is taking place and the requirements for sustaining public support for U.S. engagement and commitment over the long haul.

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The gravamen of the stories will undoubtedly undermine support in Congress for the supplemental funding that the administration is seeking in an already parlous legislative environment. Members from both parties are balking at approving additional support for the Ukrainians. The administration has now provided the opponents with their talking points—why throw good money after bad if the counteroffensive is failing?

These stories will reinforce the narrative articulated by critics like Tucker Carlson and the isolationists clustered around the Quincy Institute that the Ukrainians have lost the war, that there is no prospect of success, and that we are headed to yet another “endless war” supported by the globalists and the merchants of death in the military-industrial complex.

The emphasis on the Ukrainian high command’s sensitivity to casualties in particular would seem to validate a main message of Russian propaganda: the U.S. is willing to fight to the last Ukrainian.

The ultimate damage, however, will be to the support of the American people for the noble mission of helping an independent people resist unprovoked authoritarian aggression. Americans have shown pretty robust support for Ukraine’s fight for freedom, which is important not only for the Ukrainian people but for NATO (to demonstrate to Putin that twentieth-century-style land grabs are unacceptable), to the American people (to demonstrate that in our-interconnected world unchecked aggression against our allies inevitably affects our own security), and to show Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un that we will resist their efforts to dominate their neighbors. Americans’ support for Ukraine is especially commendable considering the fact that President Biden has never made the public case for his own policy in a primetime Oval Office address or anything other than on-the-run comments to the media. This dereliction of presidential duty is becoming more glaring as time goes on.

Where the administration should be clear and loud, in the voice of the president from the seat of executive power, it has been silent. Where the administration should be silent, in anonymous whispers of doubt and criticism for allies, it has been logorrheic.

The only people who will be heartened by the verbal incontinence of this administration will be those in Moscow, Beijing, and other quarters who wish the United States ill. They are likely to conclude that no matter what the stakes, the Biden administration lack—or, more dangerously, the American people lack—the stomach for a protracted conflict. As history has demonstrated time and again, adversaries’ perceptions of American weakness inevitably invite attacks on our vital interests.

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plus.thebulwark.com · by Eric S. Edelman

​22. John McCain’s warning of the authoritarian threat should be heeded

John McCain’s warning of the authoritarian threat should be heeded

BY DANIEL TWINING AND RICHARD FONTAINE, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS - 08/25/23 2:30 PM ET

https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/4170761-john-mccains-warning-of-the-authoritarian-threat-should-be-heeded/?utm_source=pocket_saves

Five years ago today, the United States — and the world — lost an indispensable advocate for freedom. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was one of those rare figures who fought for the values he held dear in every aspect of life — from his military career and five years as a prisoner of war, to his more than 30 years representing Arizona in the Senate, to his role as one of America’s foremost statesmen. 

It is in this latter role that he will be best remembered around the world. Beloved by small “d” democrats and loathed by dictators, a word from John McCain could hearten and inspire activists, protestors and political prisoners. The senator understood the essential connection between dictators’ oppression at home and the threats they pose abroad. Many years before most of Washington, he anticipated the global danger of resurgent authoritarianism.  

There is no subject on which John McCain showed greater prescience than the trajectory of Russia under Vladimir Putin. He expressed his distrust of Putin as early as 2000, led the charge for NATO enlargement with an eye on the dangers of Russian revanchism and in 2003 called for “a hard-headed and dispassionate reconsideration of American policy in response to the resurgence of authoritarian forces in Moscow.” 

For years, politicians on both sides of the aisle cast such warnings as alarmist or hopelessly retrograde. Yet McCain could see that the inevitable consequence of Putin’s authoritarian streak would be dictatorship at home and aggression abroad. Unfortunately, he was proven right again and again — first in Georgia in 2008, then during the first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and most conclusively with Russia’s 2022 gambit to fully colonize Ukraine. 

McCain’s foresight was grounded in his fundamental worldview. He recognized the innate connection between the behavior of governments at home and abroad. Whereas democracies tend to seek out relationships that create the conditions for security, stability and prosperity, dictatorships more often foment conflict, export corruption and other forms of authoritarian influence, and undermine the institutions and practices that keep the global economy in good working order. 

