The perfect weapon
How hostile governments use the internet to make Americans hate each other even more.
According to the FBI, a website doxxing American politicians and election officials, and explicitly calling for their assassination (I mentioned it here) was actually posted by the Iranians:
The FBI has concluded that Iran was behind online efforts earlier this month to incite lethal violence against the bureau’s director, a former top U.S. cyber expert and multiple state elections officials who have refuted claims of widespread voter fraud promoted by President Trump and his allies, federal and state officials said Tuesday.
FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and ousted Homeland Security Department official Christopher Krebs were among more than a dozen people whose images, home addresses and other personal information were posted on a website titled “Enemies of the People.” Crosshairs were superimposed over the photos.
Many of these officials in one way or another have attested to the security of November’s election, saying they had not seen evidence of widespread fraud — a conclusion at odds with Trump’s baseless claims that the election was rigged.
“The following individuals have aided and abetted the fraudulent election against Trump,” the website falsely claimed.
Iran was active in seeking to interfere in the U.S. election, targeting Democratic voters in October with fake but menacing emails that purported to be from a far-right group threatening recipients to vote for Trump “or we will come after you.”
[…]
In the ensuing days, the site and copies of it disappeared and reappeared in multiple places. The Washington Post identified at least three websites and 10 social media accounts that published it. The target list sometimes expanded, at one point including 21 people, including the governors of Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada and Michigan — all battleground states that Trump lost — as well as Dominion employees.
Joe Slowik, a senior security researcher at DomainTools, noted earlier this month that the use of multiple domains and servers put the perpetrator in a more sophisticated class than other similar disinformation campaigns that have abounded since the election.
Slowik said another unique aspect to the “kill list” was that its creators did not use anonymized Web registry services. Instead, they listed names, email addresses and a physical address — almost all in Russia or Eastern Europe.
Yet there were other traces that suggested the content had been generated in the United States. The creators used an English version of a Russian search engine, and at one point listed an address outside Macon, Ga., that is associated with a local tax preparer’s office. A call to the tax office was not returned.
Why would Iran, led by a regime not exactly sympathetic to the Trump Administration, push alt-right propaganda? The same reason Russia, which is sympathetic to the trump Administration - or maybe it’s the other way around - promoted online content aimed at African-American activists:
A social media campaign calling itself "Blacktivist" and linked to the Russian government used both Facebook and Twitter in an apparent attempt to amplify racial tensions during the U.S. presidential election, two sources with knowledge of the matter told CNN. The Twitter account has been handed over to Congress; the Facebook account is expected to be handed over in the coming days.
Both Blacktivist accounts, each of which used the handle Blacktivists, regularly shared content intended to stoke outrage. "Black people should wake up as soon as possible," one post on the Twitter account read. "Black families are divided and destroyed by mass incarceration and death of black men," another read. The accounts also posted videos of police violence against African Americans.
The Blacktivist accounts provide further evidence that Russian-linked social media accounts saw racial tensions as something to be exploited in order to achieve the broader Russian goal of dividing Americans and creating chaos in U.S. politics during a campaign in which race repeatedly became an issue.
“Blacktivist” was also used to steer potential Hillary Clinton voters toward Jill Stein, but its main purpose - along with the many extreme-right websites promoted by Russia - was to keep Americans divided and in constant conflict. This division and conflict would be happening even without hostile governments adding fuel to the fire, but it serves the interests of Putin and the Mullahs to have the United States locked in a cold civil war.
If it turns out that the anti-vaccine and anti-mask movements in the US and Western Europe have some rubles, yuan or whatever the Iranians use for money behind it, I won’t be a bit surprised.
Enough politics. Let’s talk about something that really matters:
Ford’s controversial Mustang Mach E will be released soon, and the early reviews have been very good. But some people are still a bit salty about the fact that Ford insists on calling this electric crossover-ish vehicle a Mustang:
…my problem with the use of the Mustang name goes back to what I said a while back – the new car has virtually nothing in common with the actual Mustang, save for the name itself, badging, and some styling influences. It’s on a different platform, for one thing.
The Mach-E also has a different mission from other Mustangs. While it may be sporty and fun to drive, it isn’t a pure sports car like the Mustang. It’s meant to be a family hauler with EV technology and some verve.
And that’s fine! I don’t have a problem with Ford building an EV five-seater that’s fun to drive and offers utility. I like the Mach-E as an idea. And I can’t wait to drive one. If it wasn’t for Covid restrictions on travel imposed by my home state, I’d have driven it already.
I just wish the company had called it something else, instead of cynically using the Mustang name to garner attention. As if the Mach-E wouldn’t have gotten attention anyway.
[…]
Ford has plenty of names it could’ve used from its history. Falcon. Fairlane. Taurus. Probe (OK, scratch that last one). Or it could’ve dreamt up something new. It could’ve shifted the Puma name over from Europe, where it’s used on a subcompact crossover. With the Fusion eventually being phased out, Ford could’ve called this car the next Fusion, instead of using that name for the planned Fusion Active crossover.
That last one has recent recognition among people who don’t know cars and sounds vaguely related to the generation of electricity.
Instead, we have the potential for confusion. It will be difficult for owners to explain to the curious that the Mach-E is a Mustang but also not really a Mustang.
I think “Maverick,” a great name wasted on a mediocre car in the seventies, would have been perfect. (Ford may be reviving the name for a small pickup instead.) But I’m perfectly fine with calling it a Mustang. We associate that storied brand name with muscular V8 engines, but from the very beginning, most Mustangs have been powered by V6 and even four-cylinder motors. (My family had a 1981 model that would be embarrassed by a Nissan Micra in a drag race.)
