bret schafer 02 — Transcript

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1. 0:00in studying how disinformation spreads
2. 0:02across the information ecosystem
3. 0:04one of the things that has been helpful
4. 0:05is looking at the operational
5. 0:07similarities
6. 0:08between an information operation and a
7. 0:10money laundering operation
8. 0:11because in both cases you have an
9. 0:14illegitimate product
10. 0:15that needs to be woven into a legitimate
11. 0:18endpoint
12. 0:19so anti-money laundering practitioners
13. 0:21talk about the need for financial
14. 0:23criminals to place
15. 0:24layer and integrate dirty money into the
16. 0:27banking system
17. 0:28what that means in practice is if you
18. 0:30are a drug campaign
19. 0:32if you are an international arms dealer
20. 0:35you of course can't walk into
21. 0:37a major bank and deposit a large sum of
22. 0:40money and expect there not to be
23. 0:41questions
24. 0:42asked so what they first need to do is
25. 0:44set up a shell
26. 0:45shelf or a front company as a way of
27. 0:48anonymously
28. 0:49depositing those sums of money into the
29. 0:52financial system
30. 0:53so once you have placed that money
31. 0:55there's then the process of
32. 0:56layering and layering essentially means
33. 0:59you have a bunch of different financial
34. 1:00transaction that
35. 1:01moves that money around so you're
36. 1:04further breaking the chain
37. 1:05between point of origin and the
38. 1:07beneficiary
39. 1:08so when it does come out the other side
40. 1:10and there are deposits made
41. 1:12into a legitimate bank that bank is not
42. 1:14able to connect
43. 1:15things back to the illegitimate point of
44. 1:18origin which would be the drug kin pin
45. 1:20or the arms dealer so those running a
46. 1:23disinformation campaign
47. 1:25use a similar strategy because of course
48. 1:27if you are a russian intelligence agent
49. 1:30uh you're not able to just call up the
50. 1:32new york times and get them to run
51. 1:34a damaging narrative against opponent or
52. 1:37or just
53. 1:37leak them information that you have
54. 1:40hacked
55. 1:40and of course you can't run that through
56. 1:42your own state-backed media because your
57. 1:44fingerprints would be all over it
58. 1:46so there's the first process is just to
59. 1:48place that information
60. 1:50somewhere in the information ecosystem
61. 1:53so you can do
62. 1:54that either through an anonymous social
63. 1:56media account
64. 1:57through a proxy website uh through a
65. 1:59website that is just sort of sympathetic
66. 2:01to your cause
67. 2:02and often it's more effective to place
68. 2:04it multiple places so
69. 2:05again in the financial sense there is
70. 2:07the term called smurfing
71. 2:09that is using a bunch of smaller
72. 2:10transactions
73. 2:12instead of one large transaction because
74. 2:14again easier to trace
75. 2:16so if you place this dirty information
76. 2:20in multiple different sources it's
77. 2:22harder to point back to its original
78. 2:24point of origin
79. 2:25so once it is placed then the layering
80. 2:27process in terms of disinformation
81. 2:30is using a bunch of troll accounts or
82. 2:32bot accounts on social media
83. 2:34just to spread that information kind of
84. 2:36far and wide and of course
85. 2:38this is also where genuine legitimate
86. 2:40people come into play
87. 2:41so if it is salacious uh you know if it
88. 2:44is newsworthy
89. 2:45you're gonna have real people who start
90. 2:47picking up on this narrative uh posting
91. 2:49it on their own site posting on their
92. 2:51own channels
93. 2:52running it on their own blog so by the
94. 2:54time it lands on the radar
95. 2:56of a legitimate news outlet
96. 2:59it has now been essentially cleaned from
97. 3:02its illegitimate point of origin
98. 3:04so you have this sort of cascading
99. 3:06citation effect
100. 3:07where they're then pointing back to the
101. 3:09just most recent person who's run this
102. 3:11story
103. 3:11without knowing exactly where it came
104. 3:13from so this process is a process
105. 3:16essentially of information laundering
106. 3:18it's just a way of taking a dirty
107. 3:21information for lack of a better term or
108. 3:23damaging information
109. 3:24where you want to obfuscate who is
110. 3:26behind that narrative or behind that
111. 3:29leak
112. 3:29and working it into whatever sort of
113. 3:32target audience's
114. 3:34uh media system without being able to
115. 3:37trace it back to its source