As a result, the challenge posed by malign actors requires a foreign policy grounded in the values that have enabled America to flourish. This enlightened form of national interest holds that the basic rights Americans enjoy should be the province of everyone, everywhere, and that American power finds its noblest expression in helping to secure the rights and freedoms of others. 

Since McCain’s death, competition with authoritarian adversaries — China, in particular— has escalated. The U.S. possesses everything necessary to triumph in it, and redoubling our coordination with democratic allies and partners is crucial. Dictatorships seek a world ordered in accordance with their authoritarian vision. The United States and its allies must instead help create the conditions for democracy to thrive. In so doing, they can build a world favorable to freedom, security and prosperity. 

This contest is playing out on the battlefields of Ukraine today. Ukraine’s victory will be a rebuke not only to Russia but to autocrats everywhere with similar designs. Working with our European partners, we must ensure that Russia’s brutal campaign fails, and that post-war Ukraine becomes a model for the free world. John McCain understood the stakes when he stood on the Maidan in 2013, alongside Ukrainians protesting for freedom, and then in 2014, when he led the campaign to arm Ukraine.  

Thanks in part to McCain’s leadership, the idea that democratic values should undergird American foreign policy has become a matter of bipartisan consensus in recent decades. Yet it is not without its detractors. A strain of pessimism and self-doubt has taken root on both the right and the left. Some critics argue that America is so flawed at home that it is unable to support the forces of freedom abroad. Others lament the inability to make a difference where it matters most. Still others conflate support for democracy with regime change, or simply dismiss the fundamental rights of others as none of our business. 

History refutes such well-trodden arguments. When the United States has pursued policies that accord with our deepest values, we prevail against enemies that fear their own people and lack the dynamism possible in a free society. Where would Ukraine be today without American support? Who would contest Beijing’s autocratic advance if not the United States? 

It’s become unfashionable these days to observe that the United States remains the world’s indispensable power. John McCain knew it, and he believed we are often stronger and more effective than we give ourselves credit for. His confidence in America, and his conviction that it should pursue a cause greater than self-interest, is a message our political leaders might usefully consider today.

As the senator put it, “We are blessed, and we have been a blessing to humanity in turn. . . This wondrous land has shared its treasures and ideals and shed the blood of its finest patriots to help make another, better world. And as we did so, we made our own civilization more just, freer, more accomplished, and prosperous.” That task remains ongoing. 

Daniel Twining, president of the International Republican Institute, and Richard Fontaine, CEO of the Center for a New American Security, served in succession as Sen. John McCain’s national security advisor during the period 2001-10.  

23. China Wants to Run Your Internet

I hate to beat a dead horse:  China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, and displace democratic institutions.

China Wants to Run Your Internet

The world’s decentralized internet is coming under competition.

By Edoardo Campanella and John Haigh, co-director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government and Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Foreign Policy · by Edoardo Campanella, John Haigh · August 25, 2023

For the last two centuries, great powers—both nations and their associated firms—have fiercely competed to set the technical standards for leading technologies. By imposing their preferred standards, nations not only solve technical problems to their advantage but they also project power globally. Standards determine what kind of technology will prevail in the future, ensuring market dominance to national champions, while forcing foreign competitors to adapt at hefty costs. As the industrialist Werner von Siemens reportedly put it: “He who owns the standards, owns the market.”

Given the broad ramifications of the internet, its governance represents the regulatory battleground of the future. The internet is heavily dependent on shared standards across multiple platforms that have evolved over decades to assure compatibility across hardware and software. These shared standards enable highly decentralized components developed by disparate parties to integrate into an effective overall system. Talking about the original vision of the internet, one of the inventors of its protocols, Vinton G. Cerf, argued that “universal connectivity among the willing was the default assumption.”

