J Ed
Follow Back Pro Expropriation
Given that we know the other side in US politics has used the exact same tactics since 2008, just who are the 'high information voters'?
Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower
- Thread starter Bernie Gunther
- Start date
Given that we know the other side in US politics has used the exact same tactics since 2008, just who are the 'high information voters'?
TruXta
tired
People who refuse to vote
Bernie Gunther
Fundamentalist Druid
Was pretty funny when they were talking about being “masters of disguise”and setting up sting operations to secretly record compromising material.
Full marks to the C4 undercover team for not pissing themselves laughing until later.
Full marks to the C4 undercover team for not pissing themselves laughing until later.
Bernie Gunther
Fundamentalist Druid
Comment from the ICO. They'll be raiding CA tomorrow after having a lie-in and a nice cup of tea.
Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham on Cambridge Analytica and Facebook: ‘We should all be shocked and deeply concerned’
Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham on Cambridge Analytica and Facebook: ‘We should all be shocked and deeply concerned’
pocketscience
Well-Known Member
So she announces the raid on a national tv channel's prime-time news show
CRI
Registered Chooser
Well then . . .
Facebook Security Chief Said to Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation
Paywalled, so . . .
Would be amazing if this means curtains for Bookface at last, if nothing else.
Facebook Security Chief Said to Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation
Paywalled, so . . .
Would be amazing if this means curtains for Bookface at last, if nothing else.
Bernie Gunther
Fundamentalist Druid
Never mind. Same as CRI’s link.
Stamos was the guy who quit the equivalent job at Yahoo over ethics concerns about them enabling FBI / NSA email surveillance.
Edited to add: @alexstamos was on Twitter a little while ago calling the NYT story about him quitting ‘rumours’ and saying that he’s changed roles to focus on ‘emerging threats and election security’
Stamos was the guy who quit the equivalent job at Yahoo over ethics concerns about them enabling FBI / NSA email surveillance.
Edited to add: @alexstamos was on Twitter a little while ago calling the NYT story about him quitting ‘rumours’ and saying that he’s changed roles to focus on ‘emerging threats and election security’
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So she announces the raid on a national tv channel's prime-time news show
You know, given how badly Facebook have handled this, she's probably expecting that they will panic and delete data badly. And then they'll get "perverting the course of justice" as well ...
agricola
a genuine importer of owls
I suppose it all depends on whether or not Nix was telling the truth when he said they had two ongoing campaigns, and if so who they were against (or more importantly on whose behalf they were conducted), what material was collected and what was done with it.
Not to be a conspiracy theorist but it would certainly explain how certain stories have emerged in recent domestic politics, and it could well get far more important people in trouble than just CA (given how it would have been paid for, when it would have been paid for, recent decisions around collusion with the media and the fact that lessons have been learned etc etc).
elbows
Well-Known Member
That aspect was some of the finest comedy the world of 2018 has had to offer thus far.
teqniq
DisMembered
It's Cambridge Analytica that the search warrant will be for tomorrow, not Facebook who are according to that tweet I posted a pic of earlier wanting 'their' data back. Bottom line is none of them are going to come out of this looking good.
pocketscience
Well-Known Member
From what Denham said, Facebook wont be raided as they are cooperating. CA arent, so their servers will be taken.
As for FB wanting their data back...
Has David Thorne managed to snag a job there?
RubyToogood
RubyTwobikes
I'm still not wholly sure what they're supposed to have done beyond fairly standard data scraping and audience segmentation (apart from the comedy Ukrainian prostitutes stuff).
Also I can only assume that there's an API that gives marketers a lot more granularity than the standard Facebook promoted posts interface, which really wouldn't support fine microtargeting.
Also I can only assume that there's an API that gives marketers a lot more granularity than the standard Facebook promoted posts interface, which really wouldn't support fine microtargeting.
teqniq
DisMembered
What they've done is allowed a third party developer to run an app on their platform that not only harvested the data of the people using it but also anyone else in their friend's circles who didn't have their account locked down. And they say they didn't know. Doctor, my sides.
Ted Striker
Foot's on the other hand
Yup, this.
RubyToogood
RubyTwobikes
Yes, that's pretty bad - I actually meant Cambridge Analytica, not Facebook. But every one of those people will have ticked the box saying "I have read the terms and conditions and agree to them".
