9

Bait & Switch – Fake News, propornot, the Real Inform & Influence Operation

by GH Eliason

4-red-scare-fake-news-rt
A few days before the 2016 election I contacted several publishers and told them they were on a list to be dealt with/ taken down after what was supposed to be a Clinton victory. This effort was against news sites and websites that spoke or wrote against current US policies that Clinton supported. As I was writing this Glen Greenwald’s great article came out specifically about propornot. That plays a small part in this.
Journalists that said or wrote anything damaging to the Clinton campaign or supported her opponents in any way were targeted. News sites and journalists that failed to criticize Vladimir Putin, or worse; they were sympathetic of this or that Russian or Syria policy at any time are on the lists.
The implication isn’t that Hillary Clinton had anything to do with this. She didn’t, at least not directly. We’re going to take a clear look at this, who is behind it, and why. The political stakes and stakeholders go far beyond the presidency. It was about setting the next 20 years of US policy, cabinet positions, and redefining what the United States of America is.
Long before this election, I became aware of an Inform & Influence Operation (IIO) against the American public. While researching this I came across a list of news sites that were going to be dealt with n following what was at the time thought to be an easy “Clinton victory.”
Before the election I told different publishers this was in the works and the goal was to discredit and destroy alternate media sources and silence dissent.
The Donald Trump victory slowed this down a little bit for the moment, but redoubled the effort going into it. Let’s look behind the Fake news of propornot that is the internet rage today. I’ve been keeping tabs on some of the players involved for over 1 1/2 years now.
Propornot is another incarnation of Stopfake or the Daily Dot. Both of these propaganda sites have been doing the same essential thing as propornot since the beginning of the 2014 Coup in Ukraine. In that sense there is nothing notable or remarkable about it. What is remarkable is the amount of press this crude website has generated and why.
The website itself is a compilation of working lists developed by different sources that now work in tandem. It’s been over 3 years in the making and propornot is just the latest side dish.
OpEdNews, Washingtonsblog, ZeroHedge, Consortium News, Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, the Vineyard of the Saker, and Off Guardian are among many others listed publicly and privately to developed website hit lists. Propornot pulls its own lists from sites and contacts like these. The base model is the Ukrainian website “PeaceMaker” which gained fame in March 2015.
The people that wrote the Ukrainian information policy and developed the methods for the “Myrotvorets” or Peacemaker website did so with the sole goal of creating a clearinghouse for killing dissent and dissenters. Site’s like propornot are offspring from the 40,000+ people working on the projects. At the top of the heap the lists feed downward to feed activists workloads.

Russian proxy sites are popping up and all the naive Americans posting their stories are easy to shut down. To counter, I just post a link to “Russian News And Russian Proxy News Sites” with a brief note and it usually stops. Education is a wonderful thing. There have been a ton of new websites started, probably just for this election, and I’ve simply recognized them as election propaganda sites. Not worthy for even this blog… The good news is I’m trying to gather listings for many of these sites and put them in some sort of a dump file for later. Let’s see who uses them after this election is done.”

Here is an example of their work in 2015. What exactly does “lets see who uses them mean?”
gheliasonpic1
This is how open discussions have been in the past about damage done to a site, in this case Southfront.org.
This is one example of how the lists are used from inside a conversation with the people that developed them. Jessikka Aro came to fame for her expose on Russian trolls like the publication above. She has since crowd funded over $30,000 to get the necessary hacking tools to fight them.

“The process of the private sector becoming offensive actors in cyberspace has already begun. Where this leads is uncertain, but it’s hard to imagine it being particularly positive.” Tobias Feakin is a senior analyst at ASPI

