Details of the world information and cyber warfare

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The article discusses in detail the main milestones of the world information war already ongoing in our days, as well as aspects of cyber attacks by world powers on each other. How did the Russian "electronic intelligence" "surprise" the American special services? What role does the Russian RT channel play in the information war?

The NSA is in full swing preparing for future digital wars for complete control of the world via the Internet, according to documents released by Edward Snowden. The Politerain project, run by the National Security Agency, is the creation of a team of so-called "digital snipers" whose purpose will be to disable the computer systems that control the operation of electricity and water supplies, factories, airports of a potential adversary, as well as intercept his cash flows, writes Der Spiegel.

According to the newspaper, as a result, the Internet can become the arena of a real war, causing serious damage to the belligerent parties in reality. Moreover, such a war is not regulated by any conventions and treaties, and therefore is truly uncompromising. "This turns the Internet into a zone of lawlessness, in which the superpowers and their secret services operate on their own whim," points out Der Spiegel.

Moreover, it becomes very problematic to bring intelligence officers accountable for their actions. The fact that the NSA director at the same time heads the US cyber command is not at all an accident, German journalists state.

In military terms, the total surveillance of the NSA was only phase "0", preparation for the digital phase of the war, when information was accumulated about the vulnerabilities of the systems of a potential adversary. After that, the turn of the "cyberspace war" will come, which can affect anyone and does not recognize the difference between military and civilians.

Also in the materials of ex-NSA employee Edward Snowden, it is reported that America and Great Britain "are actively using social networks Twitter, YouTube and Facebook to provoke protests in various countries, injecting disinformation and pro-Western opposition propaganda." Including against Russia.

Recall that ex-CIA and NSA officer Edward Snowden, who announced the system of total surveillance by the American intelligence services, received a three-year residence permit in Russia. Earlier, the British The Guardian has already called the US policy in cyberspace "Internet imperialism."

At the end of October, a new "spy scandal" arose in the United States, which was quiet but very alarming for the American elite.

On October 28, 2014, FireEye Corporation, which has been researching and developing cyberattacks for many years under contracts with the US intelligence community, released its latest report. Report "APT28: A Window on Russian Cyber Espionage?" claims that one of the main threats to US cybersecurity is a group of hackers that began work in 2007. This group FireEye calls "Advanced Persistent Threat 28" and considers it especially dangerous because it focuses on theft of the most important secret information of a geopolitical and military-strategic nature.

The FireEye report states that APT28 is composed of highly skilled professionals and is constantly improving the software for its hacking operations, including on closed and encrypted computer networks. FireEye calls this software "a sophisticated cyber weapon capable of evading detection and hitting computers disconnected from the Internet."

FireEye claims that the APT28 group is most likely Russian, since the commands in its hacker programs are often formulated in Russian. In addition, FireEye emphasizes that "the activity of the Russian special services in cyberspace has increased significantly after the former CIA officer Edward Snowden received political asylum in Russia."

Also on October 28, the day the FireEye report was released, US presidential administration spokesman Josh Ernest announced the infiltration of unknown hackers into the secure presidential network: “We have identified suspicious activity on the White House computer network. Now work is underway to assess it and reduce the degree of risk … The US is doing everything possible to find out where this activity came from."

Two days later, The New York Times wrote that US Cyber Command specialists were investigating the penetration into the White House network and that their main version was Russian cyber espionage. However, the newspaper emphasizes that the hackers "covered their tracks well, and the officials so far … cannot say anything with certainty."

But the problems for the United States arise not only in the closed sphere of "war in cyberspace".

War on the field of "fabrication of public consent"

As we discussed in the previous parts of this article, the many years of US efforts to establish control over the global media space have yielded very significant results. Namely - the almost global possibilities of what almost a century ago Walter Lippmann called "the fabrication of public consent." Agreeing with the position and assessments of the American elite on the main vital issues of the world "agenda".

However, at the end of the last decade, it was again Russia that began to question the totality of this American tool of "suppression through involvement".

