Pre-Election Chaos

With what we know about the Russian operations in the 2016 elections, we might spend more time looking for the same kind of activities going on right now.  Is anyone looking? Apparently, some are. 

in April, the US-CERT reported some "Russian State-Sponsored actors" were rerouting Internet traffic to their own domains, something the Chinese have been doing for years.  This gives them plenty of opportunities for man-in-the-middle attacks which can be used to read material from several different groups and political parties, alter communications, and target both support for groups and issues they want to sponsor.  They can influence, disrupt, and manipulate as they did in the national election. 

Of course this relies on the Telecommunciations giants and social media actually looking for those doing this to identify what they are up to.  In the national election, they were very reluctant to do that, and I understand their concerns but see a difference in doing this for "extremist groups" and representatives from foreign intelligence services.  Should we apply the same standard to "hate speech" that we apply to disruption attempts by foreign intelligence services?  Of course not, but it is not easy to tell the difference between the two, especially because they overlap.  The only people who can reliably do that well are in multiple intelligence services.  Algorithms are not very agile, and cannot discover all that needs to be known. 

That is more complicated than just simply telling social media what intelligence services know.  Tradition is against telling the social media and cloud environments where the activity is going on.  The more people who hear a secret, the more likely it is to be compromised. Eventually, the people trying to influence will figure out how we are collecting information about them.   For example, we all know the Internet Research Agency is a front for all kinds of activities so that name will show up less in Russian operations against us.  They know that we know what they have been up to. 

On the other hand, social media companies are not inclined to want to cooperate with the government agencies, though they are doing better at that now than a year ago.   Some argue that no oversight by anyone is justified in the name of free speech.  Does the GRU get the same right as anyone else?