SCHLOSS ELMAU, Germany, June 26 (Reuters) – Panned by critics for dragging his feet on Ukraine, called a “sulky liver sausage” by the Ukrainian ambassador, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Sunday won public praise from a man he has long privately admired: U.S. President Joe Biden.

Reaching over to touch Scholz’s arm as they sat at the start of a G7 meeting in the Bavarian Alps, Biden said it was “in no small part because of you” that the West had stuck together against Russia four months after the invasion of Ukraine.

The two men, who are from different political generations but both took office last year, have made common cause over Ukraine as they sought to heal ties that were sorely strained under Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump.

Both leaders have vowed to strengthen Ukraine’s armed forces, increase sanctions pressure on Moscow and counter surging food and energy prices that have undermined their popularity at home and tested their own domestic alliances.

At Sunday’s meeting, Biden pushed back against criticism of Scholz’s leadership, praising the chancellor for marshalling Europe’s response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. read more

“They are kindred spirits and they’re dealing with some of the same challenges,” said Steven Sokol, president of the American Council on Germany. “I could easily imagine there’s a bit of a bromance going on,” he said.

While privately expressing reservations about some other leaders, the 64-year-old Scholz speaks especially warmly of the U.S. president and sees the transatlantic relationship as a crucial pillar of German and European security.

He “has always looked very much to the USA,” according to one long-time friend and confidante.

The Social Democrat Scholz also values what he sees as Biden’s commitment to fighting for those left behind by globalisation and technological advances, a theme Scholz explored at length in his book “Land of Hope” in 2017.

KEEPING PROMISES

For his part, Biden, 79, has lauded Germany for agreeing to boost its military spending by 100 million euros over the next decade, and overcoming resistance stemming from World War Two on providing weapons to Ukraine.

Berlin’s support for repeated rounds of sanctions against Russia, often against its own economic interests, has impressed U.S. officials who had braced for a more halting embrace.

Germany was “one of the countries where we wanted to really restore and rebuild the trust and the solidarity in that relationship and I think we’ve really been able to achieve that,” a senior U.S. administration official said.

“The warm and friendly words between the two, the president’s expression of trust in Scholz showed that we’ve been able to make progress on that goal, and achieve a lot of that close working relationship that we wanted.”

Biden’s administration has also welcomed Scholz’s rapid and unprompted decision to halt the Russian-led Nord Stream 2 pipeline, said one source familiar with the matter.

“Scholz had promised the president that if Russia further invaded Ukraine, the pipeline would be shut down,” the source said. “He did exactly what he said he would do, and that was deeply appreciated.”

The Trump years contrasted to the warm relationship that Scholz’s predecessor Angela Merkel forged with Barack Obama after initial friction from disclosures that the National Security Agency had tapped Merkel’s mobile phone.

Trump’s public and private pummeling of Berlin over the pipeline, its failure to raise military spending to meet NATO targets and its support of the Iran nuclear deal sent the partnership reeling.

Biden first met Scholz in Rome at the Group of 20 meeting in October, shortly before the German leader took office.

“Relations between the two administrations are unusually close”, said one German government source. “In fact – the higher you get in the hierarchy in Washington, the closer relations are to German government.”

There have been differences, to be sure, including lingering frustration in Berlin and other European capitals over the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan last August, a move seen as a “big mistake” that may have even encouraged Putin, according to German government sources.

Some in Washington meanwhile question Germany’s continued strong economic ties with China, echoing criticisms under Trump.

But on Sunday, Scholz was all smiles after Biden’s warm words: “It’s a good message that we all managed to stay united, which, obviously, Putin never expected.”

Reporting by Andrea Shalal and Andreas Rinke; editing by Matthias Williams and Raissa Kasolowsky

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

A Russian hacking group may be responsible for a cyber attack against a liquefied natural gas plant in Texas that led to its explosion on June 8.

The explosion took place at the Freeport Liquefied Natural Gas (Freeport LNG) liquefaction plant and export terminal on Texas’ Quintana Island. The June 8 incident will have a lasting impact on Freeport LNG’s operations.

Preliminary investigations suggested that the incident resulted from the overpressure and rupture of a segment of an LNG transfer line, leading to the rapid flashing of LNG and the release and ignition of the natural gas vapor cloud.

At this time it is not clear why the safety mechanisms in place did not prevent the explosion. Experts speculate a cyber attack may have turned off the industrial safety controls at the natural gas facility.

ICS malware like TRITON, which experts associated with Russia-linked APT group XENOTIME, has offensive capabilities to shut down industrial safety controls and cause extensive damages to industrial facilities.

“On March 24 the U.S. Department of Justice brought charges against four Russian nationals suspected of using TRITON malware in cyber attacks on behalf of the Russian government between 2012 and 2018. That same day, the FBI issued an advisory warning that TRITON malware tools still remain a major threat to industrial systems around the world.” reported the American Military News website.

The Washington Times national security writer Tom Rogan confirmed that the explosion at the Freeport LNG facility could be consistent with a hacking campaign conducted by APT groups like XENOTIME.

Rogan added that the company does have in place the Operation Technology/Industrial Control Systems network detection systems.

At this time, Freeport LNG denied the theory that sees a cyber attack as the root cause of the incident.

“Unless Freeport LNG has OT/ICS network detection systems deployed appropriately and has completed a forensics investigation, a cyberattack cannot be ruled out,” Rogan wrote.

“Two more sources who spoke with Rogan said that around the time of Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, a cyber unit of Russia’s GRU military intelligence service conducted targeting-reconnaissance operations against Freeport LNG.” continues the American Military News website.

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, liquefied natural gas plant)

This article links to a state controlled Russian media. Read more.

Twitter has been hiring “an alarming number” of ex-FBI agents and other former “feds and spies,” news outlet MintPress News is reporting, after conducting an analysis of employment and recruitment websites.

According to the research, in recent years the company employed “dozens of individuals from the national security state to work in the fields of security, trust, safety and content.”

“Chief amongst these is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI is generally known as a domestic security and intelligence force. However, it has recently expanded its remit into cyberspace,” MintPress wrote.

It provides several examples of such appointments. FBI veteran Karen Walsh who, according to her Twitter profile, served as a special agent for 21 years, has become a director of corporate resilience at the Silicon Valley-based company. Mark Jaroszewski, Twitter director of corporate security and risk, joined the Twitter team after 20+ years at the FBI.

The CIA and NATO-aligned lobby group the Atlantic Council have also been named by MintPress as key incubators of personnel for Twitter.

“Twitter also directly employs active army officers. In 2019, Gordon Macmillan, the head of editorial for the entire Europe, Middle East and Africa region was revealed to be an officer in the British Army’s notorious 77th Brigade – a unit dedicated to online warfare and psychological operations. This bombshell news was steadfastly ignored across the media,” the outlet stressed.

RT has checked open-access social media accounts of Twitter’s top managers and also discovered some former employees of the security services among them – in addition to the ones mentioned in the MintPress investigation.

MintPress News stresses that while Twitter’s HR policy might appear logical – the company hires specialists in the areas it needs – it creates some serious problems, not only for the company, but also for the security agencies and organizations. According to former FBI agent and whistleblower Coleen Rowley, who is quoted by MintPress, many agents have one eye on post-retirement jobs.

“The truth is that at the FBI 50% of all the normal conversations that people had were about how you were going to make money after retirement,” Rowley said.

MintPress claimed that the fact that Twitter recruits largely from the US national security organizations undermines the company’s claims about its neutrality, as the US government “is the source of some of the largest and most extensive influence operations in the world.”

Another risk is that “the company will start to view every problem in the same manner as the U.S. government does – and act accordingly,” the outlet states. To prove this claim, the website analyzed a list – compiled by Twitter – of the countries allegedly conducting disinformation campaigns.

“One cannot help noticing that this list correlates quite closely to a hit list of U.S. government adversaries. All countries carry out disinfo campaigns to a certain extent. But these ‘former’ spooks and feds are unlikely to point the finger at their former colleagues or sister organizations or investigate their operations,” MintPress explained.

Twitter adds warning messages to the tweets and accounts of the state-affiliated media of Russia, China, Iran and Cuba, thus mirroring “US hostility” towards these countries, but does not add any warnings to the pages of state-affiliated media of US and its allies, the outlet highlighted.

Ultimately, MintPress found that Twitter is not the only social media platform that’s “cultivating such an intimate relationship with the FBI and other groups belonging to the secret state.”

“Facebook, for example, has entered into a formal partnership with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, whereby the latter holds significant influence over 2.9 billion users’ news feeds, helping to decide what content to promote and what content to suppress,” it said, adding that the company has also employed former NATO Press Secretary Ben Nimmo as its head of intelligence.

TikTok, according to the outlet, has been “filling its organization with alumni of the Atlantic Council, NATO, the CIA and the State Department.”

Reddit and various media, including Thomson Reuters and multiple US TV channels have also been actively employing former spies, MintPress News claims.

