American creating deep fakes targeting Harris works with Russian intel, documents show

[wing2000]

"A former deputy Palm Beach County sheriff who fled to Moscow and became one of the Kremlin’s most prolific propagandists is working directly with Russian military intelligence to pump out deepfakes and circulate misinformation that targets Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, according to Russian documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post.

The documents show that John Mark Dougan, who also served in the U.S. Marines and has long claimed to be working independently of the Russian government, was provided funding by an officer from the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service. Some of the payments were made after fake news sites he created began to have difficulty accessing Western artificial intelligence systems this spring and he needed an AI generator — a tool that can be prompted to create text, photos and video.

Dougan’s liaison at the GRU is a senior figure in Russian military intelligence working under the cover name Yury Khoroshevsky, the documents show. The officer’s real name is Yury Khoroshenky, though he is referred to only as Khoroshevsky in the documents, and he serves in the GRU’s Unit 29155, which oversees sabotage, political interference operations and cyberwarfare targeting the West, according to two European security officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence."

More than 150 documents were shared with the Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/10/23/dougan-russian-disinformation-harris/

 

[essentialsaltes]

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One of the most successful claims was disseminated by DC Weekly — a respectable-seeming internet outlet, which disinformation researchers at Clemson University traced back to domains affiliated with a former American police officer, John Mark Dougan, who has reinvented himself as a pro-Russian journalist in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.

Dougan, 51, who received political asylum in Moscow, is now a key player in Russia’s disinformation operations against the West.

Working from an apartment crowded with servers and other computer equipment, Dougan has built an ever-growing network of more than 160 fake websites that mimic news outlets in the United States, Britain and France.

Phony 'news' portals surpass US newspaper sites, researchers say​

Those sites include a network of 167 Russian disinformation sites that NewsGuard said were linked to John Mark Dougan, a US former law enforcement officer who fled to Moscow.