The Rise of Weaponized Flak in the New Media Era. Brian Michael Goss

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СКАЧАТЬ accounts were compromised, Russian military intelligence stole documents, logged keystrokes, and made screen shots of Clinton campaign workers’ computers. All of this was undertaken by a “tier one” threat, eager to weaponize the information it was gathering to flak against its disfavored candidate. Toward this strategic end, “By in or around June 2016,” Russia’s GRU had “gained access to approximately 33 DNC [Democratic Party National Committee] computers” (Mueller, 2018, p. 10).

      In line with a flak strategy, the stolen communications were subjected to “stage releases” for political impact at crucial intervals of the 2016 campaign. The objective was “to interfere” with the election—and to do so in ways that flaked Clinton to Trump’s advantage (Mueller, 2018, p. 2). Document dumps of the pilfered materials were made through “fictitious online persons”—Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks—in order to conceal Russia’s hand. Mueller’s indictment notes that GRU agents “created the online persona Guccifer 2.0” that was “falsely claimed to be a lone Romanian hacker” (2018, p. 14). DCLeaks, launched in June 2018, was proclaimed with similar speciousness to have been “started by a group of ‘American hacktivists’ when it was in fact started by the [GRU] Conspirators” (2018, p. 13). In both cases, the GRU fronts were designed to exude the “white hat” prestige of being concerned (h)ac(k)tivists. DCLeaks’ hashtag was subsequently used to organize flash mobs against Clinton as well as to post images from #BlacksAgainstHillary in an attempt to demobilize a core Democratic Party constituency.

      GRU also employed these fronts to recruit other players to spread the hacked booty and damage Clinton’s campaign: “the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, transferred approximately 2.5 gigabytes of data stolen from the DNCC [Democratic Party National Congressional Committee] to a then-registered state lobbyist and online source of political news” (2018, p. 16). Through the Guccifer 2.0 persona, GRU shared its ill-begotten wares with ←14 | 15→two reporters and “a person who was in regular contact with senior members of the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump” (2018, p. 16). The stolen booty was also shared with an organization named in the indictment as “Organization 1,” understood to be WikiLeaks. In turn, Mueller’s indictment cites communications between GRU/Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks about how to make the pilfered material “have a much a higher impact” (2018, p. 18)—a central flak objective since flak, by definition, does not seek to “inform” but to delegitimize and disable.

      WikiLeaks made good on its promise for impact through timing. It released a tranche of GRU-stolen materials three days before the Democratic Party convention in July 2016. The timing furnished enough news cycles before the convention to provoke internal dissension and the resignation of the party’s chairperson—and generally conjured rainclouds of distraction over Clinton’s formal nomination as the first woman standard-bearer for a major U.S. party. The revelations from the vast trove of stolen materials were damp squibs, what I will later conceptualize as faux (or phantom) flak. However, within the regime of faux flak, the mere suggestion that “something bad” was in the lode of documents was in itself enough to nourish finger-wagging flak-memes about wrongdoing.

      Stone Cold Flak

      Mueller (2018) focuses on GRU’s processes of hacking material later used for flak purposes. Mueller’s subsequent indictment in January 2019, United States of America versus Roger Jason Stone, Jr. (2019) sheds further light on the GRU’s development of flak narratives against Clinton to be channeled to the U.S. public.

      Mueller assesses Stone as implicated in an effort to obtain and then disseminate “emails damaging to the Clinton campaign” (Mueller, 2019, p. 2). Toward this end, Stone was in contact with “a senior, Trump campaign official,” among other interlocutors, discussing the timing and likely influence of the document dumps while he also coordinated with WikiLeaks (2019, p. 3). “Impact [of the document dumps] planned to be very damaging,” the indictment’s “Person 1” (Jerome Corsi) explains to Stone as the clandestine flak campaign played out in summer 2016. Person 1 further elaborates the flak campaign talking points to Stone: “Would not hurt to start suggesting HRC [Hillary Rodham Clinton] old, memory bad, has stroke—neither he nor she well […] setting stage for [Clinton] Foundation debacle” (quoted in Mueller, 2019, pp. 4–5).

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      In these flak meme rehearsals, Clinton is not simply wrong on some or even most all issues—but is broadly unfit for office due to physical and moral decrepitude. Stone and his interlocutors eagerly anticipated “October Surprise” weaponized flak memes to blow up in Clinton’s face in the endgame of the election and sink the Democrats’ campaign. In the event, no full-blown scandals arose from the dissemination of the Clinton campaigns’ hacked emails. However, that is not the standard that flak merchants need to meet. The news itself of 50,000 documents released to the public (too much material for anyone to read in short order) is in and of itself taken as casting suspicion on the victim, regardless of whether the emails reveal anything beyond office bitching and operational details. The very fact of hacks and subsequent leaks also lent themselves to residual flak “fringe benefits.” That is, news narratives projected Clinton’s campaign as a loose or sinking ship, on the defensive, needing to raise its voice over the din about emails in the effort to get its message out.

      Impacts: Flak Delivers More Than Pizza

      One revelation in the hacked emails concerned a pizza restaurant that Clinton campaign chair John Podesta frequented. This explosive discovery prompted the meme that the—non-existent—basement of the pizza establishment was the site of a child pornography ring. Among other clues, “child porn” and “cheese pizza” share the acronym “CP” (the phrase “one could not make these things up” comes to mind here). In short order, the pizza restaurant was stormed by an armed gunman, thankfully without fatalities, as flak to murder an election campaign almost spiraled into murdering people (Pilkington, 2019).

      Pizza aside, Kathleen Hall Jamieson (2018) analyzes the 2016 election at book length in Cyberwar; a volume that she pointedly titled in order to emphasize the stakes. In Jamieson’s appraisal, Russia’s interventions in the 2016 election far exceed anodyne characterizations such as meddling—and they were likely decisive to the electoral outcome. As in her analysis of 1988, Jamieson does not employ the term flak in her discussion. However, her analysis squares with a flak-based understanding of the campaign to slime Clinton with delegitimizing memes and to prop up Trump.

      Jamieson argues that Russia’s covert activities in the run-up to the election were not necessarily designed to change votes from “blue” to “red”; a tall order, as it implicates changing minds and even subjectivities to switch party allegiances in a narrow timeframe. Instead, demobilizing core Democratic ←16 | 17→constituencies from voting was a reachable goal in a flak framework—and one less vote for a candidate amounts to the same in the final electoral tally as one more vote in the other candidate’s column. Votes could be siphoned off by raising doubts about Clinton among wavering voters who leaned Democrat with whom Clinton’s campaign was assaying to close the deal in the campaign endgame. Targeted flak in these cases could crucially drain motivation to vote, or nudge voters away from Clinton toward a third-party candidate. Moreover, social media data exhaust was sufficient to identify voters with a wavering profile.

      Jamieson argues that the U.S. media system unwittingly channeled the Kremlin’s flak campaign that denigrated Clinton and put wind under the wings of Trump’s often faltering campaign. This was in part due to the U.S. media’s fixation on melodramatically narrating elections through the lens of which side is apparently winning or losing the momentum game. By contrast with the United States in 2016, Jamieson observes that Russian interventions (for Marine Le Pen, against Emmanuel Macron) fell flat in France’s 2017 election. French journalists largely ignored hacked information, rather than copiously laundering it into the news hole, as they instead tracked issues.

      Jamieson (2018) cites examples of memes drawn from the hacked material that were insinuated into the 2016 election discourse during СКАЧАТЬ