In June 2005, Russia announced that it intends to launch the international TV channel Russia Today, which will “reflect the Russian position on the main issues of international politics and inform the international audience about the events and phenomena of Russian life”. The editor-in-chief of the new TV channel Margarita Simonyan then said: “Foreign media do not always adequately reflect the events taking place in Russia. And this will be a view of the world from Russia. We do not want to change the professional format, debugged by such TV channels as BBC, CNN, Euronews. We want to reflect Russia's opinion on the world, and so that Russia itself is better visible."

On December 10, 2005, the Russia Today (RT) channel began broadcasting. And he began to quickly expand it in terms of audience geography, volume, and subject matter. In early 2010, the RT office and studio started operating in New York. In March – July 2012, RT aired the programs of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange The World Tomorrow. In 2013, RT became the world's first news TV channel to receive over 1 billion views on YouTube.

RT broadcasts are now constantly available to 700 million viewers around the world. These are three round-the-clock news channels broadcasting in over 100 countries in English, Arabic and Spanish, RT America, a Washington-based TV channel, RTD documentary, and video agency RUPTLY, which offers its own exclusive content to TV channels around the world.

On October 10, 2014, Argentine President Cristina Kirchner and Russian President V. Putin launched RT broadcasting in Spanish on the Argentine state television network.

Already during the war in Transcaucasia in 2008, the pro-American global media community discovered that RT exerts a significant influence on world public opinion and noticeably prevents its total “fabrication” in the way the United States needs.

This “destructive” influence of RT on the American “fabrication of consent” became even more noticeable in 2013, against the backdrop of a “coalition war” organized by the US against Syria. It was then that a wide circle of Western politicians, businessmen, experts and ordinary people for the first time (and referring to the arguments of Russia, which were persistently voiced by the RT channel), gave a loud enough voice against this war. And it was then that the Americans gave this circle of protesters against US policy a malicious label "Understanding Russia and Putin."

After last year's revelations by Snowden, the global prestige of the pro-American media naturally declined, and the West (and not only in the West) began to heed Russia's opinion even more. And even the unprecedented military propaganda campaign of the pro-American media, unleashed during the Ukrainian Orange Revolution, could not completely drown out either RT information or the voices of the growing community of "those who understand Putin" in the world. Moreover, as more and more not only influential, but politically and morally authoritative persons join this community, the attempts of the overthrowers to explain their pro-Russian position by the fact that they were allegedly bribed by the Russians are becoming less and less convincing.

The fact that the Americans and their allies first met in their all-out information war with real and serious resistance shows their inadequate - often literally hysterical - reactions.

On March 18, 2014, Google blocked RT's YouTube account for alleged "numerous and serious violations of the rules (deception, spreading spam, inappropriate content in the video)." However, the account was soon restored, and Google announced that it was a technical error.

On August 29, 2014, in central London, an unknown person brutally beat RT TV presenter, writer and member of the British Parliament George Galloway on the street. And at the beginning of October 2014, in the same London, RT street advertising was banned (on the basis of charges of "political character").

In the summer and autumn of 2014, expert discussions on global politics began in the high-profile American media, the center of which was actually the question of “those who understand Putin”. It should be noted that the largest Western experts and analysts joined these discussions - from Zbigniew Brzezinski to Henry Kissinger, from former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser to former US Ambassador to Moscow Michael McFall.

A striking example is the controversy between the "understanding Putin" professor at the University of Chicago, John Mearsheimer, and his opponents: former Assistant to Barack Obama for National Security and then US Ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul and former US Ambassador-at-Large to the Clinton Administration Stephen Sestanovich. In this controversy, part of which was published in the October issue of the main American global politics magazine Foreign Affairs, Mearsheimer argues in detail that the expansionist post-Soviet policy of the West and, above all, NATO's persistent eastward movement, are to blame for the crisis in Ukraine. McFaul and Sestanovich answer that the cause of the crisis is "in the imperialist policy of Russia under Putin," and that if NATO had not moved eastward, then "it would be even worse."

