Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower

[Bernie Gunther]

crikey. http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2018/03/20/scl-a-very-british-coup/

ICO seems to be taking an awful long time to get and / or execute that warrant.

What could be the problem I wonder?

 

[butchersapron]

Trading tip: Sell now before Paul Mason nationalises it

Mason's idea is that facebook has taken over and should organise society rather than the other way around. It's what post-capitalism is. That and wikipedia.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

I thought it might be useful to give some examples of how this ecosystem and body of technique has been applied elsewhere.

For example Kenya where data has been used to politicise ethnicity via dark ads.

Harris Media publicly claims much of its political campaign work – even for controversial international clients like the extreme right AfD (Germany) and the Front National (France), and Israel’s Likud government. Kenya, however, was not one they were eager to claim. Yet the digital trail from both of the Kenyan digital campaigns leads firmly back to the Austin, Texas outfit.

also to SCL / CA



Texas Media Company Hired By Trump Created Kenyan President's Viral 'Anonymous' Attack Campaign Against Rival, New Investigation Reveals

Voter profiling in the 2017 Kenyan election – Privacy International – Medium

 

[Lurdan]

For example Kenya where data has been used to politicise ethnicity via dark ads.

Was just reading this fwiw :

from Cambridge Analytica accused of exploiting ethnic tensions to swing votes - The Times today (paywalled)

Cambridge Analytica’s involvement in Kenyan politics started in 2013 when Uhuru Kenyatta and Mr Ruto were on trial for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague. Both were accused of fuelling ethnic violence after the 2007 election which left 1,200 people dead and forced half a million to flee their homes. They denied the allegations.

When Cambridge Analytica returned to Kenya last year the ICC trials had collapsed amid prosecution claims that key witnesses had disappeared. Mr Kenyatta and Mr Ruto were seeking re-election against the veteran opposition candidate Raila Odinga, whose main support was from ethnic Luos.

Nic Cheeseman, professor of democracy at Birmingham University, said Cambridge Analytica was “accused of designing a divisive campaign in Kenya that was intended to demonise Raila Odinga . . . and has yet to suffer any consequences”. In Kenya’s Daily Star, the columnist Daudi Mwenda said that Cambridge Analytica had been recruited “to portray the Luo community as inherently violent on social media, thus justifying the government deployment of police with live ammunition that killed hordes”. Cambridge Analytica denied the allegations.

That Kenya Star quote in full :

from Daudi Mwenda - NASA's push for electoral justice justified - The Star, Kenya (back on January 3rd)

Whilst the role and exact impact effect of Cambridge Anaylitica is still under scrutiny legal, moral and integrity issues arise as to the implications of the governing party Jubilee acquiring and sharing the data of millions of Kenyans with a private Company for their selfish benefit.

They are also known to have been recruited to portray the Luo community as inherently violent on social media, thus justifying the government deployment of police with live ammunition that killed hordes in Siaya, Homa Bay, Kisumu, Mathare, Kibera and Kawangware.

Almost all the victims of the government induced police violence in Nairobi were from the Luo community causing many to silently wonder whether every police bullet automatically targeted a Luo.

Obviously I know jack shit about Kenyan politics. It would be interesting to know more.

 

[camouflage]

Mason's idea is that facebook has taken over and should organise society rather than the other way around. It's what post-capitalism is. That and wikipedia.

I can see where he's coming from, but you'd need a very different beast under the skin. With facebook shares plummeting for now, maybe we should have a whip-round and buy it up, open source it, transparentize it's processes, tighten-up user privacy and get ready to build a whole range civil-useful things on top of it. even then though, it could still go terribly wrong.

 

[Lurdan]

Cambridge Analytica staff Dan Muresan died while working in Kenya - Daily Nation (Nairobi) today

It was after the death of Dan Muresan, the son of former Romania Agriculture Minister Ioan Avram Muresan, that Wylie, who has since lifted the lid on potentially illegal activities the data firm used to influence voters, was hired to the firm.

(...)

“That is why they had a vacancy. I can’t say he was murdered… He died in his hotel room.”

(...)

The Romanian paper said at the time of his death, Muresan was working for a “British political consultancy firm which developed election strategies in various states of south Africa, south-east Asia and eastern Europe”, a description that has now come to emerge as that of Cambridge Analytica.

(...)

Wylie was speaking at an event co-hosted by the global Byline Investigates in London and the Frontline Club, a private members club in Britain,

in an event streamed live on Facebook.

LOL

 

[Bernie Gunther]

This has some interesting background about the way the military and intelligence communities have embraced and influenced these disciplines.

I’ve written previously about the way in which a great deal of contemporary behavioral science aims to exploit our irrationalities rather than overcome them. A science that is oriented toward the development of behavioral technologies is bound to view us narrowly as manipulable subjects rather than rational agents. If these technologies are becoming the core of America’s military and intelligence cyber-operations, it looks as though we will have to work harder to keep these trends from affecting the everyday life of our democratic society. That will mean paying closer attention to the military and civilian boundaries being crossed by the private companies that undertake such cyber-operations.

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/21/the-digital-military-industrial-complex/

 

[extra dry]

David Icke was right guys! Just not royal shape-shifting lizard overlords, but a loosely organised group of London restuarant loving ex-spies. Who happen to have their hands in political pies all over the shop. This is just ehat the gov need to distract from....the next big tax, sock taxes!

 

[teqniq]

Facebook, Cambridge Analytica sued in U.S. by users over data...

 

[Lurdan]

Desultory browsing about Cambridge Analytica and the Kenyan elections threw up this article which asks

Data and Democracy: What Role Did Cambridge Analytica Play in Kenya’s Elections? · Global Voices

The answer appears to be that in the context of rather more straightforward attempts to rig the result it's quite impossible to judge.

