Russian Trolls Were Sloppy, but Indictment Still ‘Points at the Kremlin’

Russian Trolls Were Sloppy, but Indictment Still ‘Points at the Kremlin’
The fact that the efforts of the troll farm described in the indictment — the fake campaign protests in Florida or New York; the myriad accounts mimicking Americans set up on Twitter and Facebook; the trips to the United States to organize it all — were so easy to trace back to the Internet Research Agency
that it probably underscores that the intelligence services were not involved in running the organization.
Analysts noted that the relatively easily tracked efforts by the Internet Research Agency are very different from, for example, the American investigation into what could be a strategically
more threatening case: whether Kaspersky Labs gave a back door entry to Russian intelligence services into United States government computers running its software.
The fact that there were no senior government officials named probably helps Russia, said Mr. Frolov, because
that echoed statements from Mr. Putin last summer that any election meddling was the work of eager Russian civilians rather than government agents.
Indeed, ever since the first reports surfaced in 2014 about the existence of a troll farm
called the Internet Research Agency, there have been questions about its Kremlin ties.
Those operations involved highly sophisticated penetration of cybernetworks, the analysts noted, whereas
the troll farm work is akin to graffiti — writing nasty messages on Twitter and Facebook.
The Internet Research Agency was initially formed in 2013 to attack members of the
political opposition, like Aleksei A. Navalny, Mr. Putin’s most outspoken critic.
Lyudmila Savchuk, an internet activist who went undercover as an employee at the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, said
that there should be thousands of names in the indictment, not just 13 top managers.