What Happened Today: February 1, 2023

Russiagate killed journalism; Evictions eventually inevitable; Arab-American headlines

Feb 01, 2023

The Big Story

A year-and-a-half-long Columbia Journalism Review investigation published on Monday lays out in exhaustive detail the pattern of legacy media outlets distorting and ignoring facts about the alleged connections between Donald Trump and Russia before and after the 2016 presidential election. Written by Jeff Gerth, a Pulitzer-winning journalist who had previously spent 29 years at The New York Times, the postmortem on the media’s approach to the Trump administration identifies several key episodes in which the Times, The Washington Post, Slate, CNN, and other outlets published reports on the Steele dossier, Russian interference in the 2016 election, and phantom connections between Trump associates and the Kremlin that relied on false foundations. In multiple instances the outlets continued to endorse those erroneous reports even as mounting conflicting evidence came to light.

Gerth points out that, prior to Donald Trump’s ascent to the White House in 2016, “most Americans trusted the traditional media, and the trend was positive,” a trust that has almost entirely dissolved since, with today’s U.S. media suffering “the lowest credibility—26 percent—among forty-six nations.” A significant driver of that decline, Gerth observes, can be attributed to the journalistic standard that was often neglected during Russiagate: “the need to report facts that run counter to the prevailing narrative.” Gerth also found troubling “the volume of anonymous sources and the misleading way they’re often described” by the corporate media, including the use of the attribution of “people (or person) familiar with” used by the Times “over a thousand times in stories involving Trump and Russia between October 2016 and the end of his presidency.”

Noting that no major news organization made available a newsroom leader to talk about its coverage, Gerth found the publications’ unwillingness to confront their journalistic failures a troubling sign for 2024 election coverage. Speaking of the Russiagate coverage that “wasn’t handled well” and had “cheated” readers of the truth, Bob Woodward told Gerth that newsrooms would do well to “walk down the painful road of introspection.”

In the Back Pages: How the FBI Hacked Twitter

The Rest

→ The United States’ biggest issue might just be its leaders, according to the latest Gallup poll, which found that 21% of respondents identified the government as the country’s most significant problem. Trailing concerns over inflation, the southern border, and immigration, both Republicans and Democrats alike put government at the top spot. Some of that dissatisfaction might have to do with the news that dominated headlines while the poll was conducted earlier this month: The a 20-day stretch included the contentious election of Kevin McCarthy to the speakership of the House and revelations that classified documents had been found in the private office and the personal residence of President Joe Biden.

→ In a remarkable about-face, the Rand Corporation—a longtime advocate for U.S. escalation against Russia and influential player in D.C. policy—has published a new report advocating that the United States is not serving its interests by continuing to lead the Western proxy war in Ukraine against Russia. “U.S. interests would be best served by avoiding a protracted conflict,” Rand writes. “The costs and risks of a long war in Ukraine are significant and outweigh the possible benefits of such a trajectory for the United States.” Though there are several reasons Rand sees an extended conflict undermining American short- and long-term interests, the paramount concern remains the nation’s capacity “to focus on competition with China,” which will only become more complicated, the report suggests, as the protracted war strengthens the relationship between Moscow and Beijing.

→ Looking to boost its quarterly profits, the private equity firm Blackstone, one of the nation’s largest landlords, has been busy firing off hundreds of eviction lawsuits against tenants all across the country. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Blackstone spent billions of dollars to scoop up thousands of residential apartment buildings, suburban homes, and other properties. For a time, while eviction moratoriums and other pandemic-related relief measures were in effect, Blackstone offered terms to tenants struggling to pay rent that were more favorable than those required by federal and state laws. But pressure from wealthy individual investors in the fund that Blackstone uses to acquire most of its residential properties pressured the firm to change tack, and now those behind on rent in Blackstone-owned properties are finding their mailboxes filling up with eviction notices. “Given Blackstone’s massive role in the housing market, the firm’s recent move to evict tenants threatens housing stability for families in the U.S. and around the world,” Jim Baker, executive director of the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, told the Financial Times.

→ Lingering concerns over a recession and rising interest rates are slowing consumer demand—so much so that dwindling purchases have led to the sharpest quarterly decline in the production of cardboard boxes since the 2009 Great Recession. A key barometer for how the economy at large is faring, cardboard box output offers insights into everything from grocery sales to online clothing orders and electronics, all of which appear to be experiencing a significant downswing. “Nearly 20% of the U.S. capacity to produce boxes was stagnant last quarter,” observes the logistics industry news outlet FreightWaves, a drop that comes on the heels of unprecedented growth for the box industry thanks in no small part to government stimulus checks. “A hangover after a years-long cardboard carnival would be in order—and this one looks nasty.”

→ Map of the Day:

Zineb Riboua @zriboua

Morocco is one of the major investors in Africa. Keeps on expanding and focuses on the most critical sectors: Telecommunications, Banking, Real Estate, and fertilizers (of immense importance for agriculture).

