Bellingcat

pages: 277 words: 70,506

We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News by Eliot Higgins

4chan, active measures, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, anti-globalists, barriers to entry, belling the cat, Bellingcat, bitcoin, blockchain, citizen journalism, Columbine, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, fake news, false flag, gamification, George Floyd, Google Earth, hive mind, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, post-truth, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Tactical Technology Collective, the scientific method, WikiLeaks

v=SkCcCmYlMZc 39 www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2015/01/27/is-this-the-launch-site-of-the-missile-that-shot-down-flight-mh17/ 40 www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2015/05/31/mh17-forensic-analysis-of-satellite-images-released-by-the-russian-ministry-of-defence/ 41 www.gofundme.com/bellingcatsat 42 www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2015/06/12/july-17-imagery-mod-comparison/ 43 www.bellingcat.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/53rd-report-public.pdf 44 www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2014/12/17/mexicos-guerra-al-narco-a-disaster-rooted-in-misinterpretations/www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2015/03/20/assessing-mexicos-guerra-al-narco/www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2016/02/25/geolocating-mexican-sicarios-in-chihuahua/ www.bellingcat.com/news/2015/08/07/tracking-swiss-watches-in-sinaloa-top-6-luxury-brands-among-mexican-drug-lords/ 45 www.bellingcat.com/resources/2015/10/05/gangs-of-detroit-osint-and-indictment-documents/ 46 www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2016/02/05/yemens-bombed-water-infrastructure/ 47 www.bellingcat.com/resources/articles/2015/10/05/crowdsourced-geolocation-and-analysis-of-russian-mod-airstrike-videos-from-syria/www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2015/10/26/what-russias-own-videos-and-maps-reveal-about-who-they-are-bombing-in-syria/ 48 www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2015/03/15/how-tall-is-that-gantry/ www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2015/04/10/theres-a-map-for-that/ 49 medium.com/1st-draft/baltimore-looting-tweets-show-importance-of-quick-and-easy-image-checks-a713bbcc275e 50 www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2015/05/08/manual-reverse-image-search-with-google-and-tineye/ 51 www.bellingcat.com/resources/case-studies/2014/08/23/the-hills-of-raqqa-geolocating-the-james-foley-video/ 52 www.bellingcat.com/resources/case-studies/2015/11/23/how-we-found-one-of-the-paris-suicide-bombers-on-facebook/ 53 www.atlanticcouncil.org/images/publications/Hiding_in_Plain_Sight/HPS_English.pdf 54 By March 2019, they had funded 662 projects totalling 140 million euros.www.blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/digital-news-innovation-fund-three-years-and-662-total-projects-supported/ 55 www.bellingcat.com/resources/articles/2016/05/13/dataset-of-russian-attacks-against-syrias-civilians/ 3 FIREWALL OF FACTS 1 threatconnect.com/blog/faketivist-vs-hacktivist-how-they-differ/ 2 www.apnews.com/69b28dd8fc034cb0a2528048638d7893 3 threatconnect.com/blog/tapping-into-democratic-national-committee/threatconnect.com/blog/does-a-bear-leak-in-the-woods/ 4 threatconnect.com/blog/russia-hacks-bellingcat-mh17-investigation/ 5 www.bellingcat.com/resources/articles/2015/10/05/crowdsourced-geolocation-and-analysis-of-russian-mod-airstrike-videos-from-syria/ 6 www.rt.com/news/317971-bellingcat-russia-syria-videos-geolocation/ 7 www.linkedin.com/in/richard-galustian-a834136 8 russia-insider.com/en/understanding-history-zionism/ri26852 9 www.bellingcat.com/resources/articles/2016/04/14/response-from-the-russian-ministry-of-foreign-affairs-to-bellingcat-regarding-fakery-allegations/ www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2016/04/22/mfa-plagiarism/ 10 www.whitehelmets.org/en/ 11 www.infowars.com/report-soros-linked-group-behind-chemical-attack-in-syria/ www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/us/politics/factcheck-syria-strike-conspiracy-theories.html 12 www.bellingcat.com/resources/articles/2017/07/04/khan-sheikhoun-false-flag-conspiracy-actually-mean/ 13 www.thedailybeast.com/the-kardashian-look-alike-trolling-for-assad 14 www.youtube.com/watch?

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europe=true 24 twitter.com/DisinfoPortal/status/1113190404105568257 25 euvsdisinfo.eu/figure-of-the-week-111486-0619/ www.groene.nl/artikel/het-mh17-complot 26 www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2014/07/24/caught-in-a-lie-compelling-evidence-russia-lied-about-the-buk-linked-to-mh17/ 27 ukraineatwar.blogspot.com/2014/07/another-photo-of-mh17-buk-transport.html 28 www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2014/07/28/two-more-key-sightings-of-the-mh17-buk-missile-launcher/ 29 www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2014/07/28/the-buk-that-could-an-open-source-odyssey/ 30 www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2014/07/22/the-latest-open-source-theories-speculation-and-debunks-on-flight-mh17/ www.bellingcat.com/resources/articles/2014/08/06/investigating-the-mh17-crash-site-with-meedans-checkdesk/web.archive.org/web/20140825231735/http://bellingcat.checkdesk.org/en/story/24 31 www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2014/08/28/russias-version-of-the-navy-seals-may-be-fighting-in-ukraine/ 32 www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2014/09/08/images-show-the-buk-that-downed-flight-mh17-inside-russia-controlled-by-russian-troops/ 33 www.themoscowtimes.com/archive/activist-plans-protest-amid-outrage-over-talk-show-hosts-homophobic-meteor-comments 34 www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2014/10/11/russian-tv-inadvertently-demonstrates-mh17-wasnt-shot-down-by-aircraft-cannon-fire/ 35 www.bellingcat.com/news/2014/11/14/russian-state-television-shares-fake-images-of-mh17-being-attacked/ 36 www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2014/11/08/origin-of-the-separatists-buk-a-bellingcat-investigation/ 37 www.bellingcat.com/resources/case-studies/2015/01/27/examining-the-mh17-launch-smoke-photographs/ 38 www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkCcCmYlMZc 39 www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2015/01/27/is-this-the-launch-site-of-the-missile-that-shot-down-flight-mh17/ 40 www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2015/05/31/mh17-forensic-analysis-of-satellite-images-released-by-the-russian-ministry-of-defence/ 41 www.gofundme.com/bellingcatsat 42 www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2015/06/12/july-17-imagery-mod-comparison/ 43 www.bellingcat.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/53rd-report-public.pdf 44 www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2014/12/17/mexicos-guerra-al-narco-a-disaster-rooted-in-misinterpretations/www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2015/03/20/assessing-mexicos-guerra-al-narco/www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2016/02/25/geolocating-mexican-sicarios-in-chihuahua/ www.bellingcat.com/news/2015/08/07/tracking-swiss-watches-in-sinaloa-top-6-luxury-brands-among-mexican-drug-lords/ 45 www.bellingcat.com/resources/2015/10/05/gangs-of-detroit-osint-and-indictment-documents/ 46 www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2016/02/05/yemens-bombed-water-infrastructure/ 47 www.bellingcat.com/resources/articles/2015/10/05/crowdsourced-geolocation-and-analysis-of-russian-mod-airstrike-videos-from-syria/www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2015/10/26/what-russias-own-videos-and-maps-reveal-about-who-they-are-bombing-in-syria/ 48 www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2015/03/15/how-tall-is-that-gantry/ www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2015/04/10/theres-a-map-for-that/ 49 medium.com/1st-draft/baltimore-looting-tweets-show-importance-of-quick-and-easy-image-checks-a713bbcc275e 50 www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2015/05/08/manual-reverse-image-search-with-google-and-tineye/ 51 www.bellingcat.com/resources/case-studies/2014/08/23/the-hills-of-raqqa-geolocating-the-james-foley-video/ 52 www.bellingcat.com/resources/case-studies/2015/11/23/how-we-found-one-of-the-paris-suicide-bombers-on-facebook/ 53 www.atlanticcouncil.org/images/publications/Hiding_in_Plain_Sight/HPS_English.pdf 54 By March 2019, they had funded 662 projects totalling 140 million euros.www.blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/digital-news-innovation-fund-three-years-and-662-total-projects-supported/ 55 www.bellingcat.com/resources/articles/2016/05/13/dataset-of-russian-attacks-against-syrias-civilians/ 3 FIREWALL OF FACTS 1 threatconnect.com/blog/faketivist-vs-hacktivist-how-they-differ/ 2 www.apnews.com/69b28dd8fc034cb0a2528048638d7893 3 threatconnect.com/blog/tapping-into-democratic-national-committee/threatconnect.com/blog/does-a-bear-leak-in-the-woods/ 4 threatconnect.com/blog/russia-hacks-bellingcat-mh17-investigation/ 5 www.bellingcat.com/resources/articles/2015/10/05/crowdsourced-geolocation-and-analysis-of-russian-mod-airstrike-videos-from-syria/ 6 www.rt.com/news/317971-bellingcat-russia-syria-videos-geolocation/ 7 www.linkedin.com/in/richard-galustian-a834136 8 russia-insider.com/en/understanding-history-zionism/ri26852 9 www.bellingcat.com/resources/articles/2016/04/14/response-from-the-russian-ministry-of-foreign-affairs-to-bellingcat-regarding-fakery-allegations/ www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2016/04/22/mfa-plagiarism/ 10 www.whitehelmets.org/en/ 11 www.infowars.com/report-soros-linked-group-behind-chemical-attack-in-syria/ www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/us/politics/factcheck-syria-strike-conspiracy-theories.html 12 www.bellingcat.com/resources/articles/2017/07/04/khan-sheikhoun-false-flag-conspiracy-actually-mean/ 13 www.thedailybeast.com/the-kardashian-look-alike-trolling-for-assad 14 www.youtube.com/watch?

