dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

A secret effort to influence the 2017 Senate election in Alabama used tactics inspired by Russian disinformation teams, including the creation of fake accounts to deliver misleading messages on Facebook to hundreds of thousands of voters to help elect Democrat Doug Jones in the deeply red state, according to a document obtained by The Washington Post.

But unlike the 2016 presidential campaign when Russians worked to help elect Donald Trump, the people behind the Alabama effort — dubbed Project Birmingham — were Americans. Now Democratic operatives and a research firm known to have had roles in Project Birmingham are distancing themselves from its most controversial tactics.

Jones’s narrow, upset victory over Republican Roy Moore in all likelihood resulted from other factors, political analysts say. Moore spent much of the special-election campaign battling reports in The Post that he had decades earlier made unwanted sexual advances toward teenage girls.

Recent revelations about Project Birmingham, however, have shocked Democrats in Alabama and Washington. And news of the effort has underscored the warnings of disinformation experts who long have said that threats to honest, transparent political discourse in the age of social media are as likely to be domestic as foreign.

As the scandal has expanded, with calls for federal and state investigations and Facebook also conducting a review, the tactics described in the Project Birmingham document have come under intense scrutiny. Those included a “false flag” effort that generated phony evidence that automated Russian accounts called bots had supported Moore on Twitter and the creation of a misleading Facebook page, aimed at Alabama conservatives, that sought to undermine Moore by encouraging them to vote for a rival Republican through a write-in campaign.

But all those who have acknowledged playing a role in Project Birmingham have denied knowing the full extent of the activities described in the document.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/secret-campaign-to-use-russian-inspired-tactics-in-2017-alabama-election-stirs-anxiety-for-democrats/2019/01/06/58803f26-0400-11e9-8186-4ec26a485713_story.html

'Integrity Initiative' - New Documents From Shady NGO Released

The British Government runs an anti-Russian smear campaign through the pseudo non-government-organization Integrity Initiative. Some person, operating under the 'Anonymous' label, obtained internal papers of the Initiative and publishes those in several batches. Moon of Alabama was one of the first sites that analyzed the released papers.

Our last piece on the Initiative concluded:

After reading through all the released Initiative papers and lists one gets the impression of a secret military intelligence operation, disguised as a public NGO. Financed by millions of government money the Institute for Statecraft and the Integrity Initiative work under a charity label to create and disseminate disinformation to the global public and back into the government and military itself.

Today the Anonymous account released a new batch of some 50 internal Integrity Initiative documents at the Cyber Guerrilla website.

With the new release Anonymous lays out a timeline that connects the Skripal affair in Britain with the activities and personal of the Integrity Initiative. Our last piece had already drawn the Skripal connection to the Initiative, but some of the new documents add to the trail.

The trail starts with a document (pdf), written in January 2015(!), that lays out a plan and options for sanctioning Russia.

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/01/integrity-initiative-new-documents-from-shady-ngo-released.html