Pole and Hungarian brothers be. How Warsaw and Budapest use taxpayers’ money to build pro-government propaganda
With almost five hundred media outlets owned by a single pro-government foundation and hundreds of millions of euros of state advertising transferred annually to fund it, Hungary’s right-wing government has built Europe’s largest propaganda machine since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Warsaw follows in Budapest’s footsteps with a growing stream of taxpayers’ money funnelled […]
Attila Bátorfy
VSquare
Konrad Szczygieł
The operation ‘Lame Rebellion’
False Twitter and Facebook accounts improve the way the public sees the chairman of the Polish national state broadcaster TVP, help politicians in their election campaigns, act as lobbyists for armaments companies and carry out attacks directed at journalists. These accounts reach millions of recipients. A large-scale disinformation campaign is organized by a Warsaw-based PR company and an ex-politician, while the whole thing is co-founded by the National Disabled Persons Rehabilitation Fund. The clues from the troll farm lead us to Bartłomiej Misiewicz, who is currently suspected of corruption.
Hungary in the midst of a U.S. – Huawei war
This article was originally published by Direkt36 on November 1st, 2019. Viktor Orban’s government has found itself in the middle of a great power conflict in 2019. Last year, a new battleground emerged in the trade war between the United States and China. Washington accused Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei of espionage on behalf of the […]
Exit the Dragon
Early in the morning on January 8th, agents of the Polish Internal Security Agency entered the homes of Piotr D. and Wejing W. The former, who used to work in special services, was a manager at Orange, a telecommunications company. The latter was the head of sales at Poland’s Huawei’s office. They were charged with […]
Vulnerabilities of a Chinese Tech Giant
Huawei is at the center of heated political debate around the world. There is a general assumption among experts on China, ICT (Information and Communications Technology) experts and politicians that the company uses its ICT devices to spy on its users and provide this data to Chinese government. Though there have been separate cases of Huawei breaches […]
Polish elections: old picture, new perspective
Law and Justice won the elections and maintained undivided power in Poland. The leader of the ruling party Jaroslaw Kaczynski hoped for more. Shortly after the first exit polls appeared on TV screens, giving PiS an apparent electoral victory, a close associate of Jaroslaw Kaczynski posted a photo on Twitter. It shows a moderately smiling […]
How a Chassis Turned into a Howitzer
Two years ago Azerbaijani army showed off Czech howitzers and rocket launchers in a promotional video — despite the fact Czech Republic did not officially export military equipment to the country. How the weapons end up in the country immersed in a deadly conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh?