Is America's Influence Eroding? | EYES ON GEOPOLITICS

The Team House

This midweek episode of 'Eyes on Geopolitics' explores the evolving tactics of Russian and other state-linked actors in using gig-economy ne

Key takeaways

• Espionage is increasingly conducted through gig economy workers unaware they're being used for state purposes.
• Online networks promoting nihilistic violence may be co-opted by foreign governments without direct control.

Main topics

• Gig economy espionage
• Online radicalization networks

Notable quotes

"These are the guys that you've probably heard some pretty disturbing reports over the last couple of years about these networks and how they essentially groom children online..." - Speaker 3

Conclusion

As geopolitical threats evolve beyond traditional state actors, the li

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) What's up everybody, we're back, Speaker 1 (0:02) Eyes on Geopolitics, uh, midweek episode, I'm here with Jack and John, Jack Murphy of course, and Jonathan Hackett, uh, a lot happening as usual. What do you guys want to hit on first, want to hit on the Russians being indicted? Kind of in absentia, because none of them are in the United States, so, I told you guys this on our group chat, that I was a little, I don't know, it sounds a little sketch to me, obviously it's fucking crazy and the Russians are dirty bastards, but, uh... You know that these guys are basically not in the States and this comes out of nowhere. I don't know if they're trying to change the subject on something, change the story on something, but they've indicted five Russians and a kid from Brooklyn. Two Russians, two Speaker 3 (0:42) Cubans, and one Venezuelan. Speaker 1 (0:44) Okay, so it's a mixed bag. Are Speaker 3 (0:45) any of them here? I don't believe so. Speaker 1 (0:48) Yeah. One Speaker 3 (0:49) of them's Speaker 1 (0:49) a Speaker 3 (0:49) fucking salsa dancer instructor. Speaker 1 (0:52) That's why I've always told my ex-girlfriend about worrying about the salsa dancer instructors. Not because they were Russian saboteurs, but because she was having an affair with them. But anyway. Speaker 3 (1:03) This is really interesting, I think. And we talked about this. We had actually some academics on the show when we spoke to Rory Cormick and Magda Long. And she was saying one of the big changes in espionage in this century is that it's happening on the gig economy. And I first ran into this in investigating Havana syndrome and the harassment that Havana victims had stateside after they came back. And victims, these guys, former CIA, former State Department people, they're being followed around and photographed by people. And, you know, because some of these people have, you know, counter surveillance training and so on, they picked up on it pretty, I mean, it wasn't even being hidden really, it was harassing surveillance. Speaker 3 (1:51) And some of the people were found to have connections to Venezuela, connections to Cuba. But a lot of times they were also using like Bangladeshi DoorDash guy, you know, who has he's unwitting in a sense that, you know, he just knows he's being paid $100 to go and take some pictures. And then, OK, cool. So it's sort of this relatively new phenomenon. But you're also seeing it like I've heard reporting. About, you know, allegedly people who are conducting acts of sabotage in Russia being recruited on Telegram channels. So it's kind of going both ways. And I think that's a very interesting dynamic and something that's maybe very difficult to defend against. Speaker 2 (2:34) Yeah, actually, the. And Masa Amini, the outspoken Iranian woman living in New York City, was they tried to kill her with. Speaker 1 (2:44) Yeah. Speaker 2 (2:45) Or Masa Alinajad, I'm sorry. They tried to kill her with Chechens multiple times. And of course, the plan was to move her to Cuba on a speedboat. So there is the Cuban connection there as well, just like this story, which is kind of interesting because, you know, you can hire these people, like you said. And also Hells Angels was involved in a similar attempt. where they're actually illegal immigrants from Canada coming over here, Hells Angels guys, who one of them overstayed his visa and the other two illegally entered the country to go do an assassination just like this. Speaker 3 (3:14) And here's something else I'd like to draw people's attention to. Okay. Speaker 3 (3:21) United by Chaos, Examining the Russian Nexus to Online Networks of Nihilistic Violence. Now, this is talking about a number of different groups, 764 and others, you know, predominantly Russian speaking groups. And, you know, they make the point here. It cautions, their report, cautions against portraying the Calm, this sort of conglomerate organization, as a Kremlin-directed project, suggesting instead that potentially state-linked actors are attempting to hijack an otherwise organic youth-driven network as a recruitment pool for violence. So these are the guys that you've probably heard some pretty... disturbing reports over the last couple of years about these networks and how they essentially groom children online and get them to commit acts of self-harm and other terrible stuff and blackmail them, you know, have them produce, you