Peter Strzok:Some (not all) coverage of foreign-sourced political information has been disappointing

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

Tweet text eter Strzok
@petestrzok
“The press hasn’t solved any of this...If the GRU dumped the Biden campaign’s binder of opposition research on Kamala Harris right now, every[one] would race to publish it...f you reset the players and the facts of 2016, I’m willing to bet it plays out exactly the same way.”

Garrett M. Graff
@vermontgmg
Re: this Biden-Burisma crap this morning. I literally wrote and ran a tabletop exercise at @AspenDigital this summer about this very type of incident—and then wrote about how the media should react better. Here's the scenario and here's my playbook: https://bit.ly/2SzJWGZ
9:09 AM · Oct 14, 2020

Unrolled thread here
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1316410822160257024.html

“The press hasn’t solved any of this...If the GRU dumped the Biden campaign’s binder of opposition research on Kamala Harris right now, every[one] would race to publish it...f you reset the players and the facts of 2016, I’m willing to bet it plays out exactly the same way.”

Some (not all) coverage of foreign-sourced political information has been disappointing.

Think of this from a CI perspective:

Parse every small detail of what the information actually says and doesn’t say (does it say someone actually met, or that an offer to meet occurred?).

Look for verifiable specifics (can the events be confirmed, or are the allegations unprovable, something known to only one or two people?)

Look for evidence of manipulation — in the information itself, in metadata, on the medium the information was carried or transferred on.

Assess the info’s physical form (is it a full copy of an email or document, or a screenshot? How did you get it? How did the source get it?).

Vet the source's bona fides. What are their motivations and sources? What have they said or done before? Consider you’re being played.

Be wary of otherwise plausible explanations for non-answers: the fewer things that can be answered, the greater the concern.

Don’t rush to tweet — your first tweet will get the most RTs. No subsequent clarification is going to get that shot back.

The pernicious difference between 2016 and 2020 — and why we’re worse off now — is we have Congressmen and a president actively advancing false narratives based on Russian disinformation.

Call that out for what it is — that shouldn’t be hard, our USIC is already saying it.
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[tanyev]

1. Too many members of the press see themselves as stenographers

or worse, cheerleaders.