EGN NEWS DESK
A dozen years in the past, John Mark Dougan, a former deputy sheriff in Palm Beach County, Fla., despatched voters an electronic mail posing as a county commissioner, urging them to oppose the re-election of the county’s sheriff.
He later masqueraded on-line as a Russian tech employee with a pseudonym, BadVolf, to leak confidential info in violation of state legislation, fooling officers in Florida who thought they have been coping with a foreigner.
He additionally posed as a fictional New York City heiress he known as Jessica, tricking an adviser to the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office into divulging improper conduct by the division.
“And boy, did he ever spill ALL of the beans,” Mr. Dougan mentioned in a written response to questions for this text, wherein he confirmed his position in these episodes.
Those subterfuges within the United States, it turned out, have been solely a prelude to a extra distinguished and probably extra ominous marketing campaign of deception he has been conducting from Russia.
Mr. Dougan, 51, who acquired political asylum in Moscow, is now a key participant in Russia’s disinformation operations in opposition to the West. Back in 2016, when the Kremlin interfered within the American presidential election, a military of laptop trolls toiled for hours in an workplace constructing in St. Petersburg to attempt to idiot Americans on-line.
Today Mr. Dougan could also be conducting a lot the identical process largely by himself, in keeping with American and European authorities officers and researchers from firms and organizations which have tracked his actions since August. The teams embrace NewsGuard, an organization that critiques the reliability of reports and knowledge on-line; Recorded Future, a menace intelligence firm; and Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub.
Working from an house crowded with servers and different laptop gear, Mr. Dougan has constructed an ever-growing community of greater than 160 pretend web sites that mimic information retailers within the United States, Britain and France.
With the assistance of commercially accessible synthetic intelligence instruments, together with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E 3, he has crammed the websites with tens of 1000’s of articles, many primarily based on precise information occasions. Interspersed amongst them are additionally bespoke fabrications that officers within the United States and European Union have attributed to Russian intelligence companies or the administration of President Vladimir V. Putin.
Between September and May, Mr. Dougan’s retailers have been cited or referred to in information articles or social media posts almost 8,000 instances, and seen by greater than 37 million individuals in 16 languages, in keeping with a report back to be launched Wednesday by NewsGuard.
The fakes have not too long ago included a baseless article on a pretend San Francisco Chronicle web site that mentioned Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, had smuggled 300 kilograms of cocaine from Argentina. Another false narrative appeared final month within the sham Chronicle and on one other web site, known as The Boston Times, claiming that the C.I.A. was working with Ukrainians to undermine Donald J. Trump’s presidential marketing campaign.
Mr. Dougan, in a sequence of textual content exchanges and one phone interview with The New York Times, denied working the websites. A digital path of clues, together with internet domains and web protocol addresses, suggests in any other case, the officers and researchers say.
A good friend in Florida who has identified Mr. Dougan for 20 years, Jose Lambiet, additionally mentioned in a phone interview that Mr. Dougan instructed him in January that he had created the websites.
Steven Brill, a founding father of NewsGuard, which has spent months monitoring Mr. Dougan’s work, mentioned he represented “a large incursion into the American information ecosystem.”
“It’s not just a few man sitting in his basement in New Jersey tapping out a phony web site,” he added.
Mr. Dougan’s emergence as a weapon of the Kremlin’s propaganda struggle follows a troubled life within the United States that included dwelling foreclosures and chapter. As a legislation enforcement officer in Florida and Maine, he confronted accusations of extreme use of drive and sexual harassment that resulted in expensive lawsuits in opposition to the departments he labored for.
He faces an arrest warrant in Florida — its data sealed by court docket order — on 21 felony fees of extortion and wiretapping that resulted from a long-running feud with the sheriff of Palm Beach County.
Mr. Dougan’s actions from Moscow, the place he fled in 2016 one step forward of these fees, proceed to attract scrutiny from the authorities within the United States. Last 12 months, he impersonated an F.B.I. agent in a phone name to Mr. Brill, in keeping with an account by Mr. Brill to be printed subsequent week in a brand new ebook, “The Death of Truth.”
Mr. Dougan, who acknowledged making the decision in a textual content message this week, had been angered by a NewsGuard report in February 2023 that criticized YouTube for permitting movies parroting Russian propaganda concerning the struggle in Ukraine, together with some by Mr. Dougan.
