RE: Watergate II: Lock them up.
July 12, 2017 at 5:27 pm
(This post was last modified: July 12, 2017 at 5:38 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(July 12, 2017 at 2:00 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote:(July 12, 2017 at 1:51 pm)Anomalocaris Wrote: Not more dangerous as a military opponent, but more dangerous as an opponent with the ability
and the motivation to fundamentally subvert and debilitate our system of governance.
The soviet human intelligence network in the US was undoubtedly much more robust than those of Russia now.
Perhaps, but we're talking about disseminating disinformation to a nation of tens of millions. The internet, with its partisan gathering sites and bots trawling them, no doubt makes their efforts much more efficient than using human resources on the scale the USSR would've had to use.
The Russians did not directly tap into popularly accessible internet to disseminate disinformation. Rather they observed and assessed which of the existing new media, whether they be FOX news or Brietbart, that shared their immediate objectives of keeping Clinton out of office, and disseminated their disinformation through existing eager avenues of the agents and officers of the Trump campaign and their key supporters into those news outlets.
If the soviets had attempted to achieve the same influence, they would have done essentially the same things in this area. But the difference is the KGB would have had undoubtly more robust and thoroughly researched personnel file on the trump champaign agents and officers and their supporters, have more capability to directly bribe, intimidate and blackmail as additional tools. In addition, the Soviet Union also had available to it global influence and freedom of military, political and diplomatic maneuver to change short term perception of the global environment in coordination with the campaign to influence American election.
In summary, The Russians in 2016 really did not exhibit any potent network of agents nor pre-positioned fifth columnists, not do they have much geopolitical freedom of action to effect public perception. They really needed the cooperation of a Party full of eager traitors to pull this off. If the soviets had wanted to try, they would not have needed such a favorable alignment of conditions to make a massive difference.
