On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the Eastern bloc was in shambles, but the USSR was still standing with Mikhail Gorbachev at the helm. Vladimir Putin dabbled in minor corruption working for the Mayor of Saint Petersburg, which had just been renamed from Leningrad. The KGB meddled in other countries' affairs as usual, spreading "fake news" and helping leftist politicians to win elections with no objections from the Western mainstream media.
Very few people feared or believed the Communists any longer, ridiculing their institutions and their lying media. A typical political joke at the time was about a man who always complained that Communists had run out of everything - food, toilet paper, consumer goods, and so on. So the KGB brought him to their office and tried to explain that the country was going through historic changes and we all needed to be patient. "You should be thankful this isn't the old days when you could be shot," the KGB officer said, pointing a finger to his head. To which the man responded, "Ah, so you've also run out of bullets."How the Collapse of the USSR Felt from the Inside. A reflection by a witness 25 years later courtesy of Masha Gessen who wrote Faceless Man : biography of Putin
HAPPY NEW YEAR TO EVERYONE, even the losers, haters, and enemies ...
Back in the 1980s, when the KGB was pumping all kinds of outlandish conspiracy theories into Western media outlets to smear the Reagan administration, Washington got proficient at countering this sort of nasty deception (the Pentagon created AIDS, for instance). The Active Measures Working Group, an interagency entity stood up expressly to debunk Kremlin lies, became effective at its job, drawing on expertise from various government departments and agencies. With Cold War victory, however, it folded along with the Soviet Union Sinking: Remember That Cold War River Story ...
GRIZZLY STEPPE – Russian Malicious Cyber Activity (PDF) DHS, NCCIC, FBI. Kudos for the virulently viral ALL CAPS code name. Here’s a confidence builder. Boilerplate, no doubt, but:Wat: “RT, Bloomberg and NY Mag all have stories on this. Bloomberg and NYM anatomize the ‘Russian hacks’ as if Craig Murray had never been born. RT debunks the forensics of attribution, but still doesn’t mention Murray. Bloomberg’s supine attitude incontrovertibly indicated by ‘intelligence agencies had high confidence that the Russian government was behind the hacking’ language in last graph. (See Russia’s ‘Grizzly Steppe’ Cyberattacks Started Simply, U.S. Says Bloomberg v. Report on ‘Russian hacking’ offers disclaimers, barely mentions Russia RT.)What The Russian Hacking Report DOESN’T Say Washington’s BlogStatement by the President on Actions in Response to Russian Malicious Cyber Activity and Harassmentwhitehouse.gov. “[A]ggressive harassment of U.S. officials and cyber operations aimed at the U.S. election” via “data theft and disclosure activities.” It’s not clear to me why the DNC would come under the heading of “U.S. officials and cyber operations,” given that the Democrat Party is a private organization (as we were repeatedly informed by Clinton operatives in their defense of closed primaries).WORLD WAR THREE, BY MISTAKE New YorkerObama hits back for Russia hack, but leaves top spy off the hook Michael Isikoff, Yahoo News
