The investigations are being done by an independent police oversight authority, we believe that their findings will help us take appropriate legal action, I don't think… somebody [was] sitting there and saying: 'Shoot now'. It is the judgment of the police officer at the spur of the moment. #KenyaPolice #RailaOdinga #MournersKilled
Bartosz Lewandowski pointed out that the prosecutor's office and services used, among others, Microsoft Office, which could — as he wrote — create a risk of data leakage since the manufacturer had access to it. He added that prosecutors and officers also massively used messengers, and yet no one thought of bringing charges for that reason. #bezpieczeństwo #dataprivacy #technologia (translated)
South Korea's National Security Office convened an emergency security meeting following the launch to review the country's military readiness. #NorthKorea #BallisticMissiles #MilitaryTensions
the operation is scheduled for the first days of this week and the estimated post-operative recovery time will be about one weekWhen pressed by journalists, the Director of the Holy See Press Office, Matteo Bruni, clarified that "the operation is scheduled for the first days of this week and the estimated post-operative recovery time will be about one week". #PopeLeoXIV #lunghealth #VaticanNews
The author argued that the decision should be straightforward, citing their claim that the GRU officer behind the Leipzig attack had entered Europe on an Italian tourist visa valid throughout the Schengen area. #Schengen #EuropeanSecurity #Intelligence #IT #DE
The author wrote that the man who allegedly carried out the attempted bombing in Leipzig was a GRU officer who had entered Europe on a Schengen visa. #Leipzig #GRU #Terrorism #DE
Operation Dark Clark – Russia built a real organisation around a false identity Most influence operations create fake people, fake websites or fake news stories. Operation Dark Clark appears to have gone considerably further: Russian operators built what looked like a functioning research organisation in Latin America, employed real people to produce genuine research and concealed from those employees who was ultimately directing their work. OpenAI disclosed the operation on 8 October after banning a cluster of accounts originating in Russia. The actors used ChatGPT while targeting countries across Latin America, principally to damage Ukraine’s reputation, manipulate domestic political debates and manage a self-described research organisation called the Social Research Center, or SRC. OpenAI assessed Dark Clark as Category Five on the six-level Breakout Scale, the first operation it has disrupted since beginning its influence-operation reporting to reach that level. A front organisation with real employees The SRC presented itself as a research platform studying subjects including Latin America’s relationship with India and the Indian diaspora. OpenAI found more than 60 articles on its website, most of them apparently original rather than plagiarised. Internal reports produced by the Russian operators discussed hiring, dismissals, salary scales, staffing and unfinished research projects, strongly suggesting that the operators controlled the organisation rather than merely collaborating with it. At the centre of the structure was “Mia Clark”, a fictitious identity reportedly used to manage social-media activity and communicate with staff. According to OpenAI, the available evidence indicates that employees working for SRC in Latin America were probably unaware that the organisation was being directed by Russian actors. They interviewed experts, conducted research and wrote papers in what appears to have been good faith. The deception therefore existed primarily at the organisational level: much of the work was real, but the identity and strategic purpose of the institution commissioning it were not. OpenAI This is one reason Dark Clark differs from the familiar model of a troll farm. A reader encountering an SRC paper might be looking at research genuinely written by a Latin American employee based on genuine interviews. The manipulation lies further upstream, in who built the institution, selected its direction and controlled its infrastructure. From forged emails to real events The operation also appears to have attempted something more ambitious than online persuasion: inducing real people to produce events that could later be turned into propaganda. In May 2026, according to the operators’ internal reports, they created an email address impersonating Lima’s regional education authorities and instructed schools to organise activities about Ukraine for a cultural-diversity event. The instructions included references to Stepan Bandera, whose historical legacy remains particularly contentious in Poland and parts of Eastern Europe. The operators claimed that some schools complied, replied to the false address and sent photographs of the events. OpenAI could not independently verify every claim contained in the operators’ reports. It did, however, find Peruvian reporting matching the story, followed by publications in Poland and an English-language outlet in Hungary. Some coverage included comments from a Polish MEP calling for people displaying what he described as anti-Polish attitudes to be