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Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter Warren Singer, Emerson T. Brooking

4chan, active measures, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Comet Ping Pong, content marketing, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jacob Silverman, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral panic, new economy, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, post-materialism, Potemkin village, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, reserve currency, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social web, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, Upton Sinclair, Valery Gerasimov, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

,” Brown Moses Blog, September 16, 2013, http://brown-moses.blogspot.com/2013/09/who-was-responsible-for-august-21st.html. 73 published its first report: Eliot Higgins, “Buk Transporter Filmed ‘Heading to Russia’ Sighted in an Earlier Photograph,” Bellingcat, July 18, 2014, https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2014/07/18/buk-transporter-filmed-heading-to-russia-sighted-in-an-earlier-photograph/. 73 pattern of shrapnel damage: Eliot Higgins, “The Latest Open Source Theories, Speculation and Debunks on Flight MH17,” Bellingcat, July 22, 2014, https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2014/07/22/the-latest-open-source-theories-speculation-and-debunks-on-flight-mh17/. 73 “a lot of obsessive people”: Keefe, “Rocket Man.” 73 His in-laws thought: Aric Toler, interview with authors, Washington, DC, March 10, 2016. 73 soon after the crash: Higgins, “Buk Transporter.” 74 the equivalent of: “Origin of the Separatists’ Buk: A Bellingcat Investigation,” Bellingcat, November 8, 2014, https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2014/11/08/origin-of-the-separatists-buk-a-bellingcat-investigation/. 74 mapping out the odyssey: Bellingcat interactive map, Mapbox, accessed March 18, 2018, https://www.mapbox.com/labs/bellingcat/index.html. 74 even snapped a picture: Toler interview. 74 Worried about their loved ones: “MH17—Potential Suspects and Witnesses from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade,” Bellingcat, 2016, https://www.bellingcat.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/53rd-report-public.pdf. 75 It included the names: Janene Pieters, “Twenty Russians Wanted for Questioning in MH17 Downing,” NL Times, January 4, 2016, http://nltimes.nl/2016/01/04/twenty-russians-wanted-questioning-mh17-downing. 75 One OSINT analyst: Email to authors, February 8, 2016. 76 GVA Dictator Alert: Amar Toor, “This Twitter Bot Is Tracking Dictators’ Flights in and out of Geneva,” The Verge, October 13, 2016, https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/13/13243072/twitter-bot-tracks-dictator-planes-geneva-gva-tracker. 76 one of every five: Eric Gomez, “How Collectible Medals and Facebook Likes Encouraged Cheaters in the Mexico City Marathon,” ESPN.com, April 16, 2018, http://www.espn.com/blog/onenacion/post/_/id/8439/how-collectible-medals-and-likes-encouraged-cheaters-in-the-mexico-city-marathon. 76 chemical weapons in Syria: “Open Source Survey of Alleged Chemical Attacks in Douma on 7th April 2018,” Bellingcat, April 11, 2018, https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2018/04/11/open-source-survey-alleged-chemical-attacks-douma-7th-april-2018/. 76 indicted Mahmoud Al-Werfalli: “Situation in Libya in the Case of The Prosecutor v.

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., “Sputnik’s Unknown Brother,” Re:Baltica, April 6, 2017, https://en.rebaltica.lv/2017/04/sputniks-unknown-brother/. 108 first source of this false report: Ben Nimmo, “Three Thousand Fake Tanks,” @DFRLLab (blog), Medium, January 12, 2017, https://medium.com/@DFRLab/three-thousand-fake-tanks-575410c4f64d. 109 all-out assault: Matthew Sparkes, “Russian Government Edits Wikipedia on Flight MH17,” The Telegraph, July 18, 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10977082/Russian-government-edits-Wikipedia-on-flight-MH17.html. 109 “Questions over Why”: Paul Szoldra, “Here’s the Ridiculous Way Russia’s Propaganda Channel Is Covering the Downed Malaysia Airliner,” Business Insider Australia, July 19, 2014, https://www.businessinsider.com.au/rt-malaysia-airlines-ukraine-2014-7#JhJsCOWZzphQ00IG.99. 109 Russian Union of Engineers: Eliot Higgins, “SU-25, MH17 and the Problems with Keeping a Story Straight,” Bellingcat, January 10, 2015, https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2015/01/10/su-25-mh17-and-the-problems-with-keeping-a-story-straight/. 110 bad photoshop job: Veli-Pekka Vivimäki, “Russian State Television Shares Fake Images of MH17 Being Attacked,” Bellingcat, November 14, 2014, https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2014/11/14/russian-state-television-shares-fake-images-of-mh17-being-attacked/. 110 “It came from”: Max Seddon, “Russian TV Airs Clearly Fake Image to Claim Ukraine Shot Down MH17,” BuzzFeed, November 15, 2014, https://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/russian-tv-airs-clearly-fake-image-to-claim-ukraine-shot-dow?

pages: 371 words: 107,141

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative ﬁnance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

“Smokescreen for Channel 4,” Six to Start, accessed November 28, 2021, www.sixtostart.com/smokescreen. 50. Veli-Pekka Kivimäki, “Geolocating the MH17 Buk Convoy in Russia,” Bellingcat, September 29, 2014, www.bellingcat.com/resources/case-studies/2014/09/29/geolocating-the-mh17-buk-convoy-in-russia. 51. “The Criminal Investigation | MH17 Incident,” Government of the Netherlands, accessed November 28, 2021, www.government.nl/topics/mh17-incident/achieving-justice/the-criminal-investigation. 52. “About—Bellingcat,” Bellingcat, accessed November 28, 2021, www.bellingcat.com/about. 53. Cahal Milmo, “Revealed: How British Empire’s Dirty Secrets Went up in Smoke in the Colonies,” Independent, November 29, 2013, www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/revealed-how-british-empire-s-dirty-secrets-went-smoke-colnies-8971217.html; Jonathan Levinson, Conrad Wilson, James Doubek, and Suzanne Nuyen, “Federal Officers Use Unmarked Vehicles to Grab People in Portland, DHS Confirms,” Oregon Public Broadcasting, National Public Radio, July 17, 2020, www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-officers-use-unmarked-vehicles-to-grab-protesters-in-portland. 54.

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Ndemic Creations, November 11, 2020, www.ndemiccreations.com/en/news/184-plague-inc-the-cure-is-out-now-for-ios-and-android. 12. Robert Evans, “The El Paso Shooting and the Gamification of Terror,” Bellingcat, August 4, 2019, www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2019/08/04/the-el-paso-shooting-and-the-gamification-of-terror. 13. Robert Evans, “Ignore the Poway Synagogue Shooter’s Manifesto: Pay Attention to 8chan’s /pol/ Board,” Bellingcat, April 28, 2019, www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2019/04/28/ignore-the-poway-synagogue-shooters-manifesto-pay-attention-to-8chans-pol-board. 14. Daniel Koehler, “The Halle, Germany, Synagogue Attack and the Evolution of the Far-Right Terror Threat,” CTC Sentinel 12, no. 11 (December 2019): 14–20, https://ctc.usma.edu/halle-germany-synagogue-attack-evolution-far-right-terror-threat. 15.