“One of media’s primary functions is to serve as a fourth estate; a force that works to hold the government and its agencies to account. Yet instead of doing that, increasingly it is collaborating with them. Such are these increasing interlocking connections that it is becoming increasingly difficult to see where big government ends and big media begins,” it pointed out.

This July 9, 2019 file photo shows a sign outside of the Twitter office building in San Francisco. Jeff Chiu | AP

By Alan MacLeod / MintPress News

SAN FRANCISCO – Twitter has been on a recruitment drive of late, hiring a host of former feds and spies. Studying a number of employment and recruitment websites, MintPress has ascertained that the social media giant has, in recent years, recruited dozens of individuals from the national security state to work in the fields of security, trust, safety and content.

Chief amongst these is the Federal Bureau of Investigations. The FBI is generally known as a domestic security and intelligence force. However, it has recently expanded its remit into cyberspace. “The FBI’s investigative authority is the broadest of all federal law enforcement agencies,” the “About” section of its website informs readers. “The FBI has divided its investigations into a number of programs, such as domestic and international terrorism, foreign counterintelligence [and] cyber crime,” it adds.

For example, in 2019, Dawn Burton (the former director of Washington operations for Lockheed Martin) was poached from her job as senior innovation advisor to the director at the FBI to become senior director of strategy and operations for legal, public policy, trust and safety at Twitter. The following year, Karen Walsh went straight from 21 years at the bureau to become director of corporate resilience at the silicon valley giant. Twitter’s deputy general counsel and vice president of legal, Jim Baker, also spent four years at the FBI between 2014 and 2018, where his resumé notes he rose to the role of senior strategic advisor.

Meanwhile, Mark Jaroszewski ended his 21-year posting as a supervisory special agent in the Bay Area to take up a position at Twitter, rising to become director of corporate security and risk. And Douglas Turner spent 14 years as a senior special agent and SWAT Team leader before being recruited to serve in Twitter’s corporate and executive security services. Previously, Turner had also spent seven years as a secret service special agent with the Department of Homeland Security.

When asked to comment by MintPress, former FBI agent and whistleblower Coleen Rowley said that she was “not surprised at all” to see FBI agents now working for the very tech companies the agency polices, stating that there now exists a “revolving door” between the FBI and the areas they are trying to regulate. This created a serious conflict of interests in her mind, as many agents have one eye on post-retirement jobs. “The truth is that at the FBI 50% of all the normal conversations that people had were about how you were going to make money after retirement,” she said.

Many former FBI officials hold influential roles within Twitter. For instance, in 2020, Matthew W. left a 15-year career as an intelligence program manager at the FBI to take up the post of senior director of product trust at Twitter. Patrick G., a 23-year FBI supervisory special agent, is now head of corporate security. And Twitter’s director of insider risk and security investigations, Bruce A., was headhunted from his role as a supervisory special agent at the bureau. His resumé notes that at the FBI he held “[v]arious intelligence and law enforcement roles in the US, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East” and was a “human intelligence and counterintelligence regional specialist.” (On employment sites such as LinkedIn, many users choose not to reveal their full names.)

Meanwhile, between 2007 and 2021 Jeff Carlton built up a distinguished career in the United States Marine Corps, rising to become a senior intelligence analyst. Between 2014 and 2017, his LinkedIn profile notes, he worked for both the CIA and FBI, authored dozens of official reports, some of which were read by President Barack Obama. Carlton describes his role as a “problem-solver” and claims to have worked in many “dynamic, high-pressure environments” such as Iraq and Korea. In May 2021, he left official service to become a senior program manager at Twitter, responsible for dealing with the company’s “highest-profile trust and safety escalations.”

Other former FBI staff are employed by Twitter, such as Cherrelle Y. as a policy domain specialist and Laura D. as a senior analyst in global risk intelligence.

Many of those listed above were active in the FBI’s public outreach programs, a practice sold as a community trust-building initiative. According to Rowley, however, these also function as “ways for officials to meet the important people that would give them jobs after retirement.” “It basically inserts a huge conflict of interest,” she told MintPress. “It warps and perverts the criminal investigative work that agents do when they are still working as agents because they anticipate getting lucrative jobs after retiring or leaving the FBI.”

Rowley – who in 2002 was named, along with two other whistleblowers, as Time magazine’s Person of the Year – was skeptical that there was anything seriously nefarious about the hiring of so many FBI agents, suggesting that Twitter could be using them as sources of information and intelligence. She stated:

Retired agents often maintained good relationships and networks with current agents. So they can call up their old buddy and find out stuff… There were certainly instances of retired agents for example trying to find out if there was an investigation of so and so. And if you are working for a company, that company is going to like that influence.”

