Documents show how Russia's troll army hit America

[leveymg]

153. Trying to assess the credibility of information is a part of Open Source analysis

That's essentially what we're doing here, those of us who are making a good-faith effort to post what in our best judgement is reliable information. There are some rules of verification that go along with that.

First of all, consider the sources of the information and whether there is any documentation, and its provenance. Then, retrace to the original source and consider how many steps removed they are, along with the reliability of each step. That is known as "walking back the cat." In this case, according to the article in an on-line publication, BuzzFeed linked in the OP, the undisclosed documents are three steps removed from the original source. The documents were obtained by an opposition Russian newspaper from "a mysterious Russian hacker collective" who claim to have obtained them from email sent to the leader of a semi-official propaganda organization called the Internet Research Agency.

According to the documents, which are attached to several hundred emails sent to the project’s leader, Igor Osadchy, the effort was launched in April and is led by a firm called the Internet Research Agency.

Note that the documents described are contained in email sent to Mr. Osadchy. That means the source is actually four steps removed. This raises additional questions -Who sent them? If they are confidential, why were they sent by hackable email account. Who are these hackers, and what do they want? All of these things should raise red flags for the analyst.

This perhaps explains why we are reading about this in BuzzFeed instead of the NYT. I'm not saying the NYT is completely reliable, either, but always consider the sources and make your own best judgement about how reliable they appear to be. That having been said, I wish you best of luck in your endeavors.