The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence undertook a study of these events, consistent with its congressional mandate to oversee and conduct oversight of the intelligence activities and programs of the United States Government, to include the effectiveness of the Intelligence Community's counterintelligence function. In addition to the work of the professional staff of the Committee, the Committee's findings drew from the input of cybersecurity professionals, social media companies, U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and researchers and experts in social network analysis, political content, disinformation, hate speech, algorithms, and automation, working under the auspices of the Committee's Technical Advisory Group (TAG). 3 The efforts of these TAG researchers led to I the release of two public reports on the IRA's information warfare campaign, based on data provided to the Committee by the social media companies.
These reports provided the 1 (U) For purposes of this Volume, "information warfare" refers to Russia's strategy for the use and management of information to pursue a competitive advantage. See Congressional Research Service, Defense Primer: Information Operations, December 18, 2018. 2 3 (U) The TAG is an external group of experts the Committee consults for substantive technical advice on topics of importance to Committee activities and oversight. In this case, the Committee requested the assistance of two independent working groups, each with the technical capabilities and expertise required to analyze the data. The two working groups were led by three TAG members, with John Kelly, the founder and CEO of the social media analytics firm Graphika, and Phil Howard, an expert academic researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, leading . one working group, and Renee DiResta, the Director of Research at New Knowledge, a cybersecurity company dedicated to protecting the public sphere from disinformation attacks, leading the other.
4 (U) Renee DiResta, Dr. Kris Shaffer, Becky Ruppel, David Sullivan, Robert Matney, Ryan Fox, Dr. Jonathan Albright, and Ben Johnson, "The Tactics and Tropes of the Internet Research Agency," New Knowledge, December 17, 2018, https://www.newknowledge.com/articles/the-disinformation-report/; Phil Howard, Bharath Ganesh, Dimitra Liotsiou, John Kelly, and Camille Francois, "The IRA, Social Media and Political Polarization in the United States, 2012-2018," Computational Propaganda Research Project, Oxford Internet Institute, December 2018,
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