Rowley also suggested that hiring people from various three-letter agencies gave them a credibility boost. “These [tech] companies are using the mythical aura of the FBI. They can point to somebody and say ‘oh, you can trust us; our CEO or CFO is FBI,’” she explained.

Twitter certainly has endorsed the FBI as a credible actor, allowing the organization to play a part in regulating the global dissemination of information on its platform. In September 2020, it put out a statement thanking the federal agency. “We wish to express our gratitude to the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force for their close collaboration and continued support of our work to protect the public conversation at this critical time,” the statement read.

One month later, the company announced that the FBI was feeding it intelligence and that it was complying with their requests for deletion of accounts. “Based on intel provided by the FBI, last night we removed approximately 130 accounts that appeared to originate in Iran. They were attempting to disrupt the public conversation during the first 2020 U.S. Presidential Debate,” Twitter’s safety team wrote.

Yet the evidence they supplied of this supposed threat to American democracy was notably weak. All four of the messages from this Iranian operation that Twitter itself shared showed that none of them garnered any likes or retweets whatsoever, meaning that essentially nobody saw them. This was, in other words, a completely routine cleanup operation of insignificant troll accounts. Yet the announcement allowed Twitter to present the FBI as on the side of democracy and place the idea into the public psyche that the election was under threat from foreign actors.

Iran has been a favorite Twitter target in the past. In 2009, at the behest of the U.S. government, it postponed routine maintenance of the site, which would have required taking it offline. This was because an anti-government protest movement in Tehran was using the app to communicate and the U.S. did not want the demonstrations’ regime-change potential to be stymied.

A CARNIVAL OF SPOOKS

The FBI is far from the only state security agency filling Twitter’s ranks. Shortly after leaving a 10-year career as a CIA analyst, Michael Scott Robinson was hired to become a senior policy manager for site integrity, trust and safety.

The California-based app has also recruited heavily from the Atlantic Council, a NATO cutout organization that serves as the military alliance’s think tank. The council is sponsored by NATO, led by senior NATO generals and regularly plays out regime-change scenarios in enemy states, such as China.

The Atlantic Council has been associated with many of the most egregious fake news plants of the last few years. It published a series of lurid reports alleging that virtually every political group in Europe challenging the status quo – from the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn and UKIP in Great Britain to PODEMOS and Vox in Spain and Syriza and Golden Dawn in Greece – were all secretly “the Kremlin’s Trojan Horses.” Atlantic Council employee Michael Weiss was also very likely the creator of the shadowy organization PropOrNot, a group that anonymously published a list of fake-news websites that regularly peddled Kremlin disinformation. Included in this list was virtually every anti-war alternative media outlet one could think of – from MintPress to Truthout, TruthDig and The Black Agenda Report. Also included were pro-Trump websites like The Drudge Report, and liberatarian ventures like Antiwar.com and The Ron Paul Institute.

PropOrNot’s list was immediately heralded in the corporate press, and was the basis for a wholescale algorithm shift at Google and other big tech platforms, a shift that saw traffic to alternative media sites crash overnight, never to recover. Thus, the allegation of a huge (Russian) state-sponsored attempt to influence the media was itself an intelligence op by the U.S. national security state.

In 2020, Kanishk Karan left his job as a research associate at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research (DFR) Lab to join Twitter as information integrity and safety specialist – essentially helping to control what Twitter sees as legitimate information and nefarious disinformation. Another DFR Lab graduate turned Twitter employee is Daniel Weimert, who is now a senior public policy associate for Russia – a key target of the Atlantic Council. Meanwhile, Sarah Oh is simultaneously an Atlantic Council DFR Lab non-resident senior fellow and a Twitter advisor, her social media bio noting she works on “high risk trust and safety issues.”

In 2019, Twitter also hired Greg Andersen straight from NATO to work on cybercrime policy. There is sparse information on what Andersen did at NATO, but, alarmingly, his own LinkedIn profile stated simply that he worked on “psychological operations” for the military alliance. After MintPress highlighted this fact in an article in April, he removed all mention of “psychological operations” from his profile, claiming now to have merely worked as a NATO “researcher.” Andersen left Twitter in the summer of last year to work as a product policy manager for the popular video platform TikTok.

Twitter also directly employs active army officers. In 2019, Gordon Macmillan, the head of editorial for the entire Europe, Middle East and Africa region was revealed to be an officer in the British Army’s notorious 77th Brigade – a unit dedicated to online warfare and psychological operations. This bombshell news was steadfastly ignored across the media.