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It was one of the most impressive and well-organised reporting projects I’ve ever seen; “crowdsourcing” doesn’t even come close to describing its scale. Or there’s Bellingcat, online sleuthing at its best. If you applied ARG skills to investigative journalism, you’d get something like this open-source intelligence group that discovered how Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) was shot down over Ukraine in 2014. Bellingcat’s volunteers painstakingly pieced together publicly available information to determine MH17 was downed by a Buk missile launcher originating from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade in Kursk, Russia.50 The official Dutch-led international joint investigation team later came to the same conclusion.51 Bellingcat continues to investigate criminal activity and crimes against humanity through its network of staff and contributors in more than twenty countries.52 Conspiracy theories thrive in the absence of trust.

pages: 231 words: 71,299

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy by Talia Lavin

4chan, Bellingcat, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, end-to-end encryption, epigenetics, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, information security, Kevin Roose, lockdown, mass immigration, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Overton Window, phenotype, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, zero-sum game, éminence grise

—a frequently used segment in the Pokémon anime series to introduce new cute fuzzy monsters. Only instead of a Pokémon, the video then displays Colborne’s face—“It’s Michael Colborne, beaten Bellingcat faggot,” a computerized voice says. Then the video cuts back to the woods, where a paper target of Colborne’s face has been glued to a bottle. An unseen hand fires a gun and the bottle explodes, Colborne’s face blown to pieces. The process is repeated with more journalists, mainly Colborne’s colleagues at Bellingcat. David has sent it to multiple extremist channels, accompanied by the message, “This video is a kind of instructive response on how to deal with our enemies.”

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Colborne wrote, “For all the chatter on neo-Nazi Telegram channels about the need to preserve anonymity and security from all manner of ‘feds’ and ‘journalists/spies,’ [David Kolomiiets] was willing to throw caution to the wind because—well, to put it plainly, because he seemed to think he might get laid.” Bellingcat took what I gave them and offered more: David’s Facebook page. His page on Vkontakte, the biggest social-media site on the Russian-speaking internet. After the story dropped, David balked. He dropped out of public view entirely—but not before pretending to be his own mother on Twitter and email, begging Bellingcat to unpublish the story, and offering monetary bribes to the journalists to take his name out of circulation. He also deleted all his social-media pages.

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Chapter 7: Tween Racists, Bad Beanies, and The Great Casino Chase 1 Kevin Roose, “The Making of a YouTube Radical,” New York Times (June 8, 2019). https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/youtube-radical.html. 2 Robert Evans, “From Memes to Infowars: How 75 Fascist Activists Were ‘Red-Pilled,’” Bellingcat (October 11, 2018). https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2018/10/11/memes-infowars-75-fascist-activists-red-pilled/. 3 Laura Smith, “In the Early 1980s, White Supremacist Groups Were Early Adopters (and Masters) of the Internet,” Timeline (October 11, 2017). https://timeline.com/white-supremacist-early-internet-5e91676eb847. 4 Christopher Miller, “Azov, Ukraine’s Most Prominent Ultranationalist Group, Sets Its Sights on U.S., Europe,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (November 14, 2018). https://www.rferl.org/a/azov-ukraine-s-most-prominent-ultranationalist-group-sets-its-sights-on-u-s-europe/29600564.html.

The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, anti-globalists, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, crony capitalism, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, fake news, gentrification, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, John Markoff, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, Robert Mercer, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Transnistria, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

A crucial Russian weapons system Michael Weiss and James Miller, “How We Know Russia Shot Down MH17,” DB, July 17, 2015; Miller et al., “An Invasion by Any Other Name,” 17–34. One of the numerous The Russian detachment: “Pre-MH17 Photograph of Buk 332 Discovered,” Bellingcat, June 5, 2017; Wacław Radzinowicz, “Donbas, Syria, zestrzelony boeing,” GW, May 31, 2017. At 1:20 p.m. For further supporting detail, see Bellingcat Investigation Team, “MH-17,” 3–16, 36–44, sic passim, www.bellingcat.com/tag/mh17/; Weiss and Miller, “How We Know.” Girkin’s boast: web.archive.org/web/2014071715222’/http://vk.com/strelkov_info [website no longer active]. Khodakovskii and others: Pieniążek, Pozdrowienia z Noworosji, 199, 210; also “Aleksandr Khodakovskii: Ia znal, chto ‘Buk’ shel iz Luganska,” echo.msk.ru, July 12, 2014.

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At about the same time Herszenhorn and Odynova, “Soldiers’ Graves Bear Witness.” At some point in August “Russia’s 200th Motorized Infantry Brigade in the Donbass: The Tell-Tale Tanks,” Bellingcat, July 4, 2016. Evgeny Trundaev On Trundaev and the 200th: “Russia’s 200th Motorized Infantry Brigade in the Donbass: The Hero of Russia,” Bellingcat, June 21, 2016. Ilovaisk: “Russia’s 6th Tank Brigade,” Bellingcat, Sept. 22, 2015; Racheva, “Bilet v odin konets”; Miller et al., “An Invasion by Any Other Name,” 7, 26–37; “The Battle of Ilovaisk,” TI, Sept. 15, 2014. In early 2015 Piotr Andrusieczko, “Lotnisko w Doniecku—ukraiński Stalingrad,” GW, Oct. 3, 2014; Sergei L.

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For a thorough confirmation of Dambaev’s journey from Siberia to Ukraine and back, see Simon Ostrovsky, “Russia Denies That Its Soldiers Are in Ukraine, But We Tracked One There Using His Selfies,” Vice, June 16, 2015. On the 200th: “Russia’s 200th Motorized Infantry Brigade in the Donbass,” Bellingcat, Jan. 16, 2016. Bato Dambaev Barabanov, “V pampasakh Donbassa.” Attitude to propaganda: Elena Kostiuchenko, “My vse znali, na chto idem i chto mozhet byt’,” NG, Feb. 3, 2015. Though a second ceasefire Batomunkuev: Kostiuchenko, “My vse znali.” Units of the Russian army Ruslan Leviev, “Three Graves: Russian Investigation Team Uncovers Spetsnaz Brigade in Ukraine,” Bellingcat, May 22, 2015. This neighbor could contrast Dependence on Russian taxpayer: Konrad Schuller, “Ohne Kohle in Kohlrevier,” FAZ, Nov. 24, 2014.

pages: 363 words: 105,039

Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers by Andy Greenberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, air gap, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, Citizen Lab, clean water, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, false flag, global supply chain, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, machine readable, Mikhail Gorbachev, no-fly zone, open borders, pirate software, pre–internet, profit motive, ransomware, RFID, speech recognition, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, tech worker, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

Korabelnikov was eventually replaced: Galeotti, “Putin’s Hydra,” 6. It was the GRU that led: Galeotti, “Putin’s Secret Weapon.” “shown the rest of the world”: Ibid. In the spring: “MH17—Russian GRU Commander ‘Orion’ Identified as Oleg Kannikov,” Bellingcat, May 25, 2018, www.bellingcat.com; and “Third Suspect in Skripal Poisoning Identified as Denis Sergeev, High Ranking GRU Officer,” Bellingcat, Feb. 24, 2019, bellingcat.com. It was based on a speech: Valery Gerasimov, “The Value of Science Is in the Foresight: New Challenges Demand Rethinking the Forms and Methods of Carrying Out Combat Operations,” Military-Industrial Courier, Feb. 27, 2013, translated and reprinted in Military Review, Jan.

