In 1933, German conservatives thought they could control Hitler. Two years later, they were being executed in their own homes. I spent weeks researching this question, desperately looking for counter-examples, for hope, for any time in history where people successfully stopped fascists after they started winning elections.

Here’s what I found: Once fascists win power democratically, they have never been removed democratically. Not once. Ever.

I know that sounds impossible. I kept digging, thinking surely someone, somewhere, stopped them. The actual record is so much worse than you think.

Let’s start with Germany because everyone thinks they know this story. Franz von Papen, the conservative politician who convinced President Hindenburg to make Hitler Chancellor, said “We’ve hired him” in January 1933. He thought he was so clever. Within 18 months, the Nazis were machine-gunning von Papen’s allies in their homes during the Night of Long Knives. Von Papen himself barely escaped to Austria with his life. Every single conservative who thought they could “control” or “moderate” Hitler was either dead, in exile, or groveling for survival by 1934.

Italy was even dumber, if that’s possible. October 1922, Mussolini announces he’s marching on Rome with 30,000 blackshirts. Except here’s the thing: they were poorly armed, disorganized, and the Italian military could have crushed them in about three hours. The King had his generals ready. He had martial law papers drawn up. The military was waiting for the order. Instead, he invited Mussolini to form a government. Just handed him power. Twenty-three years later, partisans hung Mussolini’s corpse upside down at a gas station while crowds beat it with sticks. The king died in exile. Hundreds of thousands of Italians died for that moment of cowardice.

Spain might be the worst because everyone saw it coming. Three years of escalating fascist violence. Actual assassination attempts. Then in 1936, Franco and his generals launch a straight-up military coup. The Spanish Republic begged for help. France said “not our problem.” Britain said “both sides are bad.” America declared neutrality. The result? Franco ruled for 39 years. He died peacefully in his bed in 1975. They’re still finding mass graves in Spain. Still. In 2025.

Want something more recent? Look at Hungary. Orbán won democratically in 2010. By 2011 he’d rewritten the constitution. By 2012 he controlled the media. By 2013 he’d gutted the judiciary. It’s 2025 and he’s still in power. The EU has been “very concerned” for fourteen fucking years. They’ve written strongly worded letters. They’ve held meetings. Hungary is now a one-party state in the middle of Europe and everyone just… accepts it.

Okay, but surely someone, somewhere, stopped them?

Finland 1932 is the only clean win I can find. The fascist Lapua Movement tried an armed coup before they’d secured government power. The military stayed loyal to democracy, crushed the rebellion, and banned the movement. That’s it. That’s the success story. One time out of roughly fifty attempts, fascists were stopped because they were stupid enough to try violence before winning elections.

France in 1934 looked like a victory for about five minutes. Fascist leagues tried to storm parliament on February 6th. Six days later, twelve million workers went on general strike. Twelve million. The entire country stopped. No trains, no factories, no shops, nothing. The fascists backed down. Great victory, right? Except those exact same fascists enthusiastically collaborated when the Nazis invaded six years later. They just waited.

Portugal’s fascist regime finally fell in 1974. After 48 years. How? Military officers launched a coup. Democratic resistance had been crushed for five decades. International pressure meant nothing. The dictator Salazar died in 1970 and his successor just kept going until the military said enough. That’s your success story: wait half a century and hope the military gets tired.

The pattern is so consistent it’s almost funny if it weren’t so terrifying. Every single time it goes like this: Conservatives panic about socialism or progressives or whatever. They ally with fascists as the “lesser evil.” Fascists take power. Fascists immediately purge the conservatives who helped them. Then it’s 30-50 years of dictatorship. This happened in Germany, Italy, Spain, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Greece, Portugal, Croatia, Romania, and Hungary.

Want to know how many times conservatives successfully “controlled” the fascists they allied with? Zero. Want to know how many times fascists purged the conservatives after taking power? All of them. Every single time.

And here’s the part that breaks your heart. Violence works. For them. Fascists use violence while claiming to be victims. They create chaos that “requires” their authoritarian solution. Then they purge anyone who opposes them. Meanwhile, democrats keep insisting on following rules that fascists completely ignore. They file lawsuits. They write editorials. They vote on resolutions. And fascists just laugh and keep consolidating power.

The statistics are brutal. Fascist takeovers prevented after winning power democratically: zero. Average length of fascist rule once established: 31 years. Fascist regimes removed by voting: zero. Fascist regimes removed by asking nicely: zero. Most were removed by war or military coups, and tens of millions died in the process.

I’m not allowed to make the obvious contemporary comparisons, but you’re already making them in your head. “We can control him” is being said right now, in 2025, by people who apparently never cracked a history book.

