Lawfare Daily: Making Sense of the Doppelganger Disinformation Operation, with Thomas Rid
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 16 October 2024
⏱️ 59 minutes
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Summary
In early September, the U.S. Justice Department released a trove of information about the Russian influence campaign known as “Doppelganger”—a Kremlin-backed effort that created faux versions of familiar news websites and seeding them with fake material. Just a few weeks later, the German publication Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that it had received a tranche of hacked materials from inside the Doppelganger operation.
Thomas Rid, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and the founding director of the school’s Alperovitch Institute for Cybersecurity Studies, got an inside look at those documents. In a new article in Foreign Affairs, “The Lies Russia Tells Itself,” he examines the “granular operational insight” that this material provides into the active measures campaign. He joined the Lawfare Podcast to talk with Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic about his findings—and why he believes the documents show that “the biggest boost the Doppelganger campaigners got was from the West’s own anxious coverage of the project.”
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Transcript
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| 1:01.0 | A true crime podcaster has decided to ruin my life. |
| 1:05.0 | Well, that's not entirely true. |
| 1:07.0 | Technically, my life was ruined the night my best friend Savvy was murdered five years ago, |
| 1:11.0 | but dragging up the details of the case again doesn't exactly |
| 1:13.8 | improve things for me. I get that being found covered in her blood doesn't exactly |
| 1:17.6 | scream innocent, so I probably did do it, like they said. But if I didn't, then who did? Am I a murderer? You tell me. |
| 1:27.0 | Listen for the lie. Out now. It looked exactly like the Washington Post or Ilzitung in Germany and only one story would be planted |
| 1:41.5 | the link to the other stories would be real, to the actual |
| 1:44.8 | real media outlet, and the planted story would spin a certain event in a way that furthers Russia's |
| 1:52.0 | interests. |
| 1:54.0 | It's the Law Fair Podcast. |
| 1:56.0 | I'm Quinta Juresek, senior editor at Law Fair, |
| 1:59.2 | with Thomas Ridd, Professor of Strategic Studies and founding director of the Alperovich Institute for Cybersecurity Studies |
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