Using play for pay actors to harm journalists , activists, and publications is nothing new. One of the questions I have been asked repeatedly by publishers is “how could they damage me? We are a top 100 publication.” The answer is that the people that designed the methods cut their teeth taking down the largest independent alternative media news source in history. That was Indymedia.
They used an advanced form of what would later become known as “swatting.” What is swatting? Calling SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) to raid your home after trolling you online as a final form of harassment. Imagine after publishing a political article, being in bed and your door is suddenly smashed open. Heavily armed men come in screaming because they think you are a drug dealer or the new bin Laden. What if someone hacked and planted evidence supporting this on your computer?
For one of the world’s premier news websites at the time, they called the US government and Interpol. The servers were taken, the sites shut down. No crimes were prosecuted but the accusation was enough to take it down.
The people doing the work get paid by how much measurable damage they do. This is known as cyber privateering. The people and companies that get hired and paid based on the damage they do to the publication or journalist in question.
They work for different countries. Ukraine has over 40,000 volunteers across the globe as well as paid professionals like Weisburd and Harding attacking American alternative media websites.
Within one month of writing that the Weisburd/Harding inspired “Peacemaker” was a kill list, the first journalist targeted using Aaron Weisburd’s method was Olez Buzina.
Weisburd doesn’t get paid to follow people. After stalking and collecting information his method hasn’t changed since the beginning. “Weisburd has not merely “dismantled” websites. He has harassed individuals engaged in perfectly legal online dissent, threatened their family members, harassed their employers, and harassed their web hosts. He regularly uses lies, disinformation and threats to accomplish these goals. Weisburd decides what is “threatening.”
gheliasonpic2
Within a short time of writing how news websites were going to be hacked, the hacking started.
Who is paying for the new McCarthyism? It’s the same people that paid for the real fake news throughout the election cycle and were the strongest large group supporters of Hillary Clinton of course.
Let’s start with groups that are worried about deportation. Let’s talk about the Muslims. Before we do, I’ll remind you of my perspective on Muslims. It should be clear after writing “Tomi Lahren- It’s Not the Muslims Stupid!”
One of the largest Islamic groups in the US supporting Hillary Clinton are the Gulenites. The Gulenites are Islamic-fascists whose political roots are like every other group listed Waffen SS nationalists. They are so entwined in Congress right now that they were given a free pass while trying to commit a coup against a NATO partner. They are also one of the largest media operations in the world today. Gulen is also financially supportive of ISIS through the Muslim Brotherhood.

On Oct. 6, Sabah, the main pro-government paper, came out with a front-page headline “Himmet paralari Clinton’a gitti,” which translates as “Religious donations [referring to Gulenists in this context] went to Clinton.”

As a result, a majority of Turks in Turkey seem to support Trump, while a majority of Turks in the United States support Clinton, wrote Mahmut Ovur in Sabah. He added that the close relationship between Clinton and the Gulenists is not just of a financial nature, but like in Turkey, the Gulenists’ infiltration goes to “Clinton’s main arteries.”

Gülen believed that if Clinton was elected president, he would never be extradited to Turkey and that the pressure on President Erdogan would increase. Donald Trump has already made moves for his extradition back to Turkey.
According to retired Lt. General Michael Flynn:

It is unconscionable to militate against Turkey, our NATO ally, as Washington is hoodwinked by this masked source of terror and instability nestled comfortably in our own backyard in Pennsylvania.”

The Albanians and Kosovars are just as nervous. Without Clinton in the presidency, foreign policy may allow a fair trial that hangs Clinton’s long time friend Kosovar president Hashim Thaci for crimes against humanity.
Hussam Ayloush, long-time head of CAIR’s Los Angeles office, will help awaken the press to CAIR’s true Islamist identity. Ayloush wrote:
That second line is Arabic (“الشعب يريد إسقاط النظام‎‎”) for “The people wants to bring down the regime.”
In other words, Ayloush unambiguously and directly called for the overthrow of the U.S. government.
unnamed
We can’t forget the Syrian American Council who, like Ahmed Chalabi won Iraq, will rule an Islamic State in Syria if ISIS wins against Assad. The brotherhood between the Syrian American Council and the Ukrainian American UCCA go back to WWII.

Nobody believes in it. You’re like, ‘f*ck this,'” a former Green Beret says of America’s covert and clandestine programs to train and arm Syrian militias. “Everyone on the ground knows they are jihadis. No one on the ground believes in this mission or this effort, and they know they are just training the next generation of jihadis, so they are sabotaging it by saying, ‘f*ck it, who cares?”…”I don’t want to be responsible for Nusra guys saying they were trained by Americans,” the Green Beret added.

As you can see the two fascist entities have a long history together. This brings us back to Joel Harding and Aaron Weisburd that hate terrorism but support ISIS, especially in Ukraine. In June 2016 Joel Harding was commissioned with updating Ukraine’s information policy. At the same time, he tried to forward one to the US Congress. Given the fact you can be shot if you disagree with the Ukrainian government, I wonder what he turned over to the US.

I need to give a brief bit of history before proceeding, about the Ministry of Information Policy
(abbreviated MIP). The MIP was founded on 2 December 2014. Shortly after I was contacted and I produced a “National Information Strategy for Ukraine” on their behalf.
After various corrections, I submitted the last version on 2 January 2014. It was apparent, however, that their interest was in cyber only, which is only one of many aspects of ‘information operations’…were accompanied by a long-time friend of mine, Christina (I do not have permission to use her last name, yet, I am protecting her)…That, plus I have worked, quite literally, for years with Christina, to educate as many as possible of Russia’s treacherous nature and actions.” Joel Harding

I’m going to come back to the phrase “cyber only.” Before going to Washington DC and meeting Harding, the Rada members were obliged to stop in Albany, New York followed by a community meet-and-greet event at the Ukrainian-American Citizens Club, located in Watervliet, New York.
Accompanying the four national deputies was Krystyna V. Dobrovolska, a U.S. Embassy-assigned government liaison and translator who escorted the delegates from Kyiv during their visits to Albany and Washington. She is the Christina that Joel mentioned working with, and is an emigre nationalist from Canada. She among other things writes at NBC.
The Watervliet Ukrainian-American Citizen’s Club is owned by Nestor Paslawsky, the nephew of Mikola Lebed, OUNb leader. It was his family that they were there to meet. And it is his family’s influence as OUNb leaders that professor Moytl states Russian President Vladimir Putin needs to be afraid of. Consider the fact that they now control CEE (Central & Eastern European) countries. The CEE is composed of 18 emigre nations that are putting their resources behind Ukraine and the UCCA (OUNb).

