[throwaway71958]

As a Russian myself, I can tell you with certainty that there are mistakes in that text that a Russian ESL speaker would never make, and verb tenses are a bit too good for an unskilled speaker. Due to the combination of these two factors, I bet this was written by a native English speaker who thinks he/she knows the mistakes a Russian would make. They're wrong.

[snowwrestler]

"Actually it's probably a false flag to make Russia look bad." - throwaway71958, created 8 days ago

2017 in a nutshell right there.

[throwaway71958]

For a pro-Russian shill I seem to be doing a bad job, seeing how I'm actually Russian and made no attempt to conceal this fact.

[jfoutz]

Eh, new account, and a throwaway, don't get offended at people not taking you seriously. You could just as easily be a 14 year old in North Dakota.

[NDlurker]

Hi. I live in North Dakota! I get hacker news RSS feeds to my phone and made this account to reply to your comment.

[kefka]

Probably from Alaska. I know you can "See Russia from there"...

[krapp]

You can actually, barely see it.

[wyldfire]

Just not from the mansion in Juneau

[snowwrestler]

No, you're doing a great job; claiming that you are Russian is essential to the particular doubt you are here to sow.

[1337biz]

Full circle irony: I find the argument of the dubious throwaway more beliveable than OP.

[coldtea]

Count us both.

The BS one hears today (against Russia, etc) are the "WMD"s of 2017.

There's a single superpower the last 2+ decades (Russia is no USSR) and it has a long history of pushing for its "interests" all over the world, starting wars, grabbing resources, overthrowing governments, supporting all kinds of lunatics and dictators.

And covering the whole damage they do with holier than though finger pointing, made up stories, and generally BS they serve a docile and mostly ignorant on anything happening outside their home state, much less worldwide, population. Or, actually, worse than ignorant: mostly informed from mainstream tv news presenting them the "enemy du jour", but with a complete lack of context and history, and with any nuance and details jumbled up in their minds (in a "Go to Austria, see the kangaroos" fashion).

Whether its a Joe Sixpack or a college educated person, in the majority of cases they equally lack context and perspective, and have no real reason to even try to get one, since they have no skin in the game: some other poor suckers will go and fight (e.g. literally poor whites, blacks and latinos going into service) and some remote countries will pay the toll, so no big deal.

[wyldfire]

I can't say I agree with all of the foreign policy decisions made on my behalf in the last few decades. But Russia reaps what it sows. And it sows corruption much worse than ours.

Also it's remarkably unfair for you to cherry pick our foreign policy misdeeds while leaving out all of the good we've done over that same time frame.

I wish we cultivated a better interest in world news and culture here. Our natural borders play some (small) role in our isolation. But, yes, the population at large also ignores much of the global news.

[mistermann]

> Also it's remarkably unfair for you to cherry pick our foreign policy misdeeds while leaving out all of the good we've done over that same time frame.

Considering the US government and it's MSM propaganda machine tell only one side of the story, I'd think you'd be comfortable with someone telling the other side of that story, if it's fairness you're seeking of course.

[boomboomsubban]

Who cares who's leaders are worse? Both countries are ruled by people without the population's best interest at heart.

Do not trust the people telling you Russia is behind all of these problems for the US. Even if it's true, it's a fraction of Russians that are guilty, and if you judge the whole population by what they've done Americans are guilty of a whole hell of a lot too.

[vidarh]

Russia is no USSR, but Putin is ex-KGB. On one hand I agree with you that it's overdramatised to some extent, and that it's likely that a lot of the claims about Russia are made up. On the other hand, Putin seems like exactly the type who would see intelligence and manipulation as a way for Russia to punch above its weight and is likely to be engaging in it.

The problem with trying to unravel the truth about Russian hacking is that both sides have similar incentives to play up the drama: For the West to paint Russia as a threat plays straight into an agenda of making Russia seem relevant and powerful. Because of that, there's no reason for Putin to try particularly hard to squash allegations whether they're true or false.

[coldtea]

>On the other hand, Putin seems like exactly the type who would see intelligence and manipulation as a way for Russia to punch above its weight and is likely to be engaging in it.

Sure, but at the level Russia can afford, and "puppeteering the US president" is a BS claim way above that, tailor-made for a nation spoon-fed with shows like 24 and Homeland and endless claims about how all the world "plots against it" while itself does exactly that globally (and nobody bats an eyelid).

And while Russia/Putin will use such tactics for their country's (and/or his own) immediate interests/survival (e.g. in Crimea, a place with a huge majority of ethnic Russians, or the middle east), they don't have neither the means or the history of meddling and plundering all over the world.

The claims are mostly a way to invent a present-day Bond villain, an easily identifiable target, like it has been played out tons of times in the past. Russia has too many natural resources and wants to control its periphery, something that goes against the general "interests" and plundering intentions of outside players, hence the pressure, combined with the constant post-Cold-War expansion of Nato to suffocate them.

