Is this private counter-Russia advocacy group spying on you?

According to their website, The Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) is a bipartisan transatlantic national security advocacy group. Their self-styled mission is countering what it claims is an "unprecedented attack" on United States democracy by Russia.

In general, the ASD appears to be a respectable organization with some decent credentials. I of course question their conclusion's veracity, considering we've seen no substantive evidence (only Crowdstrike has even gotten to look at this evidence, per Wikipedia and other media sources). I won't go into the myriad of reasons why this is a speculative conclusion though or how this Russia threat is hyped-up for politics/increase security budget, and instead will be focusing on a specific method ASD goes about carrying out their mission.

They appear to be engaging in open-source intelligence collection via Twitter (with plans to expand into the other social media giants) likely through some creative API uses. Of course they don't hide this fact, you can actually visit their live feed and see some of the accounts for yourself. This is yet another reason to avoid social media, because after looking at the list of their so-called "Russian bots, or those re-posting the Russian government's 'general opinion' and others" it appears to include a lot of genuine simply right-wing themed accounts.

The means by which they categorize these accounts are disturbing, and it is curious what they are using this information for. Given the statistics they've presented, we at least know they conduct some type of analysis in order to determine the %'s they have.

Top Themes
Updated on January 17, 5:16 PM
Between January 2 and January 13, we examined 97 unique articles that were among the top URLs shared by Kremlin-oriented accounts on Twitter. As with past weeks, attacks on liberals/Democrats were prominent (featured in 27% of all URLs). The most common targets were the Clintons (11 articles), Oprah Winfrey (4 articles), and Barack Obama (4 articles). However, Republicans John McCain (2 articles) and Marco Rubio (1 article) were also targets. Other prominent themes were discrediting Fusion GPS and the Steele dossier (14% of examined URLs) and pushing "deep state" narratives/conspiracies (13%) -- (note: there was a significant amount of overlap between those two themes). Anti-immigration was another key theme (8% of all URLs), with promoted articles bashing both DACA and Europe’s migration policies. The focus on immigration and migrant crimes made the EU (7% of all URLs) the most prominent geopolitical topic (6 of the 7 articles focused on migration issues; the other one discussed crypto-currency in Estonia). Iran (6%) and Ukraine (5%) were the two other main areas of focus. Articles on Iran had two main themes: blaming the Obama administration for the Iran nuclear deal and suggesting the U.S. was engaging in "regime change."

Surprisingly there is probably nothing illegal about their actions. These aren't private communications after-all, and no one has an expectation of privacy when posting to social media. Still, I can't help but feel concern at the potential for abuse by this private company taking extreme action based in specious allegations and evidence-less conjecture. Shouldn't they wait to see what the various investigations uncover before acting on Crowdstrike's word-alone and engaging in potentially hostile actions against U.S. Citizens?

dashboard.securingdemocracy.org...

My question is, who else is on there? What are they using the information for? Couldn't find anything about this on ATS, so I figured I would see if someone had seen this before.

I will applaud their effort to combat propaganda/misinformation, however I feel this may not be the best solution. The part I take issue with is the opaque and possibly discriminatory means by which these "bots" are identified vs. a real person stating their opinion. I don't need to point out that real people expressing their opinions (even if it coincides with a Russian POV) is never propaganda. They should be working to educate and mitigate this very real and very common nuisance of misinformation, not tread along the lines of labeling legitimate opposition a "troll/propagandist/what else"

Well , let me send them a message in binary
0100
0

Now in code
Servant , king , servant , servant . All servants bow.

In US speak - the "flyin fickle finger of fate award"(Rowan and Martin's Laugh In)

Or better yet, the full arm Greek salute....NY style.

a reply to: JBurns

I can honestly say I do not quite understand how this russian bot thing works, but this is concerning, going forward:

As with past weeks, attacks on liberals/Democrats were prominent (featured in 27% of all URLs). The most common targets were the Clintons (11 articles), Oprah Winfrey (4 articles), and Barack Obama (4 articles).

So, are they saying that any tweet or communication that is critical of liberals/Democrats is "pro-Russian-anti-American"?

Looks like this could turn into another "McCarthyism" trend.

a reply to: TonyS

My issues exactly!!

They also classified discussion of "deep state 'conspiracy theories' " as one of their selectors. Absolutely mind-boggling. Why anyone would use these compromised platforms is beyond my comprehension.

Although the "deep state" is now a provable, immutable fact of life. We have evidence, ie: "secret society" So fake-organizations like this should go back to the drawing boards.

a reply to: Gothmog



Flyin fickle finger of fate award

a reply to: JBurns

Rather than go away, my guess is that groups like this will proliferate in the rush to be the agent of a socal credit system. At a minimum, they will be advocating for it. And Facebook is the logical platform for implementation. And in so doing, FBook will be seen to be redeeming itself from the faux scandal of the Russia hack of the elections.

To understand the social credit system, see:
www.wired.com...

Its quite chilling and doubtless coming soon to the US and Europe. Its ingenious. It provides the mechanism to legally distance the politically incorrect from jobs, credit, travel and education. This will be the ultimate tool for reparations!