The Tools of Espionage Are Going Mainstream

Deception is getting real. This month, lawyers for Facebook, Twitter, and Google testified before Congress, facing hard questions and ugly truths about Russia’s online operations to inflame American divisions and undermine American democracy. The story keeps getting worse. Twitter has now more than 2,700 accounts controlled by Russians and 36,000 suspected Russian “bots”—accounts that automatically generated 1.4 million election-related tweets receiving 288 million impressions during the final 10 weeks of the 2016 presidential election. Google has that suspected Russian agents uploaded more than 1,000 YouTube videos about divisive social issues. And Facebook that Kremlin-instigated content may have reached 126 million Americans. That’s more than a third of the U.S. population. Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr even had his own Cuban missile crisis moment—bringing out the to show the world smoking gun evidence of Russian duplicity. But instead of secret missile sites, his pictures displayed two popular Facebook groups: Heart of Texas and United Muslims of America.