If instead of Putin there was some friendly dolt selling Russia wholesale to foreign corporate interests (instead to national players that the country can somewhat control -- something which is labeled "cronyism"), like e.g. Yeltsin, it would be all love and hugs with EU and the US, even if they did ten times worse in freedom internally. You know, like those lovable Saudis.

[astronautjones]

100%

[doktrin]

Just seems like general obfuscation to me. It would be very weird for anyone to make assumptions about their identity based on broken english.

[mootothemax]

While I get your wider point, I find the different types of mistakes that ESL'ers with different mother tongues make absolutely fascinating.

I've noticed, say, that in Poland, where the native tongue lacks articles, people regularly mess up "the" and "a," or miss them altogether. I've never met a French person with the same issue, for obvious reasons.

When I started looking into people's mistakes with tenses in English - dear god, so much about my native tongue that I had no idea about, and yet made particular nationality error combinations really stand out. It's crazy fun.

Edit: and I love my eldest's progress with English. While she's basically a bilingual preschooler, she tends to speak English with polish word order: I like cars red. Her natural instinct is to also use the polish rules for nouns when choosing he/she/it. It's an absolutely fascinating process I feel privileged to observe.

[Pyxl101]

> I like cars red

Interestingly, that word order is also valid English, though it has a slightly different meaning than "I like red cars".

Example: "I like [my] soup warm".

"I like soup warm, but you can eat it cold and left over if you want."

"I like having soup warm"

"I like my cookies freshly baked"

"I like men muscular and toned"

"I like my women blonde, so you can go for the brunette"

"I like cars red" doesn't quite work as well but doesn't seem wrong. Add a little context and it seems more normal. "As a buyer of many sports cars, I like my cars red, even despite the speeding tickets I get".

Perhaps a linguist could explain how this phrasing works.

(That said, of course I advocate teaching her to speak fluently and to use that word order only when she intends its subtlety of meaning.)

[Geee]

I think this form puts the emphasis on "how?" instead of "what?".

What do you want? - I want tea. How do you want your tea? - I want my tea hot with sugar.

[noobermin]

I think it is a short hand slang for "I like cars painted red." or "I like cars colored red."

[FeepingCreature]

I think it's short for "I like for cars to be red."

[jwilk]

No, in Polish adjectives normally go before nouns, just like in English.

[Avenger42]

I assumed he was facetiously referring to Reverse Polish Notation[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Polish_notation

[wyldfire]

No, it seems to me more like Polish is actually one of his daughter's native languages.

[mootothemax]

Ehhhh... not often quite set in stone enough that you can rely on it, especially for spoken language. Emphasis and a whole host of other situations lean towards - but by no means demand - order in the example given.

[waitwait]

Another angle I haven't heard is that they are just having a bit of fun for the lulz: They know their adversaries can (fabricate) attribute with or without obfuscation (cyber war signalling style). So they bring it over the top with some cold war 80s action movie dialogue. It serves no other function than to taunt and confuse and hear some American housewives on Twitter go: I dunno, sounds Russian to me!

[mootothemax]

By halfway through I was kinda surprised they weren't going the full hog and throwing in a good Da, or Nyet, the people's... for full effect.

[waitwait]

The full effect seems to be a thread of 200+ comments talking about the language in the release, sentence-for-sentence, and many (un)witting agents pouring over the contents of the files.

Perhaps, besides the fun of imagining someone having to explain to McCain what a "double dutch rudder" is, the language serves a higher purpose of increasing virality and impact.

[rdtsc]

> It would be very weird for anyone to make assumptions about their identity based on broken english.

They could be haven trying to disguise themselves, maybe fearing a grammatical analysis or somehow exposing some fingerprint in how they construct sentences.

And as throwaway claimed, if you speak both English and Russian (I do), and have heard many others who speak both English and Russian for a many years you start to pick up patterns and understand when someone is speaking with a fake-make-it-sound-Russian style.

[microtonal]

Due to the combination of these two factors, I bet this was written by a native English speaker who thinks he/she knows the mistakes a Russian would make.

Or it is Russian and they intentionally formulated this as cartoonesque Russian, so that everyone says "this can't possibly be Russian, it's someone who tries to put the blame on Russia".

The problem is that if this comes from a government power, it is likely that they have the resources to use some professional translators and/or linguists to make it look whatever they want it to look like.

Anything here that is not backed by other data is just pure speculation.

[crimsoneer]

Quite. If this was actually designed by a state actor, they have access to professional linguists who specialise in this sort of stuff. You're not going to figure out who it is unless they want you to, and it certainly won't be obvious enough for a cursory browse to identify provenance.

[NDlurker]

Why do people keep saying it's Russian or someone faking Russian? Clearly it was written to avoid identification by text analysis or whatever it's called.