know, compromising videos of themselves. These are young people, you know, they don't know how to respond or react. You know, they're vulnerable people. Speaker 3 (4:23) And so I bring people's attention to this article and this dynamic because some of these groups are coming out of Russia and some of the main players are in Russia and they're targeting people in America and inspiring them to commit acts of violence. And yeah, it's notes that they may not be Kremlin directed, maybe not, but here's the next thing I would point towards. So here we have Speaker 3 (4:53) Wali Haddad. He was a terrorist back in the 1970s, worked with the Palestinian Liberation Front. And after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the KGB files were opened. We had access to them. And this guy was a directed KGB asset. He was working as a proxy to commit acts of terrorism against the West and to drag the West down strategically to occupy our resources, running around Speaker 2 (5:20) fighting Palestinian aircraft hijackings. Speaker 3 (5:23) So this one was directed, but the other more famous terrorist, if you will, that people know about is Abu Nadal. And Abu Nadal was probably, I would say definitely not KGB directed, but he was influenced. He was the kind of guy that the KGB would meet with in East Germany and they would give him information and just let him do what he's going to do. Right. So it's an it's influence as well as direction, depending on how they handle that person. So I'm just bring this stuff up to, you know, maybe make people a little bit more aware of what's going on in the background of the headlines. Speaker 2 (6:01) Now, Jack, do you think this is like a directed chaos agent thing from the Russian government or is it more organic people in Russia who are disaffected and angry at the world and just trying to make other people do harm? Speaker 3 (6:12) I think that it has some government direction behind it. I mean, it probably does. And that report is probably correct that it's largely organic, so to speak, that it's, you know, just nihilistic assholes that want to spread the hate. But that at some point it becomes hijacked and used by the Russian government as well. I mean, this is a little bit more controversial, actually, but I believe the Chinese have agents of chaos here in the United States as well. And there's a few Speaker 2 (6:41) things that I have conversations I've had with law enforcement folks where Speaker 3 (6:45) they pick up somebody. So like one instance was a guy who is ethnically Chinese, but he worked here in the United States. He had advanced degrees. But this guy was living out of his minivan and he was selling ghost guns in Speaker 2 (6:58) New York City. Speaker 3 (6:59) Wasn't he a doctor? Yeah. He worked for a governmental agency, had the ID card and everything. Living out of your van. That's unbelievable. And selling ghost, the way the ghost gun thing works is you go into Pennsylvania, you buy a kit. It's like an AR-15 kit. It's like the pieces of the rifle. And then you transport it, sell it in New York. The person constructs the rifle and now you have a rifle without a serial number on it. And by the way, this is completely illegal to do. And so the police will follow these smugglers all the way from Pennsylvania into New York City. And once they come within, city lines arrest them. So I had a Speaker 1 (7:38) friend directly who was arrested and went to prison for a couple of years for doing this. Not because he was selling them, but because he just loved guns and stuff. And he's Speaker 3 (7:47) an Speaker 1 (7:47) idiot. And Speaker 3 (7:47) New York City has like a whole task force. I think it's the Queens District Attorney's Office actually ran that task force. So it's one of these things that I couldn't prove to you that this guy was a Chinese agent, but he may be more along the lines of like these young kids you hear about, young Chinese kids that try to jump the fence onto a military base in the United States and take pictures. But they're not necessarily like directed assets of the Chinese MSS or something like that. It's more like. They want to do something to impress, you know, the government when they, you know, like, look what I did, you know, look, look, look, you know, how prominent I am. I did a good thing. Or they maybe even be pressured in some cases where they get a phone call from someone from like, you know, their aunt who's like, yeah, yeah, I got a visit from, you know, party representative in our town. And he was asking, you know, what our son studying in America has done to support the party lately. And they get the message when they hear that. So I think this is something that, suffice to say, warrants further investigation. Speaker 1 (8:51) You know what it kind of like a little bit reminds me of? It has some like kind of threads that like it parallels between is accelerationists. Speaker 3 (9:00) Yes, it's closely related. Speaker 1 (9:02) Yeah, yeah. Because once you start like just doing it just to fucking cause chaos, it's like. really does like it's the light bulb went on my head in terms of like accelerationists. Speaker 3 (9:12) The thing with the guy living in the van, though, that that that rings some bells for me because I've