Based on the historical record, there are exactly three ways this goes. Option one: Stop them before they take power. Option two: War. Option three: Wait for them to die of old age.

[…]

Source: I researched every attempt to stop fascism in history. The success rate is 0%.

The epigram for my forthcoming book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It is a quote from Ed Zitron: “I hate them for what they’ve done to the computer” (Ed even recorded a little cameo of this for the audiobook):

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/enshittification-the-drm-free-audiobook/

Ed’s a smart and passionate guy, and this was definitely the quote to sum up the rage I felt as I wrote the book. Ed’s got a whole theory of who “they” are and “what they did to the computer,” which he calls “the Rot Economy”:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-rot-economy/

The Rot Economy describes the ideology of bosses, starting with monsters like GE’s Jack Welch, who financialized companies, optimizing them for making short term cash gains for investors, at the expense of their workers, their customers, their products and services, and, ultimately, their long-term health.

For Ed, these bosses (especially tech bosses) are the sociopaths who destroyed “the computer” (a stand-in for tech more generally). I don’t disagree at all. The there is a direct, undeniable line from the ideas and conduct of tech bosses and the tech hellscape we live in today. A good read on this subject is Anil Dash’s scorching post from yesterday, “How Tim Cook sold out Steve Jobs”:

https://www.anildash.com/2025/09/09/how-tim-cook-sold-out-steve-jobs/

I find the Rot Economy hypothesis entirely compelling, but also, incomplete. Ed’s explaining why we should hate the players and why we should hate the game, but the enshittification thesis goes even further and explains why we need to hate the umpires – the policymakers, enforcers, economists and legal theorists who created the enshittogenic environment in which the Rot Economy took hold.

Some early reviews of Enshittification have expressed dissatisfaction with book’s “solutions” section, complaining that all the solutions are policy oriented, and there’s nothing suggested for us to do in our capacity as individual consumers:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems

Those criticisms are correct: there is nothing we can do as individual consumers. Agonizing about your consumption choices will not fight enshittification any more than conscientiously sorting your recycling will end the climate emergency. Enshittification isn’t caused by “lazy consumers” who choose “convenience” or are “too cheap to pay for online services”:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/12/give-me-convenience/#or-give-me-death

The wellspring of enshittification isn’t poor consumption choices, it’s poor policy choices. The reason monsters are able to destroy our online lives isn’t their personal moral failings, it’s the system that rewards predatory, deceptive and unfair commercial practices and elevates their foremost practitioners to positions of power within firms:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

And here’s the kicker: we know where those policy choices came from! The people who made these policy choices did so in living memory. They were warned at the time about the foreseeable consequences of their choices. They made those choices anyway. They faced zero consequences for doing so, even after every one of the prophesied horrors came to pass. Not only were they spared consequences for their actions, but they prospered as a result – they are revered as statesmen, lawyers, scholars and titans of economics.

As Trashfuture showrunner Riley Quinn often says, the curse of being a leftist is that you have object permanence – you actually remember the stuff that happened and how it happened. You don’t live in an eternal now that has no causal relationship to the past.

It’s not enough to hate the player, nor the game – we’ve got to remember the crooked umps who rigged the match. We have to say their names, because that’s how we root out their terrible ideas and ensure that our policy interventions make real change. If Elon Musk OD’ed on ketamine tomorrow, there’d be ten Big Balls who’d tear each others’ throats out in the ensuing succession fight, and the next guy would be just as stupid, racist, and authoritarian. Musk, Cook, Zuck, Pichai, Nadella, Larry Ellison – they’re just filling the monster-shaped holes that policy-makers installed in our society.

Start with Robert Bork, the jurist who championed the “consumer welfare” theory of antitrust, which promotes monopolies as efficient and counsels policymakers not to punish companies that take over markets, because the only way to really dominate a market is to be so good that everyone chooses your products and services. Wouldn’t it just be perverse to use public funds to shut down the public’s favorite companies? Bork was a virulent racist, a Nixonite criminal, and he was dead wrong about the law and the economics of monopoly:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

Bork’s legacy of pro-monopoly advocacy is, unsurprisingly, monopolies. Monopolies that make everything more expensive and worse: from athletic shoes to microchips, glass bottles to pharmaceuticals, pro wrestling to eyeglasses:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

These monopolies did not arise because of the iron laws of economics. They are not the product of the great forces of history. They are the direct and undeniable consequence of Robert Bork convincing the world’s governments to embrace his bullshit, pro-monopoly policies.

