"Patriotic" Data Scientist Remi Barrette
A Series on Misinformation, Disinformation and Subterfuge
Remi Barrette, the far-right twitter troll Canadian data scientist with Twitter console used to ban BNN, Rebekah Jones’s campaign, Jim Stewartson, myself and likely hundreds of other accounts, worked with Louise Mensch to develop the Alfa Bank Trump Tower Wire Tap Conspiracy back in 2016, using a different account than his conspirator0 one. Here was Jim Stewartson’s excellent piece on that.
The account in question, named by Louise Mensch on her November 6th, 2017 Heat Street Piece, is this one, @Trollfinder_Gen, in her bunk article “Russian Intel Bots Are Boosting Infowars Alt-Right Twitter Accounts For Trump.”
It’s still up, has 0 tweets, 0 likes, and for all intents and purposes is a blank account that made no sense as to why Louise would cite it as her source November 6th, 2017.
What makes even less sense was Louise months later asking this question if she had this patriot data scientist friend she already relied on.
The reason for that was simple.
The team Mensch was working with to push Yonder-Heat Street’s disinformation campaign to discredit the Russia-Trump connections with the fake Alfa Bank Trump Tower Wire Tap story, opted to mint a new account for this conspiracy in the very same role that Remi held as conspirator0. This in effect allowed Remi Barrette’s conspirator0 account to stay under the radar, giving the later impression on March 15th, that what he was doing with Mensch was completely organic, not the staged nonsense it is now known to be.
Also note that Remi’s main account, conspirator0 was minted July 2016, when the non-public data was being assembled by Tea Leaves and his team.
Here, from Franklin Foer’s October 31, 2016 Slate piece:
“In late July, one of these scientists—who asked to be referred to as Tea Leaves, a pseudonym that would protect his relationship with the networks and banks that employ him to sift their data—found what looked like malware emanating from Russia. The destination domain had Trump in its name, which of course attracted Tea Leaves’ attention. But his discovery of the data was pure happenstance—a surprising needle in a large haystack of DNS lookups on his screen. “I have an outlier here that connects to Russia in a strange way,” he wrote in his notes. He couldn’t quite figure it out at first. But what he saw was a bank in Moscow that kept irregularly pinging a server registered to the Trump Organization on Fifth Avenue.”
Remi Barrette runs internet security for Bell Canada, a telephone communication company. Presumably, such a position would allow him access to the same internet traffic that Tea Leaves, and his cohorts “found” regarding a largely abandoned email server in Trump Tower sending out spam emails regarding Trump properties to primarily Alfa Bank, who made up 87% of the traffic, and also Spectrum Health.
While it is unclear who signed up Alfa Bank for spam, I will note my own experience with Remi or his friends running a similar scenario on my email address. Within minutes after one of my posts, an automated script had been deployed rapidly signing my email up to hundreds of subscriptions filling my inbox. Think of this sort of cyber attack as a Distributed Denial of Service, DDoS attack targeting just one email as that action effectively renders the account inoperable in short order.
Also from the Slate piece:
“Spectrum Health does not have a relationship with Alfa Bank or any of the Trump organizations. We have concluded a rigorous investigation with both our internal IT security specialists and expert cyber security firms. Our experts have conducted a detailed analysis of the alleged internet traffic and did not find any evidence that it included any actual communications (no emails, chat, text, etc.) between Spectrum Health and Alfa Bank or any of the Trump organizations. While we did find a small number of incoming spam marketing emails, they originated from a digital marketing company, Cendyn, advertising Trump Hotels.”)
In order for an operative to spoof such an obscure connection connecting Trump to Russia, then record data his own actions created, he or she would simply need to sign up the targeted entities, Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health, for the Trump Hotel’s mailing list.
There was an additional sneakiness that these operatives deployed using my own email address, using a coded combination with a “+" sign in the email address, which allowed them to rapidly sign up the same email address to a mailing list, shown here.
Applying the same exact technique, Remi Barrette or another operative could generate a massive spike of “piled” duplicative stacked emails sent to Alfa Bank similar to this here:
That email spamming hack would account for the roughly 87% share of data being sent, all of it pitching Trump hotels, without the receiver at Alfa Bank being likely aware.
While it isn’t exactly proven who Tea Leaves is, Remi Barrette was clearly involved working with Louise Mensch in October of 2016 on the conspiracy, had the tools and access to observe the data working for a phone company, and knows how to script spamming email attacks that could generate manufactured data to support the lie, just as he has done for each other conspiracy I have dug into.
Remi needs to answer some big questions.