Glossary of Terms for Upcoming Congressional Investigations

Monday, March 20, at 10 am Eastern time, the House Intelligence Committee will begin what is listed as "Open Hearing on Russian Active Measures Investigation," focused on interference in the 2016 election campaign.

The first two listed witnesses in Monday's hearing are FBI Director James Comey and Director of National Intelligence Mike Rogers.

Here is a glossary of some of the terms that might come up during this hearing, which is the first hearing resulting from at least 5 Congressional investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 and possible involvement of members of the Trump campaign, transition team, and administration.

FISA - Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. This law, passed in 1978, established the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to review warrants related to national security. Warrants are drawn up in the National Security Agency at the request of an officer of one of the federal intelligence agencies. The target of the warrant must be a foreign power, the agent of a foreign power, orm in the case of a citizen or resident alien, that the target may be involved in the commission of a crime.

FARA - Foreign Agents Registration Act. This law, passed in 1938, requires that a person representing the interests of a foreign power in a political capacity disclose details regarding finances and activities.

Kompromat - compromising material about a politician or other public figure. Kompromat is used to blackmail or force loyalty from a victim.

Maskirovka – Russian military deception.  

Mirror trading -  a scheme of stock trading that can be used for laundering money.  Mirror trades were used for years in schemes at Deutsche Bank, which was fined $629 million by regulators in the U.S and U.K. for trades carried out from 2011 to 2015. As Matt Levine of Bloomberg News explained, “some Russian entity would buy a chunk of Russian shares from Deutsche Bank's Moscow office for rubles, and an affiliated entity would sell the same shares to Deutsche Bank's London office for U.S. dollars, with the result that the web of entities moved rubles offshore and converted them into dollars. It's a simple transaction, using the stock trades as just a mechanical tool for the money transfer.” https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-31/mirror-trades-and-two-for-one-rules

Wikileaks - an international organization that publishes leaked information from anonymous sources. The website was launched in Iceland in 2006. Many U.S. intelligence experts believe that, after American creditors refused to do business with them in 2010, founder Julian Assange turned to the Russian Federation for financing.

Guccifer 2.0 - the persona of a hacker that stole information from the server of the Democratic National Committee. The information was then released on Wikileaks. Some of the documents appeared to be cobbled together, including portions of news articles and disinformation. Most U.S. intelligence experts believe the persona to be multiple intelligence operatives of the Russian GRU.

GRU - Russian Federation military intelligence service.

FSB - Russian Federation foreign intelligence service.

NSA - U.S. National Security Agency.

FBI - U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.

MI5 - British domestic counter-intelligence and security agency. MI5 is similar to the FBI

MI6 - British foreign intelligence service. James Bond is the most famous MI6 operative.

GCHQ - Government Communications Headquarters, the U.K.’s security organization responsible for providing signals intelligence (listening) to the government and military.

SIGINT - Signals intelligence. This means information gathering by picking up signals, either between people (COMINT) or electronic signals (ELINT).​

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