Satan took Bork to hell in 2012, but you know who’s still with us? Bruce Lehman. Bruce Lehman was Bill Clinton’s copyright czar, the man who, in his own words, “did an end-run around Congress” by getting an UN treaty passed that obliged its signatories to ban reverse engineering:

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16145640-ctrl-ctrl-ctrl

Lehman’s used the treaty to get Congress to pass the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and section 1201 of the DMCA made it a felony to break DRM. Bruce Lehman is why farmers can’t fix their own tractors, hospitals can’t fix their own ventilators, and your mechanic can’t fix your car. He’s why, when the manufacturer of your artificial eyes bricks a computer that is permanently wired to your nervous system, no one else can revive it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/12/unsafe-at-any-speed/

Bruce Lehman is why you can’t use the apps of your choosing on your phone or games console. He’s why we can’t preserve beloved old video games. He’s why Apple and Google get to steal 30 cents out of every dollar you send to a performer, software author, or creator through an app:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/01/its-not-the-crime/#its-the-coverup

Yeah, Tim Cook is a venal billionaire who owes his wealth to the Chinese sweatshops of iPhone City, where they had to install suicide nets to catch the workers who’d rather end it all than work another day for Tim Apple, but Tim Cook’s power over those workers is owed to Bruce Lehman and Robert Bork.

Then there’s the ISP sector, whose Net Neutrality violations and underinvestment mean that people who live in the country where the internet was invented have some of the slowest, most expensive internet in the world. Big ISP bosses are some of the worst people on Earth. Take Thomas Rutledge, who CEO of Charter/Spectrum when covid broke out. At the time, Rutledge was America’s highest-paid CEO. He dictated that his back-office staff could not work from home (imagine a telco boss who doesn’t believe in telework!), and those back-offices all turned into super-spreader sites. Rutledge’s field workers – the people who came to our homes and upgraded our internet so we could work from home – did not get PPE or danger pay. Instead, they got vouchers exclusively redeemable at restaurants that had shut down during the pandemic:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/22/filternet/#thomas-rutledge-murderer

Fuck Thomas Rutledge and may his name be a curse forever. But the reason Thomas Rutledge – and all the other terrible telco bosses – were able to reap millions by supplying us with dogshit internet while literally murdering their employees was that Trump’s FCC chairman, an ex-Verizon lawyer named Ajit Pai, let them get away with it:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/12/ajit-pai/#pai

Ajit Pai engaged in some of the most flagrant cheating ever seen in American regulation (prior to Jan 20, 2025, at least). When he decided to kill Net Neutrality, he accepted obviously fraudulent comments into the official record, including one million identical comments from @pornhub.com email addresses, as well as millions of comments whose return addresses were taken from darknet data-dumps, including the email addresses of dead people and of sitting US senators who supported Net Neutrality:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/10/digital-redlining/#stop-confusing-the-issue-with-relevant-facts

Pai – and his co-conspirators – are the umps who rigged the game. Hate Thomas Rutledge to be sure, but to prevent people like Rutledge from gaining power over your digital life in future, you must remember Ajit Pai with the special form of white-hot rage that keeps people like him from ever making policy decisions again.

Then there’s Canada’s hall of shame, which is full of monsters. Two of my least favorite are James Moore and Tony Clement, who, as ministers under Stephen Harper, rammed through a Canadian version of the DMCA, 2012’s Bill C-11, despite their own consultation, which found that Canadians overwhelmingly rejected the idea:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#sex-pest

Clement (now a disgraced sex-pest) and Moore (still accepted into polite society as a corporate lawyer) are the reason that Canada’s Right to Repair and interop laws are dead on arrival. They’re also why Canada can’t retaliate against Trump’s tariffs by jailbreaking US products, making everything cheaper for Canadians and birthing new, global Canadian tech businesses:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham

In Europe, there’s Axel Voss, the man behind 2019’s “filternet” proposal, which requires tech platforms to spend hundreds of millions of euros for copyright filters that use AI to process everything posted to the public internet in Europe and block anything the AI thinks is “copyrighted”:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/03/26/article-13-will-wreck-the-internet-because-swedish-meps-accidentally-pushed-the-wrong-voting-button/

For years, Voss maintained that none of this was true, that there would be no filters, and dismissed his critics as hysterical fools:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/04/03/after-months-of-insisting-that-article13-doesnt-require-filters-top-eu-commissioner-says-article-13-requires-filters/

But then, after his law passed, he admitted he “didn’t know what he was voting for”:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/09/14/father-of-the-catastrophic-copyright-directive-reveals-he-didnt-know-what-he-was-voting-for/

Fuck the media lobbyists who spent hundreds of millions of euros to push this catastrophic law through:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/12/13/clash-of-the-corporate-titans-whos-spending-what-in-europes-copyright-directive-battle/

But especially and forever, fuck Axel Voss, the policymaker who helped turn those corporate bribes into policy.

Ed Zitron is right to hate the people who implement the Rot Economy for what they did to the computer. But those people are only doing what policymakers let them do. Corporate monsters thrive in an enshittogenic environment.

But political monsters are the ones create that enshittogenic environment. They’re the ones who are terraforming our planet to sideline human life and replace it with the immortal colony organisms we call “limited liability corporations.”

Source: Pluralistic: Hate the player AND the game (10 Sep 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Deterioration of the Washington Post’s subscriber base continued on Tuesday, hours after its proprietor, Jeff Bezos, defended the decision to forgo formally endorsing a presidential candidate as part of an effort to restore trust in the media.

The publication has now shed 250,000 subscribers, or 10% of the 2.5 million customers it had before the decision was made public on Friday, according to the NPR reporter David Folkenflik.

A day earlier, 200,000 had left according to the same outlet.

[…]

Source: Washington Post cancellations hit 250,000 – 10% of subscribers | Washington Post | The Guardian

See also: Washington Post and NYTimes suppressed by fascist Trump Through Billionaire Cowardice

The new programme of the Dutch cabinet under Prime Minister Dick Schoof reflects the tough migration stance promised during the election campaign, outlining a comprehensive plan to radically reform the country’s asylum system and push for an opt-out from EU migration policies. 

The Schoof cabinet’s plans for the upcoming term were unveiled today (13 September).  

The government’s newly published programme builds on the key agreements reached earlier this year after extensive negotiations between the former Liberal Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), led by the successor to former prime minister Mark Rutte, Wilders’ Freedom Party (PVV), New Social Contract (NSC) party and Citizen-Farmer Movement. 

The programme echoes the hardline stance on migration that dominated the campaign rhetoric and outlines a broad package of measures aimed at radically reforming the asylum system, citing “pressure on housing, healthcare, and education” as threats to social cohesion and safety.

“We must change direction and cut the influx immediately. That’s why I’m introducing the strictest asylum policy ever,” said the Minister of Asylum and Migration from the far-right populist PVV Marjolein Faber on X just before the programme’s release. 

A key element of the strategy focuses on action at the European level, including reforms to regulations and international treaties, as the government plans to take the issue to Brussels “as soon as possible” to achieve “an opt-out from European asylum and migration regulations.” 

At last week’s Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio, PVV leader Geert Wilders reiterated his call for EU countries to have an opt-out option on immigration and asylum policies.  

Last week, Minister Faber announced in her debut parliamentary debate that the cabinet intends to declare the asylum crisis an emergency – bypassing parliamentary approval – to swiftly enact measures to cut the migrant influx.

The programme addresses the asylum crisis, including a new Asylum Crisis Law as part of its structural reforms, as well as a redefinition of the nuclear family to restrict family reunification.

It also mentions the scrapping of indefinite asylum permits, allowing periodic reviews to determine if protection is still needed or if individuals can be returned to their home countries. 

Following last November’s national election, which was prompted by the collapse of the fourth Rutte cabinet over immigration policy disputes, Geert Wilders’s far-right party PVV emerged victorious. Securing a landslide victory with 37 seats, PVV became the largest party in the Dutch parliament. 

However, despite winning the election, Wilders opted not to personally join the government. Instead, Dick Schoof, an unelected career bureaucrat who previously headed the Dutch intelligence agency AIVD and served as a top official at the Ministry of Justice, was appointed prime minister by the King last July. 

Source: New Dutch government unveils toughest asylum reform in history – Euractiv

PARIS, Aug 24 (Reuters) – Pavel Durov, the Russian-French billionaire founder and CEO of the Telegram messaging app, was arrested at Bourget airport outside Paris on Saturday evening, TF1 TV and BFM TV said, citing unidentified sources.

Durov was travelling aboard his private jet, TF1 said on its website, adding he had been targeted by an arrest warrant in France as part of a preliminary police investigation.

TF1 and BFM both said the investigation was focused on a lack of moderators on Telegram, and that police considered that this situation allowed criminal activity to go on undeterred on the messaging app.

Durov faces possible indictment on Sunday, according to French media.

The encrypted Telegram, with close to one billion users, is particularly influential in Russia, Ukraine and the republics of the former Soviet Union. It is ranked as one of the major social media platforms after Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok and Wechat.

Telegram did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. The French Interior Ministry and police had no comment.