This notion was based on a commitment to a unified cyberspace. But the world of nation states is not unified and unfragmented. It is territorial and sovereign. And now many countries, especially authoritarian regimes, want the basic governing structure of the internet to be the decisions of the state. China in particular has proposed a fundamental internet redesign—the “New IP”—whose official goal is to build “intrinsic security” into the web that in practice means creating the capacity to become a massive surveillance and information control system.

The battle for the internet governance of the future will differ from past struggles over technical standards in a fundamental way. Setting these rules is not exclusively about addressing technical issues or projecting global power. It is about promoting different visions of the world: a decentralized and democratic one (the traditional internet) or a centralized and authoritarian one (China’s “New IP”). This is an entirely new chapter in the history of standards setting that will contribute to shape the relationship between China and the West, with enormous geopolitical and economic ramifications.

Since the dawn of the First Industrial Revolution, setting standards has traditionally been a prerogative of technical experts, largely from the private sector. The regulation of the internet has roughly followed a similar pattern. From 1969 to 2000, the dominant ideology of the internet community resisted almost any form of conventional government regulation. By virtue of its openness and international nature, it was believed that the internet could not be regulated. But despite widespread support for a sort of “cyberanarchy,” the internet has always been regulated through a set of open standards and platforms that required the engagement of many stakeholders: firms, governments, academics, and nonprofits.

The internet is truly a network of networks. It has evolved based on a modular structure requiring collaboration and coordination across multiple parties. The modules are part of a protocol stack, a term used by engineers to describe the many layers in a packet-switched network. Each layer handles a different set of tasks associated with networked communications (e.g., addresses assignment, sessions managing, and congestion control). Engineers focusing on one layer need only to be concerned with implementation details at that layer.

In short, a line is drawn between application layers (where humans and technologies interface) and the core architectural layers (where data are transmitted). The application layer is inherently political. Think about someone chatting on Facebook or watching a YouTube video. Communications take place at that level and, if the layer is centrally controlled, governments could limit freedom of expression and thought, while violating the privacy of an individual and targeting specific groups.

This open and modular standards model has been characterized by pluralistic, voluntary, bottom-up participation, driven by innovation needs. Key organizations, such as the internet Engineering Task Force, the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers or the World Wide Web Consortium, are mostly comprised of engineers and have emerged to establish these shared standards. The iconic internet protocol suite (TCP/IP), for example, was introduced in 1973 to allow physically distinct networks to interconnect with one another as “peers” in order to exchange packets through special hardware.

In this structure, operators of different components of the system cannot observe all the aspects of the information sent. Imagine the internet as operating like a postal system. Messages that move from one computer to another are broken down into small packets. Each packet is stamped with the IP address of the computer it wants to reach. Eventually, the receiving computer reassembles the packets in the correct order. The current system is akin to a postman who delivers envelopes along his route without knowing what’s inside them, while only the final recipient of the mail can piece the packets back together and read the entirety of a coherent letter.

A highly decentralized internet system is compatible with the democratic philosophy of Western countries. Even so, democracies are interested in regulating it more to reduce the influence of Big Tech, while giving intelligence agencies greater access to users’ data. But China is going a step further. Since 2014, President Xi Jinping has framed becoming “a cyber great power” as the cornerstone of China’s internet policy. The aspiration is to embed its own ideological tenets into the design and architecture of the internet.

Beijing is trying to shift the development of the internet standards from the multistakeholder, collaborative, voluntary consensus system of the IETF, IEEE or W3C towards a multilateral, nation-state driven forum like the United Nations International Telecommunication Union (ITU). This choice is telling about Beijing’s goals and interests. Unlike the open standards models, negotiations within ITU are restricted only to member states in a traditional form of state-centric diplomacy. This explains Beijing’s failed efforts to appoint a former Huawei executive to the role of ITU’s Secretary General in 2022.

China’s primary entity for advocating for new internet standards is Huawei. In September 2019 the company submitted to the ITU a proposal for the creation of technical standards underpinning a new, centralized internet architecture. The proposal was rejected, but China has since been working on domestic pilots. In April 2021, Beijing announced a backbone network to connect 40 leading Chinese universities in order to test what has been advertised as the “internet of the Future.”

