IMAGE: Dmitri Lovetsky / AP file
President Donald Trump personally aproved a US military cyber operation that blocked internet access for a “Russian troll farm” during the 2018 midterm election, NBC News reported on February 27 citing “multiple sources”.
“The action by U.S. Cyber Command against the Internet Research Agency (IRA) — first reported Tuesday by The Washington Post — marks the most aggressive known move to date by the Trump administration to combat Russian election interference.
The IRA has been charged by special counsel Robert Mueller with interfering in the 2016 election. Financed by a Kremlin-connected oligarch, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the St. Peterburg-based company employed Russians who posed as Americans on social media and sought to sow division in U.S. politics by launching and amplifying extreme messages at the far ends of the political spectrum, according to federal prosecutors.
U.S. Cyber Command, working with intelligence gathered by the National Security Agency, shut down internet access at the facility in the hours before the 2018 midterms and for a few days afterward, the sources said,” NBC News report reads.
NBC News went even further and claimed that “employees of the IRA complained to their IT department about the disruption”. According to the report, the cyber operation against the IRA was part of a larger effort by Cyber Command “to strike against attempts to interfere in U.S. politics ahead of the midterm elections.”
The NBC News report comes in the framework of the “Russian meddling” narrative, whch has become popular in US media over the past few years. It’s especially interesting that the report claimed that Trump had personally ordered a miltiary cyber attack against a Russian “troll farm”. This claim itself challegens the US military and cybercapabilities around the globe. It’s hard to assume that one of Turmp counterparts, for example Xi Jinping, would give a personal order to carry out a cyber attack on some private “troll farm” in the US.
Gotta shut down the Russian troll farms. Otherwise the American and Israeli troll farms can’t do their work.
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