Russian Trolls Were Sloppy, but Indictment Still ‘Points at the Kremlin’<br />The fact that the efforts of the troll farm described in the indictment — the fake campaign protests in Florida or New York; the myriad accounts mimicking Americans set up on Twitter and Facebook; the trips to the United States to organize it all — were so easy to trace back to the Internet Research Agency<br />that it probably underscores that the intelligence services were not involved in running the organization.<br />Analysts noted that the relatively easily tracked efforts by the Internet Research Agency are very different from, for example, the American investigation into what could be a strategically<br />more threatening case: whether Kaspersky Labs gave a back door entry to Russian intelligence services into United States government computers running its software.<br />The fact that there were no senior government officials named probably helps Russia, said Mr. Frolov, because<br />that echoed statements from Mr. Putin last summer that any election meddling was the work of eager Russian civilians rather than government agents.<br />Indeed, ever since the first reports surfaced in 2014 about the existence of a troll farm<br />called the Internet Research Agency, there have been questions about its Kremlin ties.<br />Those operations involved highly sophisticated penetration of cybernetworks, the analysts noted, whereas<br />the troll farm work is akin to graffiti — writing nasty messages on Twitter and Facebook.<br />The Internet Research Agency was initially formed in 2013 to attack members of the<br />political opposition, like Aleksei A. Navalny, Mr. Putin’s most outspoken critic.<br />Lyudmila Savchuk, an internet activist who went undercover as an employee at the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, said<br />that there should be thousands of names in the indictment, not just 13 top managers.