I don't think most of the people covering this story have any idea what it's about. They talk about standard digital marketing techniques as though they were some kind of hideous high tech dark art. You did message testing??? OMG you are satan incarnate!
RubyToogood
RubyTwobikes
BTW I think Facebook is quite fragile. Their success is not built on strong foundations. They basically do one thing and do it increasingly badly.
agricola
a genuine importer of owls
Its the fake news stuff that Nix admitted to in the undercover filming that will cause them the real problems - that and the what might be termed "discreet billing" (which its hard to imagine could ever have been on official spending returns, as people would have asked who the front company no-one had ever heard of by now).
RubyToogood
RubyTwobikes
That's just advertising. It's been going on for several hundred years. Just not with computers.
RubyToogood
RubyTwobikes
It's really quite difficult to separate out CA's fantasies from their actual "achievements" though. They come across as a bunch of self-aggrandising idiots in the film rather than highly effective deadly psyops agents.
pk
drink flounce rinse repeat
Interesting take from someone who knows - Greg Palast:
Cambridge Analytica Ain’t Nuthin:
Look out for i360 and DataTrust
By Greg Palast
There are two dangers in the media howl over Trump’s computer gurus Cambridge Analytica, the data-driven psy-ops company founded by billionaire brown-shirts, the Mercer Family.
Clip from Palast's film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
The story is that Cambridge Analytica, once directed by Steve Bannon, by shoplifting Facebook profiles to bend your brain, is some unique “bad apple” of the cyber world.
That’s a dangerously narrow view. In fact, the dark art of dynamic psychometric manipulation in politics was not pioneered by Cambridge Analytica for Trump, but by i360 Themis, the operation founded by… no points for guessing… the Brothers Koch.
Mark Swedlund, himself an expert in these tools, explained in film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, that i360 dynamically tracks you on 1800 behaviors, or as Swedlund graphically puts it [see clip above],“They know the last time you downloaded porn and
whether you ordered Chinese food before you voted.”Swedlund adds his expert conclusion: "I think that’s creepy."
The Koch operation and its competitor, DataTrust, use your credit card purchases, cable TV choices and other personal info — which is far more revealing about your inner life than the BS you put on your Facebook profile. Don’t trust DataTrust: This cyber-monster is operated by Karl Rove, “Bush’s Brain,” who is principally funded by Paul Singer, the far Right financier better known as The Vulture.
Way too much is made of the importance of Cambridge Analytica stealing data through a phony app. If you’ve ever filled out an online survey, Swedlund told me, they’ve got you — legally.
The second danger is to forget that the GOP has been using computer power to erase the voting rights of Black and Hispanic voters for years — by "caging," "Crosscheck," citizenship challenges based on last name (Garcia? Not American!!), the list goes on — a far more effective use of cyberpower than manipulating your behavior through Facebook ads.
Just last week, Kris Kobach, Secretary of State of Kansas and Trump’s chief voting law advisor, defended his method of hunting alleged “aliens” on voter rolls against a legal challenge by the ALCU. Kobach's expert, Jessie Richman, uses a computer algorithm that can locate “foreign” names on voter rolls. He identified, for example, one “Carlos Murguia” as a potential alien voter. Murguia is a Kansas-born judge who presides in a nearby courtroom.
It would be a joke, except that Kobach’s “alien” hunt has blocked one in seven new (i.e. young) voters from registering in the state. If Kobach wins, it will, like his Crosscheck purge program and voter ID laws, almost certainly spread to other GOP controlled states. This could ultimately block one million new voters, exactly what Trump had in mind by pushing the alien-voter hysteria.
Become A Kobach Litigation Supporter
Help us fund our mass litigation operation against Kris Kobach (Trump’s Vote-Thief-in-Chief). For now, details must remain confidential.
— Click here to make a tax-deductible donation.
The Cambridge Analytica story was first reported by The Guardian and Observer in 2015. Did we listen? Did any US paper carry the story the British paper worked on for years? So, my first reaction reading this story was nostalgia — for the time when I was a reporter with The Guardian and Observer investigations team. We could spend a year digging deep into complex stories, working with crazy insiders. There, in 2000, I uncovered another cyber-crime: Using database matching to purge felons from Florida voter rolls. (None, in fact, were felons; most were Democrats.)