Russian-born Durov founded Telegram with his brother in 2013. He left Russia in 2014 after refusing to comply with government demands to shut down opposition communities on his VKontakte social media platform, which he sold.

“I would rather be free than to take orders from anyone,” Durov told U.S. journalist Tucker Carlson in April about his exit from Russia and search for a home for his company which included stints in Berlin, London, Singapore and San Francisco.

After Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Telegram has become the main source of unfiltered – and sometimes graphic and misleading – content from both sides about the war and the politics surrounding the conflict.

The platform has become what some analysts call ‘a virtual battlefield’ for the war, used heavily by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his officials, as well as the Russian government.

Telegram – which allows users to evade official scrutiny – has also become one of the few places where Russians can access independent news about the war after the Kremlin increased curbs on independent media following its invasion of Ukraine.

The Russian foreign ministry said its embassy in Paris was clarifying the situation around Durov and called on Western non-governmental organisations to demand his release.

[…]

F1 said Dubai-based Durov had been travelling from Azerbaijan and was arrested at around 8 p.m. (1800 GMT).

Durov, whose fortune was estimated by Forbes at $15.5 billion, said some governments had sought to pressure him but the app should remain a “neutral platform” and not a “player in geopolitics”.

Telegram’s increasing popularity, however, has prompted scrutiny from several countries in Europe, including France, on security and data breach concerns.

Russia’s representative to international organisations in Vienna, Mikhail Ulyanov, and several other Russian politicians were quick on Sunday to accuse France of acting as a dictatorship – the same criticism that Moscow faced when putting demands on Durov in 2014 and trying to ban Telegram in 2018.

[…]

Source: Telegram messaging app CEO Durov arrested in France | Reuters

Telegram – unlike twitter, extwitter, or ex or whatever that moron is calling it today – is a place where you actually can be anonymous and free and for a European country to heavy-handidly slamming on the brakes like this hearkens more to a totalitarian Russia than a free France. France should be ashamed of itself and Europeans should be worried.

[…]The general stability for the full-year average obscures a dramatic shift over the course of 2021, from a nine-percentage-point Democratic advantage in the first quarter to a rare five-point Republican edge in the fourth quarter.

Line graph. Quarterly averages of U.S. party identification and leaning in 2021. In the first quarter of 2021, 49% of U.S. adults identified as Democrats or leaned Democratic, while 40% identified as Republicans or leaned Republican. In the second quarter, 49% were Democrats or Democratic leaners, and 43% were Republicans and Republican leaners. In the third quarter, 45% were Democrats and Democratic leaners, and were 44% Republicans and Republican leaners. In the fourth quarter, 42% were Democrats and Democratic leaners, and 47% were Republicans and Republican leaners.

These results are based on aggregated data from all U.S. Gallup telephone surveys in 2021, which included interviews with more than 12,000 randomly sampled U.S. adults.

[…]

Shifting party preferences in 2021 are likely tied to changes in popularity of the two men who served as president during the year.

[…]

With Trump’s approval rating at a low point and Biden relatively popular in the first quarter, 49% of Americans identified as Democrats or leaned Democratic, compared with 40% who were Republicans or Republican leaners.

In the second quarter, Democratic affiliation stayed high, while Republican affiliation began to recover, increasing to 43%.

The third quarter saw a decline in Democratic identification and leaning, from 49% to 45%, as Biden’s ratings began to falter, while there was no meaningful change in Republican affiliation.

In the fourth quarter, party support flipped as Republicans made gains, from 44% to 47%, and Democratic affiliation fell from 45% to 42%. These fourth-quarter shifts coincided with strong GOP performances in 2021 elections, including a Republican victory in the Virginia gubernatorial election and a near-upset of the Democratic incumbent governor in New Jersey. Biden won both states by double digits in the 2020 election.

[…]

The shifts in party affiliation in each quarter of 2021 were apparent in both the percentage identifying with each party and the percentage of independents leaning to each party, but with more changes among leaners than identifiers.

[…]

Republican identification increased by three points from the beginning to the end of 2021, while Republican leaners increased by four points.

	2021-I	2021-II	2021-III	2021-IV
	%	%	%	%
Democrat	30	31	28	28
Democratic-leaning independent	19	18	17	14
Non-leaning independent	10	5	8	9
Republican-leaning independent	15	17	16	19
Republican	25	26	28	28
Percentage with no opinion not shown
Gallup

[…]

Independents Are Still the Largest Political Group in the U.S.

Regardless of which party has an advantage in party affiliation, over the past three decades, presidential elections have generally been competitive, and party control of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate has changed hands numerous times. This is partly because neither party can claim a very high share of core supporters — those who identify with the party — as the largest proportion of Americans identify initially as political independents.