The strategy is to improve these standards domestically and legitimize them internationally, at least among authoritarian regimes that would be the natural adopters. China’s internet vision is supported by Iran, Russia, and Saudi Arabia and it has recently turned the World internet Conference, which it founded and controls, into a formal organization to shift authority away from Western-dominated institutions.

The New IP is supposed to connect devices and share information and resources across networks through a centralized control of the data that are transferred along the way. Advocates of this new internet architecture emphasize that the old IP is outdated as it was originally designed to identify physical objects being bounded to specific locations, whereas in the age of the internet of Things a plethora of objects (computers, sensors, content, services, and other virtual entities) operate on the web.

The traditional IP is unaware of the content or services it carries, which hampers it from providing the best forwarding solution. China’s alternative internet infrastructure, instead, would introduce new controls at the level of the network connection. In short, a network operator will be able to identify the sender, the receiver and the content of the information shared, with the ability to stop the dissemination and access to that information. Returning to the postal system analogy, China would allow the postman to open the envelopes, see what’s inside them, and then decide whether or not to deliver the box to its destination.

The New IP can be seen as a technical solution to a political problem. A centralized authority would be able to track the browsing history and the online habits of any individual, while deciding who can access the internet. These features could convert the New IP into an instrument for social control and state surveillance that, in its most dystopian form, would enable far-reaching censorship and propaganda.

Going forward, China is likely to keep investing in its own New IP, gathering the support of several authoritarian regimes that are natural adopters of that kind of technology. Since the West is unlikely to support any such standard, there is a growing risk of a splintered internet, with a traditional, mostly decentralized architecture on one side and a centralized architecture that does not respect fundamental values and norms of open societies on the other side.

But even among those jurisdictions that opt for the Chinese model there would be the risk of lack of interoperability. Rather than a unified world wide web, citizens would connect to a patchwork of national internets, each with its own rules. This is consistent with the idea of cyber sovereignty that Beijing outlined in its 2017 International Strategy of Cooperation on Cyberspace, where it stated: “Countries should respect each other’s right to choose their own path of cyber development, model of cyber regulation and internet public policies.”

The reality is that the multistakeholder standards development organizations will continue to function and define internet standards. Even if China implements its New IP vision, it will still need to address and meet the existing standards and structures of the internet at points of interconnection with the West if it wishes for information to flow across sovereign boundaries, something that is essential in a world of integrated global supply chains and commerce which is a major source of China’s economic strength.

From a technical perspective, the traditional IP system based on TCP/IP requires substantial upgrades. At the “host” level it suffers from inadequate memory and inadequate processors, along with latency problems at the “link” level. At the “IP layer” there are problems with discarded packets and reassembly failures.

Even so, over the last forty years the layered and modular architecture of the internet has proved to be extremely adaptable, incorporating new networking technologies, meeting new requirements, and supporting an exponential number of users. As highlighted by the Internet Society, the modular character of the internet architecture allows for innovation in one area without having to rearchitect the entire internet. The introduction of new wireless technologies, for example, has not required an upgrade to the entire internet.

Western powers should leverage the technical flexibility of the traditional IP to propose upgrades within the existing framework, preserving the collaborative engineering efforts. In April 2022, the European Union and the United States led the efforts behind the “Declaration for the Future of the Internet” that affirmed the objective of preserving an “open, free, global, interoperable, reliable, and secure internet.” The declaration was signed by more than 60 countries, mostly democracies. This is symptomatic of the growing risk of a splinternet.

Western governments should foster an internet that is consistent with democratic values. But it is in their interest to engage China to avoid a costly fragmentation of the internet. This can be achieved by striking a balance between the old multistakeholder standards development approach and the intergovernmental one that is promoted by Beijing. After all, Western governments want to shape the internet governance to protect the data of their citizens, build walls against cyberattacks and tame the power of tech companies. For better or worse, the internet will increasingly become a matter of national sovereignty.