POSITIONS OF POWER AND CONTROL

With nearly 400 million global users, there is no doubt that Twitter has grown to become a platform large and influential enough to necessitate extensive security measures, as actors of all stripes attempt to use the service to influence public opinion and political actions. There is also no doubt that there is a limited pool of people qualified in these sorts of fields.

But recruiting largely from the U.S. national security state fundamentally undermines claims Twitter makes about its neutrality. The U.S. government is the source of some of the largest and most extensive influence operations in the world. As far back as 2011, The Guardian reported on the existence of a massive, worldwide U.S. military online influence campaign in which it had designed software that allowed its personnel to “secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.” The program boasts that the background of these personas is so convincing that psychological operations soldiers can be sure to work “without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries.” Yet Twitter appears to be recruiting from the source of the problem.

These former national security state officials are not being employed in politically neutral departments such as sales or customer service, but in security, trust and content, meaning that some hold considerable sway over what messages and information are promoted, and what is suppressed, demoted or deleted.

It could be said that poachers-turned-gamekeepers often play a crucial role in safety and protection, as they know how bad actors think and operate. But there exists little evidence that any of these national security state operatives have changed their stances. Twitter is not hiring whistleblowers or dissidents. It appears, then, that some of these people are essentially doing the same job they were doing before, but now in the private sector. And few are even acknowledging that there is anything wrong with moving from big government to big tech, as if the U.S. national security state and the fourth estate are allies, rather than adversaries.

That Twitter is already working so closely with the FBI and other agencies makes it easy for them to recruit from the federal pool. As Rowley said, “over a period of time these people will be totally in sync with the mindset of Twitter and other social media platforms. So from the company’s standpoint, they are not hiring somebody new. They already know this person. They know where they stand on things.”

IS THERE A PROBLEM?

Some might ask “What is the problem with Twitter actively recruiting from the FBI, CIA and other three-letter agencies?” They, after all, are experts in studying online disinformation and propaganda. One is optical. If a Russian-owned social media app’s trust, security and content moderation was run by former KGB or FSB agents and still insisted it was a politically neutral platform, the entire world would laugh.

But apart from this, the huge influx of security state personnel into Twitter’s decision-making ranks means that the company will start to view every problem in the same manner as the U.S. government does – and act accordingly. “In terms of their outlooks on the world and on the question of misinformation and internet security, you couldn’t get a better field of professionals who are almost inherently going to be more in tune with the government’s perspective,” Rowley said.

Thus, when policing the platform for disinformation and influence campaigns, the former FBI and CIA agents and Atlantic Council fellows only ever seem to find them emanating from enemy states and never from the U.S. government itself. This is because their backgrounds and outlooks condition them to consider Washington to be a unique force for good.

This one-sided view of disinformation can be seen by studying the reports Twitter has published on state-linked information operations. The entire list of countries it has identified as engaging in these campaigns are as follows: Russia (in 7 reports), Iran (in 5 reports), China (4 reports), Saudi Arabia (4 reports), Venezuela (3 reports), Egypt (2 reports), Cuba, Serbia, Bangladesh, the UAE, Ecuador, Ghana, Nigeria, Honduras, Indonesia, Turkey, Thailand, Armenia, Spain, Tanzania, Mexico and Uganda.

One cannot help noticing that this list correlates quite closely to a hit list of U.S. government adversaries. All countries carry out disinfo campaigns to a certain extent. But these “former” spooks and feds are unlikely to point the finger at their former colleagues or sister organizations or investigate their operations.

THE COLD (CYBER)WAR

Twitter has mirrored U.S. hostility towards states like Russia, China, Iran and Cuba, attempting to suppress the reach and influence of their state media by adding warning messages to the tweets of journalists and accounts affiliated with those governments. “State-affiliated media is defined as outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution,” it noted.

In a rather bizarre addendum, it explained that it would not be doing the same to state-affiliated media or personalities from other countries, least of all the U.S. “State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the U.K. or NPR in the U.S. for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy,” it wrote. It did not explain how it decided that Cuban, Russian, Chinese or Iranian journalists did not have editorial independence, but British and American ones did – this was taken for granted. The effect of the action has been a throttling of ideas and narratives from enemy states and an amplification of those coming from Western state media.

As the U.S. ramps up tensions with Beijing, so too has Twitter aggressively shut down pro-China voices on its platform. In 2020, it banned 170,000 accounts it said were “spreading geopolitical narratives favorable to the Communist Party of China,” such as praising its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic or expressing opposition to the Hong Kong protests, both of which are majority views in China. Importantly, the Silicon Valley company did not claim that these accounts were controlled by the government; merely sharing these opinions was grounds enough for deletion.

