Lawfare Daily: Making Sense of the Doppelganger Disinformation Operation, with Thomas Rid

In early September, the U.S. Justice Department released a trove of information about the Russian influence campaign known as “Doppelganger”—a Kremlin-backed effort that created faux versions of familiar news websites and seeding them with fake material. Just a few weeks later, the German publication Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that it had received a tranche of hacked materials from inside the Doppelganger operation. 

Thomas Rid, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and the founding director of the school’s Alperovitch Institute for Cybersecurity Studies, got an inside look at those documents. In a new article in Foreign Affairs, “The Lies Russia Tells Itself,” he examines the “granular operational insight” that this material provides into the active measures campaign. He joined the Lawfare Podcast to talk with Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic about his findings—and why he believes the documents show that “the biggest boost the Doppelganger campaigners got was from the West’s own anxious coverage of the project.”

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