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” *1 One clue does hint at the GRU’s involvement in the Georgian cyberattacks: The website StopGeorgia.ru, which seemed designed to recruit and equip hacktivists to participate in those attacks, was hosted by a company called SteadyHost, which was headquartered next door to a known GRU research institute in Moscow. *2 In the spring of 2018, the investigative news outlet Bellingcat and the Russian news site The Insider would also name two GRU officers as responsible for the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, which resulted in 298 civilian deaths. In the following months, the same investigators would also name three GRU agents as the assassins responsible for the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal. 33 THE PENALTY One afternoon in February 2018, the Trump White House released an extremely short, straightforward statement: In June 2017, the Russian military launched the most destructive and costly cyber-attack in history.

pages: 317 words: 87,048

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, global pandemic, green transition, housing justice, informal economy, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julian Assange, lab leak, lockdown, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, nuclear winter, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Piers Corbyn, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, real-name policy, Russell Brand, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Snapchat, social contagion, Steve Bannon, survivorship bias, TikTok, trade route, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks

See www.perplexcity.com/ 40. Sarah Perez, ‘Rogue National Park Service Twitter account says it’s no longer run by National Park Service employees … but maybe it never was’, https://techcrunch.com, 27 January 2017. 41. There’s a good history of some of these accounts in this Bellingcat account: ‘The Making of Qanon: A Crowdsourced Conspiracy’, www.bellingcat.com, 7 January 2021. 42. Office of Environment, Health, Safety and Security, ‘Departmental Personnel Security FAQs’, https://www.energy.gov, accessed 7 October 2022. 43. See https://archer.fandom.com/wiki/Nellis. 44. See https://qposts.online/post/2. 45.

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At https://www.4channel.org/faq#trip. 5. At https://qposts.online/post/2. 6. At https://qposts.online/post/4. 7. ‘A trail of bread crumbs leading conspiracy theorists into the wilderness’, www.nytimes.com, 11 September 2018. 8. ‘The Greatest LARP’ section of this very good Bellingcat piece is great on this: ‘The Making of QAnon: A Crowdsourced Conspiracy’, www.bellingcat.com, 7 January 2021. 9. ‘Who Is Behind QAnon? Linguistic Detectives Find Fingerprints’, www.nytimes.com, 19 February 2022. 10. Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins, ‘How three conspiracy theorists took “Q” and sparked Qanon’, www.nbcnews.com, 14 August 2018. 11.

pages: 439 words: 131,081

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, Computer Lib, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, desegregation, disinformation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, game design, gamification, George Floyd, growth hacking, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, military-industrial complex, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, public intellectual, QAnon, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

A Leaked Oath Keepers Roster Has Answers,” Ali Breland, Mother Jones, October 27, 2021. 33 a system it called Reinforce: “The Making of a YouTube Radical,” Kevin Roose, New York Times, June 9, 2019. 34 “One of my closest friends”: Tweet by Chris Sacca (@sacca), January 12, 2021. twitter.com/sacca/status/1349055880348663808 35 his descent had started: “How YouTube Built a Radicalization Machine for the Far-Right,” Kelly Weill, Daily Beast, December 19, 2018. 36 Bellingcat scoured an archive: “From Memes to Infowars: How 75 Fascist Activists Were ‘Red-Pilled,’” Robert Evans, Bellingcat.com, October 11, 2018. 37 “YouTube’s algorithms bounced”: “My Affair with the Intellectual Dark Web,” Meghan Daum, Medium.com, August 24, 2018. 38 Kaiser and Rauchfleisch ran automated: Kaiser and Rauchfleisch provided me, in interviews over 2019 and 2020, with several working papers that detail their methods and findings, as well as much of the underlying data.

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The system recommended him into pro-atheism videos, which tell science-and-math kids they are part of an ultrarational minority besieged by social justice warriors. Then anti-feminism videos, then incel-aligned “men’s rights” videos, some of which he contributed himself, then outright neo-Nazi videos. In 2018, an outlet called Bellingcat scoured an archive of private far-right chat rooms that totaled hundreds of thousands of messages. The investigators scanned for instances where users had mentioned how they’d arrived at the cause. The single most common entry point they cited: YouTube. They would start with banal videos, many said, then be recommended into channels that were more and more extreme.

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-based views: “Internal Alarm, Public Shrugs: Facebook’s Employees Dissect Its Election Role,” Ryan Mac and Sheera Frenkel, New York Times, October 22, 2021. 82 top 1 percent of YouTube’s: Tweet by Guillaume Chaslot (@gchaslot), December 3, 2020. twitter.com/gchaslot/status/1334615047197380610 83 viewed 138 million times: “Election Fraud Narrative,” Transparency.tube Report, November 17, 2020. 84 The platform remained saturated: “YouTube Still Awash in False Voter Fraud Claims,” Tech Transparency Report, December 22, 2020. 85 “mountains of evidence”: “Trump’s Far-Right Supporters Promise Violence at Today’s DC Protests,” Jordan Green, Raw Story, January 6, 2021. 86 more than 80 percent of discussions: “On Far-Right Websites, Plans to Storm Capitol Were Made in Plain Sight,” Laurel Wamsley, NPR, January 7, 2021. 87 “We’re gonna kill Congress”: Green, January 6, 2021. 88 “This is OUR COUNTRY!!!”: Swaine, April 2021. 89 “If you don’t like it”: “Richard Barnett Benton County Republican Rally,” KNWA Fox 24, January 6, 2021. 90 “Today I had the very difficult”: “How the Insurgent and MAGA Right Are Being Welded Together on the Streets of Washington D.C.,” Robert Evans, Bellingcat.com, January 5, 2021. 91 “I told my Mom goodbye”: Ibid. 92 YouTube- and Reddit-inspired nickname: “What Does ‘Pedes’ Mean?” naterich_stl, Reddit, March 16, 2019. 93 “honor of my life”: Evans. 94 an inspector general report found: “Capitol Police Told to Hold Back on Riot Response on Jan. 6, Report Finds,” Luke Broadwater, New York Times, April 13, 2021. 95 “We’re in, we’re in!”

pages: 240 words: 74,182

This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality by Peter Pomerantsev

4chan, active measures, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, data science, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, illegal immigration, mass immigration, mega-rich, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, post-truth, side hustle, Skype, South China Sea

Physicians for Human Rights, ‘2015 Marks Worst Year for Attacks on Hospitals in Syria’. 33 Dove, Steve, ‘The White Helmets Is the 2017 Oscar Winner for Documentary (Short Subject)’, ABC, 27 February 2017; https://oscar.go.com/news/winners/the-white-helmets-is-the-2017-oscar-winner-for-documentary-short-subject. 34 Solon, Olivia, ‘How Syria’s White Helmets Became Victims of an Online Propaganda Machine’, Guardian, 18 December 2017; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/18/syria-white-helmets-conspiracy-theories. 35 Buncombe, Andrew, ‘Trump Suggests “Vicious World” Should Be Blamed for Khashoggi Murder While Disputing Saudi Responsibility’, Independent, 22 November 2018; https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-khashoggi-murder-blame-vicious-world-saudi-journalist-a8647701.html. 36 Miliband, David, ‘America Is Fueling Our Age of Impunity. Just Look at Yemen’, Guardian, 5 April 2019. 37 Cruickshank, Michael, ‘A Saudi War-Crime in Yemen? Analysing the Dahyan Bombing’, Bellingcat, 18 August 2018; https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2018/08/18/19432/. 38 Safi, Michael and Amantha Perera, ‘Sri Lanka Blocks Social Media as Deadly Violence Continues’, Guardian, 7 March 2018; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/07/sri-lanka-blocks-social-media-as-deadly-violence-continues-buddhist-temple-anti-muslim-riots-kandy. 39 Hall, Eleanor, ‘Syrian War Crimes Evidence Strongest Since Nuremberg Trials’, ABC News, 3 December 2018; https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/worldtoday/these-are-crimes-the-world-wont-forget-stephen-rapp-on-syria/10577142. 40 Puddington, Arch, Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2015). 41 Parta, Eugene, Discovering the Hidden Listener: An Empirical Assessment of Radio Liberty and Western Broadcasting to the USSR in the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2007). 42 Zinik, Zinovy, ‘Soviet Paradise Lost’, Carnegie International, Vol. 1 (Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Rizzoli, New York, 1991). 43 Groys, Boris, History Becomes Form (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).

pages: 309 words: 79,414

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists by Julia Ebner

23andMe, 4chan, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, game design, gamification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Greta Thunberg, information security, job satisfaction, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, off grid, OpenAI, Overton Window, pattern recognition, pre–internet, QAnon, RAND corporation, ransomware, rising living standards, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, SQL injection, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Transnistria, WikiLeaks, zero day

