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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bonefish who wrote (1010291)	4/6/2017 11:05:53 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 1573432

What began a few years ago was not spying, but the weaponization of info obtained by spying. IIRC, one of the experts at the Senate hearings said they saw a real change in '14. Congress was informed about it almost exactly 2 years ago. Russia’s “Weaponization” of Information By Helle C. Dale ABOUT THE AUTHOR Helle C. DaleSenior Fellow for Public Diplomacy The Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom Testimony Presented to the House Foreign Affairs Committee April 15, 2015 Helle C. Dale My name is Helle Dale. I am Senior Fellow for Public Diplomacy in the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation. The views I express in this testimony are my own, and should not be construed as representing any official position of The Heritage Foundation. Audiences within reach of Russia’s growing media empire are increasingly subjected to manipulation and rampant anti-Americanism. [1] This trend has intensified since the Russian annexation of Crimea and its invasion of Eastern Ukraine in 2014. Through its global network, Russia Today (RT), the Kremlin broadcasts globally in five major languages, including on cable TV stations in the United States. Free Western media has no comparable presence in Russia. Russian propaganda is corrosive to the image of the United States and to our values. Or as Assistant Secretary of State for Europe Victoria Nuland described it before this committee on March 4, “the Kremlin’s pervasive propaganda campaign, where is truth is no obstacle.” And Russian propaganda is being spread aggressively around the world as we have not seen it since Soviet days. This is not just in Central Asia, and Eastern and Central Europe, but even here in the West. The daily content and commentary from RT and others is often polished and slickly produced. And it’s not like old-fashioned propaganda, aimed solely at making Putin and Russia look good. It’s a new kind of propaganda, aimed at sowing doubt about anything having to do with the U.S. and the West, and in a number of countries, unsophisticated audiences are eating it up. The unfortunate fact is that the United States government became complacent in the battle for “hearts and minds” in Russia and its neighboring countries after the end of the Cold War. For instance, the administration’s budget request for 2016 is $751,436 million for U.S. International Broadcasting. [2] Reportedly, RT has a budget of $400 million for its Washington bureau alone. Today, the U.S. government is scrambling to increase capacity to counter Russian disinformation. The relevant U.S. government agencies in this information war are primarily the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG, which oversees all U.S. civilian international broadcasting) and to some extent the State Department and the Department of Defense. The administration has requested for 2016 $693 million for democracy promotion and public diplomacy for Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine to help them withstand pressure from Russia, as Secretary of State John Kerry put it to this committee. [3] Let me first describe the position we find ourselves in today.Then current efforts by the U.S. government to catch up to the Russians.And finally present my recommendations, important among them, the need to reform the BBG. Where We Are Today BBG abandons broadcasting to Russia origin.heritage.org