For two centuries, technical standards have shaped great power dynamics. But never has a technical standard been so consequential as the development of internet protocols. At its core, the issue is not just about fragmentation of the internet between democracies and authoritarian regimes. It is about the mismatch between the global boundaries of the internet and the geographic boundaries that define nation states, and the desire of sovereign states to manifest control over information flows to reflect their underlying governance philosophies. Democratic states must recognize that the evolution of the internet has far reaching ramifications for global stability and the types of societies we will live in.

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Foreign Policy · by Edoardo Campanella, John Haigh · August 25, 2023

24. Royal Thai Army, US Soldiers Participate in Historic All-Female Airborne Course

Hooah.

Royal Thai Army, US Soldiers Participate in Historic All-Female Airborne Course

dvidshub.net

Courtesy Photo | U.S. Army 1st Sgt. Sarah Meyers, Forward Support Company, 1st Battalion, 1st Special...... read more

Courtesy Photo | U.S. Army 1st Sgt. Sarah Meyers, Forward Support Company, 1st Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne) serves as a U.S. Army Special Operations Forces jumpmaster mentor during the first Royal Thai Army all-female Basic Airborne Course conducted by the RTA Special Warfare School at Camp Erawan, Lop Buri, Thailand, Aug. 7, 2023. The United States and Thailand have nearly two centuries of diplomatic relations and have been security treaty allies for over 66 years. Our continued, face-to-face exchanges with our allies and partners are a foundation of a our bilateral relationships, and bolster understanding in the region that we are going to be a reliable partner in both good and bad times. Courtesy Photo) | View Image Page

LOP BURI, THAILAND

08.23.2023

Story by Master Sgt. Theanne Tangen

U.S. Special Operations Command Pacific

LOP BURI, Thailand - The Royal Thai Army invited U.S. Soldiers to participate in their first all-female Basic Airborne Course conducted by the Special Warfare School at Camp Erawan, Lop Buri, Thailand, July 18 – Aug. 9.

Nearly 100 female RTA soldiers from Airborne Class 345 earned their Parachutist Badge after completing four weeks of rigorous training to include four static line jumps, one with combat equipment and one at night. The course concluded with an 8k ruck march from the drop zone.

During the graduation ceremony, the Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Thai Army General Narongpan Jittkaewtae reminded the soldiers what it means to wear the Parachutist Badge.

“To earn this badge you have to follow Standing Operating Procedures strictly, including vigorous training.” said Jittkaewtae. “This badge represents your persistence, courage, and discipline to protect the country, which is the pride of the Royal Thai Army Airborne. May I remind those who wear this badge on your left chest, you are Airborne, you are capable of static line operations, ready for airborne operations.”

1st Sgt. Sarah Meyers, U.S. Army Forward Support Company, 1st Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne), served as the U.S. Army Special Operations Forces jumpmaster mentor during the course. Meyers has 15 years of airborne operations experience and is the only female jumpmaster in her battalion.

“Being a part of a historic all-female jump feels empowering and significant, as it represents breaking barriers while working to improve combat effectiveness while promoting equality, diversity and inclusivity,” said Meyers. “It inspires a sense of pride, camaraderie, and a feeling of contribution to a positive change.”

At the completion of the course Meyers recognized and gave encouragement to the female with the highest physical fitness score.

“Good job exceeding the standard, don’t just do the minimum push yourself all the way,” said Meyers. “To keep up with our airborne brothers try to meet their standards.”

Meyers also presented her U.S. Master Parachutist Jump Wings to a standout female to continue to motivate and encourage the soldiers of the RTA.

“I am so proud of them all,” said Meyers. “They are now officially my Airborne sisters.”

The United States and Thailand have nearly two centuries of diplomatic relations and have been security treaty allies for over 66 years.

“The U.S. can help recommend how we can do better, and they can see how we do things differently which creates an exchange of information between us,” said 2nd Lt. Akararin Yucharoen, Thailand Special Warfare Command, instructor. “We have a great partnership.”

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Date Taken: 08.23.2023 Date Posted: 08.23.2023 23:36 Story ID: 451961 Location: LOP BURI, TH Web Views: 189 Downloads: 0

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De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com