Russian Trolls and the 2016 U.S. Election Campaign

I noticed some time ago that Conservatives on the Internet social media sites could
not spell English language words and I began to think they were all home-schooled. 

Maybe that was part of the reason, but it is now clear that there were Russians trolling

American social media and they simply hadn't learned English completely. Russians

trolls, on the other hand, know a lot of cuss words! 

The Russian hacking of our 2016 presidential campaigns and their involvement in the

public debate about politics and their use of fake news stories has been brazen and

unprecedented.

 
The intelligence community report, issued today 1/6/17, indicates they have done this

elsewhere in the world and to some lesser extent here, but for this election they upped

their game and picked a candidate to back: Donald Trump. They used several techniques

to try and convince our voters that Hillary wasn't healthy or male enough to be

president. Why? 

Apparently Vladimir Putin was afraid of Hillary, hated her for pointing out that in 2011

the Russian election wasn't kosher. It appears Donald Trump isn't the only person

worried about the validity of his election results and confirmation. 
 

In this article I'm going to provide a handful of links to websites with articles about

relevant things. Most of these are not very long, but the New York Times article and

the intelligence  community report will take a little time to read. I present them in an

order which may be of most use to the reader. We begin with a prism and a new

Russian law... 

America's NSA Prism surveillance system:
made public in 2007, but probably created earlier


In America our NSA has used a program called Prism to collect information from
telephone or digital information networks. They have to find information about
or from the enemies of America.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)



In Russia they have something similar. They began by changing their law in 1995:


1995


SORM - Wikipedia 



The Russians decided they needed to spy on us and even to influence our thinking
on various subjects.


PRISM just gave Russia a great excuse to step up its war on social networks — Quartz



The New York Times investigated The IRA -- the Internet Research Agency


The Agency - The New York Times (longish, but thorough)




Here are a couple of other stories about the Russian Internet Trolls


Internet Research Agency 


Trolls from Olgino - Wikipedia


Invasion of the troll armies: ‘Social media where the war goes on’ 

Russia launches a 'troll factory'



Then Russia decided to become very active and created fake news stories:


Why are Russian trolls spreading online hoaxes in the U.S.?



While a few years ago Russia was not always seen as an arch-enemy, Vladimir Putin is trying his hardest to get attention -- not unlike a 5-year-old throwing a fit. Russia doesn't have the power and resources the Soviet Union has, but apparently Putin hasn't learned to down-size his ego. The trouble is that they still have nuclear bombs. How can anyone deal with such a problem "child"?