The second reason I mention Paslawsky is that he was, after all, a Ukrainian-American. In killing him—and make no mistake about it: Putin killed him—Putin has taken on, in addition to the entire world, the Ukrainian American diaspora. He probably thinks it’s a joke. But in killing a Ukrainian American, he’s made the war in Ukraine personal for Ukrainian Americans. Their intellectual, material, and political resources are far greater than Putin can imagine. Be forewarned, Vlad: diasporas have long memories. And this one will give you and your apologists in Russia and the West no rest.” Alexander Moytl

In other words, the OUNb and the Paslawsky’s will not rest until they have exhausted US resources in a hot war with Russia.
Andrij Dobriansky is a spokesman for the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America. It is an umbrella group for about a million Ukrainian-Americans, which is supposed to remain nonpartisan campaigned for Clinton because the OUNb (nazi-political ideology) of the UCCA was deathly afraid that Trump would force Ukraine to act like a civilized democratic country.
Someone should probably tell Weisburd and Harding that Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, wants to help ISIS militants take revenge against Russian forces in Syria “in accordance with Sharia law.”
In another statement from Gerashchenko, he recently threatened president-elect Donald Trump that he would put him on his
“Peacemaker” site as a target. The same has been done with Silvio Berscaloni in the past.
This means they are attacking US citizens for a foreign government, their property, reputation, and income because they are journalists and publishers. Harding and Weisburd also currently work for a country that threatened an elected president. In March 2015, when the Verkhovna Rada passed a law in 2383 which made it legal for Ukraine to hunt down and eliminate anyone that disagreed with the regime across the entire world.
In March 2015, I wrote an article about the beginning of an invasion scale info war being prepared and what to expect in the US against journalists and publications. At the time, one of the people standing behind the people at propornot noted that this was the definition of Propaganda in use “The word is frequently used to describe any news emerging from one’s opponent.”
Going further he stated:

As she said, and I am paraphrasing for my purposes, the vast majority of peaceful people are irrelevant…The official US government view on free speech is ‘It is also important that US citizens enjoy their freedom of speech and their unique ability to voice their own opinions. This portrays a vibrant democracy and further aids to combat oppressive governments.’…About this last paragraph, this is a source of frustration for me, personally. I believe this is, perhaps, an overly altruistic statement.

His reason is that free speech causes information fratricide. Free speech makes the IIO at best difficult and at worst impossible. To counter this a top-down disinformation charter needed to be established and “rival” media from Al-Jazeera, BBC, and beyond needed to get together and create a charter of what was acceptable behavior. Media organizations which practice conscious deception defined as propaganda were to be excluded from the community.
Today he is saying:

We also must restrict fake news sites, fake news, and their spread on social media and elsewhere. Detractors will cite the first amendment, but the issue is national security, so preventing information designed to undermine our freedom more than justifies such a law.”

The above list of emigre organizations is far from complete. These articles link over 20 emigre groups that were stakeholders in foreign policy if Clinton won. They want to keep control of the old countries from America and decide who there is worthy of living. An overview of this history shows they have been belligerent and committed atrocity to the people they are supposed to represent.
Add to this the 187 Soros groups and you have a media frenzy out to destroy what should have been an easy election for them if it were not for alternative media stepping up and playing a role by reporting facts.
The onslaught journalism is facing won’t stop unless these groups are rooted out of Congress. They supply so much graft that when one group of congressmen came under investigation, the investigators had to let them go because they were guilty on another count. Look at the Gulen articles above.
This brings us to the 3rd part of the IIO which is still to come. Protest the inauguration if you must. It is your right, no caveat there. But be aware the same minds that killed so many in Kiev and across Syria are looking to start the same kind for upheaval in the USA.
Inside Soros 187 groups are groups that to find out about you need to look at documents that have a “Nazi war crime disclosure act” release attached to them.
One group called Common Cause is translated Spilna Sprava in Ukrainian. They pushed crowds into the police so the police thought they were being attacked and threw Molotov cocktails in Kiev.
These people are fighting for the survival of WWII Axis ideologies in America and if they win, America loses. People that support ISIS, Pravy Sektor, Al-Nusra, and pick your bad guy are crying foul the loudest right now. They are fighting to keep their influence and to be able to influence governments abroad. Just be aware of who is next to you.
Should they win and gain policy positions or keep their hold on Congress through gifts and graft, the publication you are reading this in will probably be shuttered. The amazing journalism of the last year won’t be allowed to happen again. It’s been labeled information fratricide and therefore propaganda.


