Today's Russia hearings actually revealed something new and important

[Bernardo de La Paz]

7. The web brigades of St. Petersburg, Russia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_brigades

Ukraine conflict: Inside Russia's Kremlin troll army, BBC http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31962644

Documents Show How Russia's Troll Army Hit America". BuzzFeed. 2014-07-08 http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/documents-show-how-russias-troll-army-hit-america

http://kremlintrolls.com/

There now is a new site to address Kremlin active measures, particularly as those manifest themselves online. Note: there is no connection between this site (kremlintrolls.com) or me (@webradius) and the person or persons currently d/b/a @kremlintrolls on Twitter.

http://aktivnyye.com/t/20161125-one_simple_trick.html

Put another way, if you start with any given piece of disinformation and try to trace it back to the source, you're doing it the hard way. Spend a little time observing how disinformation is distributed in support of Kremlin policy objectives and you will start noticing the same people and patterns of behavior. Identify the distribution channels and you will know what the latest Kremlin campaign is not by analyzing the content or tracing it back to a particular website, but by noting who is distributing it, and where.

Note (added 2016-12-09): For an example of how this plays out in real time, see our article in the Daily Beast, and the addenda here. In short, we were already monitoring people like Marcel Sardo due to their involvement in distributing or promoting disinfo. So rather than finding a story about a non-existent attack on the NATO base at Incerlik and trying to trace it back to a source, we noted that Sardo was trying to make something of a story about an attack on the base at Incerlik that as far as we knew did not occur. It's small but important distinction.