In a rambling, profanity-laced video in response on YouTube final 12 months, Mr. Dougan posted excepts of the decision with Mr. Brill and confirmed a Google Earth satellite tv for pc {photograph} of his dwelling in Westchester County, a suburb of New York City — “simply down the highway from the Clinton crime household,” as Mr. Dougan put it, referring to the house of former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The name prompted an F.B.I. investigation that, in keeping with Mr. Brill, traced the decision to Mr. Dougan’s phone in Russia. (A spokeswoman for the bureau didn’t reply to a request for touch upon the investigation or Mr. Dougan’s earlier actions.)
A History in Law Enforcement
Mr. Dougan started to hone the abilities that he’s placing to make use of right now throughout a turbulent childhood within the United States. In the written responses to questions for this text, he mentioned he had struggled at dwelling and at school, bullied due to Tourette’s syndrome, however discovered a ardour in computer systems. When he was 8, he mentioned, the person who would turn into his stepfather started educating him to jot down laptop code.
“By the time I used to be 16,” he wrote in a single response, “I knew a dozen completely different programming languages.”
After a four-year stint within the Marine Corps, which he claims he supplied to affix in lieu of a jail sentence for fleeing a police cease for dashing on a motorbike, he grew to become a police officer first in a small drive in Mangonia Park, Fla., after which the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office from 2005 to 2009.
According to information experiences and his personal accounts through the years, Mr. Dougan repeatedly clashed with superiors and colleagues, dealing with quite a few inside investigations that he mentioned have been retaliatory as a result of he objected to police misconduct, together with situations of racial bias.
In 2009, he moved briefly to Windham, Maine, to work in one other small-town police division. There he confronted a criticism of sexual harassment that resulted in his dismissal earlier than he accomplished his probationary interval.
Mr. Dougan began an internet site known as WindhamSpeak to defend himself. The web site foreshadowed others he would create, together with one dedicated to the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, PBSOTalk.
After transferring again to Florida, he used PBSOTalk to torment specifically the division’s elected sheriff, Ric L. Bradshaw, whom he accused of corruption. He posted the illegal recordings of “Jessica” chatting with a former detective commander, Mark Lewis, who, Mr. Dougan claimed, was investigating the sheriff’s critics, together with himself. As Mr. Dougan acknowledged in a video interview final 12 months, it’s unlawful in Florida to document a phone dialog with out permission.
In a press release, a spokeswoman for the Sheriff’s Office, Therese C. Barbera, mentioned Mr. Dougan was “a wished felon for cyberstalking utilizing unsubstantiated and fabricated claims which have NO factual foundation.”
In February 2016, PBSOTalk posted confidential details about 1000’s of cops, federal brokers and judges. The subsequent month. F.B.I. brokers and native cops searched Mr. Dougan’s dwelling, seizing all of his digital gear.
Fearing arrest, he mentioned, he made his technique to Canada and caught a flight to Moscow. He was indicted on the 21 Florida felony fees the following 12 months.
Peddling Russia Propaganda
In Russia, Mr. Dougan refashioned himself as a form of journalist, documenting his travels across the nation, together with Lake Baikal in Siberia and Crimea, the peninsula in Ukraine that Russian annexed in 2014 in violation of worldwide legislation.
He posted pictures and movies from these journeys on YouTube, which suspended his channel after NewsGuard’s report final 12 months. He additionally appeared often on state media, together with with two former intelligence operatives, Maria Butina, who penetrated Republican political circles, and Anna Chapman, one in all 10 spies who impressed the tv sequence “The Americans.”
In 2021, as Mr. Putin started mobilizing the navy forces that will invade Ukraine, Mr. Dougan posted a video that the Kremlin would cite as one justification for its assault. In it, he claimed that the United States operated organic weapons factories in Ukraine, an accusation that Russia and its allies have pushed with out ever offering proof.
Once the struggle began, Mr. Dougan recounted in his written responses to questions, he traveled to Ukraine 14 instances to report from the Russian aspect of the entrance strains. He appeared in Russian authorities hearings purporting to show Ukraine’s transgressions, indicating some degree of cooperation with the federal government authorities.
He has confronted criticism for the experiences, together with in a profile in The Daily Beast, that he posted on YouTube and different platforms. Mr. Dougan has portrayed the struggle a lot as Russia’s propaganda has: as a righteous battle in opposition to neo-Nazis backed by a decadent West, led by the United States and NATO.
“The West has persistently lied about each side of this battle,” he wrote. “Why does just one aspect get to inform their story?”
Fake News Sites within the U.S.
In April 2021, Mr. Dougan revived an internet site known as DC Weekly, which had been created 4 years earlier and printed pretend articles concerning the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office. According to a report final December by Clemson’s Media Forensics Hub, the area and web protocol handle have been shared by PBSOTalk and Mr. Dougan’s private web site, in addition to two advertising books he wrote in exile and a safety agency he operated, Falcon Eye Tech, which supplied “offshore safety monitoring providers.”