The large - some say bloated - early-seventies model was marketed more as a personal luxury car than a performance machine. And that was followed by this abomination against man and God:
If the Mustang can survive that, it can survive anything. People complained when Porsche and Lamborghini started building SUVs, but they got used to it.
More than any other company, Ford knows what can happen when you don’t change with the times. Once the world’s dominant car company, it stubbornly kept building the Model T, with few changes, and lost its market leadership to GM. With some countries, including Canada, musing about banning gasoline-powered cars in the near future, they can’t make that mistake again.
The Ripper, Netflix’s documentary series about British serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, gets my highest recommendation. Sutcliffe (who coincidentally passed away from COVID-19 last month; my condolences to the virus for how it must have suffered in that body) murdered at least thirteen women while the West Yorkshire Police made almost every mistake imaginable.
The police had tunnel vision, wrongly assuming that Sutcliffe was targeting prostitutes, and on some level believed that his victims were undesirables who didn’t deserve thorough investigation. (This was part of the reason Canada’s own Robert Pickton got away with his killing spree for so long.) It is striking to see how the police, and Britain’s tabloid media, treated victims who were actually engaged in sex work compared to the “respectable” women who were not.
Worse, some letters and then an audiotape from a person claiming to be the killer were mailed to the police from Sunderland, leading top investigators to assume he was from that part of the country. These materials were the centerpiece of a massive media campaign to help catch him.
In the course of their investigation, Sutcliffe was interviewed by police nine times, but was ultimately disregarded as a suspect because he didn’t have the same accent as the person on the tape.
If Sutcliffe hadn’t been pulled over for having the wrong license plate on his car, he might have gotten away with it for much longer. (Not the first time a traffic violation brought down a serial killer.) The Sunderland tape was a hoax all along.
And that’s the one thing that is left out of this otherwise excellent documentary series: who sent the tape and letters, and why did he do it?
John William Humble, whose little prank may have led to the deaths of several women, was discovered years later.
Humble, who was an unemployed labourer living on the Ford Estate in Sunderland, was said to be motivated by a wish for notoriety, a hatred for police and an obsession with Jack the Ripper. He was born on January 8th 1956 in Sunderland, and grew up there. He was said to have had “above average” school results, but his career never progressed further than a bricklaying apprenticeship. Humble left school at 16 and worked for a few months in a hospital laundry and for a short period as a security guard.
He was known to be an avid reader, with a strange interest in Jack the Ripper. He was obsessed with crime novels, and it was in the summer of 1974 where he rented a book about the London killer from his local library. He kept the copy for a year – writing out excerpts of it to keep.
His hatred of police was also apparent. In 1975, when Humble was aged 19, he was convicted of actual bodily harm after he kicked an off-duty policeman in the head, and was sentenced to three months at a young offenders institution. Two years earlier, he had been convicted of burglary and theft.
At the time of the hoax, he was reported to have been living with his mother, sister and brother.
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DNA samples from an envelope of one of the letters John Humble had sent to West Yorkshire Police matched his profile which on the database from an unrelated incident in 2001, where he was cautioned for being drunk and disorderly. He was arrested on 18th October 2005.
After his arrest, it has been reported he was so drunk police had to wait a full day to interview him. During his police interviews he said: “[The Ripper case] was getting on my nerves. It was on the bloody telly all the time. I shouldn’t have done it. I know that – because it’s evil. I do deserve jail.”
It was later revealed Humble had tried to tell the police anonymously that they were been hoaxed, but it had been dismissed because the police force had so many similar claims. Shortly after this ignored confession, it has been reported he had tried to take his own life.
Humble admitted to conspiring to pervert the course of justice at Leeds Crown Court and was jailed in 2006 for eight years. Humble was released in 2009 after serving four years of his sentence and was given a new identity as John Samuel Anderson.
Ironically, Sutcliffe outlived the man who impersonated him. Humble died from alcoholism-induced heart failure in 2019.
Can you imagine having something like this on your conscience?
On that cheery note, I’m taking a few days off for Christmas. I plan to be back at work, and writing this newsletter, on December 29.
Enjoy the greatest Christmas TV special of all time. The world could sure use Jim Henson these days.
We should ask ourselves why it is somehow seen as less of a problem when a person not deemed “respectable” is killed. For one thing, murder is murder. And for another, when a double standard is applied so that a lesser priority is assigned to a criminal thought to be targeting “only” sex workers or other groups of marginalized persons, inevitably this may result in more victims - including those who were not considered targets.
Failing to take murder seriously because the victims are dismissed as socially unacceptable is playing with fire. It’s also wrong because society both uses and condemns sex workers, for example. When we find ourselves devaluing others to the point of assigning a lower significance to their very life, it’s usually because it’s easier than facing up to uncomfortable truths about how these people got there in the first place.
When people get very excited about, say, the name of a new car, they don’t foresee that in a few months or a year, they’re not going to care. They’ll be busy getting excited over some new issue which will also pass quickly. A good name is important, of course, but I’d be mainly interested in how it drives. If it hugs the road nicely and goes through curves smoothly, who cares what it’s called? ;)
Those rubles and yuans would be wasted if not for internet users’ tendency to jump on any myth that suits them instead of thinking logically. Lack of education and critical thinking skills can be exploited in more ways than one.