[int_19h]

I'm also Russian, and I have to concur with this assessment after looking at the text (while noting that I do generally believe that Russian government was actively involved in cyberattacks against US, including, among other things, to affect election results last year). It does sound very much like a native or near-native English speaker trying to fake Russian accent.

[bluecreator]

This text structure is from the poem "America" by Ginsberg. They're playing with it. Particularly first second third person stuff.

[bluecreator]

Here's the link. It's a beautiful poem.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detai...

[ooqr]

I'm pretty sure that was GP's point. The text is intentionally garbled with no identifiable first-language bias.

[ktta]

Not really. The GP is implying that they are Russian with this

>since they can't just say "I work for Russia and we're reminding America that they're not invulnerable."

But the person who replied is saying how the grammatical obfuscation doesn't look like something that's done by a Russian but by an English speaker who is trying to sound like a Russian with bad English. Because a Russian with bad English wouldn't make those mistakes.

[throwaway71958]

To my ear, this obfuscation sounds Middle Eastern, due to the frequent use of "-ing" in verbs whether it belongs there or not. I know an Iranian guy who does this a lot.

[diminoten]

The whole point is to feed it through translation services dozens of times until the meaning remains but the actual word selection is super poor and completely unidentifiable.

It's weird to me that you're trying to push this to blame another group so quickly, especially with an 8 day old account.

[mirimir]

Yes, that's what I do sometimes, using offline apps with local dictionaries.

[benwilber0]

> I work for Russia ...

does not imply it was done by a Russian.

[throwaway71958]

Well, there's no Russian first-language bias in that text for sure. Another argument in favor of the opinion that this was written by an American: the author seems to be well versed in the memes of the US political discourse. Someone from outside the US is unlikely to even know or care about Trump's "movement", or who "Bannon" is, or "drain the swamp", or "white privilege" etc. They're also unlikely to abbreviate "New York Times" as "NYT". The telltale signs are all over the text.

[celticninja]

That's a terrible analysis, I'm not from the US and know all of the above and would abbreviate NYT. I'm not hugely into US politics but I'm not ignorant of it either. Hell the BBC, Der Spiegel and Le Monde all covered Bannon losing his NSC seat.

[benwilber0]

> the author seems to be well versed in the memes of the US political discourse

that's not exactly hard for anyone that payed even a little attention during the very controversial US political season in 2016. Same with Brexit. The terminologies and crux issues have been widely debated on the social web. I would say it has actually been very difficult to escape

[atemerev]

Right. However, things like "caucus" and "SCOTUS" are really unlikely to be written by a Russian, on any English knowledge level. We do make mistakes, but our mistakes are different. In this text, there are too few common mistakes, and too many strange things.

[doktrin]

> things like "caucus" and "SCOTUS" are really unlikely to be written by a Russian, on any English knowledge level

What a weird thing to say. Even the most native of idioms can be learned, and there are plenty of fully bi-tri lingual people in the world.

Mining the text for cultural clues is a fool's errand.

[PeCaN]

> Even the most native of idioms can be learned

the parent's point though was that there's a mismatch between the level of idioms used and the broken grammar used (which is, imo, pretty obviously intentionally obfuscated; it's just… not how a non-native speaker would write it, esp russian)

[throwaway71958]

I've observed the whole Brexit thing with great interest, but I don't feel well versed in the vernacular. And for someone well versed, it'd be difficult to know what the person who's not well versed wouldn't know. Which is what we're observing here.

[viraptor]

You won't be well versed in the vernacular of any political event unless you follow the news. But that's just as true for native speakers. You seem to imply that people who learn tens of thousands of words to communicate in a foreign language would be unlikely to learn the additional vocabulary of the current events. Especially the big events. Could anyone with a British friend in Twitter never hear of the NHS bus, for example? Unlikely.

[ShrubberyKnight]

Unfortunately, as with any form of communication, the only way to know where something really came from is to find the source, whether an individual or a collaboration. Facts are still being discovered about decisions, choices and actions relating to Benghazi, years ago. Obfuscation of the source is intended to delay. It works. Masking the source behind fingers pointing to cultures is a "cheat", and cheaters do not like to be discovered. Personally, we have been presented with evidence of tools and techniques of Alinsky in the 2016 U. S. election.

[atemerev]

Yes, exactly. While those are still somewhat plausible (I am Russian, and I might have occasionally used all of these ironically), it was "POTUS" and "SCOTUS" that made me 99% sure that this text was written by an American (or at least a US insider). You guys love your acronyms.

[gbuk2013]

Yup, I've been living in England for over 20 years and my English language proficiency is well above that of most of the locals, but I still had to look up SCOTUS and POTUS a few years ago (probably when I started reading HN actually). Now that I know them I still would never consider using them in writing (the former is actually reminiscent of something offensive).