heard stories about Chinese spies that have been captured by the arrested by the FBI. One case, it was a husband and wife couple, and they both had like good paying government jobs, but they lived like poor people. Like they ate off of newspapers. They didn't even have plates. And that was because they were hardcore Maoists. There are hardcore committed ideologues who, you know, all the money went back to the party. Speaker 2 (9:42) Wow. Speaker 2 (9:44) Well, even with these youths, you know, like you find some male 15 year old kid who's been, you know, online a lot and already has tendencies that once identified could be easily manipulated to achieve some kind of outcome across the Internet in the United States. Speaker 3 (9:58) Exactly. You know, yeah, you find somebody who's like a borderline school shooter and then just push them over the edge. And that's, we've seen that with like, you know, back in the day, it was like 4chan, you know, where they encourage people to go and do that. And it continues like on dark web and discord forums and things like that. Speaker 1 (10:18) Can't this kid just like. Beat off like I did when I was 15, you know, I mean like sorry bad joke But uh the interesting thing like you you were talking about it how like they start off slow where they're like Yeah, just take some pictures and then they're like, you know make a grand 1500 bucks and then it's like would you mind you mind? Killing this guy for like 40 grand. Is that like is that in your wheelhouse? Like because like the story that just came out the about the charges That's literally what happened. And then the Venezuelan kid from Brooklyn was like, I don't really want to do it, but I could probably find somebody that can do it. But that's the Speaker 2 (10:54) whole thing with like recruiting assets in the intelligence community. We don't give them a task right away. That's going to be the task that we recruited them for in the first place. We give them small little things that slowly create a dependency that they have on us. And they also prove to us that they're willing to do things under certain time pressures within certain requirements. We also correct their behaviors. You know, we create this whole structures so that when they do get to that moment, when you ask, to do that thing that's a little bit more than they should be doing, they almost feel so committed to you that they have this problem in their brain where they're like, well, I have to do it because that's my friend or that's my whatever, however they rationalize it. And they'll do it for that reason, even though reason is in their brain saying, don't do that. Speaker 3 (11:32) See, I mean, there's example after example like this of people being recruited over the internet and directed to go and do things. Speaker 1 (11:44) Is this the UK? Speaker 3 (11:46) Yeah. Yep. Speaker 2 (11:49) Yeah. We saw the same thing in Israel, actually. There was a older Jewish man who was recruited online by Iran's Ministry of Intelligence or Vaja, who basically created like a romantic relationship that was fake and convinced the guy to go take pictures of military installations and other sensitive things and so on. And then they gave him other tasks as well. But the Israeli intelligence. services thwarted it and then publicized it. It's kind of an interesting operation as well. Speaker 3 (12:14) Weren't they like escalating him up to conducting violent attacks? And that's exactly the authorities moved in. Speaker 2 (12:20) Yep. They were doing exactly what we just described. They gave him small little things at first, slowly building him up. And of course, you know, sitting there in your chair, you're like, I shouldn't do that. That's wrong. Like I shouldn't be going onto a base I'm not allowed on, but I like talking to this person. I want to please them, you know? Speaker 3 (12:35) Yeah. And it's a, it's a, again, somewhat vulnerable person. They're lonely. Speaker 1 (12:39) Weren't they, wasn't Iranians also, weren't they getting Israeli like teenagers to go do BDA? Yes, Speaker 2 (12:46) they were. And these weren't like Palestinians. These were Jewish Israeli kids. Speaker 1 (12:51) Yeah. Wow. Yeah, it's interesting. Be careful, kids, if you're online. You know what I mean? If some weird guy or your fake girlfriend is asking you to go and step on a military installation and take pictures. Or some elf in World Speaker 2 (13:04) of Warcraft dressed scantily asks you to go observe a military installation and give you gold in exchange. Be careful. Yeah, Speaker 3 (13:11) you got to have that conversation with your seven-year-old. Like, yeah, don't talk to neo-Nazis on Roblox, okay? Speaker 1 (13:22) You guys, let's talk about what's going on. Like, we really haven't touched on it. Obviously, like, we've talked about it, like, slightly, but, like, what's happened to, like, our bases in and around the Middle East? Oh, yeah, Speaker 3 (13:35) I got one for that, too, dude. Speaker 1 (13:37) Yeah, so CBS reported something. And I think also, didn't the inspector general come out with something, too, in terms of, like, how much and what the damage was? Like, they really didn't get super specific, but that was only up until June. So it's been, like, another three Speaker 2