Eurasia note #58 – Microsoft Touts For Profit In Ukraine

Timely sacking of security chiefs can’t hurt but who's firing Zelenskiy's friends?

Jul 20, 2022

President Zelenskiy axes top prosecutor and intelligence boss, alleging treason.
U.S., Poland or Microsoft in his ear? MS runs cyber operation on behalf of Ukraine.
Ceding land to Poland may be the fall back if Russian forces advance to Kyiv.

Senior Ukrainian Air Force officers killed in Russian strike on Vinnitsa airbase.
Ukraine hits Russian targets with American mid-to-long range missiles.
Russia’s gas giant says scheduled repairs to pipelines delayed by force majeure.

(2,300 words or about 11 minutes’ read.)

Microsoft’s $22 billion military deal for enhanced goggles

Tbilisi, Jul 20, 2022

Ukraine’s president fired the head of domestic intelligence and the prosecutor general, along with dozens of agents, accusing them of treason for plotting with Russia. Earlier this month he fired seven ambassadors.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that between the prosecutor’s office and Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), more than 60 officials were working against Ukraine in Russian-occupied territories. He had opened 651 treason cases against law enforcement officials.

On Jul 17 he fired head of the security service Ivan Bakanov and prosecutor general Iryna Venediktova, who led efforts to prosecute Russian war crimes. Both were part of his entourage and one a childhood friend.

The New York Times points out that the SBU, successor to the Ukrainian KGB, is Europe’s largest security service with more than 30,000 staff, compared to just over 4,000 at Britain’s MI5. Of course, the SBU doesn’t have Silicon Valley and the social media companies to do much of its monitoring. But that may be changing.

The press focuses on foreign aid in the form of weaponry but perhaps more important is intelligence. European Union foreign ministers will give Ukraine another 500 million euros in weapons (the single currency approximately par with U.S. dollars) — the EU has given 2.5 billion euros since February. That compares with almost $60 billion from the U.S..

In Washington, State Department spokesman Ned Price said the sharing of sensitive information would not be affected.

Then there’s assistance “in kind” like that provided by Microsoft.

Last month the president of the software monopoly, Brad Smith, issued a report on Microsoft’s intelligence activity in Ukraine. Entitled Defending Ukraine: Early Lessons from the Cyber War, he gave speeches and interviews with numerous news outlets. His point was that wars use the latest technologies, and develop new ones. In this case, the cyber war. [1]

Smith posits three ways in which Russia is fighting Ukraine: cyber attacks to disrupt operations within Ukraine, espionage from outside Ukraine, and internet influence activities targeting audiences around the world.

It is a reasonable bet that the West’s digital corporations — namely Microsoft — in coordination with governments are doing the same. After all, you cannot make a vaccine without the virus. The former deputy director of Russia’s FSB Oleg Syromolotov claims Ukraine has outsourced control of its security infrastructure to the Redmond company.

The company is also involved in the rollout by Kyiv of a digital ID and prototype universal basic income scheme - even in the midst of war, the country is becoming a corporate playground.

Microsoft has helped Ukraine disperse its cyber operations and digital assets outside the country and across many countries, militaries and NGOs. That, Smith says, has led Russian intelligence to target foreign, in particular, NATO countries, infrastructure suppliers, think tanks and humanitarian organizations.

Microsoft says it has seen the Russian military launch multiple waves of destructive cyber attacks against 48 distinct Ukrainian agencies and enterprises. Influence operations take advantage of the openness of Western societies and the public’s polarization, and also target nonaligned countries.

Smith even puts a number on the spread of Russian propaganda, saying it has increased 216 per cent in Ukraine and 82 per cent in the United States between the February invasion and mid-June. Of Russia’s attempted cyber intrusions aimed at Ukraine, 29 per cent succeeded.

The asymmetric nature of this propaganda saw the Russians use Event Covid to inflame anti-vaxxers in the West while pushing jabs at home, he said.

Note that Microsoft is no benefactor of Ukraine. It regularly prosecutes companies large and small for failing to pay tithes, taxes and duties to, and buy indulgences from, the mighty Washington monopoly. Back in 2011 it filed 70 law suits for criminal or economic crimes, including the three main electronics chains Hello, Diawest and Technopolis.