The very fact of such polemics in Foreign Affairs shows that in the United States, Russia's influence on expanding the circle of “those who understand Putin” is perceived with great concern. However, the aforementioned controversy is one of the few examples of at least somehow reasoned dialogue. In other Western publications and in most TV programs, when assessing Russian politics and personally V. Putin, they have long been, as they say, not shy about using expressions. At the same time, they are not shy about assessing the information policy of Russia Today.

In this sense, the discussion of the situation in the international information environment, which took place on October 17, 2014 in Washington, at the Cannan Institute, with the participation of US State Department officials and American experts, is indicative. Voice of America provided some of the speeches at this forum. Freedom House President David Kramer: “The propaganda that comes from the Kremlin and from the Kremlin-controlled news organizations is extremely worrisome. They don't just distort information, they try to create their own reality. They misinterpret everything … and present the situation as it really is not. A striking example of this is Ukraine … All their activities are built on lies and have a very anti-Western and anti-American tone … which, in my opinion, is very dangerous. Tania Chomyak-Salvi, Deputy Coordinator of the Bureau of International Information Programs of the US State Department: “We are especially concerned … the attempts of the Russian leadership to limit fundamental freedoms not only for Russian citizens, but also for citizens of neighboring countries who receive information from the Russian media … While we were distracted to other global challenges … President Putin has built a huge disinformation machine that has a global reach. We are shocked by her impudence and the impact she has …”.

Note that these accusations are being made not only against Russia Today. For example, in the United States, there have been more than once calls to block the "Russian" Internet resources that "are conducting ever wider and more persistent Kremlin propaganda."

In addition, the conductors of American media policy pay special attention to the so-called "news aggregators" (thematic media resources) specializing in Russia. For example, British analyst Ben Judah (a longtime hater of Russia and Putin who previously worked in Russia) launched an attack on Johnson's Russia List (JRL), the oldest and most popular among American and European experts, American news aggregator from Russia, accusing him of editorial office in "pro-Kremlin sympathies". Ben Judah writes that "with the development of Ukrainian events … I stopped reading the JRL because every day I received a selection of the top 20 Russian propaganda materials, diluted with Reuters notes."

No less hysteria in the West, as well as among the domestic "liberal public", was caused by the discussion in Russia of amendments to the legislation limiting the participation of foreign companies and citizens in the authorized capital of Russian media. However, despite the wave of accusations against Russia of “restricting freedom of speech” and “gagging those who disagree,” on October 15, President V. Putin signed a law adopted by the State Duma and the Federation Council, which, since 2016, has limited the share of foreign capital in Russian media to 20%. …

Let us emphasize that such restrictions are generally accepted world practice. In France and Japan, the permissible share of foreigners in the capital of the media is 20%, in Australia - 30%, in Canada - 46%; in the UK, foreigners cannot own a share in the media that exceeds the share of the national co-owner. In the United States, the permissible share of foreigners in the capital of television and radio stations is no more than 25%.

On November 10, 2014, Dmitry Kiselev, General Director of the International News Agency (MIA) Rossiya Segodnya, announced the "full-size" launch of the Sputnik multimedia project aimed at foreign audiences. Sputnik is already producing news feeds in English, Spanish and Arabic, and will start broadcasting in Chinese from December. Sputnik is formed in the form of 30 "multimedia hubs", each of which includes a news agency, radio station, website editorial office and a press center. The total volume of radio broadcasting of the project in 130 cities of 34 countries of the world, according to D. Kiselev, will be 800 hours a day.

The next day, November 11, 2014, there was an implicit "response" from London. British media regulator Ofcom issued another warning to the Russia Today TV channel for "biased coverage of events in Ukraine" and threatened to revoke the license and close broadcasting.

