CNN just added two more reporters to the byline (there was only one when I first posted the link) so they are probably going to publish more at the link soon. On live TV it is clear they have not had time to digest the indictments.

Rosenstein is speaking live now.

One thing that already struck me is that he spent time explaining how this group took care to hire Americans who did not know they were working for Russia and to stress that no Americans have been charged. That they worked to promote discord in the population by appearing as grassroot activists. That they did things like organize rallies both for and against Trump on the very same day.

What I can't get out of my mind on this whole thing is how it means that there were some genuises in Russian intel who understood that Trump was a troll par excellence, the ideal vessel for what they wanted to do: provoke discord. Even before most of us understood the extent of Trump's troll capabilities. This is counter all I have learned about Russian intel, I've learned over the years to think of them as mostly clueless oafs about our government and culture.

On the other hand, I am less convinced that in the end "Hillary lost because of the Russians".  Because those Americans who fell for or worked for these guys agreed with whatever was being pushed. It's not like the Russians pushed them to believe it. They were just exploiting American tendencies already there. This is the way I see it: every time you push polarizing political agitprop, you are doing what these Russians think will help bring our country down. 

And that means: if you think they are correct in their analysis of our country's situation, and you don't want our country brought down, you will stop with the polarizing rhetoric and want to tamp down the partisanship and try to reach out to whoever you think the other side is.

I found this 2015 NYTimes piece worth a read for thinking about big picture motive, hat tip Andrew Prokop's piece on the indictments @ Vox.com

The agency existed before the 2016 campaign. In fact, Adrian Chen reported on it in a deeply researched New York Times magazine piece back in June 2015, calling it a “shadowy organization in St. Petersburg, Russia, that spreads false information on the Internet.” Chen described how the group and its workers used fake social media accounts to spread alarming hoaxes in the US, from a report of a false police shooting of an unarmed black woman, to a fake chemical spill.

And before they started to work on other countries, in Russia, where Chen went to check it all out, it's totalitarian but more Kafka than Orwell, the original purpose: basically to ruin the internet for anti-government purposes. Same as with cracking down and taking over other media. A couple of excerpts:

Savchuk’s revelations about the agency have fascinated Russia not because they are shocking but because they confirm what everyone has long suspected: The Russian Internet is awash in trolls. “This troll business becomes more popular year by year,” says Platon Mamatov, who says that he ran his own troll farm in the Ural Mountains from 2008 to 2013. During that time he employed from 20 to 40 people, mostly students and young mothers, to carry out online tasks for Kremlin contacts and local and regional authorities from Putin’s United Russia party. Mamatov says there are scores of operations like his around the country, working for government authorities at every level. Because the industry is secretive, with its funds funneled through a maze of innocuous-sounding contracts and shell businesses, it is difficult to estimate exactly how many people are at work trolling today. But Mamatov claims “there are thousands — I’m not sure about how many, but yes, really, thousands.”

The boom in pro-Kremlin trolling can be traced to the antigovernment protests of 2011, when tens of thousands of people took to the streets after evidence of fraud in the recent Parliamentary election emerged.  The protests were organized largely over Facebook and Twitter and spearheaded by leaders, like the anticorruption crusader Alexei Navalny, who used LiveJournal blogs to mobilize support. The following year, when Vyascheslav Volodin, the new deputy head of Putin’s administration and architect of his domestic policy, came into office, one of his main tasks was to rein in the Internet. Volodin, a lawyer who studied engineering in college, approached the problem as if it were a design flaw in a heating system.  [....]

All of this has contributed to a dawning sense, among the Russian journalists and activists I spoke with, that the Internet is no longer a natural medium for political opposition. “The myth that the Internet is controlled by the opposition is very, very old,” says Leonid Volkov, a liberal politician and campaign manager to Alexei Navalny. “It’s not true since at least three years.” Part of this is simple demographics: The Internet audience has expanded from its early adopters, who were more likely to be well-educated liberal intelligentsia, to the whole of Russia, which overwhelmingly supports Putin. Also, by working every day to spread Kremlin propaganda, the paid trolls have made it impossible for the normal Internet user to separate truth from fiction.

“The point is to spoil it, to create the atmosphere of hate, to make it so stinky that normal people won’t want to touch it,” Volkov said, when we met in the office of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. “You have to remember the Internet population of Russia is just over 50 percent. The rest are yet to join, and when they join it’s very important what is their first impression.” The Internet still remains the one medium where the opposition can reliably get its message out. But their message is now surrounded by so much garbage from trolls that readers can become resistant before the message even gets to them [.....]

Russia’s information war might be thought of as the biggest trolling operation in history, and its target is nothing less than the utility of the Internet as a democratic space [....]

Goes on to explain how they ended up started to troll in English around 2014...

A former Russian troll speaks: ‘It was like being in Orwell’s world’

By Anton Troianovski @ WashingtonPost.com, February 17 at 7:10 PM

The indictment by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III of 13 Russians associated with a St. Petersburg online “troll factory” that allegedly interfered with the U.S. election has brought a sense of vindication to the handful of former employees who have already been speaking out about what they witnessed.

One of them, 43-year-old Marat Mindiyarov, a teacher by training, spoke by phone with The Washington Post on Saturday from the village outside St. Petersburg where he lives. Mindiyarov worked in a department for Russian domestic consumption. When he took a test in December 2014 to move to the factory’s “Facebook department” targeting the U.S. market, Mindiyarov recalled, he was asked to write an essay about Hillary Clinton. Here are lightly edited excerpts of the conversation.

What was your first reaction when you heard about the Mueller indictment?

I congratulate America that they achieved something — that they put forward an indictment rather than just writing about this. I congratulate Robert Mueller.

How did you end up at the troll factory?

I worked there from November 2014 to February 2015. I ended up there totally by accident — I happened to be unemployed, and this place had work right by my house. So I went there. I realized quickly that this was the kind of place where I only wanted to spend enough time until I got my salary and I could leave.

How did it feel inside?

I arrived there, and I immediately felt like a character in the book “1984” by George Orwell — a place where you have to write that white is black and black is white. Your first feeling, when you ended up there, was that you were in some kind of factory that turned lying, telling untruths, into an industrial assembly line. The volumes were colossal — there were huge numbers of people, 300 to 400, and they were all writing absolute untruths. It was like being in Orwell’s world.

What sorts of untruths did you write?

My untruths amounted to posting comments. I worked in the commenting department — I had to comment on the news. No one asked me my opinion [....]

Max Boot ramping up the troll bait: Trump is ignoring the worst attack on America since 9/11