“White House believes Iran is preparing imminent ballistic missile attack against Israel”
“A senior White House official says the US believes Iran is preparing to “imminently launch a ballistic missile attack against Israel.”
“The United States has indications that Iran is preparing to imminently launch a ballistic missile attack against Israel,” a full statement reads.
“We are actively supporting defensive preparations to defend Israel against this attack. A direct military attack from Iran against Israel will carry severe consequences for Iran,” it continued.”
“The Lies Russia Tells Itself”
“The Country’s Propagandists Target the West—but Mislead the Kremlin, Too”
“In early September, the infamous Russian disinformation project known as Doppelganger hit the news again.
Doppelganger—a scheme to disseminate fake articles, videos, and polls about polarizing political and cultural issues in the United States, as well as in France, Germany, and Ukraine—was first exposed in 2022 and widely covered in the Western press. The project cloned entire news organizations’ websites—complete with logos and the bylines of actual journalists—and planted its own fake stories, memes, and cartoons, luring casual Internet users to the sites via social media posts, often automated ones.
Tech companies and research labs had carefully traced, documented, and often removed some of Doppelganger’s online footprints, and even exposed the private Moscow firm mostly responsible for the campaigns: the Social Design Agency. But the disinformation campaigns persisted, and on September 4, in a move to counter them, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it had seized 32 Internet domains behind the Doppelganger campaign—and published an unprecedented 277-page FBI affidavit that included 190 pages of internal SDA documents likely sourced by American spies. Then, 12 days later, the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that, in late August, it had received from an anonymous source, large amounts of authentic internal SDA documents. A day before the FBI released its affidavit and the accompanying files—some of which overlapped with the leaked ones—Süddeutsche Zeitung asked me to comment on the leak for its investigation, because I have researched and written about disinformation and political warfare for almost ten years. I inquired whether its source might allow me to have the entire 2.4 gigabytes of leaked SDA documents, and the source agreed.
Until these recent disclosures—comprising more than 3,000 individual files—observers could mostly just speculate about the goals, specific methods and tradecraft, and bureaucratic procedures driving contemporary Russian disinformation campaigns. The FBI affidavit and the European media leak offered something unprecedented: a glimpse into the planning of one of the most notorious disinformation efforts in the post–Cold War era. Disinformation operators taking advantage of the Internet to disseminate propaganda to gullible users had been a major concern since at least 2015, when the efforts of a St. Petersburg troll factory known as the Internet Research Agency to inflame latent conflicts was exposed in the press, and Russian military intelligence deployed creative disinformation operations to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential race.”
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“The SDA’s top goal was not to influence citizens in adversary countries, but to persuade Russian bureaucrats that the company was effective in order to get the next contract or renew a budget. “
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russia/lies-russia-tells-itself