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Credit to Author: Brian Barrett| Date: Sat, 17 Feb 2018 12:00:00 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n Special counsel Robert <\/span>Mueller\u2019s indictment against Russia\u2019s Internet Research Agency<\/a> contains a number of striking moments, from the inflammatory ads bought by the so-called \u201ctroll factory\u201d to the rampant identity theft against US citizens<\/a>. But what stands out most may be the reminder that for Russia, subverting the foundations of US democracy was just another 9 to 5.<\/p>\n The IRA is by now a known quantity; Adrian Chen detailed operations in deeply reported New York Times<\/em><\/a> piece in 2015. At the time, Chen described rank and file workers huddled together in bland office spaces, charged with meeting trolling quotas intended to rile up Ukraine, for instance, or sow general confusion in the US. If the focus were on anything other than upsetting the geopolitical order, it would all seem pretty mundane.<\/p>\n But while previous IRA accounts are plenty jarring in and of themselves, the Justice Department\u2019s indictment\u2014with its unfiltered internal communications and an unthinkably urgent target\u2014feels even more so. It\u2019s a picture of an attack on the US that\u2019s all the more alarming for its blandly bureaucratic approach, hundreds of employees punching in each morning to grab some coffee, bitch about the boss, and pick away at the fabric of society.<\/p>\n In fact, as described by Mueller, the IRA looks probably not unlike your office, especially if you work at a digital marketing agency. It has a graphics department, a data analysis team, and SEO boffins working to game Google. It all feels almost satirical, The Americans<\/em> meets Mike Judge.<\/p>\n It was also more than that, of course. One of the named defendants, Sergey Pavlovich Polozov, allegedly managed the IT department, which in this case involved setting up illicit US servers with untraceable VPNs through which to funnel internet traffic. And while Anna Vladislovovna Bogacheva had a seemingly rote position overseeing the project\u2019s data analysis group, the indictment alleges that her job description included traveling to the US under false pretenses for intelligence-gathering purposes.<\/p>\n It all feels almost satirical, The Americans<\/em> meets Mike Judge.<\/p>\n What stands out most among the charges isn\u2019t the radical, though, but the mundane. Russia allegedly had 80 full-time employees specifically dedicated to its \u201ctranslator project,\u201d an effort to flood YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and more with pro-Trump, anti-Clinton propaganda. The program\u2019s $1.25 million budget apparently included incentive bonuses, just shy of naming an Employee of the Month.<\/p>\n So-called specialists allegedly created social media accounts posing as politically active US citizens, limiting their vitriol to a list of relevant topics handed down by management. They worked regular shifts, their work monitored and evaluated both for authenticity, with regular feedback coming from their superiors. They received guidelines on how to maximize engagement, down to the ratio of text to graphics to video in a given post. The tracked engagement, says the indictment, with the zeal of a Fortune 500 social media manager:<\/p>\n \u201cThey tracked the size of the online US audiences reached through posts, different types of engagement with the posts (such as likes, comments, and reposts), changes in audience size, and other metrics,\u201d reads the charge. \u201cDefendants and their co-conspirators received and maintained metrics reports on certain group pages and individualized posts.\u201d<\/p>\n Even the feedback they received feels familiar to anyone who has occupied a lower rung of the corporate latter. The operator of Russia-backed Facebook account called \u201cSecured Borders\u201d was allegedly reprimanded for a \u201clow number of posts dedicated to criticizing Hillary Clinton.\u201d The rigid requirements of an assembly line, applied to stoking partisan flames 5,000 miles away.<\/p>\n Or take an email included in the complaint, from a defendant to an unnamed family member: \u201cWe had a slight crisis here at work: the FBI busted our activity (not a joke),\u201d it reads. \u201cSo, I got preoccupied with covering tracks together with the colleagues.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s a new spin on an email you\u2019ve sent yourself: Sorry I\u2019m late; work got out of hand<\/em>.<\/p>\n That\u2019s what makes this all so chilling. The people chiseling away at the foundations of US democracy weren\u2019t zealots, or necessarily even true believers. They were collecting a paycheck, presumably doing just enough not to catch hell from middle management. America faced\u2014and continues to face\u2014not a fevered onslaught, but a swarm of interchangeable corporate drones.<\/p>\n It\u2019s important to remember that Mueller\u2019s indictment does not cover the activities of other Russian groups, like the so-called Fancy Bear hackers who broke into the Democratic National Committee\u2019s emails<\/a>, or Russia's probing US election infrastructure<\/a>. Russia came at the US from multiple angles. But in the work of the IRA, you can see a glimpse of how systematic, how unerring, how coordinated the threat truly was and continues to be. Bureaucracies are bland, sure, but they\u2019re also ruthless.<\/p>\n