The group behind Twitter’s decision to ban those Chinese accounts was the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), a deeply controversial think tank funded by the Pentagon, the State Department and a host of weapons manufacturers. ASPI has constantly peddled conspiracy theories about China and called for ramping up tensions with the Asian nation.

Perhaps most notable, however, was Twitter’s announcement last year that it was deleting dozens of accounts for the new violation of “undermining faith in the NATO alliance.” The statement was widely ridiculed online by users. But few noted that the decision was based upon a partnership with the Stanford Internet Observatory, a counter-disinformation think tank filled with former spooks and state officials and headed by an individual who is on the advisory board of NATO’s Collective Cybersecurity Center of Excellence. That Twitter is working so closely with organizations that are clearly intelligence industry catspaws should concern all users.

NOT JUST TWITTER

While some might be alarmed that Twitter is cultivating such an intimate relationship with the FBI and other groups belonging to the secret state, it is perhaps unfair to single it out, as many social media platforms are doing the same. Facebook, for example, has entered into a formal partnership with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, whereby the latter holds significant influence over 2.9 billion users’ news feeds, helping to decide what content to promote and what content to suppress. The NATO cutout organization now serves as Facebook’s “eyes and ears,” according to a Facebook press release. Anti-war and anti-establishment voices across the world have reported massive drops in traffic on the platform.

The social media giant also hired former NATO Press Secretary Ben Nimmo to be its head of intelligence. Nimmo subsequently used his power to attempt to swing the election in Nicaragua away from the leftist Sandinista Party and towards the far-right, pro-U.S. candidate, deleting hundreds of left-wing voices in the week of the election, claiming they were engaging in “inauthentic behavior.” When these individuals (including some well-known personalities) poured onto Twitter, recording video messages proving they were not bots, Twitter deleted those accounts too, in what one commentator called a Silicon Valley “double tap strike.”

An April MintPress study revealed how TikTok, too, has been filling its organization with alumni of the Atlantic Council, NATO, the CIA and the State Department. As with Twitter, these new TikTok employees largely work in highly politically sensitive fields such as trust, safety, security and content moderation, meaning these state operatives hold influence over the direction of the company and what content is promoted and what is demoted.

Likewise, in 2017, content aggregation site Reddit plucked Jessica Ashooh from the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Strategy Task Force to become its new director of policy, despite the fact that she had few relevant qualifications or experience in the field.

In corporate media too, we have seen a widespread infiltration of former security officials into the upper echelons of news organizations. So normalized is the penetration of the national security state into the media that is supposed to be holding it to account, that few reacted in 2015 when Dawn Scalici left her job as national intelligence manager for the Western hemisphere at the Director of National Intelligence to become the global business director of international news conglomerate Thomson Reuters. Scalici, a 33-year CIA veteran who had worked her way up to become a director in the organization, was open about what her role was. In a blog post on the Reuters website, she wrote that she was there to “meet the disparate needs of the U.S. Government” – a statement that is at odds with even the most basic journalistic concepts of impartiality and holding the powerful to account.

Meanwhile, cable news outlets routinely employ a wide range of “former” agents and mandarins as trusted personalities and experts. These include former CIA Directors John Brennan (NBC, MSNBC) and Michael Hayden (CNN), ex-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (CNN), and former Homeland Security Advisor Frances Townsend (CBS). And news for so many Americans comes delivered through ex-CIA interns like Anderson Cooper (CNN), CIA-applicants like Tucker Carlson (Fox), or by Mika Brzezinski (MSNBC), the daughter of a powerful national security advisor. The FBI has its own former agents on TV as well, with talking heads such as James Gagliano (Fox), Asha Rangappa (CNN) and Frank Figliuzzi (NBC, MSNBC) becoming household names. In short, then, the national security state once used to infiltrate the media. Today, however, the national security state is the media.

Social media holds enormous influence in today’s society. While this article is not alleging that anyone mentioned is a bad actor or does not genuinely care about the spread of disinformation, it is highlighting a glaring conflict of interest. Through its agencies, the U.S. government regularly plants fake news and false information. Therefore, social media hiring individuals straight from the FBI, CIA, NATO and other groups to work on regulating disinformation is a fundamentally flawed practice. One of media’s primary functions is to serve as a fourth estate; a force that works to hold the government and its agencies to account. Yet instead of doing that, increasingly it is collaborating with them. Such are these increasing interlocking connections that it is becoming increasingly difficult to see where big government ends and big media begins.