declared persona non grata. OpenAI therefore concluded that the fabricated starting point appears to have entered genuine political debate across national borders. The mechanism is unusually effective because the final photographs need not themselves be fabricated. If people can be tricked into staging a real event on the basis of a forged instruction, the operation creates authentic visual evidence of something that was artificially initiated. The same method in Ecuador and Bolivia Dark Clark’s internal reports describe similar efforts elsewhere. In Ecuador, the operators claimed they used a fake education email to encourage schools to stage ceremonies involving President Daniel Noboa and Erik Prince, the former head of Blackwater. Ecuadorian media subsequently covered a matching controversy, and the country’s education minister issued a detailed denial. Other Ecuador-focused material included fabricated audio attributed to Ukraine’s consul and a false television report alleging that Noboa’s government was recruiting Ecuadorians to fight in Ukraine. Local fact-checker Lupa found that the supposed Teleamazonas report had never been broadcast, that images had been taken from Instagram, that the audio was AI-generated and that a company named in a supposed recruitment contract did not exist in Ecuador’s corporate registry. In Bolivia, an internal report described a fake audio recording supposedly made by an employee of state water company EPSAS during anti-government protests. It claimed that water supplies to La Paz would be cut and a state of emergency declared. The allegation produced a fact-check and an official denial. OpenAI says the operators explicitly described their objective as worsening the political crisis surrounding the demonstrations. Possible links to the post-Wagner influence machine Dark Clark did not emerge in a vacuum. The operators repeatedly asked ChatGPT about Politology and La Compania, names associated in previous investigations with the Russian influence apparatus that developed from structures once connected to Yevgeny Prigozhin. Forbidden Stories and its partners obtained 1,431 pages of internal documents describing a network known as “The Company”, which they reported had grown to almost 100 operatives and was conducting influence projects across roughly 30 Global South countries. Their investigation found that the organisation moved under the supervision of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, after Prigozhin’s death. Its documented budget for ten months of activity in 2024 was approximately €7.3 million. Two older Argentina campaigns claimed in Dark Clark’s internal reports — a false story about Javier Milei buying Cartier collars for his dogs and the staging of anti-Milei graffiti — had already been independently attributed by investigative journalists to Politology/La Compania. That is significant corroboration, but it is not enough to prove that every Dark Clark activity was run by the same organisational structure. AI was the back office, not the mastermind Perhaps the most important finding concerns artificial intelligence itself. In most documented cases, the Russians were not using ChatGPT to generate the propaganda seen by the public. Their principal use was administrative: drafting reports for an unknown superior, summarising operations, translating material and recording the supposed success of campaigns. Those reports also expose a weakness in the operators’ own measurement. OpenAI found instances in which they tried to claim credit for developments they had probably not caused, suggesting that they were not only attempting to manipulate Latin American audiences but also presenting an inflated picture of their effectiveness to whoever was supervising them. Dark Clark nevertheless broke further into the real world than any influence operation OpenAI had previously disrupted. Under the Brookings framework, Category Five means that an operation has escaped its original network and been amplified by high-profile individuals such as politicians. Dark Clark crossed that threshold because fabricated narratives appear to have provoked governmental denials, mainstream reporting and political comment in several countries. Its most important innovation was therefore not a particularly convincing deepfake. It was the construction of a partly genuine institution around a concealed foreign controller. The research could be real. The employees could be real. The interviews could be real. What was false was who they were ultimately working for. Sources OpenAI — Disrupting AI-enabled “false front” operations https://openai.com/index/disrupting-ai-enabled-false-front-operations/ Forbidden Stories — Propaganda Machine: Russia’s foreign influence strategy across three continents https://forbiddenstories.org/propaganda-machine-secret-documents-reveal-russias-foreign-influence-strategy-across-three-continents/ Forbidden Stories — Ghost Journalists, Cash and Kremlin Scripts: Argentina https://forbiddenstories.org/ghost-journalists-cash-and-kremlin-scripts-how-russian-operatives-tried-to-influence-argentinian-media/ openDemocracy — Russian influence operation in Bolivia https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/russia-bolivia-south-america-putin-evo-morales-wagner-prigozhin-covert-operations-propaganda-disinformation-foreign-interference/ Lupa Media — Fake Teleamazonas report about recruiting Ecuadorians for Ukraine https://lupa.com.ec/verificaciones/noboa-mercenarios-ucrania-ecuador/ Brookings Institution — The Breakout Scale https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-breakout-scale-measuring-the-impact-of-influence-operations/ Keywords: #DISINFORMED #Episode17 #OperationDarkClark #DarkClark #Russia #LatinAmerica #RussianInfluence #RussianDisinformation #Disinformation #InformationWarfare #InfluenceOperations #ForeignInterference #FIMI #FalseFront #FrontOrganisation #FakeInstitution #SocialResearchCenter #SRC #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #GenerativeAI #ChatGPT #OpenAI #NarrativeManipulation #SourceLaundering #InstitutionalManipulation #ForgedDocuments #FakeAudio #PoliticalInfluence #CovertInfluence #Peru #Ecuador #Bolivia #Argentina #Ukraine #Politology #LaCompania #TheCompany #SVR #WagnerLegacy #PropagandaMachine #GlobalSouth #BreakoutScale #OSINT #MediaManipulation #WRLD
The post highlighted a Nikkei preview of the week ahead in Asia, listing the IMF-World Bank meetings, Anthropic’s Singapore office and Japan’s auto show. https://t.co/3OuDObvwvT #Asia #IMF #WorldBank #SG #JP
The publication stated that the British Home Office had begun deploying contactless electronic gates at East Midlands airport that identified travelers by their face, without scanning their passports. #ReinoUnido #Tecnología #Viajes #GB (translated)
Martin Blessing, the Chief Investment Officer for Germany, evaluates his first year, in which he was able to achieve some progress despite challenging conditions and a decline in foreign investments, such as commitments to infrastructure projects and generating interest from international investors. #Investitionen #Deutschland #ChiefInvestmentOfficer (translated)
The author expressed joy at the discovery of the two Renoir paintings stolen in September from the museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer and praised the work of the investigators from the Criminal Police and the Central Office for the Fighting against the Trafficking of Goods. #Patrimoine #Renoir #Justice #FR (translated)
The Auschwitz Memorial reported that Polish Army officer Józef Śliwiński was born in Chrzanowice on 9 October 1895. It said he was imprisoned in Auschwitz from 30 July 1941 under prisoner number 19130 and died there on 25 October 1941. https://t.co/wU9jlRseLs #Historia #Polska #IIwojnaświatowa (translated)
Microsoft has reduced the cloud storage for its Office subscription "Family" from 6 terabytes to 2 terabytes, leading to frustration among millions of users who now have to either clean up or pay extra. #Microsoft #OneDrive #CloudSpeicher (translated)
The author wrote that Montenegro was showing how a NATO member should act, citing reports that Mikhail Zvinchuk, founder of the pro-Kremlin Rybar network and a former Russian military intelligence officer, had been detained with close associates. The author added that the reports would need confirmation from Montenegrin authorities. https://t.co/a01CW3Y0RF #Montenegro #NATO #Security #ME #RU
Google has introduced Gemini, a new artificial intelligence agent designed to facilitate business tasks in applications such as Gmail, Office, and Slack, allowing users to delegate complex jobs without the need to supervise the process. #InteligenciaArtificial #GoogleCloud #Gemini (translated)
The author said a new Terminator film with a suitable director would probably gross $2 billion worldwide, damage the AI industry and potentially push the global economy into recession.
Eyewitnesses say they saw a few masked officers wearing Department of Homeland Security branded clothes surrounding a man on the ground who appeared injured. They say they heard three or four gunshots being fired. #ICE #Immigration #PoliceShooting
The National Prosecutor's Office intends to try the free program LibreOffice as an alternative to the paid Microsoft Office, which raises concerns among investigators worried about the quality and security of work. #Prokuratura #LibreOffice #MicrosoftOffice (translated)
Petr Němec stated that he created an interface for office manager Anička for purchasing beverages for the office, so that all employees could benefit from the use of AI. According to him, it is connected via MCP to Rohlík and Košík, and AI divides the purchase among stores to make it as cheap as possible, and prepares the order, which Němec then confirms and pays. He also added a calculation of sugar content and kilojoules to help employees shop more responsibly. #AI #kancelář #nákupy (translated)
This evening, at a previously agreed-upon time, I was questioned by the Central Investigative Prosecutor’s Office in connection with the events of June 21, 2024. I gave a brief statement and did not admit to the crime I am accused of. I will provide updates on any further developments, Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar announced on his Facebook page that he was questioned by the Central Investigative Prosecutor’s Office (KNYF) on Wednesday evening in connection with what has been referred to as “the cell phone theft case.” #HungarianPolitics #PéterMagyar #CorruptionAllegations (translated)
