Quote of the Day (Bob Moser, Warning on Homegrown 2020 Disinformation Threats)

“Four years ago, fake-news meddling in America’s presidential race was primarily an external threat, with the Russians’ Internet Research Agency leading the way and the Trump campaign eagerly tagging along. That won’t be the case in 2020, when the most malicious and effective disinformation will be homegrown—planted and artificially amplified by for-profit troll farms, freelance cyberwarriors swapping notes in chat rooms, political parties and PACs, and campaigns up and down the ballot. As Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia, wrote in The Guardian this summer, ‘We won’t need Russia in 2020. We will hijack our democracy ourselves.’”— Bob Moser, former editor of the Texas Observer and executive editor of The American Prospect, “Interference 2020,” Columbia Journalism Review, Fall 2019

Quote of the Day (John Sipher, on Vladimir Putin and the World’s First ‘Intelligence State’)

“The history of the brutal Soviet security services lays bare the roots of Russia's current use of political arrests, subversion, disinformation, assassination, espionage and the weaponization of lies. None of those tactics is new to the Kremlin. In fact, those tactics made Soviet Russia the world's first ‘intelligence state,' and they also distinguished it from authoritarian states run by militaries. Today's Russia has become even more of an intelligence state after Mr. [Vladimir] Putin's almost 20-year tenure….[A] decade after the Soviet Union fell, Mr. Putin rose to power and recruited many of his former K.G.B. colleagues to help rebuild the state.  The result is a regime with the policies and philosophy of a supercharged secret police service, a regime that relies on intelligence operations to deal with foreign policy challenges and maintain control at home.”—Former CIA station chief John Sipher, “Putin’s Main Weapon: The ‘Intelligence State,’” The New York Times, Feb. 23, 2019