Disinformation business

Microsoft’s contribution is not limited to the technical aspects of IT and software. In June 2022 it bought Miburo, an example of the burgeoning trade in “countering disinformation” — or in Miburo’s words, detecting and attributing “malign and extremist influence” to “protect democracies and the free information environment” by ensuring the integrity and resilience of the free Internet.

This is not as neutral as it sounds. A perusal of Miburo’s posts on Substack suggest it is itself in the NATO, Atlantic Council camp, dismissing the existence of Ukrainian fascists, and making the subjective allegation that anyone who shares “an idea or claim promoted by the Kremlin” is a victim of penetration — for example, anyone who thinks NATO’s expansion contributed to the war in Ukraine.

It concedes that RT (formerly Russia Today) does not broadcast in Turkish or Vietnamese, and that Sputnik radio (from the same stable) has few followers in those countries yet Miburo concludes that some Turkish media still repeats Russian talking points.

That said, Miburo’s analysis appears to be fairly thorough and well written.

Microsoft criticized

Smith’s comments attracted criticism from security professionals. A combined cyber and physical attack on Ukraine’s nuclear plants did not happen. A power company’s networks may have been exposed to a cyber threat in passing — which does not constitute an attack. The allegation that Russia is launching joint network and military ground operations credits Russian military and intelligence with a level of coordination that it has not demonstrated, another analyst told the journal CyberScoop. [2]

It spoke to a dozen analysts of cyber threats who said Microsoft had failed to back its claims with “technical underpinnings or evidence.” A scientist at RAND Corporation said citations were “thin to nonexistent” and CyberScoop suggested the primary objective of the report was to use the Ukraine war and perceived cyber threats to drum up business.

Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade, adjunct professor at SAIS, said that when cyber attacks are being considered as war crimes by the International Criminal Court, assessments must be dispassionate and objective.

Ryan Maness, director of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, said the claims did not accord with Russian objectives: they need nuclear plants intact for their own energy advantage.

He said Microsoft was presenting a “very incomplete assessment of the cyber situation of the war.”

Gary Kildall

It is apposite that one expert should hail from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey, California. That is where Gary Kildall taught mathematics and computer science.

Some readers will recognize Kildall as the father of operating systems and the author of CP/M, on which MS-DOS was based. Bill Gates actually paid $75,000 to another coder, Tim Paterson, to copy Kildall’s system. [3]

Surveillance capitalism

Microsoft’s president Smith calls for the advanced use of digital technologies, AI and data to counter “cyber destructive,” espionage and influence operations. The longer the war continues, he says, the more important it is to the West to counter fatigue in support for Ukraine or NATO’s objectives.

Governments must coordinate public and private collaboration, across sectors of society and borders. Microsoft is an example of precisely that: the melding of the state and corporation in the intelligence sector that is nowadays largely outsourced to private contractors.

If there was no defensive need for state security it would still be expanded because it is nowadays a source of profit. To a surveillance capitalist there is no difference between tracking the public’s every move for ecommerce and doing it for law enforcement, military, intelligence and cyber security.

Microsoft has been part of this process ever since it was founded on the initiative of IBM and the military industrial complex, which also funded the development of MS-DOS.

To quote Michael Spencer, in The Last Futurist, “Surveillance capitalism manifests when a species’ economic greed meets a technological means of data harvesting so pervasive that it becomes normative and the new business rule of the century and this in the 21st century is where we find ourselves. Google, the Chinese Government, Microsoft or Facebook — all essentially working to the same end.” [4]

This is the context in which Microsoft’s president describes the war in Ukraine as “a call to action for effective measures that will be vital to the protection of democracy’s future.”

“As a company, we are committed to supporting these efforts, including through ongoing and new investments in technology, data, and partnerships that will support governments, companies, NGOs and universities.”

There doubtless is a big Russian influence operation: that’s why RT and Sputnik exist. A fun fact is that Russia Today was founded in 2005 on the advice of the U.S. deep state public relations company Ketchum, at a time when President George W Bush said he could “see” the soul of his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.