[Nexxxeh]

British native here. Do you not watch much TV or many movies?

[gbuk2013]

I don't own a TV. :) I do watch some movies now and again though, especially when flying long haul but I never had one that mentioned those. Off the top of my head I can only think of 24 as a candidate but I never watched that.

[doktrin]

I honestly don't know why you guys are trying to divine identity based on textual clues like this. It's safe to assume every stylistic and linguistic choice is deliberate.

[throwaway71958]

Sure. But if that's what you really think, then you don't get to assume that the DNC was hacked "by the Russians". Agreed?

[willstrafach]

Are you able to elaborate on how this case is related to the DNC hacks? ShadowBrokers was never accused of being the same as Guccifer2, as far as I understand.

[atemerev]

No, as a fellow Russian I am fine to admit that the DNC hacks were probably done by us. When the leak happened, there was a little too much enthusiasm in Russian hacking circles. Guccifer2.0's style was also consistent with Russian writing.

But when the Shadowbrokers leak appeared, the community response was more like "wat."

[doktrin]

> if that's what you really think, then you don't get to assume that the DNC was hacked "by the Russians". Agreed?

Are you saying there's some letter written in broken english that's being used as proof of Russian involvement in the DNC hacks?

[mirimir]

Maybe they're a non-American who's trying to look like an American who's trying to look like a Russian.

[rugffgbv]

Possible. Certainly those are not genuine mistakes by native Russian speaker.

[mirimir]

Yes, I think that we can agree on that.

[nickpsecurity]

That's far from true. Professional propagandists from Russia would definitely know about that stuff because they'd follow the campaign. Other trolls outside USA would see headlines that could give them useful information. I have no idea of nationality of the author but nothing in it precludes them from being Russian. Especially at this level in the game where people might put talent or time into faking things to generate a specific reaction.

[zzzcpan]

While this is true, it doesn't mean that they don't work for Russia or even live outside of the US.

[kafkaesq]

I'd be curious as to which particular "anti-mistakes" you had in mind (that you believe a non-native speaker wouldn't be likely to make). I have some hunches (like the over-use of linking verbs, and certain overly-idiomatic colocations), but I'd be curious as to what stands out in your view.

[throwaway71958]

"The peoples" is unlikely. "-ing" after most verbs is unlikely. "the" is unlikely before "Freedom Caucus" and "NSC". There's no "the" in Russian, and ESL speakers often omit it, or put it where it doesn't really belong. The word "caucus" in itself is unlikely: I've never even heard of it before I moved to the US, it's not in common use abroad. "Whose" is unlikely. "To destroying" is very unlikely. "Will be happening" is unlikely ("will happen" is far more likely). "Be remembering" is very unlikely. "Do you be thinking" is very unlikely. And so on.

[nyolfen]

'freedom caucus' is a proper noun referring to an organization, they wouldn't need to know the meaning in order to use it. also you seem to ignore the possibility of using some machine translation assistance (eg for short phrases or sentences) which could account both for irregularities and correct verb conjugations.

[throwaway71958]

To this day I don't know what the word "caucus" would even correspond to in Russian. And English/Russian language pair is notoriously bad in machine translation systems. We're talking borderline unreadable, in either direction.

[int_19h]

> To this day I don't know what the word "caucus" would even correspond to in Russian.

It would vary depending on the meaning in English, too.

The kind of caucus that nominates candidates would be "выборный съезд".

Congressional caucus is actually trickier, just because there's usually no close equivalent in other parliamentary systems (including the Russian one). It's like a political faction, but 1) its platform is not all-encompassing, and 2) its membership is not exclusive (i.e. people can, and normally do, belong to several different caucuses). For that, I don't think there's any good word other than loaning the English word directly.

[throwaway71958]

It's a proper noun that describes an obscure sub-structure of US Congress. Now, quickly, name some sub-structures of the Russian Duma for us, and tell us what Putin thinks about them.

[hnaparst]

fascinating. To me, this linguistic analysis is much more interesting than the data dumps.

[kafkaesq]

Very cool. Thanks for the data points.

[ender89]

Sure, but I'm betting that a russian backed attempt to sow chaos could hire someone capable of putting together a decent sentence in english. There could be all sorts of reasons for the broken sentence. Sentence structure can be a sort of fingerprint, I would probably run any message I had through google translate a few times until I had something which was still legible, but didn't sound like my writing. And that has the benefit of making it seem like a non-english speaker wrote the post, its all just misdirection.

[nthcolumn]

People are assuming Russian or someone pretending to be Russian. For me the person is an Iranian living in the West possibly Europe.

[hnaparst]

If you have a copy of the linguistic analysis written by Shlomo Argamon, please post it.

[hnaparst]

http://multaverba.blogspot.com/2017/04/initial-linguistic-an...

[zedred]

Can you give us some examples?

[samstave]

CIA got it...