I moved back to America, but found I had to give up any hope of doing true, deep investigative reports for newspapers in my own country. US papers will sometimes re-report Guardian news, but American media almost never initiates deep investigation. And THAT, fear of the cost, difficulty and risk in digging out the truth, is a greater threat to America than Steve Bannon.
Cambridge Analytica Ain’t Nuthin:
Look out for i360 and DataTrust
By Greg Palast
There are two dangers in the media howl over Trump’s computer gurus Cambridge Analytica, the data-driven psy-ops company founded by billionaire brown-shirts, the Mercer Family.
Clip from Palast's film The Best Democracy Money Can BuyThe story is that Cambridge Analytica, once directed by Steve Bannon, by shoplifting Facebook profiles to bend your brain, is some unique “bad apple” of the cyber world.
That’s a dangerously narrow view. In fact, the dark art of dynamic psychometric manipulation in politics was not pioneered by Cambridge Analytica for Trump, but by i360 Themis, the operation founded by… no points for guessing… the Brothers Koch.
Mark Swedlund, himself an expert in these tools, explained in film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, that i360 dynamically tracks you on 1800 behaviors, or as Swedlund graphically puts it [see clip above],“They know the last time you downloaded porn and
whether you ordered Chinese food before you voted.”Swedlund adds his expert conclusion: "I think that’s creepy."
The Koch operation and its competitor, DataTrust, use your credit card purchases, cable TV choices and other personal info — which is far more revealing about your inner life than the BS you put on your Facebook profile. Don’t trust DataTrust: This cyber-monster is operated by Karl Rove, “Bush’s Brain,” who is principally funded by Paul Singer, the far Right financier better known as The Vulture.
Way too much is made of the importance of Cambridge Analytica stealing data through a phony app. If you’ve ever filled out an online survey, Swedlund told me, they’ve got you — legally.
The second danger is to forget that the GOP has been using computer power to erase the voting rights of Black and Hispanic voters for years — by "caging," "Crosscheck," citizenship challenges based on last name (Garcia? Not American!!), the list goes on — a far more effective use of cyberpower than manipulating your behavior through Facebook ads.
Just last week, Kris Kobach, Secretary of State of Kansas and Trump’s chief voting law advisor, defended his method of hunting alleged “aliens” on voter rolls against a legal challenge by the ALCU. Kobach's expert, Jessie Richman, uses a computer algorithm that can locate “foreign” names on voter rolls. He identified, for example, one “Carlos Murguia” as a potential alien voter. Murguia is a Kansas-born judge who presides in a nearby courtroom.
It would be a joke, except that Kobach’s “alien” hunt has blocked one in seven new (i.e. young) voters from registering in the state. If Kobach wins, it will, like his Crosscheck purge program and voter ID laws, almost certainly spread to other GOP controlled states. This could ultimately block one million new voters, exactly what Trump had in mind by pushing the alien-voter hysteria.
Become A Kobach Litigation Supporter
— Click here to make a tax-deductible donation.
The Cambridge Analytica story was first reported by The Guardian and Observer in 2015. Did we listen? Did any US paper carry the story the British paper worked on for years? So, my first reaction reading this story was nostalgia — for the time when I was a reporter with The Guardian and Observer investigations team. We could spend a year digging deep into complex stories, working with crazy insiders. There, in 2000, I uncovered another cyber-crime: Using database matching to purge felons from Florida voter rolls. (None, in fact, were felons; most were Democrats.)
I moved back to America, but found I had to give up any hope of doing true, deep investigative reports for newspapers in my own country. US papers will sometimes re-report Guardian news, but American media almost never initiates deep investigation. And THAT, fear of the cost, difficulty and risk in digging out the truth, is a greater threat to America than Steve Bannon.
teqniq
DisMembered
Well yeah maybe fair enough but here we have a the potential of fine grain analysis and manipulation and the reach to vast amounts of people undreamt-of in the last several hundred years. Also advertising in general has benefited from applied psychology otherwise known as 'public relations' and that's a fairly recent development.
TruXta
tired
But if you actually read the literature around nudging and behavioural influence more broadly the effects are typically small and/or ephemeral. Just because they know what you do it doesn't follow that they can make you do something you wouldn't already be inclined to do.
agricola
a genuine importer of owls
They do, but the issue is not what they've done so much as how they were doing it - after all, you might want to spin fibs about your competence but you are unlikely to tell whoppers about how you would like to be paid.
emanymton
A cat politely sat on the flaming gardener.