So Are Their Connections’, New York Times, 3 April 2019. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/03/world/white-extremist-terrorism-christchurch.html. 10Robert Evans, ‘Ignore the Poway Synagogue Shooter’s Manifesto: Pay Attention to 8chan’s /pol/ Board’, Bellingcat, 28 April 2019. Available at https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2019/04/28/ignore-the-poway-synagogue-shooters-manifesto-pay-attention-to-8chans-pol-board/. 11Andrew Marantz, ‘The Poway Synagogue Shooting Follows an Unsettling New Script’, New Yorker, 29 April 2019. Available at https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-poway-synagogue-shooting-follows-an-unsettling-new-script. 12The archived post on 8chan can be found at https://web.archive.org/web/20190803162950/https:/8ch.net/pol/res/13561044.html. 13Steve Almasy, Dave Alsup and Madeline Holcombe, ‘Dozens of people have been arrested over threats to commit mass attacks since the El Paso and Dayton shootings’, CCN, 20 August 2019.

pages: 329 words: 100,162

Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following by Gabrielle Bluestone

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, cashless society, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, financial thriller, forensic accounting, gig economy, global pandemic, growth hacking, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Kevin Roose, lock screen, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Mason jar, Menlo Park, Multics, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post-truth, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Russell Brand, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech bro, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork

There are all these ideological and moral inconsistencies in how we behave on social media, and how our tech giants behave. And there’s a lot of room for concern and it can be very scary. You can get scammed and you can be lied to and you can be catfished,” explained Natalia Antonova, a security expert and former Bellingcat editor. “I think we could all learn from this story and maybe encourage our tech giants to tell people, ‘Hey you have to mark this as an ad,’ if it is in fact an ad. But you know, our tech giants don’t always have our best interest at heart do they? So that’s kind of the other elephant in the room here, right?

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“I think Caroline is a victim of growing up steeped in that culture of it’s more important what you appear to be than what you actually are. Who you are is one thing, but who you are on Instagram is how most people are going to know you,” explained Natalia Antonova, an internet security expert and former Bellingcat editor, who’s well-versed in the infamous personas who rise up to the level of what’s pejoratively referred to as Twitter’s main character of the day. “I think it’s a convergence of all of those things. For the same reason that Billy McFarland threw the Fyre Festival and the same reason that people bought the tickets to it.

pages: 335 words: 100,154

Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath by Bill Browder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist lawyer, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Clive Stafford Smith, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Donald Trump, estate planning, fake news, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, Ponzi scheme, power law, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Bannon

Vladimir Kara-Murza continues to circle the globe advocating for Magnitsky sanctions and justice for Boris Nemtsov. Despite his poisoning, and attempts by me to persuade him otherwise, he still officially resides and spends most of his time in Russia, fighting for freedom and democracy. In early 2017, he was poisoned a second time. Again, he was saved by Dr. Denis Protsenko. A 2021 report by Bellingcat, a crowdsourced investigative organization based in London, identified four officers from the FSB who were behind Vladimir’s poisonings, including two who followed him to Kazan in May 2015. The same operatives were involved in the poisoning of other Russian dissidents and opposition figures, including Alexei Navalny.

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ABC, 10 Akhmetshin, Rinat, 203, 206–207, 215, 217, 221, 224, 254 Albats, Yevgenia, 32, 164 Albert, Prince of Monaco, 70–71 Al-Jazeera, 282 Alpert, Bill, 58–61, 62, 79–82, 96–97, 98 American Communist Party, 58 American Interest, 219 Angert, Svetlana, 237, 283–284, 284n Ashcroft, John, 230 Aslan, 52–53, 54 Aspen, Colorado trips, of Browder, 108–113, 179–181, 182–187, 219, 250–252, 256, 277–282, 283–289 Aspen Institute (Colorado), 109–111, 252–253, 281–282, 285–289 Aspen Security Forum, 286–289 Aspen Times, 112 Aspen trips, 249 Associated Press (AP), 180, 254 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 282 Auštrevičius, Petras, 294 BakerHostetler, 26–29 as Madoff trustee, 27–28 Prevezon case and, 98–103, 114–121, 122–131, 142–152, 177–179, 182–184, 185–187, 204, 212, 226, 236, 238, 296–297 represents Hermitage, 21–23, 26–27, 101, 116 Banca di Economii (Moldova), 79–80 Bank of America, 97 Bank of Credit and Commerce International, 21 Bannon, Steve, 261 Barron’s, 58–61, 82, 98 BBC, 10, 282 Becker, Jo, 250–253 Behrends, Paul, 198, 211, 217, 297 Bellingcat, 297 Berlingske (Denmark), 273–275, 276, 290–291 Berschinski, Robert, 216, 217 Bino, Maria-Antonella, 62, 63–64, 68 BlackBerry communications, 73, 106, 221 Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge (Moscow), 137–140, 153 Borgen, Thomas, 291 Bradshaw, Adrian, 212–213 Brexit vote, 38, 229 Browder, David (son), 8, 10, 109–111, 124, 126, 266, 285–287 Browder, Earl (grandfather), 58 Browder, Elena (wife), 125, 126, 160–161, 212–214, 257, 270, 271–272, 284 Aspen trips, 108–109, 111–113, 180, 182, 186, 249, 254, 280–281, 283 Madrid arrest of Browder and, 2, 3–4, 8, 10 Browder, Hannah (daughter), 251, 252 Browder, Jessica (daughter), 8, 232, 280 Browder, Noah (son), 225–226 Browder, Tom (brother), 124, 126, 230 Browder, Veronica (daughter), 8, 112, 253–256 Browder’s List (NTV documentary), 95 Buchdahl, Jacob, 182–183, 185, 187, 212, 213, 225–226 Bush, Jason, 25–26 Business Insider, 128, 224–225 BusinessWeek, 25–26 Butyrka, 29–30 BuzzFeed, 231–232 Cambridge Crime Conference, 21, 44–47, 58, 150, 297 Cardin, Ben, 38, 269, 294 Carter-Ruck, 202–203 CBC, 282 Chaika, Yuri, 64–65, 180–181, 198, 199, 253, 272–273, 292–293 Cherkasov, Ivan, 18–19, 172–173, 248, 265 Chernova, Anna, 72, 74 Chicago Junior Police Patrol, 16, 43 Chicago Police Department (CPD), 12–16 Cicilline, David, 210 Citibank, 29, 32, 47 Clinton, Bill, 151, 228–229 Clinton, Hillary, 228–229, 232–233, 253, 284 CNN, 10, 224–225, 255, 261–262, 281–282, 287 Connolly, Gerald, 210 Cook County Juvenile Court (Chicago), 14 Cooper, Chris, 215–216, 217, 224, 256 Cornyn, John, 264 Cotler, Irwin, 294 Council of Europe: Interpol hearing, 206, 208 Credit Suisse, 36, 43, 45, 56, 57, 61, 66, 193 C-SPAN, 262, 264 Cuomo, Chris, 261–262 Customs and Border Control (CBP), 265–269 Cymrot, Mark, 100, 117–120, 148–152, 177–179, 182, 183, 206, 207, 223–224, 236, 293, 296–297 Daily Beast, 178–179, 219 The Daily Show, 128–131, 132, 133, 142, 143 Danske Bank, 278, 293 acquires Sampo Bank (Estonia), 290, 291n audit of, 273–275, 290–292 Russian Laundromat data leak, 273–275, 276, 291 Davis, Patrick, 246–248, 257–259, 264, 268 Delco Networks, 194–195 Dellums, Ron, 206, 207, 223 Deloitte & Touche, 90 Democratic National Committee, 278 Department of Homeland Security (DHS), 93, 112, 236–237, 268–269, 283–284 Department of Justice, 97, 117, 177–179 Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), 222–226, 246, 248–249, 253, 255–256, 259–260 Prevezon case and, 93–94, 96, 106, 112, 120, 147, 150, 224 Depository Insurance Agency (Russia), 296 de Selliers, Sophie, 125–130, 132 Deutche Welle, 282 DHL, 169, 170 Dilanian, Ken, 254, 254n Echo Moscow Radio, 137 Elliott Management, 116–117 Elizabeth, Queen, 212 Engel, Eliot, 154, 199, 209, 210 Engel, Richard, 249 European Parliament, 38–42, 201–203, 207 European Union (EU): Brexit vote, 38, 229 EU Magnitsky Act, 292–293 Facebook posts, 120–121 FaceTime communications, 111–112, 126 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 198, 216, 231, 277 FedEx, 169, 170 Feinstein, Dianne, 264 Finrosforum, 39–42, 200 Firestone, Thomas, 222–223 Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), 222–226, 246, 248–249, 253, 255–256, 259–260 Fox News, 282, 287–288 Fox & Friends (TV program), 127–128 France-24, 282 Freedom House, 284 Freeland, Chrystia, 294 French National Police, 188–189 FSB (successor to KGB), 32, 40, 52–53, 64, 75–76, 107, 148, 157, 162, 164, 190, 200, 202, 228, 238, 297–298 Fusion GPS, 214–215 G20 Summit (Hamburg), 250, 277 Gasanov, Oktai, 49, 181 Gazprom, 25, 133, 180 Geneva detention of Browder, 270–272, 278 Geneva Human Rights Summit (2018), 270–272 George W.