Demonstrating the spreading influence of Morocco across Africa, this map, posted by Scroll contributor and journalist Zineb Riboua, shows how the North African outpost has made major inroads into the financial, agricultural, and telecom sectors.

→ And then there were two: Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, is set to announce her bid for the Republican nomination for the 2024 White House race. Teasing her candidacy for months, Haley will host a Feb. 15 event in Charleston, South Carolina, to formally join the only other declared candidate, Donald Trump, who apparently told Haley she should “go by your heart if you want to run.”

→ Today’s headlines in translation come from the Beirut Times, the only bilingual English-Arabic newspaper published daily in the United States. It was founded in 1985 in Pasadena, California, to serve the city’s Arab American community.

Sanctions on Syria disrupt an Egyptian plan to subsidize electricity in Lebanon // Egypt manufactures lethal weapons // Tunisian President Qais Said says Tunisia is fighting a national liberation battle to preserve the state and its institutions // Trump is suing a famous American journalist over audio recordings and is demanding $50 million in compensation // The Iraqi prime minister confirms the occurrence of “fraudulent transfers” of dollars abroad // Biden: Climate change is more dangerous to humanity than nuclear weapons // Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi: The recent riots in Iran disrupted the business and trade of citizens and sent unsatisfactory signals to the markets

→ Google’s dominance in the internet search space could soon receive a healthy dose of new competition from Microsoft’s Bing, which plans to begin leveraging the artificial intelligence technology behind ChatGPT. Microsoft announced plans in 2020 to construct “one of the top five publicly disclosed supercomputers in the world” with a capacity to feed data into “extremely large artificial intelligence models.” That move may now be about to pay dividends as artificial intelligence technology allows ChatGPT to deliver responses to questions with increasing speed, in a way that could challenge Google’s quasi monopoly on search.

→ Quote of the Day:

South Dakota destroyed a perfectly good mountain by carving faces on it. North Dakota has oil.

That’s North Dakota Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer’s response to an inquiry from media outlet Semafor after the publication mistakenly referred to Cramer as the representative of South Dakota in the Senate. Cramer’s suggestion for how to tell the two states apart was perhaps bested by Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-SD). “South Dakotans run about 10 IQ points higher than North Dakotans,” Johnson said. Despite that, “Kevin Cramer is one of the smarter North Dakotans.”

TODAY IN TABLET:

Ethiopian Jews and Their Sacred Scripture by Yaacov Gonchel

The African Jewish holy books that the rabbis never read

Amos Yadlin Remembers His Friend Ilan Ramon by Menachem Butler

One of Israel’s most decorated pilots reminisces about the Israeli astronaut who died 20 years ago today

SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

This originally appeared in Tablet Magazine on January 5th, 2023

How the FBI Hacked Twitter

The answer begins with Russiagate

By Lee Smith

After journalist Matt Taibbi published the first batch of internal Twitter documents known as the Twitter files, he tweeted that the company’s deputy general counsel, James Baker, was vetting them.

“The news that Baker was reviewing the ‘Twitter files’ surprised everyone involved,” Taibbi wrote. That apparently included even Twitter’s new boss, Elon Musk, who added that Baker may have deleted some of the files he was supposed to be reviewing.

Baker had been the top lawyer at the FBI when it interfered in the 2016 presidential election. News that he might have been burying evidence of the spy service’s use of a social media company to interfere with the 2020 election, is rightly setting off alarm bells.

In fact, the FBI’s penetration of Twitter constituted just one part of a much larger intelligence operation—one in which the bureau offshored the machinery it used to interfere in the 2016 election and embedded it within the private sector. The resulting behemoth, still being built today, is a public-private consortium made up of U.S. intelligence agencies, Big Tech companies, civil society institutions, and major media organizations that has become the world’s most powerful spy service—one that was powerful enough to disappear the former president of the United States from public life, and that is now powerful enough to do the same or worse to anyone else it chooses.

Records from the Twitter files show that the FBI paid Twitter nearly $3.5 million, apparently for actions in connection with the 2020 election and nominally a payout for the platform’s work censoring “dangerous” content that had been flagged as mis- or disinformation. That “dangerous” content notably included material that threatened Joe Biden and implicated U.S. officials who have been curating the Biden family’s foreign corruption for decades.

The Twitter files have to date focused on FBI and, to a lesser extent, CIA election interference. However a lesser-known U.S. government agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) also played a significant role in shaping the 2020 vote. “CISA is a sub-agency at DHS that was set up to protect real physical infrastructure, like servers, malware and hacking threats,” said former State Department official Mike Benz, now the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online. “But they expanded ‘infrastructure’ to mean us, the U.S. electorate. So ‘disinformation’ threatened infrastructure and that’s how cybersecurity became cyber-censorship. CISA’s mandate went from stopping threats of Russian malware to stopping tweets from accounts that questioned the integrity of mail-in voting.”