Overall in 2021, an average of 29% of Americans identified as Democrats, 27% as Republicans and 42% as independents. Roughly equal proportions of independents leaned to the Democratic Party (17%) and to the Republican Party (16%).

The percentage of independent identifiers is up from 39% in 2020, but similar to the 41% measured in 2019. Gallup has often seen a decrease in independents in a presidential election year and an increase in the year after.

[…]

[…]

Source: U.S. Political Party Preferences Shifted Greatly During 2021

While geographic boundaries can often seem like a semi-static thing, they’ve changed a lot when you look at them on the scale of centuries. Point in History, by Hans Hack, presents a map of what boundaries used to be. Click anywhere to see the history.

The map is based on the historical basemaps project, which you can access here.

Source: Mapping the boundaries of history | FlowingData

Which countries are the most (and least) corrupt? This map shows corruption around the world, and the movers and shakers over the last decade.

Source: Mapped: Corruption in Countries Around the World

Denmark’s foreign secret service allowed the US National Security Agency to tap into a crucial internet and telecommunications hub in Denmark and spy on the communications of European politicians, a joint investigation by some of Europe’s biggest news agencies revealed on Sunday.

The covert spying operation, called Operation Dunhammer, took place between 2012 and 2014, based on a secret partnership signed by the two agencies.

The secret pact, signed between the NSA and the Danish Defense Intelligence Service (Danish: Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste, FE) allowed US spies to deploy a data interception system named XKeyscore on the network of Sandagergårdan, an important internet and communications hub in the city of Dragor, near Copenhagen, where several key submarine cables connected Denmark (and continental Europe) to the Scandinavian peninsula.

The NSA allegedly used XKeyscore to mass-sniff internet and mobile traffic and intercept communications such as emails, phone calls, SMS texts, and chat messages sent to the phone numbers and email addresses of European politicians.

The covert operation abruptly stopped in 2014 after Danish government officials learned of the NSA-FE collaboration following the Snowden leaks.

Danish officials put a stop to the operation after they learned that the NSA had also spied on Danish government members.

Several high-ranking FE officials were suspended from the agency last year for their involvement in the operation, as Danish law prohibits the foreign intelligence agency from using its resources to spy internally.

News of the scandal leaked over the weekend after journalists from Danish broadcaster DR got their hands on a document called the Dunhammer Report, which contained the results of the Danish government’s investigation into the NSA-FE secret pact, and which was presented to Danish government officials back in 2015.

[…]

Source: NSA spied on European politicians through Danish telecommunications hub | The Record by Recorded Future

Belarusian authorities appear to have forced a Ryanair jet to perform an emergency landing in Minsk in order to arrest an opposition blogger wanted for organising last summer’s protests against leader Alexander Lukashenko.

Roman Protasevich, a former editor of the influential Telegram channels Nexta and Nexta Live, was detained by police after his flight was diverted to Minsk national airport due to a bomb threat. Minsk confirmed it had scrambled a Mig-29 fighter to escort the plane.

Protasevich has been accused of terrorism and provoking riots after the Nexta channels became one of the main conduits for organising last year’s anti-Lukashenko protests over elections fraud. Protasevich had been living in exile in 2019 and Poland had previously rejected an extradition request sent by Minsk.

Protasevich was flying on an intra-EU flight from Athens to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, when the plane was diverted to Minsk. According to online flight data, the plane was over Belarusian airspace when it diverted course but was closer to Vilnius than Minsk.

[…]

Protasevich, who has been living in exile since 2019, told colleagues earlier on Sunday he had been followed while travelling to the airport in Athens. A Russian speaker had followed him into a line at the airport and attempted to photograph his documents, he wrote to colleagues.

“He was next in line at the document check and just turned around and walked away,” he said. “For some reason, he also tried to secretly photograph my documents.” Colleagues said they had not heard from him since.

Source: Belarus accused of ‘abhorrent action’ after Ryanair flight diverted to arrest blogger | Belarus | The Guardian

Within a week, Basecamp’s loathed no-politics-at-work rule has escalated to a mass exodus. This afternoon, reporter Casey Newton tweeted that around one-third of the company’s employees accepted buyouts following a “contentious all-hands meeting.” The software company behind Ruby on Rails, Campfire, and HEY was, until this week or so, generally perceived by outsiders as one of the good ones.

The stir came out of left field on Tuesday, when co-founder and CEO Jason Fried announced a ban on “societal and political discussions” within the company Basecamp account. The move depressingly aligned with similar internal policies at companies like Google and Amazon, who’ve also lost all semblance of moral superiority.

