Davin News Server

I guess they haven't heard... Putin's pulling for Harris.

Russia's 2024 Election Interference Has Already Begun

Moscow Is Spreading Disinformation About Joe Biden And Other Democrats To Lessen U.S. Military Aid To Ukraine 
And U.S. Support For NATO, Former U.S. Officials And Cyber Experts Say.

Russia is already spreading disinformation in advance of the 2024 election, using fake online accounts and 
bots to damage President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats, according to former U.S. officials and cyber 
experts. 

The dissemination of attacks on Biden is part of a continuing effort by Moscow to undercut American military 
aid to Ukraine and U.S. support for and solidarity with NATO, experts said.

A similar effort is underway in Europe. France, Germany and Poland said this month that Russia has launched a 
barrage of propaganda to try to influence European parliamentary elections in June.

With Donald Trump opposing U.S. aid to Ukraine and claiming that he once warned a NATO leader that he would 
"encourage" Russia to attack a NATO ally if it didn't pay its share in defense spending, the potential 
rewards for Russian President Vladimir Putin are high, according to Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at the 
Alliance for Securing Democracy of the German Marshall Fund.

"Not that they didn't have an incentive to interfere in the last two presidential elections," said Schafer, 
who tracks disinformation efforts by Russia and other regimes. "But I would say that the incentive to 
interfere is heightened right now."

Biden's national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said Sunday on NBC News' "Meet the Press" that there's 
"plenty of reason to be concerned" about Russia's trying to interfere in the 2024 election but that he 
couldn't discuss evidence related to it. He added: "We're going to be vigilant about that."

U.S. officials and experts are most concerned that Russia could try to interfere in the election through a 
"deepfake" audio or video using artificial intelligence tools or through a "hack and leak," such as the 
politically damaging theft of internal Democratic Party emails by Russian military intelligence operatives in 
2016. 

The type of pro-Russia online propaganda campaigns that thrived on Twitter and Facebook ahead of the 2016 
U.S. presidential election is now routine on every major social media platform, though it's rare for 
individual accounts to go as viral now as they once did.

Those influence operations often create matching accounts on multiple sites, which vary drastically in their 
moderation policies. Accounts from one pro-Russia campaign that Meta, the owner of Facebook, cracked down on 
late last year, an English-language news influencer persona called "People Say," are still live on other 
platforms, though some are dormant. 
US-NEWS-SC-PRIMARY-CROSSOVER-VOTERS-1-MB
Donald Trump claimed at a rally in South Carolina on Feb. 10 that he once warned a NATO leader that he would 
"encourage" Russia to attack a NATO ally if it didn't pay its fair share in defense spending. Jason Lee / The 
Sun News/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

A "People Say" account on X is still visible, but it has only 51 followers and hasn't posted in almost a 
year. Its counterpart on Telegram, which has become a home for some Americans on the far right, is still 
actively posting divisive content and has almost 5,000 subscribers. 
A perfect storm

Moscow and its proxies have long sought to exploit divisions in American society. But experts and former U.S. 
officials said Trump's false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, the country's deepening political 
polarization and sharp cuts in disinformation and election integrity teams at X and other platforms provide 
fertile ground to spread confusion, division and chaos. 
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"In many ways it's a perfect storm of opportunity for them," said Paul Kolbe, who worked for 25 years in the 
CIA's Directorate of Operations and is now a fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International 
Affairs. "I think, for a lot of reasons, we will see the same approach, but amplified and, I think, with some 
of the constraints that you might have seen taken off."

In the 2022 midterm elections, Russia primarily targeted the Democratic Party to weaken U.S. support for 
Ukraine, as it most likely blames Biden for forging a unified Western alliance backing Kyiv, according to a 
recently released U.S. intelligence assessment.

In what appears to be an effort to deepen divisions, Russia has amplified the political dispute between the 
Biden administration and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott over security at the Texas border over the past month. 
Russian politicians, bloggers, state media and bots have promoted the idea that America is headed to a new 
"civil war."

It was a quintessential move by a Russian regime with a long tradition of trying to manipulate existing 
political rifts, like immigration, to its advantage, experts said.

But there's so far no sign that Russia's disinformation operation in Texas has had any significant impact, 
said Emerson Brooking, a senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council.

"So far, Russian operations targeting the U.S. have been opportunistic. They see whatever narrative is rising 
to the top, and they try to push it," Brooking said. "Disinformation isn't created in a vacuum. The more 
polarized a country is, the easier it is for foreign actors to infiltrate and hijack its political 
processes."
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House GOP duped by 'Russian disinformation propaganda,' Raskin says
06:06
The artificial intelligence threat

The bigger Russian threat to the 2024 election, Brooking and other experts said, could prove to be artificial 
intelligence-created fake audio.

An orchestrated deepfake or leak may not unfold on the national stage; instead, it could target a 
particularly crucial swing state or district, experts said. It might aim to discourage some voters from going 
to the polls or sow distrust about the accuracy of ballot counting.

The most likely disinformation scenario will be "hyper-personalized, localized attacks," said Miles Taylor, a 
senior Trump administration homeland security official who has warned of the risks of another Trump 
presidency.

Deepfake audio, which is easy to create and difficult to detect, has been used in recent elections in 
multiple countries. In the U.S. last month, a fake Joe Biden robocall told New Hampshire Democrats not to 
vote in the state's primary. In the United Kingdom in November, a fake audio of London Mayor Sadiq Khan 
called for pro-Palestinian marches.

