American creating deepfakes targeting Harris works with Russian intel, documents show

Catherine Belton reports:

A former deputy Palm Beach County sheriff who fled to Moscow and became one of the Kremlin’s most prolific propagandists is working directly with Russian military intelligence to pump out deepfakes and circulate misinformation that targets Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, according to Russian documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post.

The documents show that John Mark Dougan, who also served in the U.S. Marines and has long claimed to be working independently of the Russian government, was provided funding by an officer from the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service. Some of the payments were made after fake news sites he created began to have difficulty accessing Western artificial intelligence systems this spring and he needed an AI generator — a tool that can be prompted to create text, photos and video.

Read more at The Washington Post.

If Dougan’s name or picture seems familiar, it may be that you are recalling this site’s coverage of him back in 2016, when he was exposing the personal information of Palm Beach law enforcement officers and blaming it on Russian hackers. Months later, I was reporting on even wilder claims by him — that DCLeaks was a conspiracy to get Trump elected — and yes, Russian hackers were allegedly involved in that one, too. And there was Dougan wearing his mother’s blonde wig as he fled to Russia to seek asylum from U.S. law enforcement.

So now 8 years later, here’s Dougan again and allegedly working with Russians again to help get Trump elected? Everything old is new again?

For more coverage on Dougan back in 2016, see also posts mentioning “badvolf.”