Ever since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a war in Ukraine this February, his ouster has been predicted up the wazoo; the invasion hasn’t been the quick success he’d hoped it would be, his insider circle has been itching to get rid of him, and he’s rumored to have cancer.

But rather than counting on exiting the political scene in dramatic fashion, Putin might be betting that he can somehow outlast his detractors as well as the Biden Administration, whose security assistance for Ukraine has been pivotal in keeping a Russian win at bay. And part of Putin’s plot to outlive the Biden administration is likely to include influence operations aimed at securing an American political environment that’s more favorable to his goals, former CIA and Department of Homeland Security officials told The Daily Beast.

That scheme will inevitably aim to influence voters participating in both the midterms and the presidential election in 2024 in an attempt to get candidates elected who are somehow more sympathetic to Putin, according to Daniel Hoffman, a former CIA Moscow chief of station.

“He’s going to try really, really hard to… exacerbate those isolationist tendencies and kind of induce us to question, ‘Why are we supporting Ukraine?’” Hoffman said. “He’s trying to dilute U.S. support for [Ukrainian President] Zelensky.”

Already, Russian influence operations targeting American and Western audiences appear to be weakening Americans’ support and appetite for providing aid to Ukraine, according to a U.S. intelligence community bulletin obtained by The Daily Beast.

The May intelligence bulletin from the Office of Intelligence and Analysis at the Department of Homeland Security says the Kremlin’s influence arm has focused Russian influence operations that are targeting American audiences almost entirely on the war in Ukraine. Russian state media and proxy information operations are working to paint Western support for Ukraine as the reason the war is dragging on so long, and the reason there is a growing food crisis. Never mind the fact the conflict and grain export problems exist because Putin chose to invade Ukraine in the first place.

“Outlets claimed… that Western nations prolonged the conflict by sending military aid to Ukraine,” reads the intelligence brief, which focused on Russian information operations in May. “Outlets claimed that Western actions were causing global food prices to soar.”

The intelligence team also assesses that the Russian government remains one of the primary threats to the United States due to its “malicious cyber operations against federal and state, local, tribal, and territorial governments, election organizations,” and more.

The Russian influence shops have also particularly been zeroing in on the idea that Western security assistance to Ukraine has been escalating the war.

“Outlets regularly published stories about Western arms shipments and pledges of aid to Ukraine, saying that they further destabilize and prolong the conflict,” the intelligence assessment states. “Outlets spread claims that there was no accountability for weapons entering Ukraine, which would likely lead to them being misdirected.”

These kinds of narratives are only likely to increase in the coming days as Putin seeks to shore up his power, according to Brian Harrell, a former Assistant Secretary at the Department of Homeland Security.

“As health related rumors swirl surrounding Putin, I suspect we will see an uptick in propaganda and even counter-messages from loyalists,” Harrell told The Daily Beast.

Any good spy will tell you it’s impossible to get inside Putin’s head. But Russian information operations can offer a clue. In distracting Americans from supporting Ukraine, and as Russian forces continue to try to take key Ukrainian cities, Putin is likely hoping that he can stave off defeat in Ukraine and therefore stave off an ouster, too.

“Putin’s thinking: ‘I can outlast all you people. And if I get this to 2024, I might get a Republican who doesn’t feel like Joe Biden,’” Hoffman told The Daily Beast. “They’re students of American politics. Of course he’s going to look at the midterms and he’s looking at anybody who’s… against the war in Ukraine.”

Russian election interference may also include efforts to advance politicians or themes that would reverse sanctions against Russia, according to Gavin Wilde, a former director for Russia, Baltic, and Caucasus affairs on the White House National Security Council.

“Their major headache has been the idea that Washington is kind of facilitating Ukraine’s westward geopolitical tilt,” Wilde, who contributed to the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, told The Daily Beast. “To the extent that they can both delegitimize that in Ukraine proper as well as delegitimize those forces in Washington, D.C. and break that strain of support over the longer term, that’s kind of the major end goal.”

Russia has long intervened in American politics by choosing a preferred candidate to support in influence operations. In 2016, Putin developed a preference for Donald Trump’s candidacy, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee assessment. In the buildup to the 2020 presidential elections, Putin had Russian influence operations denigrating Biden’s candidacy while supporting Trump’s reelection, according to a National Intelligence Council briefing on the matter.

Russian proxies and information operations teams have also worked to meddle in U.S. politics by exacerbating existing divisions in the United States in order to sow discord and create distrust in the U.S. government. Even before the coronavirus pandemic, vaccination debates were a favorite of the Kremlin. Between 2014 and 2017 Russian influence operations linked to the Russian government Internet Research Agency (IRA) focused on pumping both pro- and anti-vaccination narratives online to amplify divisions around vaccination in the United States. In the buildup to the 2016 presidential elections, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) aimed to stoke racial divisions by creating fake Black Lives Matter groups on Facebook. In 2020, Russian efforts focused on inflaming racial tensions and on duping real journalists to publish posts that would inflame political tensions.