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Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists, the Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All by Laura Bates

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, anti-bias training, autism spectrum disorder, Bellingcat, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, deplatforming, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, off grid, Overton Window, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech bro, young professional

Public attention on this issue has focused almost exclusively on Facebook, but, as The Guardian pointed out, these findings are alarming, in light of the fact that Donald Trump won the election by just 80,000 votes, and the videos in Chaslot’s database of YouTube-recommended election fare were watched, in total, over 3 billion times before election day.16 And, of course, the algorithm plays straight into the hands of deliberate manipulation by trolls like Cernovich, whose conspiracy theories about Clinton’s health created such a powerful ripple effect. So is there concrete reason to be concerned that this could be having a serious impact on young people? Do we know for sure that simply being exposed to this content actually has an effect? In a word: yes. In 2018, investigative journalism collective Bellingcat published the results of an in-depth analysis into the extremist journeys of seventy-five fascist activists, exploring the ways in which they had become radicalised. The investigation used a database of hundreds of thousands of Discord server posts. (Discord is a chat platform primarily designed for gamers, but often used by members of the alt-right and manosphere.)

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MEN WHO DON’T KNOW THEY HATE WOMEN 1 ‘Teens, Social Media & Technology 2018’, Pew Research Center, 31 May 2018 2 ‘Thousands of teenagers spending more than eight hours a day online at weekends, Ofcom figures show’, Daily Telegraph, 12 July 2017 3 ‘BBC Three survey reveals one in four young people first view porn at age 12 or under’, BBC, 10 April 2014 4 ‘A fifth of 16–24-year-olds spend more than seven hours a day online every day of the week, exclusive Ofcom figures reveal’, Daily Telegraph, 11 August 2018 5 ‘Fiction is outperforming reality: how YouTube’s algorithm distorts the truth’, The Guardian, 2 February 2018 6 ‘The Mobile Internet Phenomena Report’, Sandvine, February 2019 7 ‘For the New Far Right, YouTube Has Become the New Talk Radio’, New York Times, 3 August 2017 8 ‘Alternative Influence: Broadcasting the Reactionary Right on YouTube’, Data & Society, 18 September 2018 9 ‘YouTube’s AI is the puppet master over most of what you watch’, CNET, 10 January 2018 10 ‘YouTube, the Great Radicalizer’, New York Times, 10 March 2018 11 ‘How YouTube Drives People to the Internet’s Darkest Corners’, Wall Street Journal, 7 February 2018 12 ‘YouTube’s Product Chief on Online Radicalization and Algorithmic Rabbit Holes’, New York Times, 29 March 2019 13 ‘Google Diversity Annual Report’, 2019 14 ‘How YouTube Built a Radicalization Machine for the Far-Right’, Daily Beast, 19 December 2018 15 ‘How an ex-YouTube insider investigated its secret algorithm’, The Guardian, 2 February 2018 16 The Guardian (2 February 2018), op. cit. 17 ‘From Memes to Infowars: How 75 Fascist Activists Were “Red-Pilled” ’, Bellingcat, 11 October 2018 18 Adrienne Massanari, ‘Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures’, New Media & Society, Volume 19, Issue 3 (2015) 19 ‘Milo Yiannopoulos’s Twitter ban, explained’, Vox, 20 July 2016 20 ‘5 facts about Americans and video games’, Pew Research Center, 7 September 2018 21 ‘Right-Wing Hate Groups Are Recruiting Video Gamers’, NPR, 5 November 2018 22 ‘Drunk or flirty victims often “to blame” says survey’, Daily Telegraph, 12 February 2015 10.

pages: 392 words: 114,189

The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime by Renee Dudley, Daniel Golden

2021 United States Capitol attack, Amazon Web Services, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, Hacker News, heat death of the universe, information security, late fees, lockdown, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Picturephone, pirate software, publish or perish, ransomware, Richard Feynman, Ross Ulbricht, seminal paper, smart meter, social distancing, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing, War on Poverty, Y2K, zero day

Yakubets was married: Sergei Dobrynin and Mark Krutov, “In Lavish Wedding Photos, Clues to an Alleged Russian Cyberthief’s FSB Family Ties,” RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty, December 11, 2019, rferl.org/a/in-lavish-wedding-photos-clues-to-an-alleged-russian-cyberthief-fsb-family-ties/30320440.html. Spetsnaz: “‘V’ for ‘Vympel’: FSB’s Secretive Department ‘V’ Behind Assassination of Georgian Asylum Seeker in Germany,” Bellingcat, February 17, 2020, bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2020/02/17/v-like-vympel-fsbs-secretive-department-v-behind-assassination-of-zelimkhan-khangoshvili/. blamed North Korea: Thomas P. Bossert, “It’s Official: North Korea Is Behind WannaCry,” Wall Street Journal, December 18, 2017. indicted Yakubets: “Russian National Charged.”

pages: 466 words: 116,165

American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History by Casey Michel

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, forensic accounting, Global Witness, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, Internet Archive, invention of the telegraph, Jeffrey Epstein, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, too big to fail

Max de Haldevang, “Top US Think Tank Criticized for Taking $12 Million from a Russia-Tied Oligarch,” Quartz, 16 October 2019, https://qz.com/1721240/council-of-foreign-relations-criticized-for-russia-tied-donation/. 58. Casey Michel, “Money Talks: Len Blavatnik and the Council on Foreign Relations,” Bellingcat, 10 October 2019, https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2019/10/10/money-talks-len-blavatnik-and-the-council-on-foreign-relations/. 59. Ann Marlowe, “Is Harvard Whitewashing a Russian Oligarch’s Fortune?,” New York Times, 5 December 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/opinion/harvard-russian-oligarch-whitewash.html. 60.

pages: 579 words: 160,351

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now by Alan Rusbridger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, country house hotel, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, death of newspapers, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, forensic accounting, Frank Gehry, future of journalism, G4S, high net worth, information security, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, natural language processing, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-truth, pre–internet, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ruby on Rails, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

By working entirely in the open – analysing social media and up to 450 YouTube channels a day – he became one of the world’s leading experts on the weaponry being used in that conflict. Within a short period, he was attracting 250,000 page views a month and had been appointed visiting research associate at King’s College London as well as joining the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab as senior non-resident fellow. He went on to help create a new website, Bellingcat, for people to investigate current events using open-source information. We had used ‘open’ techniques in June 2009 at the height of the concern over the sums British MPs were claiming by way of expenses. When the entire database was released it consisted of 700,000 individual documents within 5,500 PDF files covering all 646 members of parliament.