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Sheek
Sheek
Dec 27, 2016 8:16 AM

Can someone explain why the great patriot, Joel Harding, is so ashamed of his military rank of staff sergeant?

Roland
Roland
Dec 3, 2016 6:05 PM

Amazing and despicable that Watervliet, whose Watervliet Arsenal machined the cannons that helped defeat the Nazis in WWII, should host this cadre of neo-Nazis whose cannons in fact, fought.

Peter
Peter
Dec 3, 2016 10:18 AM

A pity this article is written in such a confusing way. Who is Silvio Berscaloni? This is all a bit new to me, and Eliason assumes knowledge I personally don’t have. It would be helpful to have a clearer breakdown for dummies.
That said, there clearly is a propaganda war going on. What I’m worried about is that access to alternative (like this one) and ‘enemy’ (like RT) news sites may eventually be shut down.

paul
paul
Dec 10, 2016 7:04 PM
Reply to  Peter

Peter, there is a thing called the internet.
On the internet there are websites called ‘search engines’.
You could use a basic one like GOOGLE.COM
You put in a term or set of words and push enter.
Then a list of related websites regarding the subject you entered will come back.
You can then read about the subject.
Point is, is you don’t know who Silvio Berscaloni is now in 2016 perhaps you just stay with television.

BigB
BigB
Dec 1, 2016 12:35 PM

#fakenews – Busted: Guardian added to PropOrNot website.
Just read the latest article by Washington ‘useful idiot’ George Monbiot. Using clever sleight of hand – he seeks to disinform – telling us not to be worried about “invented stories” about “Hillary selling arms to Islamic State.”
Except that HRC did oversee a $29bn arms deal to Saudi Arabia (source-IBT) – the Clinton Foundation did receive $10-25m in donations from the Saudis (source-NYT) – Boeing (the largest benefactor of the contract) did contribute $900k to her Foundation (source-WaPo) – HRC did latterly admit knowledge of Saudi and Qatari funding of IS:-
(“to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, >> which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL” – extract from Podesta email 3774 – source-Wikileaks)
Whilst not direct support – there is a despicable ‘menage a trois’ between the ‘state sponsors’ and the terrorists – a fetid stink that Monbiot seeks to cover.
Nice try George – but these facts were NOT made up by bored 16yr olds in Macedonia (see his Guardian article)
I hope you spent your 30 pieces of silver well.

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Nov 30, 2016 6:34 PM

And here I thought it was all just a tempest in a teapot . . . and I was taking heart from the fact that such ‘alt-media kill lists’ were being compiled as a measure of how effective the alt-media were becoming at disseminating ‘facts.’
So blogging isn’t such a waste of time after all . . . Information matters. I mean, if it promises to get nasty(-er) and all . . .
But fuck ’em, eh, and just carry on as if you haven’t noticed you’ve pissed anyone off although by all means do flatter yourself if you have. And I wish them good luck on ‘their’ intimidation tactics. Not everyone will bend.

BigB
BigB
Nov 30, 2016 5:21 PM

In case you do not think and act as a model citizen on the web they want – there is a provision in law – the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) – that Obama smuggled through – like a Patriot Act 2.0 – without the anthrax though nearly as toxic.
This nefarious bill – that even Bush would not sign – which even the NSA claimed it did not want – extended the Panopticon of the surveillance industrial complex by allowing the sharing of information with private corporations – and the searching thereof without warrant.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-12-18/congress-just-passed-second-patriot-act-and-nobody-noticed-how-cisa-became-law
That was last year, in America of course.
We have a much more robust and democratic parliamentary process in the UK. We would not get Her Majesty’s Opposition voting with the Tories to pass such a law here – would we now?
Now, as the Investigatory Powers Act passes Royal Assent – thanks to our SIGINT (14 eyes intelligence sharing) partners – we are well on the way to borderless, warrantless surveillance and intelligence sharing across three continents.
Thanks Labour. (Oh, you got the Trade Unions excluded – well done!)
The message seems to be clear – we are watching you. Be informed and influenced – or else.
I say – #f_ck you!

Kathleen Lowrey
Kathleen Lowrey
Nov 30, 2016 4:59 PM

Does Indymedia not still exist?

manfromatlan
manfromatlan
Nov 30, 2016 6:27 PM

Yes, though it doesn’t have the same reach it once did. https://www.indymedia.org/or/index.shtml