And on November 13, The Washington Post responded with an editorial, "Mr Putin Steps Up His Anti-Western Propaganda." The article reports that “in recent months, the Russian authorities have tightened their control over a range of channels of expression and news outlets. Internet servers providing Russian traffic, including those used by Google, must now be relocated to Russia. Thousands of Putin-sponsored propagandists are set to deploy in 25 major cities around the world to counter what the Kremlin sees as the pro-American bias that dominates Western media outlets. This Sputnik project, which includes websites and radio broadcasts in 30 languages, will be run by Dmitry Kiselev, an ardent nationalist and homophobe … Kremlin laws increasingly infringing on human rights, which also prohibit foreigners from acquiring more than 20% of shares in Russian media companies, already have the expected chilling effect. This week, CNN has suspended its broadcasting in Russia (although its new office continues to operate)."

So what is Russia to blame?

Russia - at least in the United States this is how it is believed - through Assange and especially Snowden, uncovered the most important Anglo-Saxon (of course, mainly American) instrument of "suppression through involvement" - a total system of electronic espionage for both opponents and allies

The fact of this American cyber espionage not only deeply offended the allied elites and called into question the further involvement of these elites in serving American interests. This fact also led to large-scale concrete actions devaluing the specified American "cyber blackmail" toolkit.

China, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and a number of other countries are already laying their own "independent" from the US fiber-optic communication cables by land and across the seas and oceans and are creating their own server systems "independent" from American and US-friendly Internet hubs. At the same time, all over the world there is a fairly massive refusal of services controlled by American corporations of postal services (including the widespread Microsoft Outlook), social networks and hosting (Facebook, YouTube, Skype, etc.) with the parallel creation of their own independent services and data storage and processing centers. The use of US-controlled cloud storage services has slowed sharply.

Russia - as, again, the US is convinced - has presented its own capabilities for successful cyber espionage, comparable (if not in scale, but in intellectual and technical capabilities) with the American ones. And, therefore, it additionally devalued the corresponding American cybertools.

Russia - and this is evident from the increasingly panicky reactions in the United States and Great Britain - has managed to significantly undermine the omnipotence of the Anglo-Saxon information and propaganda machine in the global media and the Internet. And it even created an expanding (and, what is especially important, expanding in intellectual circles, most significantly influencing the assessments of the situation by the broad masses) international community recognizing the truth and fairness of Russian assessments of world events (“who understand Russia and Putin”).

Thus, Russia called into question the second key American instrument of "suppression through involvement": the ability of the United States to ensure global "fabrication of the consent of the masses" with the world agenda announced by the Americans and assessments of world events and processes.

Russia - both with its cyber intelligence methods, its media resources, and its international policy - has seriously weakened the unity of positions and actions of its American allies, which is being persistently built by the United States

Russia (primarily by Snowden's revelations, but not only by them) to a very significant extent undermined the strategic project of asserting American global economic dominance - the creation of US-controlled free trade zones in the form of the Transatlantic (TTIP) and Trans-Pacific (TPP) partnerships

In connection with TTIP and TPP, it is worth noting several poorly reflected in the media, but very indicative of recent events.

In August 2014, representatives of the European Commission admitted that negotiations on the TTIP "are going on with difficulty and are far from over."

On September 12, European Commissioner for EU Enlargement and Neighborhood Policy Stefan Füle said that "the time has come for … to start the negotiation process on free trade between the European Union and the Eurasian Union …". That is, Fule (albeit not long before the end of his mandate) actually indicated the possibility of Europe's “pivot” to a strategic economic alliance with Russia, allegedly “buried” by the current Ukrainian crisis.

November 10 - on the day of the start of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Beijing - the future members of the TRC (which, I remind you, is not supposed to include China and Russia), privately collected by Barack Obama at the US Embassy, again could not reach a compromise on the agreement about TPP.

On November 11, MEPs rejected a bill proposed by the European Commission, according to which EU member states were deprived of the right to prohibit the cultivation of genetically modified crops on their territory. But the spread of genetically modified products (the main patents for them belong to the largest American corporations Monsanto and others) is one of the most important points of the American TTIP and TPP projects.

