Lessons from Europes Fight Against Russian Disinformation

[Sunlei]

By Dana Priest July 24, 2017

The security police, like the F.B.I. in the United States, conduct counterintelligence, which mainly involves trying to uncover and stop Russian interference in the nation’s affairs. Ever since Latvia regained its independence, in 1991, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia has used spies, Latvian turncoats, blackmail, bribery, surveillance, and other skullduggery to stir up trouble, Normunds Mežviets, the director-general of the security police, told me during an interview. For at least ten years, Russia has also employed the Web to spread disinformation about Latvian society, in an effort to weaken citizens’ support for European unity and for their democratic form of government, he said.

Despite the headquarters’ décor, much has changed there, as I discovered when I visited, this spring, while reporting a story for the Washington Post on how Europe is handling Russian disinformation. To fight online troublemaking, Mežviets and his officers have become experts in the business of the news media. They know the owners and journalists of prominent television stations and newspapers. They also make it their business to know even the tiniest and most amateur Russian-language Web sites that pop up in the Latvian news sphere. When the officers spot even a discreet change in the Russian-language sites, they investigate those, too. By now, Mežviets has learned so much about the media that sometimes he sounds more like a journalism professor than a national-security officer. “It’s very important that normal media use really credible sources,” he told me in his office.

Viewing the professional media as a strategic asset, the pipeline through which credible information travels, had never occurred to me in my thirty-five years as a reporter. But it is certainly the view of authoritarian governments and those transitioning to authoritarianism. The Chinese Communist Party maintains political power in part by controlling the information that citizens read, hear, and watch, and by imprisoning journalists whose work challenges the political status quo. The Russian President Vladimir Putin suffocated independent television and then built up a vast new state-run cultural, entertainment, and news apparatus to substitute as the main pipeline through which most Russians are informed about their neighbors and country.

In every nation on Earth where the government is moving from a participatory to an authoritarian form of rule, seizing the information pipeline is a prerequisite for staying in power. The general turned President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi did it in Egypt, by imprisoning dozens of journalists and censoring news about the military not provided by his own government. President Recep Erdoğan’s Turkish prisons now hold nearly one-third of all the journalists imprisoned in the world. “The people that claim to be journalists are not there because of their work as journalists but because of their links to terrorism,” an officer at the Turkish Embassy said recently.



http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/lessons-from-europes-fight-against-russian-disinformation