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Comment by cloutchaser | Hacker News Reader

So, the million (or trillion) dollar question is, who controls them?

I am not sure but I used to be in a Telegram group called "Ukraine IT army" which had ~50k members all around the world at that time trying to contribute to Ukraine in any way.

It was mostly about posting spam, DDoSing Russian sites and hacking them. (Majority of people weren't tech savy enough to be a hacker, they would just download a script and run it on a specific ip/domain)

That was about 3-4 weeks into the war and I left it so I don't know what happened to it maybe it still exists and has more members.

> it still exists and has more members

It is, 225k members.

The most amusing is what they are not only 'attacking' Russian sites, but any and anything what doesn't fit their view of the world (eg 1-star bombing some Germany *Bahn when they didn't 'didn't threw out the occupant from the job' when a conductor ignored some butthurt Ukranian)

And what it is freely accessible from Wikipedia: https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D1%96%D0%BA%D1%96%D0%BF...

World needs new Snowden, god knows what U.S. Intelligence Community has been up to lately ? If U.S. supply lots of military intelligence to Ukraine[1], why not also help them win the information war?

[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Anytimes.com+u.s.+intelligen...

... umm you say that like the CIA helping defend freedom and democracy in allied countries is a bad thing...?

You say that like U.S. does have a patent or exclusive right to spread and defend freedom and democracy ®. And CIA is helping U.S. to become more powerful firstly, all this freedom[1] and democracy ® BS is just propaganda.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=molecules+of+freedom&ia=web

You're also leaving out Ukraine asked us for help. Yea, the U.S. does in fact have the RIGHT & moral obligation to help a fellow democracy and ally when they ask for help defeating an invading dictatorship.

Edit: Oh of course a Russian would be upset that the U.S. is helping Ukraine repel their invasion.

There is conflict of interests between U.S. and Ukraine[1][2][3], this nullifies right and morality that U.S. is supposedly has. You treat Russian state as an invading dictatorship, then treat U.S. as imperialistic hegemony.

But it's all power play between states and ruling elites, what about citizens? They are dissatisfied in democracy as much in U.S. as in Russia. [4] We better fix our problems from within rather than turn on each other.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=Biden+family+ukraine&ia=web

[2] NATO expansion

[3] (use translate) https://russian.rt.com/business/article/1010248-gaz-rossiya-...

[4] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/27/how-people-...

Sign so a bunch of bullshit about Bidens son?

Also the invasion clearly had nothing to with NATO. It was about Russian imperialism. Putin clearly spelled it out for people

Private companies that leverage interest in war to drive traffic to their services

Don't you think that would be a pretty big PR risk?

Plausible deniability

I don't buy it. I'm sure their individual lobbying efforts with politicians are far more effective and less risky forms of marketing.

It may be a job for an Olgino trolls, which is being run by Prigozhin aka putins chef https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency

I think it has to be contractors paid by the state. Information and misinformation in digital warfare

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