…

Abell, Stig ref1n Abramson, Jill ref1, ref2 Abu Qatada ref1 accountability journalism ref1, ref2 accuracy ref1 Adebolajo, Lee ref1 advertising specifics ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 classified ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 passim, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6n Advertising Standards Authority ref1 Afghanistan ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 The African Queen (film) ref1 Aftonbladet (newspaper) ref1 Age (newspaper) ref1, ref2 Ageh, Tony ref1, ref2 aggregation ref1 Ahad, Ghaith Abdul ref1 AIDS ref1 Aitken, Jonathan (MP) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n Aitken, Lolicia ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Aitken, Victoria ref1 Al Jazeera ref1 Al-Fayed, Mohamed ref1 al-Qaeda ref1, ref2 al-Yamanah deal ref1 Alibhai-Brown, Yasmin ref1 All the President’s Men (film) ref1 Allison, Eric ref1 Amazon ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 American Journalism Review (AJR) ref1, ref2 American Society of Newspaper Editors ref1 Amnesty International ref1 Anatomy of Britain (Sampson) ref1 Anderson, Chris ref1 anonymity ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13 Apple ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Arab Spring ref1, ref2 Archer, Lord Jeffrey ref1 Arendt, Hannah ref1 arms companies ref1 Àrrese, Angel ref1 Ashley, Jackie ref1 Asian Babes (magazine) ref1 Assange, Julian ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8n Associated Newspapers ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Associated Press (AP) ref1, ref2 Atex system ref1 Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) ref1 Atlantic Council, Digital Forensic Research Lab ref1 Attacking the Devil (film) ref1n Attenborough, David ref1 attention time ref1, ref2 tl;dr (too long didn’t read) ref1, ref2n Australia ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 AutoTrader ref1, ref2 awards ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 Azhar, Azeem ref1 ‘back doors’ ref1, ref2 Baker, Stewart ref1 Ball, James ref1 Baltimore Sun (newspaper) ref1, ref2 Ban Ki–Moon, Secretary General (UN) ref1 Bandar, Prince ref1 Bank of England ref1, ref2 banking ref1 Bannon, Steve ref1n Baquet, Dean ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Barcelona Football Club ref1, ref2 Barclay, Aidan ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Barclay, David ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Barclay, Frederick ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Barclay, Howard ref1, ref2, ref3 Barclays Bank ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Barnes, Julian ref1 Barnes, Thomas ref1, ref2 Baron, Martin ref1, ref2, ref3 Barrow Cadbury Trust ref1 Barstow, Tom ref1 BBC ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 digital news ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 ethos ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 radio ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 TV ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 BBH agency ref1 Beatty, Warren ref1 Beauchamp, Zack ref1n Beaverbrook, Lord ref1, ref2 Bebo ref1 Been There ref1, ref2 Being Digital (Negroponte) ref1 Belhaj, Abdel Hakim ref1 Bell, Sir David ref1, ref2 Bell, Emily ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 passim, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n Mad/Great Pronouncements ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Bellfield, Levi ref1 Bellingcat ref1 Benjamin, Alison ref1 Benkler, Yochai ref1 Benn, Aluf ref1 Berkett, Neil ref1, ref2, ref3 Berliner, Wendy ref1 Berliner format ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6n Berlusconi, Silvio ref1, ref2 Bermuda ref1 Berners-Lee, Sir Tim ref1, ref2, ref3 Bernstein, Carl ref1, ref2, ref3 Berwin Leighton Paisner ref1 Beslan ref1 Bezos, Jeff ref1, ref2, ref3 Biafra War plan ref1 Bickel, Mr Justice ref1 Big Brother (TV) ref1 ‘big properties’ ref1 Bildt, Prime Minister Carl (Sweden) ref1, ref2 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ref1, ref2, ref3 Bill of Rights (1968) ref1 Billington, Michael ref1, ref2 Bin Jassim, Sheikh Hamad (aka HBJ) ref1 Bizzari, Marco ref1 Black, Conrad ref1, ref2, ref3 Black, Ian ref1 Black, Mr Justice ref1 BlackBerry ref1 Blackhurst, Chris ref1 Blair, Prime Minister Tony ref1 Blau, Wolfgang ref1, ref2, ref3n Blendle ref1 Bletchley Park ref1 Bloom, Godfrey ref1, ref2 Bloomberg ref1, ref2, ref3 Bloomberg Terminal ref1 Blunkett, David (MP) ref1 Boards ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Guardian Media Group (GMG) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8n, ref9n Boer War ref1 Bogart, Humphrey ref1 Bogler, Dan ref1 bombs ref1, ref2, ref3 book festivals ref1, ref2 Boseley, Sarah ref1n Boston Consulting Group (BCG) ref1 Boston Globe (newspaper) ref1 Bowcott, Owen ref1, ref2 Bradlee, Ben ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Bradshaw, Peter ref1 Bragg, Billy ref1 brands ref1, ref2, ref3 passim, ref1, ref2 passim, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Brecqhou island ref1, ref2 Breitbart ref1, ref2 Brennan Jr, William ref1 Brexit ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8n British Aerospace (BAE) ref1, ref2n British Airways (BA) ref1, ref2 British Journalism Review (BJR) ref1 broadsheets ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 passim, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10n Broder, David ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n Brody, Neville ref1, ref2n Brooks, Rebekah ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Brooks, Richard ref1n Brooks, Tim ref1 Brown, Prime Minister Gordon ref1, ref2 Brown, Andrew ref1 Brown, George (MP) ref1 BSkyB ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n Buckingham Palace ref1 B.UK Limited ref1 bulk sales ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7n, ref8n Bunting, Madeleine ref1, ref2, ref3 Bush, President George W. ref1 Butler report (2004) ref1 Buzzfeed ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Byrne, Gabriel ref1 Cable, Vince (MP) ref1 Cadwalladr, Carole ref1 Cairns, Colonel Douglas ref1 Calder, Simon ref1 Cambridge Analytica (CA) ref1, ref2 Cambridge Evening News (CEN) (newspaper) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Cameron, Prime Minister David ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Campbell, W.

pages: 469 words: 149,526

The War Came to Us: Life and Death in Ukraine by Christopher Miller

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, Bellingcat, Boris Johnson, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, false flag, friendly fire, game design, global pandemic, military-industrial complex, Ponzi scheme, private military company, rolling blackouts, Saturday Night Live, special economic zone, stakhanovite, wikimedia commons

In it, an amateur open-source analyst had claimed to have narrowed the possible launch site to three locations in a relatively small area southeast of Snizhne, based on a photograph of the missile’s vapor trail that had been posted to Twitter. His findings seemed to align closely with the movement of the Buk missile system traced by Eliot Higgins, the open-source analyst who founded the investigative group Bellingcat, using dashboard-camera footage and satellite images. It would be a long shot, but with an early start and a smaller area to search than previously thought, Roland and I had a hunch that we might just get lucky. We had set off early in the morning with a local taxi driver in a crappy old car, hoping to keep as low a profile as possible.

…

Index 25th Airborne Brigade here 25th Kyivan Rus Territorial Defense Battalion here 25th Separate Airborne Brigade here, here, here 36th Ukrainian Marine Brigade here, here 43rd Battalion here 43rd Brigade here 53rd Air Defense Brigade, Russian here 56th Motorized Brigade here 58th Motorized Infantry Brigade here 62nd Fighter Aviation Regiment here 72nd Mechanized Brigade here 93rd Mechanized Brigade here, here, here 95th Air Assault Brigade here 109th Separate Territorial Defense Brigade here 138th Radio-Technical Brigade here 204th Tactical Aviation Brigade here Abkhazia here Addario, Lynsey here Admiral Essen here adoption agencies here Afgantsy here airborne forces, Ukrainian here, here, here, here Akhmetov, Rinat here, here, here, here, here Aksyonov, Sergei here, here ‘American Boy’ Kombinaciya here Ametov, Reshat here An-225 Mriya aircraft here Ana-Yurt, Crimea here Anatoliy (driver) here, here Anderson Cooper 360o here Andrei (DNR commander) here Andronov, Vitaliy here anti-Semitism, modern here, here Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) here, here Antonov Airport here Arab Spring here, here Army SOS here Artemivsk here, here central hospital and morgue here, here, here Krasne village school here, here, here Men’s Day and physical fitness day here nightlife and celebrations here politics in here, here salt mines here Second World War here Ukrainian military operations here wine making here see also the Donbas Artemsil here Artwinery, Artemivsk here Ashton, Catherine here assassinations of Ukrainian enemies, Russian here, here Automaidan here Avakov, Arsen here Avdiivka here, here Azarov, Mykola here Azov Regiment, National Guard here Bakanov, Ivan here Bakhmut here, here here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Balaclava, Crimea here Balasynovych, Natalia here Baltic Fleet, Russian here Bandera, Stepan here, here Barroso, José Manuel here Batkivshchyna Party here, here Battle of Debaltseve (2015) here, here Battle of Donetsk Airport (2014) here, here, here Battle of Ilovaisk (2014) here, here Battle of Kyiv (2022) atrocities/war crimes here civilian defenders here, here, here, here second day strikes against the capital here distribution of arms to civilians here erection of checkpoints here families search for survivors here food and fuel supplies here, here, here Kyiv hospital here outbreak of war here residents flee the city here, here Ukrainian forces take on Russian ground troops here withdrawal of Russian troops here Battle of the Donbas (2022) here Bakhmut here, here, here, here evacuation programs here, here front line, Izyum here Western arms and ammunition supplies here BBC Panorama here Belarus here Belbek air base, Crimea here Bellingcat here Berdyansk Port here Berezhnoi, Volodymyr here Berezovets, Taras here Beriev A-50 planes here Berkut here, here, here, here, here, here, here Bezler, Igor ‘The Demon’ here Biden, Hunter here Biden, Joe here, here, here, here, here, here, here Bidenko, Artem here Bidenko, Ihor here Black Sea Fleet, Russian here, here, here, here, here Black Tulip here Blinken, Antony here Bodnar, Natalia here body/corpse collection, role of battlefield here Bohomolets, Olha here Bohuslavskiy, Junior Sergeant Stanislav here Bolgarov, Oleksandr here Bolgarova, Lyubov and Andriy here bomb-disposal squad, Russian Cossack here bomb shelters here, here, here Bonner, Brian here, here, here, here Borodai, Alexander here Bragin, Akhat here Bratchenko, Yelena here Bri (CM’s girlfriend/wife) here, here, here, here Bucha here, here Budanov, General Kyrylo here Budapest Memorandum of Security Assurances here Bulatov, Dmytro here Burns, Bill here, here BuzzFeed News here, here, here Campbell, Sol here Canada here Carney, Jay here ‘The Caucasus’ (T.