While there is obviously shady shit going on. But probably nothing especially new. To me this whole thing looks like liberals of various hues trying to understand brexit and Trump. And reaching the conclusion it has to be some shadow conspiracy type shit. It can't just be that their politics has failed and created millions of pissed off people. Oh no, can't be that.
Rob Ray
Weight is meaningless
Interesting take from someone who knows - Greg Palast:
Cambridge Analytica Ain’t Nuthin:
Look out for i360 and DataTrust
By Greg Palast
There are two dangers in the media howl over Trump’s computer gurus Cambridge Analytica, the data-driven psy-ops company founded by billionaire brown-shirts, the Mercer Family.
The story is that Cambridge Analytica, once directed by Steve Bannon, by shoplifting Facebook profiles to bend your brain, is some unique “bad apple” of the cyber world.
That’s a dangerously narrow view. In fact, the dark art of dynamic psychometric manipulation in politics was not pioneered by Cambridge Analytica for Trump, but by i360 Themis, the operation founded by… no points for guessing… the Brothers Koch.
Mark Swedlund, himself an expert in these tools, explained in film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, that i360 dynamically tracks you on 1800 behaviors, or as Swedlund graphically puts it [see clip above],“They know the last time you downloaded porn and
whether you ordered Chinese food before you voted.”Swedlund adds his expert conclusion: "I think that’s creepy."
The Koch operation and its competitor, DataTrust, use your credit card purchases, cable TV choices and other personal info — which is far more revealing about your inner life than the BS you put on your Facebook profile. Don’t trust DataTrust: This cyber-monster is operated by Karl Rove, “Bush’s Brain,” who is principally funded by Paul Singer, the far Right financier better known as The Vulture.
Way too much is made of the importance of Cambridge Analytica stealing data through a phony app. If you’ve ever filled out an online survey, Swedlund told me, they’ve got you — legally.
The second danger is to forget that the GOP has been using computer power to erase the voting rights of Black and Hispanic voters for years — by "caging," "Crosscheck," citizenship challenges based on last name (Garcia? Not American!!), the list goes on — a far more effective use of cyberpower than manipulating your behavior through Facebook ads.
Just last week, Kris Kobach, Secretary of State of Kansas and Trump’s chief voting law advisor, defended his method of hunting alleged “aliens” on voter rolls against a legal challenge by the ALCU. Kobach's expert, Jessie Richman, uses a computer algorithm that can locate “foreign” names on voter rolls. He identified, for example, one “Carlos Murguia” as a potential alien voter. Murguia is a Kansas-born judge who presides in a nearby courtroom.
It would be a joke, except that Kobach’s “alien” hunt has blocked one in seven new (i.e. young) voters from registering in the state. If Kobach wins, it will, like his Crosscheck purge program and voter ID laws, almost certainly spread to other GOP controlled states. This could ultimately block one million new voters, exactly what Trump had in mind by pushing the alien-voter hysteria.
Become A Kobach Litigation Supporter
Help us fund our mass litigation operation against Kris Kobach (Trump’s Vote-Thief-in-Chief). For now, details must remain confidential.
— Click here to make a tax-deductible donation.
The Cambridge Analytica story was first reported by The Guardian and Observer in 2015. Did we listen? Did any US paper carry the story the British paper worked on for years? So, my first reaction reading this story was nostalgia — for the time when I was a reporter with The Guardian and Observer investigations team. We could spend a year digging deep into complex stories, working with crazy insiders. There, in 2000, I uncovered another cyber-crime: Using database matching to purge felons from Florida voter rolls. (None, in fact, were felons; most were Democrats.)
I moved back to America, but found I had to give up any hope of doing true, deep investigative reports for newspapers in my own country. US papers will sometimes re-report Guardian news, but American media almost never initiates deep investigation. And THAT, fear of the cost, difficulty and risk in digging out the truth, is a greater threat to America than Steve Bannon.
Great reporter Palast, his stuff on Bush-era shenanigans was what got me into politics. It's a damn tragedy he doesn't get the funding any more.
Bernie Gunther
Fundamentalist Druid
The technology is pretty good at sifting though those millions of pissed off people, selecting the ones likely to be moved to action by proto fascist propaganda and bombarding them with such though.
TruXta
tired
Well, is it? There's a lot of hype and very little evidence either way.