After Russia’s assault on Ukraine started in 2022, the positioning carried articles concerning the struggle.
Then, final August, the positioning started to publish articles primarily based on elaborate fabrications that the Western authorities officers and disinformation researchers mentioned got here from Russia’s propaganda items. They usually appeared first in movies or audio recordings on obscure X accounts or YouTube channels, then unfold to websites like DC Weekly after which to Russian state media as in the event that they have been genuine accusations, a course of researchers name “narrative laundering.”
The baseless narratives included claims that family or cronies of Ukraine’s chief secretly purchased luxurious properties, yachts or jewellery, and that Prince Andrew, the brother of King Charles III of Britain, had kidnapped and abused kids throughout a secret go to to Ukraine.
Dozens of recent websites have appeared in current months. They included ones made to appear like native information retailers: The Chicago Chronicle, The Miami Chronicle, The Boston Times, The Flagstaff Post and The Houston Post. Some hijacked names of precise information organizations, like The San Francisco Chronicle, or approximated them, within the case of 1 known as The New York News Daily.
When The New York Times reported on the brand new websites in March, DC Weekly printed a prolonged response in a stilted type that indicated the usage of synthetic intelligence. It was written underneath the title Jessica Devlin, one of many fictitious journalists on the positioning. “I’m not a shadowy international actor,” the article mentioned.
At the tip, the article invited media inquiries at an electronic mail handle with the area Falcon Eye Tech.
Two days later, Mr. Dougan answered.
103 New Sites in Two Days
Mr. Dougan, who grew to become a Russian citizen final 12 months and voted within the nation’s presidential election in March, mentioned in his messages to The Times that he made a dwelling by promoting safety units he designed for a producer in China. He denied being paid by any Russian authorities, claiming he funds his actions himself.
His good friend Mr. Lambiet, a non-public investigator and former journalist, mentioned he thought of Mr. Dougan man however cautioned that Mr. Dougan had a propensity to make issues up. “He’s like a Russian disinformation marketing campaign: It’s laborious to know what’s true and what’s not,” he mentioned.
As proof of Mr. Dougan’s position within the information websites has emerged, he has shifted techniques. Recorded Future, the menace intelligence firm, launched a report this month that detailed his ties to companies linked to the Russian disinformation. The report documented the in depth use of A.I., which one of many firm’s researchers, Clément Briens, estimated made Mr. Dougan’s work far cheaper than hiring a troll military.
At the time, Recorded Future recognized 57 domains that Mr. Dougan had created. In a two-day span after the report was printed, 103 new websites appeared, all on a server in California.
“He’s attempting to obfuscate the Russian hyperlinks,” Mr. Briens mentioned.
Mr. Dougan at instances treats his actions as a sport of cat and mouse. He spent months participating with a researcher at NewsGuard, McKenzie Sadeghi, revealing particulars of his life in Moscow whereas mocking her boss, Mr. Brill.
“He appeared to be toying with me, each to elicit my responses and, it appeared, to indicate off his expertise for world on-line mischief, with out really admitting something,” she wrote within the report back to be printed on Wednesday.
While Mr. Dougan’s websites have targeted on Russian narratives concerning the struggle in Ukraine, the researchers and authorities officers say he has laid the muse for interference within the unusually massive confluence of elections going down world wide this 12 months.
This suggests a “danger of an expanded operation scope within the close to future, probably concentrating on various audiences and democratic methods in Europe and different Western nations for varied strategic targets.” the diplomatic service of the European Union wrote in a report final month when the community included solely 23 web sites.
In current weeks, the websites have included themes that appear meant to stoke the partisan fires within the United States earlier than November’s presidential election.
Last month, articles appeared on two of Mr. Dougan’s newer pretend websites, The Houston Post and The Flagstaff Post, detailing a baseless declare that the F.B.I. had planted an eavesdropping machine in Mr. Trump’s workplace at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.
Some of the brand new websites have names, like Right Review and Red State Report, that counsel a conservative political bent. In April, a web site that researchers additionally linked to Mr. Dougan supplied “main cryptocurrency rewards” for leaks of details about American officers, singling out two prosecutors and a judge concerned within the prison circumstances in opposition to Mr. Trump.
“If the positioning was mine,” he wrote in response to a query about it, “I might need individuals to offer paperwork on any soiled politician, Republican, Democrat or different.”