pages: 257 words: 80,698

Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals by Oliver Bullough

Alan Greenspan, Bellingcat, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, capital controls, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Downton Abbey, Etonian, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Global Witness, John Bercow, Julian Assange, light touch regulation, lockdown, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, surveillance capitalism, the High Line, WikiLeaks

The Kroll report into the Moldovan bank heist is easily discoverable online. I am very grateful to David Leask and Ian Fraser for helping me understand all this, and also to Richard Smith, who’s an old co-conspirator. His blogs on Naked Capitalism are full of important insights. Graham Barrow was extremely helpful, as is his wont. The Bellingcat/Transparency International report on SLPs – ‘Smash and Grab, The UK’s Money Laundering Machine’ – was published in 2017 and is available on both organisations’ websites. There’s not much written about limited partnerships, but Elspeth Perry showed me around what there is with patience and kindness.

pages: 340 words: 90,674

The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future by Geoffrey Cain

airport security, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Kickstarter, land reform, lockdown, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, phenotype, pirate software, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, speech recognition, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, WikiLeaks

“Edward Wong, “China Sentences Uighur Scholar to Life,” New York Times, September 23, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/world/asia/china-court-sentences-uighur-scholar-to-life-in-separatism-case.html. 13. Radio Free Asia, “Under the Guise of Public Safety, China Demolishes Thousands of Mosques,” December 19, 2016, https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/udner-the-guise-of-public-safety-12192016140127.html. An investigation by the Guardian and the website Bellingcat further documented, through satellite imagery, two dozen religious sites that had been partly or completely demolished from 2016 to 2018. See Lily Kuo, “Revealed: New Evidence of China’s Mission to Raze the Mosques of Xinjiang,” Guardian, May 7, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/07/revealed-new-evidence-of-chinas-mission-to-raze-the-mosques-of-xinjiang. 14.

pages: 324 words: 96,491

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News by Clint Watts

4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Climatic Research Unit, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, Filter Bubble, global pandemic, Google Earth, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Julian Assange, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, operational security, pre–internet, Russian election interference, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing test, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

Taking down the tech giants opens enormous space for the strongest manipulators to take hold of unwitting minds; Bannon would be one of those best positioned to gain from their demise. Disinformation tracking efforts continue to grow and expand. Amazing social media sleuthing by the likes of the online collective BellingCat have restored truth among Russia’s disinformation storms. Bot tracking and troll outing has become a pastime for social media enthusiasts around the world, and exhaustive studies of the Internet Research Agency and Iranian Twitter data arise nearly every week. The massive swing of interest toward what my colleagues and I began researching five years ago has been rewarding; it turns out that people do care about Russian trolls after all.

pages: 371 words: 109,320

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World by Alan Rusbridger

airport security, basic income, Bellingcat, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, crisis actor, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Google Earth, green new deal, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Murray Gell-Mann, Narrative Science, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, post-truth, profit motive, public intellectual, publication bias, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech baron, the scientific method, TikTok, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

With the aid of his followers he soon narrowed it down (by spotting an unusual bit of ironwork) to the Ponte dei Ferali in Venice. The same programme enabled him, through historical imagery, to check the colour of the water in 2013 and 2018 and compare it with other contemporary images. Point proved. Higgins’s website, Bellingcat, has an online course teaching modern-day tools for verification which go much further. There are numerous open-source maps and satellite resources, along with endless ways of doing geolocation-based searching. There are instructions for reading, writing, removing (and manipulating) metadata for a vast number of file types – including video.

Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, digital technologies were used extensively to monitor the environment; to share information in ways that the original designers intended (think of Wikipedia); to mobilize social movements and hold bad actors to account; to lift the lid on corrupt and despotic leaders in the way the Citizen Lab, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Amnesty International, R3D, Derechos Digitales, AccessNow, Bellingcat, Privacy International, and other civic watchdogs do. If we all unplugged completely, we would be left without these benign uses of information and communications technologies. Throwing away the technology is not a viable solution for humanity as a whole; we need to find alternative ways to organize our communications environment instead.

Mbs: The Rise to Power of Mohammed Bin Salman by Ben Hubbard

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, bitcoin, Citizen Lab, Donald Trump, fake news, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, megacity, Mohammed Bouazizi, NSO Group, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Dated Sept. 23, 2013. https://wikileaks.org/hackingteam/emails/emailid/14112 “90% of them are not up to it”: Ibid. media monitoring under King Abdullah: “Royal Order: Appointing Saud Al-Qahtani as Advisor, at the Royal Court,” SPA, Nov. 12, 2015. hacker had hacked him: “Lord Of The Flies: An Open-Source Investigation Into Saud Al-Qahtani,” Bellingcat, June 26, 2019. “good man and look trusted!!!”: Ibid. to secure their accounts: Ibid. when he did it himself: Ibid. posting while drunk: Ibid. “drink tackila and dance lol”: Ibid. could help him prevail: Author interviews, American officials and an associate of the royal family, May 2019.

Spies, Lies, and Algorithms by Amy B. Zegart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, air gap, airport security, Apollo 13, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Chelsea Manning, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, failed state, feminist movement, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Gene Kranz, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, index card, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, Network effects, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, operational security, Parler "social media", post-truth, power law, principal–agent problem, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, uber lyft, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Academic teams, like my colleagues at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, bring together researchers across disciplines and former government officials. Think tanks do, too. Some organizations, like Janes and Maxar, provide commercial analysis for profit. There are advocacy groups, journalist organizations like Bellingcat, and even hobbyists. One of my favorites is Jacob Bogle, a coin dealer who lives in Tennessee and has a passion for developing detailed maps of North Korea using commercial imagery and making them available online. Taken together, this nuclear sleuthing ecosystem looks very different from the classified world of intelligence agencies.59 I summarize key differences in table 9.1.

pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

New York: Longman. Evans, M. Stanton. 1965. The Liberal Establishment: Who Runs America… and How. New York: Devin-Adair. Evans, Richard J. 2005. The Coming of the Third Reich. New York: Penguin. Evans, Robert. 2018. “From Memes to Infowars: How 75 Fascist Activists Were ‘Red-Pilled.’” bell¿ngcat. www.bellingcat.com/news/amer icas/2018/10/11/memes-infowars-75-fascist-activists-red-pilled. Evanson, Robert E., and Douglas Gollin. 2003. “Assessing the Impact of the Green Revolution, 1960 to 2000.” Science 300, no. 5620: 758‒762. Everitt, B. S., and Anders Skrondal. 2010. Cambridge Dictionary of Statistics.