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_______ Publisher's Note: Last week, MSNBC, working with a past Republican campaign manager, came up with the Top Ten most important stories of 2017. Number One? Russian interference with the US elections. Berit Anderson, CEO and co-founder of Scout.ai, is a global expert on this subject. Scout broke what may have been the earliest story on how what she calls "computational propaganda" was used by Putin's info-war teams in a torrent of well-orchestrated and smartly planned efforts to affect outcomes in both state and national elections inside US boundaries. Today, experts are reasonably certain that the same teams and techniques were used against Britain to affect the Brexit vote, in Spain during the Catalan rebellion, in France, in Germany, and elsewhere. Worse yet, there appears so far to be no real solution, and politicos are assuming in public that all upcoming elections in the world's democracies will again fall under info-attack by Russia, and perhaps others. As a result of all the above, Berit has been speaking around the world on the issues relating to this direct threat to free speech and democracy, from New York to Lithuania to Brussels, Amsterdam, Estonia - the list gets longer daily. At our recent FiRe conference, Berit was interviewed by the BBC's Ed Butler on this subject, after which member Larry Smarr said to me, "We have to get this out to a larger audience." Well, Larry, I agree. I hope our members find this as important, and as riveting, as the FiRe audience did. - mra.
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