Ketchum is now performing the same role for China. [5]

Microsoft and Miburo make no mention of the internet influence activities that emanate from the West. Both companies use the language of war: the same words like integrity and resilience that were set out by Britain’s former Chief of the Defence Staff Gen Sir Nick Carter in his speeches on hybrid conflict, in which he suggested there are no longer binary conditions of war and peace: the enemy is everywhere, including at home.

Worried yet? You should be. The Silicon six, as the giants of social media are sometimes called, are simply the front end of an influence and propaganda operation, a symbiosis justified from the point of view of profit and state security — a mutually beneficial relationship for corporations, government and the narrative builders among the think tanks, humanitarian organisations and NGOs.

You may say the other side is doing it and so should we. You may decry a lack of patriotism: that it is disloyal to point out that governments have bought the compliance of Western media with Covid advertising budgets, and that social media companies openly hire NATO and CIA alumni. The problem is, there’s no end to this campaign against speech that the governments find objectionable.

Well, there is one end: which is to become the authoritarian state we claim to oppose.

Spencer describes this process as the weaponization of artificial intelligence. It powers a malign triad of wealth inequality, surveillance capitalism and information control. One might add that by causing such division it creates the domestic enemy that governments claim to fear.

It may have started as data mining and the commercialization of your personal information, but “recently, it has begun also to mean a new cybersecurity area of an AI-arms race, propaganda machines and how algorithms are used to alter human behaviour.

“Surveillance capitalism is more efficient with full-out behavior modification. The emergence of a social credit architecture in China with pervasive rewards and punishments is such an example.”

Microsoft no longer hides its role as part of the military financial digital pharma complex. Mr Smith uses the same snappy military jargon: detect, defend, disrupt and deter cyber threats — but how far does its role go in abetting war in Ukraine?

It has several public-facing operations, including Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) and Microsoft Digital Security Unit (DSU). A third, Microsoft CEE Multi-Country News Center, publishes information in various languages.

It is not simply monitoring or passing information. In April Microsoft obtained a court order to shut down domains used by APT28, described as a state-sponsored group operated by Russia's military intelligence service, GRU. Facebook has done the same with regards to Iran.

MS has long been a military contractor, from cloud provider to drone software to hologram-enhanced goggles to direct soldiers to enemies — the latter being a $22 billion contract inked last year to produce 120,000 augmented reality headsets for U.S. Army soldiers. Employees have protested its work for the Defense Department. [6]

Military latest

Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said its ambition was no longer limited to the Donbas. “Now the geography is different,” he said, citing the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.

Ukraine is making more strikes within Russian-held territory using long-range missiles supplied by countries including the U.S.. It claims to have hit more than 30 ammunition and supply hubs.

From Ukraine’s perspective, the objective is to retake 2,500 settlements from Russian forces, and from the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. The American HIMARS (high-mobility artillery rocket systems) is central to what Ukraine defence minister Oleksii Reznikov says would be precise “like the scalpel of a doctor [in] surgery.”

Washington originally implied it would supply medium but not long-range missiles. Reznikov told an Atlantic Council event on Jul 19 that the longer 100-150 kilometer range was essential to success.

The Microsoft-style business motive was apparent in the minister’s comments: war is a testing ground for new weapons. “Give us the tools — we will finish the job [and] you will have new information.”

Bridges across the Dnieper remain a vulnerability for Russian forces, according to the latest British military update on Ukraine.

Zelensky’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak said on Jul 19 that if Ukraine cannot expel Russian forces before winter they would have time to regroup, worsening Ukraine’s prospects.

Ukraine’s forces are reportedly using a scorched earth tactic in Kalinovka, Donetsk, and in the region of Zaporizhzhia, where they are setting fields ablaze or bombing grain silos.

Sanctions latest

Russia will ease the export of Ukraine’s farm produce only if the West lifts sanctions against Russia, said Putin, in Tehran for talks with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz seems less willing to arm Ukraine. Die Welt reports that shipments in the past three weeks have declined to food rations and one hundred cars.

Russia’s main gas exporter Gazprom has told customers in Europe it cannot guarantee gas supplies because of “extraordinary” circumstances. Pipelines closed for scheduled 10-day maintenance may not reopen due to force majeure. The resumption of supply to German due on Jul 22 is unclear, according to a letter sent on Jul 14. It blamed sanctions for the delayed return of a turbine sent to Canada for repair.

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