Some of Putin’s influence operations in the coming months are likely to try to dig in on existing divisive issues to create more tension and drama in the United States, just as Russian operations have before, both to sow discord and distract from the war in Ukraine.

“Certainly there’s probably a line of thought out of Moscow that any country if distracted by its own internal problems will have less of an appetite for foreign problems,” Wilde told The Daily Beast. “All politics are local in that sense and I think the Kremlin certainly grasps that—that might be one kind of avenue through which to kind of limit Washington’s appetite or capacity to support Ukraine.”

And according to a second intelligence bulletin from the Office of Intelligence and Analysis that The Daily Beast obtained, the intelligence community already believes that the Kremlin is seeking to interfere in the midterm elections this year.

“We expect Russian interference in the upcoming 2022 midterm elections, as Russia views this activity as an equitable response to perceived actions by Washington and an opportunity to both undermine U.S. global standing and influence U.S. decision-making,” the June intelligence bulletin, which was first reported by CNN, reads.

The DHS intelligence team expects the Russian government to continue to rely on troll farms, state media outlets, and other proxies online to spread pro-Russia narratives and to try to divide Americans in the coming months.

“We assess that Russia will continue malign influence and interference activities designed to undermine U.S. global prestige, sow division among the American public, undermine faith in U.S. democratic institutions, and portray Russia as a global power,” the intelligence brief states.

One topic Putin might be eyeing is support in the United States for Europe, and in particular, U.S. dedication to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and other security assistance to Ukraine and Europe, according to Wilde.

“There’s going to probably be, by 2024, a crystallized debate about the degree of U.S. commitment to Europe… including Ukraine,” Wilde said. “Putin is very well aware that that debate is probably only going to become more acute.”

Part of the Kremlin’s information operations tactics to undermine the U.S. political process will be aimed at suppressing the American vote by dissuading voters from showing up to the polls, the report states.

“Russian malign influence actors likely will attempt to dissuade U.S. voters from participating in the 2022 midterm elections using similar tactics employed during the 2020 and 2016 presidential elections, such as targeting audiences with false information about voting logistics, exacerbating racial tensions, and levying attacks or praise on candidates from either political party,” the report states.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States will send another $450 million in military aid to Ukraine, including some additional medium-range rocket systems, to help push back Russian progress in the war, officials announced Thursday.

The latest package includes four High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, which will double the number they have now. All four were prepositioned in Europe, and training on those systems has already begun with the Ukrainian troops who will use them, said Marine Corps Lt. Col. Anton Semelroth, a Pentagon spokesman. The first four HIMARS that the U.S. previously sent have already gone to the battlefield in Ukraine and are in the hands of troops there.

According to the Pentagon, the aid also includes 18 tactical vehicles that are used to tow howitzers, so the weapons can be moved around the battlefield, as well as 18 coastal and riverine patrol boats, thousands of machine guns, grenade launchers and rounds of ammunition, and some other equipment and spare parts.

The new aid comes just a week after the U.S. announced it was sending $1 billion in military aid to Ukraine, and as the Russian military continues to slowly expand its control in the eastern Donbas region. Ukrainian leaders have persistently asked for the more advanced, precision rocket systems in order to better fight back against Russia.

The Russian military captured two villages in eastern Ukraine on Thursday and is fighting for control of a key highway in a campaign to cut supply lines and encircle frontline Ukrainian forces, according to British and Ukrainian military officials.

Russian forces have been bombarding the city of Sievierodonetsk for weeks with artillery and air raids, and fought the Ukrainian army house-to-house. The HIMARS gives Ukraine the ability to strike Russian forces and weapons from further away, making it less risky for Ukrainian troops. The systems are mounted on trucks, which carry a container with six precision-guided rockets that can travel about 45 miles (70 kilometers).

It took about three weeks to train Ukrainian troops on the first four HIMARS, before the systems were moved to the fight.

The aid is part of the $40 billion in security and economic assistance passed last month by Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden. And it is the 13th package of military weapons and equipment committed to Ukraine since the war began.

Overall, since the war started in late February, the U.S. has committed about $6.1 billion in security assistance to Ukraine, including this latest package. The $450 million in equipment and weapons will be from drawdown authority, which means the Defense Department will take it all from its own stocks and ship it to Ukraine.