Why the paper on the CRISPR babies stayed secret for so long
Antonio Regalado,
MIT Technology Review

A year has passed since Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui presented work on editing the DNA of two girls while they were still embryos. Ethical issues with his actions abound, and even after all this time, there’s still missing details on exactly what did/didn’t happen. MIT Technology Review has several pieces on the story this week. Those include unpublished portions of the research manuscript and an explanation of why it hasn’t been published by either of the two influential scientific journals He sent it to.

According to the report, the IRA had dozens of employees who were responsible for “operating accounts and personas” on all these social media sites. The IRA referred to these employees as “specialists,” and they were in charge of creating pages that pretended to be personal accounts of people in the US and, later, fake US organizations. In one particular instance, the investigation found that the IRA controlled a Twitter account with the username @TEN_GOP, which purported to be connected with the Tennessee Republican Party but wasn’t. Additionally, the IRA made accounts to pose as anti-immigration groups, Tea Party activists and Black Lives Matter protestors, all with the intention of pitting Americans against each other.

The IRA also found ways to bring its digital footprint into the real world, using tools like Facebook Groups to recruit moderators of conservative pages to promote the toxic social media content it was generating. At one point, per the report, the IRA recruited someone to walk around New York City dressed up as Santa Claus with a mask of President Trump’s face. Meanwhile, fictitious Twitter accounts @TEN_GOP were cited or retweeted by “multiple Trump campaign officials and surrogates,” such as Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. Just as well, the report points to President Trump continuously sharing tweets from IRA-controlled accounts.

“In sum, the investigation established that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election through the ‘active measures’ social media campaign carried out by the IRA,” states the report. “IRA employees violated US law through these operations, principally by undermining through deceptive acts the work of federal agencies charged with regulating foreign influence in US elections.”

There are sections on “Russian hacking and dumping operations,” “Trump campaign and the dissemination of hacked materials” and “Russian government links to and contacts with the Trump campaign.” We’re looking into this to see if there’s new info on the use of social media, WikiLeaks and hacking.

We already know a fair amount of what this report covers. Last year, Russians were indicted for hacking democrats and election tampering, groups of 12 and 13 people, respectively

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