[…]

Source: One-Third of Basecamp Employees Have Reportedly Quit at Once

The US is following through on promises of retaliation against Russia for its alleged involvement in the SolarWinds cyberattack. The AP reports that President Biden has expelled 10 Russian diplomats from Washington, DC, including members of intelligence services, in response to actions that include the SolarWinds hack. The White House also imposed sanctions on 32 “entities and individuals” as an answer to reported 2020 election interference attempts.

Biden formally blamed the Russia-backed cyberattack group Cozy Bear (aka APT29) as the culprit behind the SolarWinds breach. The FBI, NSA and CISA also issued a joint cybersecurity advisory warning of vulnerabilities Russian intelligence used to compromise networks. The Treasury Department, meanwhile, declared that six Russian technology companies were involved in creating the tools to enable “malicious cyber activities.”

[…]

The actions also encompass a number of non-technology concerns, such as bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan, Russia’s ongoing actions in Crimea and the attempts to silence Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

[…]

Source: US expels Russian diplomats in response to SolarWinds hack | Engadget

This piece is  very worth reading in its’ entirety. Underneath just the conclusions.

Conclusions and Recommendations

This report reviews some of the research that is relevant to foreign information efforts targeting U.S. elections. It provides a general framework for understanding these efforts and will inform our analysis in future volumes of this series. We focused on efforts by Russia and its proxies because these actors appear to have been the most active in recent years, but we note that other state and nonstate actors also might target the United States. As a result of this work, we reached four general conclusions.

Conclusions

Foreign Interference in U.S. Politics Is Not a New Phenomenon

Foreign influence in U.S. domestic affairs dates back to the founding of this country, and there are several examples in our 244 years of existence.

How the Russians Have Tried to Interfere in Recent U.S. Elections Follows Some Logic

We hypothesize that reflexive control theory—a theoretical research program first developed in the 1960s and used by the Soviet military—is part of the intellectual basis for current Russian efforts. At its core, reflexive control theory assumes that people live in a polarized world defined by either cooperation or conflict and that people make decisions based on these views. We believe that Russia is trying to generate, spread, and amplify falsehoods that distort views of “us” versus “them,” with the desired outcomes of (1) driving people to view each other as either friends or adversaries, or (2) exhausting people to the point that they disengage from civic affairs altogether, with the result of political paralysis.

Russia’s Tactics Aim to Polarize Americans and Paralyze the U.S. Political Process

These tactics consist of attempts at polarizing and disrupting social cohesion. Some tactics aim to exacerbate divisive issues, such as racial inequities or immigration. Others target public confidence in democratic institutions and processes as a way to undermine social trust. Underlying these efforts is a broader tactic of using falsehoods to spread confusion, drive groups of people to extreme positions, and generate collective exhaustion within U.S. society. Finally, there is evidence that Russia has tried—and continues to try—to gain direct influence over the U.S. political decisionmaking process, although we do not know how effective these efforts have been.

Our Sample of Relevant Research Revealed Some Trends for Responding to Falsehoods

Although our sample of studies is not representative of all research on this topic, it does provide some ideas for emerging practices in responding to foreign information efforts. Much of this research is fragmented and cuts across multiple disciplines, causing us to organize it by primary unit of analysis: the production of new falsehoods, the distribution of existing falsehoods, or the consumers of this content.

Research on production largely focused on targeting of falsehoods and the features of this content. For studies on the distribution of existing falsehoods, research focused on the role of social media platforms in preventing the spread of online falsehoods and the role of machine-learning models to mitigate this spread. Finally, research on consumption largely focused on consumer views of content and the impacts of fact-checking.

Recommendations for Responding to Foreign Information Efforts

Democracy depends on citizens finding consensus with people whom they might view as different from them. Foreign adversaries have made attempts at undermining the formation of this consensus and will continue to do so.

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Foreign interference has occurred throughout U.S. history and likely will continue in the future. Russia seems to have advanced its information efforts in recent years, and we suspect other countries will try to emulate these practices. We offer three recommendations for how to start designing responses to these existing and emerging threats that target U.S. democracy. In future volumes of this series, we will present results with more-specific recommendations for responding to these foreign information efforts.

A Holistic Strategy Is the Optimal Response to Information Efforts by Foreign Countries

During the Cold War, Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger recommended a “balanced approach” to Soviet information efforts that neither ignores the threat nor becomes obsessed with it (Eagleburger, 1983). Our assumption is that reflexive control theory is part of the intellectual basis for Russian efforts targeting U.S. elections. The unit of analysis of this theory is broad, spanning the entirety of U.S. society and any particular piece of online content, social media platform, or individual consumer. We recommend that any defensive strategy account for the complex relationships among the production of falsehoods, how others distribute content (particularly online), and the impacts of this content on consumers.