Also on November 11, APEC members adopted a strategic alternative to the TRP proposed by President Xi Jinping - a "road map" for the creation of a single (that is, including 21 countries in the region, including China and Russia) Asia-Pacific Free Trade Area (APFTA).

On November 15, the first day of the summit of the leaders of the world's twenty leading economies (G20) in Brisbane, Australia, its participants unanimously - and very harshly - called on the United States to urgently ratify the IMF reform, which will increase the participation of developing countries in the Fund's decision-making.

On the same day, a meeting of the leaders of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) was held in Brisbane, at which the leadership and the interim Board of Directors of the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB), established at the BRICS summit in Brazilian Fortaleza, were appointed for four months ago, in July 2014.

The NDB, which should start working as early as 2015, will have a capital of $ 100 billion, and will create a pool of notional foreign exchange reserves - also in the amount of $ 100 billion. This will provide opportunities to support the economies of the BRICS countries in crisis conditions, as well as expand trade between them in national currencies, and not in dollars. And some analysts have already called the NDB (in which BRICS invites others to participate) "an alternative IMF."

I will mention a few more recent events that are directly related to our topic.

On November 13, immediately after the APEC summit, The New York Times reported that the Chinese leadership, including President Xi Jinping, actively supports the "anti-American" pathos of Chinese bloggers. In the United States, they immediately started talking about the fact that the combination of the propaganda resources of China and Russia could have a dangerous influence on world public opinion. And also that the unification of Russian and Chinese cyber espionage potentials could become no less dangerous for the United States.

On November 19, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said at the "government hour" in the State Duma that Russia had suspended the implementation of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), since NATO had not yet ratified the treaty and it was "dead."

On November 20, Deputy Head of the International Relations Department of the CPC Central Committee Zhou Li (for the first time!) Unequivocally supported Russia's policy in Ukraine, and also stated that “Russian-Chinese relations are more important than the strategic partnership established between the PRC and other countries … now these the relationship is the best ever."

Also on November 20, the head of the US National Security Agency, Admiral Michael Rogers, told the Congress commission that "malicious software from the PRC and other countries is ubiquitous on American computer networks that support the life of citizens" and that China and "one or two other countries" can in any the moment to turn off the power supply system and other utilities in the United States.

And on November 21, Britain's The Financial Times reported that NATO had just completed a major computerized military exercise using simulated hacker attacks on the military, administrative and industrial networks of the bloc's countries.

What does all this mean for Russia?

This means that Russia - lately with the support of China and the growing ranks of "understanding Putin" in the world - has significantly torpedoed the main resources of American global domination today by means of "soft power", including the concept of "suppression through involvement." And therefore, it is Russia that the United States will strive to suppress in the first place and by all means.

In the Russian media, in connection with the victory of Obama's Republican rivals in the midterm elections to Congress, there have been suggestions that the Republicans will put a spoke in the wheels of Obama's policy and, among other things, will help him “play” the situation in Ukraine. And it is also often said that since Russia is actively supported by China, then nothing, we will cope with the crisis.

It seems that such assessments are deeply mistaken.

For America, the “at stake” is not the presidency in the United States (a tactical problem). In the United States, for all the inter-party contradictions, there is a strategic elite consensus on the question that no one in the world should question the absoluteness of American hegemony. And China is still behaving rather cautiously in relation to the United States. It seems that a stake on his unconditional alliance with Russia would be rash. In our joint history, everything happened …

This means that the United States will do everything possible and impossible against Russia to confirm its status as "master of the global agenda." And since they do not succeed with "soft power", they will most likely impose a multifactorial systemic war on us.

Therefore, we should expect decisions on the arming of Kiev, and military provocations in the Donbass and on the Russian borders, and a new wave of internal Russian terrorism, and large-scale street Maidan actions of the liberal and Nazi fifth column, and new economic sanctions, and powerful internal elite sabotage " ", And much more.

Today Russia is catastrophically unprepared for all this.

It means that we urgently need to prepare.

Yuri Byaly