新闻周刊:俄罗斯对美国的冷战战略(3)（在线收听）

The precautions the campaigns are taking now tend to address yesterday's problems, such as the DNC hack that was ultimately so damaging to the Clinton campaign in 2016. The worry of intelligence and security experts is what the Russians are likely to do in 2020 that somehow was either overlooked in the aftermath of the last two elections or comes out of the blue. "We recognize that our adversaries are going to keep adapting and upping their game," the FBI's Wray said to the Council on Foreign Relations in April.

竞选团队目前采取的防范措施，往往是为了解决昨日的问题，比如民主党全国委员会遭到黑客攻击，最终对希拉里2016年的竞选造成了如此严重的损害。情报和安全专家担心的是，俄罗斯人在2020年可能会采取的行动，这在上两次选举之后被忽视了，或者是出乎意料。“我们认识到，我们的对手将不断调整和提高他们的策略，”美国联邦调查局的雷今年4月对美国外交关系委员会表示。

To understand how Russia plans to undermine Americans' faith in the U.S. democratic system, cyber-security experts and campaign officials are digging through the aftermath of the elections of 2016 and 2018 for clues. There's a lot to worry about.

为了了解俄罗斯计划如何破坏美国人对美国民主制度的信心，网络安全专家和竞选官员正在梳理2016年和2018年大选的余局，寻找线索。有很多事要担心。

The Propaganda War

宣传战争

Shortly before the 2016 election, University of Washington researcher Kate Starbird began studying the online conversations of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. She and her team followed some of the most active Twitter accounts and tracked the influence of their tweets.

2016年大选前不久，华盛顿大学研究员凯特·斯塔伯德开始研究“黑人生活很重要”运动的在线对话。她和她的团队跟踪了一些最活跃的Twitter账户，并跟踪了他们的推文的影响力。

Starbird, who studies human-computer interaction, was primarily struck by how toxic much of the content was—and how vitriolic and polarized the debate had become, with some advocating violence and others using racist language. Then, just a few weeks after the team published its first paper on the topic in October 2017, representatives of Facebook admitted to congressional investigators that they had traced ad sales totaling more than $100,000 to a shadowy Russian company known as Russia's Internet Research Agency (IRA), with a history of pushing pro-Kremlin propaganda. The US Intelligence community had already concluded that Russia paid social media trolls to spread fake news and influence public opinion. The ads had focused on politically divisive issues such as gun rights, immigration, and racial discrimination.

斯塔伯德研究人机交互，主要被这些内容的毒性所震惊，以及辩论变得如此尖刻和两极分化，一些人提倡暴力，另一些人使用种族主义语言。然后,几周后团队对主题的第一篇论文发表在2017年10月，Facebook的代表向国会调查人员承认,他们追踪广告销售总额超过100000美元到一个神秘的俄罗斯公司，名为俄罗斯互联网研究机构，曾推动亲克里姆林宫的宣传。美国情报部门已经得出结论，俄罗斯付钱给社交媒体喷子，传播假新闻，影响公众舆论。这些广告集中在枪支权利、移民和种族歧视等政治分歧问题上。

The news got Starbird and her team wondering if any of the trolls engaged in any of the conversations she had studied. In November, when the House Intelligence Committee released a list of accounts given them by Twitter associated with IRA, Starbird and her team decided to take a look and see if they recognized anyone. They were stunned by what they discovered. Dozens of the accounts in the list appeared in their data—some among the most retweeted. IRA accounts were also masquerading as genuine #BlackLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter activists.

这个消息让斯塔伯德和她的团队怀疑是否有网络喷子参与了她研究过的任何对话。去年11月，当众议院情报委员会公布了一份由Twitter提供的与IRA有关的账户清单时，斯塔伯德和她的团队决定查看一下，看看他们是不是认出了什么人。他们被发现惊呆了。名单上的许多账户都出现在他们的数据中，其中一些属于转发最多的账户。IRA账户也伪装成真实的“黑人生活很重要”和“蓝色生命很重要”活动人士。