Intelligence reportedly targeted the U.S. and Western public to exploit the crisis ahead of the U.S. presidential election.
U.S. authorities say Russian intelligence agencies are a trio of network sites founded in England to spread erroneous data about the coronavirus pandemic, which seek to exploit a crisis that the U.S. is suffering before the November presidential election.
Two Russians who have held senior positions in the Moscow army intelligence service, known as GRU, have been known as culprits of a disdatum effort to secure the American and Western public, U.S. government officials said Tuesday. They spoke to The Associated Press on anonymity because they were not allowed to speak in public.
The data had long been classified, but authorities said they were demoted so they could be less rebellious. Authorities said they are now sounding the alarm on specific network sites and spreading what they say is a transparent link between Russian network sites and intelligence services.
Between May and early July, an official said, the websites published about 150 articles in the response to the pandemic, adding policies to Russia or denigrating the United States.
Among the headlines that caught the attention of U.S. officials was one that said that “Russia’s assistance opposite Covid-1nine to America is advancing the difficulty for détente,” which reported that Russia had provided urgent and truly extensive assistance to combat the pandemic. “Beijing believes that Covid-1nine is a biological weapon,” which amplified the Chinese’s statements, was another.
Disclosure comes at a time when the dissemination of erroneous information, added across Russia, is an urgent concern in the run-up to the November presidential election. U.S. authorities seek to avoid a repeat of the 2016 race, when Russia announced a covert crusade on social media to divide U.S. public opinion. And favor then-candidate Donald Trump over his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. The U.S. government’s counterintelligence leader warned in an extraordinary audience Friday about Russia’s continued use of Internet trolls to advance its goals.
Even outside politics, the two crises that are shaking up the rustic and the far from the global (pandemics and race relations and manifestations) have provided fertile territory for mistakes or the falsification of lies. Trump himself has been under scrutiny from the apple for sharing erroneous data about a drug that refuses to consider coronavirus in videos that were deleted via Twitter and Facebook.
The authorities have described Russia’s data as a component of an ongoing and persistent effort to advance false narratives and sow confusion. They did not say whether the effort behind those composite network sites was directly applicable to the November election, although some of the policies denigrate Joe Biden, and they recalled Russia’s efforts in 2016 to exacerbate race relations in the United States and lead corruption allegations against American politicians. .
While U.S. officials have warned about the spread of pandemic-like misinformation, on Tuesday they were additional in naming a special Russian-registered news agency, InfoRos, which operates a chain of sites: InfoRos.ru, Infobrics.org, and OneWorld. press – which reveled in using the pandemic to announce anti-Western targets and spread misinformation.
An email to InfoRos did not respond immediately on Tuesday.
The sites herald their stories in a confusing but insidious effort that American officials equate with coin-laundering, where well-written English articles, and with pro-Russian sentiment and anti-American sentiment, have gone through other de facto resources to hide their origin. and strengthen the legitimacy of the facts.
The sites also magnify stories from other places, the government said.
Beyond the coronavirus, there’s also a focus on America, global politics and topical stories of the moment.
A headline Tuesday in InfoRos.ru in turmoil in major U.S. cities. It read “Chaos in Blue Cities,” accompanying a story that lamented how New Yorkers who grew up in crime-fighting mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg’s technique “will have to accept life in high-crime urban areas.”
InfoRos and One World’s ties to the Russian state have attracted scrutiny in the past from European disinformation analysts.
In 2019, a European Union management organization that read dysdato campaigns known as One World as “a new direct complement to the pantheon of Moscow-based dysdato outlets.” The organization in operation noted that one World’s content broke the Russian state’s schedule on upheavals such as the war in Syria.
A report published last month through a non-governmental intellectual organization, EU DisinfoLab, founded in Brussels, tested the links between InfoRos and One World and the intelligence of the Russian army. The researchers knew technical clues that linked them to Russia and knew some economic ties between InfoRos and the government.
“InfoRos operates in a shaded gray area, where normal data activities are combined with more debatable movements that may also be applicable with Russian state data operations,” the report’s authors concluded.
On its Facebok page in English, InfoRos describes itself as a “news agency: the global eyes of Russia.”