And two days before Slovakia's parliamentary elections in September, a fake audio clip purported to show the 
leader of a pro-Western political party discussing how to rig the election. The audio was eventually 
debunked, and it's unclear what effect it had on the election. But a pro-Russia party opposing aid to Ukraine 
won the most votes.

While an emerging cottage industry claims that software can identify whether audio or video is authentic or a 
deepfake, such programs are often wrong.
Past Russian efforts

Alleged Russian information operations against Ukraine over the past two years open a window into some of the 
Kremlin's tactics.

A study published Wednesday by the Slovakian cybersecurity company ESET found that a pro-Russia campaign has 
been spamming Ukrainians with false and dispiriting emails about the war with claims of heating and food 
shortages.

In a coordinated effort near the start of Russia's invasion in 2022, cyberattacks temporarily knocked key 
Ukrainian websites offline, while residents received spam texts telling them that ATMs in the country were 
down. 
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in United States
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with President Joe Biden during his visit to Washington on Dec. 
12.Ukrainian Presidency / Anadolu via Getty Images

Other apparent Russian efforts to sow division are much simpler.

Last year, celebrities who sell personalized videos on the website Cameo, including Priscilla Presley, Mike 
Tyson and Elijah Wood, were tricked into inadvertently recording messages that denigrated two major enemies 
of the Kremlin, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Moldovan President Maia Sandu.

The messages were overlaid with text falsely claiming that the celebrities were calling for those leaders to 
step down. Representatives for Wood and Presley said the celebrities recorded the videos thinking they were 
helping a fan with addiction. A representative for Tyson said the videos of him were fake.
In the American mainstream

In the U.S., though, Russia's propaganda themes are now often echoed in comments from some Republican 
lawmakers and pro-Trump commentators, including the portrayal of Ukraine's government as deeply corrupt.

The adoption of Russian state rhetoric in America's political debate is a victory for Moscow, experts said. 
Putin's goal is to spread doubt and division among Americans. 

"An equally nice outcome for them is just what we had last time, where a third of the country doesn't believe 
the vote," Schafer said. "Democracy is questioned; the system gets questioned. So they don't necessarily need 
to see their guy win to have it be a good outcome for them."

It remains extraordinarily difficult for a remote cyberattack to take over voting systems in the U.S. and 
change vote counts. The American intelligence assessment of the 2022 midterms found no indication that Russia 
had tried to hack into election systems or ballot counting that year. 

But Kolbe, the former CIA directorate of operations official, said the Kremlin would most likely see trying 
to penetrate U.S. voting systems as a low-risk undertaking.

"I don't see any reason why they wouldn't," he said. "You'd be hard-pressed to find where they would see the 
risk part of the equation. It gets close to zero."
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Microsoft's Satya Nadella on AI and potential election interference
00:56

Such interference could come with plausible deniability. On the day of the 2022 midterm elections, the 
Mississippi secretary of state's website, which hosts the official polling place finder for voters in 
Mississippi, was knocked offline most of the day after pro-Kremlin hacktivists on Telegram called for 
supporters to join in a low-level cyberattack against it.

Still, U.S. officials and disinformation analysts say Russia's ability to manipulate voters shouldn't be 
overstated. When it comes to spreading disinformation and fueling distrust in election authorities and 
election results, the biggest threat comes from within America's fractured, polarized society, not from the 
outside.

"I am very skeptical, whether it's 2016 or 2024, that the United States political and media culture needs any 
push from Russia," said Gavin Wilde, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who 
specializes in Russia and information warfare.

"The Kremlin has every interest in seeing an American public, or American leadership, that's less inclined to 
support Ukraine, that's less inclined to punish Russia. Those incentives are certainly there," he said. "But 
we're already doing a pretty good job of that at home. I don't know how much of a nudge the Kremlin thinks it 
needs to lend it."

==============================================================================

And YOU want THIS to be President:
https://youtu.be/WzSBm4CaWPM

https://www.skynews.com.au/world-news/us-vice-president-kamala-harris-attempts-to-explain-ai-in-latest-word-
salad-gaffe-kind-of-a-fancy-thing/news-story/96539b79b23be7b45ba66db72c5fbd34

"This is the most election of our lifetime."

I can imagine what can be and be unburdened by what has been. You know?

What can be unburdened by what has been.

There are those who are unable to see what can be.

But there are many more who are able to see what can be unburdened by what has been.

Remember Venn diagrams, those three circles? Right.

And then let's just see where they overlap.

You will not be surprised because I have constructed a Venn diagram on this. 

Remember those three circles, how they overlap?

I love Venn diagrams. So, I just do.

Whenever you're dealing with conflict, pull out a Venn diagram. Right?

And so, you know, the three circles.

Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country. 
Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So, basically, 
that's wrong.

I am Kamala Harris. My pronouns are she, her, hers. My pronouns sitting at the table wearing a blue suit.

"We invested an additional $12 billion into community banks, because we know community banks are in the 
community, and understand the needs and desires of that community as well as the talent and capacity of 
community."

"We also recognize just as it has been in the United States, for Jamaica, one of the issues that has been 
presented as an issue that is economic in the way of its impact has been the pandemic. So to that end, we are 
announcing today also that we will assist Jamaica in COVID recovery by assisting in terms of the recovery 
efforts in Jamaica that have been essential to, I believe, what is necessary to strengthen not only the issue 
of public health but also the economy."

"It's time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day."

"I think that, to be very honest with you, I do believe that we should have rightly believed, but we 
certainly believe that certain issues are just settled. Certain issues are just settled."