We have some insight into CISA’s de facto censorship of Twitter because their private-sector partners boasted about such activities in promotional material. One such public-private partnership was the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a censorship consortium consisting of the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and Graphika, a D.C.-based private company founded by former national security officials. According to a document from the Twitter files release, Graphika is employed by the Senate Intelligence Committee for “narrative analysis and investigations.” For CISA, Graphika and its EIP partners served as an intermediary to censor social media during the 2020 election cycle.

CISA targeted posts questioning the election procedures introduced into the election process on account of COVID-19, like mass mail-in ballots, early voting drop boxes, and lack of voter ID requirements. But instead of going to the platforms directly, CISA filed tickets with EIP, which relayed them to Twitter, Facebook, and other tech companies. In “after-action” reports, the Election Integrity Partnership bragged about censoring Fox News, the New York Post, Breitbart, and other right-leaning publications for social media posts and online links concerning the integrity of the 2020 election.

The censorship industry is based on a “whole of society model,” said Benz. “It unifies the government and the private sector, as well as civil society in the form of academia and NGOs and news organizations, including fact-checking organizations. All these projects with catchphrases like building resilience, media literacy, cognitive security, etc., are all part of a broad partnership to help censor opponents of the Biden administration.”

Notably, Baker was enlisted in one of the civil-society organizations at the same time he joined Twitter as deputy general counsel. According to Benz, the National Task Force on Election Crises is something like a sister organization to the Transition Integrity Project, the group founded by former Democratic Party officials and Never Trump publicists who war-gamed post-2020-election scenarios. “The outfit Baker was part of,” said Benz, “effectively handled the public messaging for an organization that threatened street violence and counseled violating the constitution to thwart a Trump victory.”

Baker’s presence at Twitter, then, and his review of the Twitter files, was deeply disconcerting. “This is who is inside Twitter,” the journalist and filmmaker Mike Cernovich tweeted at Elon Musk this spring. “He facilitated fraud.”

Musk replied: “Sounds pretty bad.”

In fact, Musk has done more in two months to bring to light crimes committed by U.S. officials than William Barr and John Durham did during their three-year investigation of the FBI’s election interference activities during the 2016 election. Musk now owns what became a crucial component of the national security apparatus that, seen in this light, is worth many times more than the $44 billion he paid for it.

The FBI prepared America’s new public-private censorship regime for the 2020 election by falsely telling Twitter, as well as other social media platforms, press outlets, lawmakers, and staff members of the White House, that Russians were readying a hack and leak operation to dirty the Democratic candidate. Accordingly, when reports of a laptop owned by Hunter Biden and giving evidence of his family’s financial ties with foreign officials were published in October 2020, Twitter blocked them.

In the week before the election, the FBI field office in charge of investigating Hunter Biden sent multiple censorship requests to Twitter. The FBI has “some folks in the Baltimore field office and at [FBI headquarters] that are just doing keyword searches for violations,” a company lawyer wrote in a Nov. 3, 2020, email.

The documents also show that Twitter banished Trump after misrepresenting his posts as incitement to violence. With U.S. intelligence services reportedly using informants to provoke violence during the January 6th protest at the Capitol, the trap closed on Trump. Twitter and Facebook then moved to silence the outgoing president by denying him access to the global communications infrastructure.

The FBI unit designated to coordinate with social media companies during the 2020 election cycle was the Foreign Influence Task Force. It was set up in the fall of 2017 “to identify and counteract malign foreign influence operations” through, “strategic engagement with U.S. technology companies.” During the election cycle, according to the Twitter files, the unit “swelled to 80 agents and corresponded with Twitter to identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering of all kinds.”

The FBI’s chief liaison with Twitter was Elvis Chan, an agent from its Cyber Branch. Based in the San Francisco field office, Chan was also in communication with Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Reddit and LinkedIn. Chan demanded user information that Twitter said it could not release outside of a “legal process.” In exchange, Chan promised to secure temporary security clearances for 30 Twitter employees a month before the election, presumably to give staff the same briefings on alleged Russian information operations provided to U.S. officials in classified settings.

But Twitter executives claimed they found little evidence of Russian activity on the site. So Chan badgered former head of site security Yoel Roth to produce evidence the FBI was serving its advertised mission of combating foreign influence operations when in fact it was focused on violating the First Amendment rights of Americans.

Chan briefed Twitter extensively on an alleged Russian hacking unit, APT28, or Fancy Bear, which was the same outfit that was claimed by Hillary Clinton campaign contractors to have hacked and leaked Democratic National Committee emails in 2016. According to Roth, the FBI had “primed” him to attribute reports about Hunter Biden’s laptop to an APT28 hack-and-leak operation. Needless to say, the FBI’s reports—and subsequent “disinformation” claims—were themselves blatant disinformation, invented by the FBI, which had been in possession of the laptop for nearly a year.

Read the rest in Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-the-fbi-hacked-twitter-lee-smith

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