Maverick's World

RIS's real superweapon

I have been following @mikefarb1 and he had a thread going on a cyber attack on the Illinois voter rolls. Mike has been running an investigation into the possibility that RIS attacked the election directly either targeting the election machines themselves or the software packages that tabulated the results. In this thread he feels he may have hit on something much more disruptive and effective at hacking the actual electoral  process.

I found the comments by@JernauMoratGurg most enlightening. Before I get into those comments, I want to lay out a little bit of what we know so far.

Based on numerous reports, it appears the Trump Campaign made contact with RIS via secret meetings and offered up an end to sanctions against Putin in exchange for support in the election. It is not clear if this was a novel thing for Trump to do, or whether it was part of an ongoing relationship that the Trump corporation enjoyed with Russia in the decades past.

A large fraction of RIS backed trolls, hackers and information warfare operations supported the Trump campaign.

1) RIS paid trolls at the "Internet Research Agency" infiltrated online polls and social media to conduct a psyops campaign aimed at making Trumpers think they were a far greater number than they actually were.

2) RIS backed hackers and disinformation operatives carried out a marketing campaign which sought to dissuade Berniecrats, Jill Stein and Johnson supporters from voting for Hillary.

Trump pubilcy associated with these two RIS backed campaigns - including the highly illegal hacking parts. As indicated by @selectedwisdom in his testimony before the HPSCI, the overt manner in which Trump used RIS disinformation to attack his opponents made the RIS effects extremely successful at undermining the election process.

We also know that Trump's information team leader Brad Parscale, set up a database called The Alamo Project. The data contained a vast amount of information collected illegally from scraping Facebook. The company Cambridge Analytica is believed to be associated with the creation and sorting of this database. We also know that the database was maintained at Betsy DeVos/Erik Prince's Spectrum Health company, at Trump's corporate premises and at Alfa Bank in Russia. The strange nature of the DNS queries between these three machines pointed very strongly towards maintaining a shared database.

There has been a great deal of speculation as to what the database was used for. @MWRDBM opined that it could have been used for micro-targeting but that form of marketing is statistically unreliable. It cannot be used to explain the observed electoral swings. It is also unlikely that someone as educated as Dr. Robert Mercer would be hoodwinked into supporting something that was statistically incapable of producing a viable correlation.  This has left open questions about what this is all about - or if it is about anything at all.

There is also the strange matter of the hacking attacks on electoral rolls and the as yet unexplained Dyn outage, we don't know why the RIS targetted both the DNC and the electoral offices of so many states.

In Mike's thread I feel we are seeing the "third campaign" emerge. As indicated in comments by@JernauMoratGurg - the RIS realized that merely electing the president was not sufficient if the opposition party still controlled the House and the Senate. So a parallel operation was likely launched which focused on the overlap between DNC's Vertica database (which contained the names and personal details of various democratic party voters in many states) and the voter ID rolls held in various states. If errors were deliberately and selectively introduced into the state voter rolls for likely democratic party voters, then when the state election commissions attempted to verify their credentials at the polling booth or when they registered, then these voters would be turned away per prevailing voter ID laws.

This is a very sophisticated form of anti-GOTV operations. The Spectrum-TrumpCorp-AlfaBank server would contain the lists of all likely HRC voters, and this "Third Campaign" would quietly break into voter rolls in various states and damage the voter roll entries for HRC voters. While such editing would likely not change whether the state went for HRC or DT, it would ensure that the GOP had a strong placement in the House and Senate. In the event that Donald Trump won, this would shield him from impeachment for treason and in the event that HRC won, this would act as a place to constantly stage anti-HRC media spectaculars like the Benghazi hearings.

I feel this story hangs together rather well.

I feel this "Third Campaign" might very easily be the much feared RIS superweapon - the "greatest innovation since the Atom bomb". (you all know who said that right)

posted by maverick @ 6:18 AM