Any Defense Should Anticipate Those Who Are Likely to Become Targets of These Efforts

We believe that a key goal for information efforts is to alter people’s perceptions to amplify a view of “us versus them,” with political paralysis as the ultimate goal. Social or political issues tied to identities (such as race, gender, social class, or political affiliation) that hold meaning for people are useful starting points because false content tied to these characteristics might elicit strong reactions (Marwick, 2018). We suspect that foreign efforts will likely produce content that plays on these identities in an effort to amplify differences and deepen preexisting fault lines in U.S. society. Thus, we recommend developing strategies that anticipate which subgroups are most vulnerable to such efforts without publicly shaming these groups or targeting specific individuals.

Any Response Should Attempt to Protect Potential Targets Against Foreign Information Efforts

The antidote to manufacturing intergroup conflict is convincing people that they have more in common with those who are different from them than they might believe at first glance. We recommend collecting, analyzing, and evaluating preventative interventions to protect people from reacting to falsehoods meant to divide the country (e.g., public campaigns that emphasize shared interests of Californians, public warnings about broader information efforts by foreign adversaries, or media literacy programs for subgroups that are potential targets).

In conclusion, democracy depends on citizens finding consensus with people whom they might view as different from them. Foreign adversaries have made attempts at undermining the formation of this consensus and will continue to do so. There is a logic to these attempts. The best defense is a holistic approach that accounts for the preexisting fault lines that exist within U.S. society.

Download the Full Report (includes references and appendixes) ⤴

Source: From Consensus to Conflict: Understanding Foreign Measures Targeting U.S. Elections | RAND

The 6,600-word memo, written by former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang, is filled with concrete examples of heads of government and political parties in Azerbaijan and Honduras using fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves to sway public opinion. In countries including India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador, she found evidence of coordinated campaigns of varying sizes to boost or hinder political candidates or outcomes, though she did not always conclude who was behind them.

“In the three years I’ve spent at Facebook, I’ve found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry, and caused international news on multiple occasions,” wrote Zhang, who declined to talk to BuzzFeed News. Her LinkedIn profile said she “worked as the data scientist for the Facebook Site Integrity fake engagement team” and dealt with “bots influencing elections and the like.”

“I have personally made decisions that affected national presidents without oversight, and taken action to enforce against so many prominent politicians globally that I’ve lost count,” she wrote.

The memo is a damning account of Facebook’s failures. It’s the story of Facebook abdicating responsibility for malign activities on its platform that could affect the political fate of nations outside the United States or Western Europe. It’s also the story of a junior employee wielding extraordinary moderation powers that affected millions of people without any real institutional support, and the personal torment that followed.

“I know that I have blood on my hands by now,” Zhang wrote.

[…]

“There was so much violating behavior worldwide that it was left to my personal assessment of which cases to further investigate, to file tasks, and escalate for prioritization afterwards,” she wrote.

That power contrasted with what she said seemed to be a lack of desire from senior leadership to protect democratic processes in smaller countries. Facebook, Zhang said, prioritized regions including the US and Western Europe, and often only acted when she repeatedly pressed the issue publicly in comments on Workplace, the company’s internal, employee-only message board.

“With no oversight whatsoever, I was left in a situation where I was trusted with immense influence in my spare time,” she wrote. “A manager on Strategic Response mused to myself that most of the world outside the West was effectively the Wild West with myself as the part-time dictator – he meant the statement as a compliment, but it illustrated the immense pressures upon me.”

A former Facebook engineer who knew her told BuzzFeed News that Zhang was skilled at discovering fake account networks on the platform.

[…]

“I have made countless decisions in this vein – from Iraq to Indonesia, from Italy to El Salvador,” she wrote. “Individually, the impact was likely small in each case, but the world is a vast place.”

Still, she did not believe that the failures she observed during her two and a half years at the company were the result of bad intent by Facebook’s employees or leadership. It was a lack of resources, Zhang wrote, and the company’s tendency to focus on global activity that posed public relations risks, as opposed to electoral or civic harm.

“Facebook projects an image of strength and competence to the outside world that can lend itself to such theories, but the reality is that many of our actions are slapdash and haphazard accidents,” she wrote.

[…]

Source: Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation

A really good insight into the problems that Faebook has to look at. I’m pretty sure that it’s not Facebook ignoring the problem, it’s that their solution was in the person of the whislteblower, who felt underappreciated and alone and seems to have been unable to garner support within Facebook for more resources.