After the election they played a more prominent role as the losing side exaggerated their influence, including circulating a fake memorandum, supposedly by them, that purported to outline what they had been up to

Entertaining nonsense here:
Cambridge Analytica Hired Thugs to Disrupt NASA Demos, Leaked Memo - Kahawa Tungu last October.

Nonetheless these activities are still very interesting. It's interesting what services our networks of ex-military and spooks and entrepreneurs are able to sell. And even if, as I suspect, their effect is generally rather less than claimed that doesn't mean that it's non-existent.

 

[TruXta]

Desultory browsing about Cambridge Analytica and the Kenyan elections threw up this article which asks

Data and Democracy: What Role Did Cambridge Analytica Play in Kenya’s Elections? · Global Voices

The answer appears to be that in the context of rather more straightforward attempts to rig the result it's quite impossible to judge.

After the election they played a more prominent role as the losing side exaggerated their influence, including circulating a fake memorandum, supposedly by them, that purported to outline what they had been up to

Entertaining nonsense here:
Cambridge Analytica Hired Thugs to Disrupt NASA Demos, Leaked Memo - Kahawa Tungu last October.

Nonetheless these activities are still very interesting. It's interesting what services our networks of ex-military and spooks and entrepreneurs are able to sell. And even if, as I suspect, their effect is generally rather less than claimed that doesn't mean that it's non-existent.

It appears that a fair amount of the work SCL did prior to setting up CA was in psy ops around Iraq and Afghanistan. Assuming the brief they and similar outfits had were broadly to help create stable power systems that would work well with Western interests, it's tempting to conclude that they are rubbish at that. I suspect that it's rather easier and more immediately effective to bribe and coerce where possible, and bluster and bullshit where it's not.

 

[agricola]

It appears that a fair amount of the work SCL did prior to setting up CA was in psy ops around Iraq and Afghanistan. Assuming the brief they and similar outfits had were broadly to help create stable power systems that would work well with Western interests, it's tempting to conclude that they are rubbish at that. I suspect that it's rather easier and more immediately effective to bribe and coerce where possible, and bluster and bullshit where it's not.

I am not even sure they are very good at that - if anything they are probably best at being a group of people from the establishment that other people from the establishment like to turn to when they need the arcane power of the interwebs, or to speak to the public in languages that they think they understand.

 

[TruXta]

I am not even sure they are very good at that - if anything they are probably best at being a group of people from the establishment that other people from the establishment like to turn to when they need the arcane power of the interwebs, or to speak to the public in languages that they think they understand.

In fairness I think the CA/Facebook angle is just one facet of what they do, their (SCL's) prior electioneering and psyops work certainly doesn't seem to have relied on social media very much.

 

[agricola]

In fairness I think the CA/Facebook angle is just one facet of what they do, their (SCL's) prior electioneering and psyops work certainly doesn't seem to have relied on social media very much.

Indeed, If anything the Facebook side of things is probably the one being pushed because its the least damaging to them (in the same way that "phone hacking" came to dominate the scandal of Press malpractice rather than the fact that they'd been corrupting civil servants, cops and the rest for years).

 

[Bernie Gunther]

It appears that a fair amount of the work SCL did prior to setting up CA was in psy ops around Iraq and Afghanistan. Assuming the brief they and similar outfits had were broadly to help create stable power systems that would work well with Western interests, it's tempting to conclude that they are rubbish at that. I suspect that it's rather easier and more immediately effective to bribe and coerce where possible, and bluster and bullshit where it's not.

It would be quite interesting to see what metrics of effectiveness were in use, if any.

“[Bannon] got it immediately. He believes in the whole Andrew Breitbart doctrine that politics is downstream from culture, so to change politics you need to change culture. And fashion trends are a useful proxy for that. Trump is like a pair of Uggs, or Crocs, basically. So how do you get from people thinking ‘Ugh. Totally ugly’ to the moment when everyone is wearing them? That was the inflection point he was looking for.”

‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower

I mean, suppose for a moment we accept what Wylie says about Bannon wanting to effect cultural change as a primary goal.

If you were SCL (or any of numerous similar outfits) and were asked to track and optimise your initiatives for effectiveness at driving cultural change, how would you measure and report on impact?

 

[StigoftheDig]

In the Bannonite world view it will be when political change is effected.

I believe his whole thesis in regards to this - sorry, I'm sure you've covered this - is that culture is "upstream" of politics. So pushing a bunch of "traditionalist" attitudes - I guess you could say anti-feminism, the primacy of European culture, "globalism" - into the youngsters will soon see them coming of age and electing parties that support those policies. Unfortunately, I think he's had a good deal of success.

 

[newbie]

If you were SCL and were asked to track and optimise your initiatives for effectiveness at driving cultural change, how would you measure and report on impact?

facebook likes

 

[Bernie Gunther]

facebook likes

By whom and of what content?

 

[newbie]

By whom and of what content?

I was being a bit whimsical, but monitoring cultural change without using trends identifiable from facebook (twitter, google, insta, youtube...) is a bit meaningless, no? Obviously those are all self-selecting, so there's an adjustment necessary for that, but otherwise what cultural effects are you left with that can actually be measured? Box office figures for movies and other sales info are good indicators, I suppose.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

To be honest, I think they probably would try to find proxies for cultural change on the web because it's cheaper and easier than e.g. knocking on doors.

What would the people paying for this think a good online proxy for the sort of change they were seeking was though?

What sort of initiatives would you get if you were optimising for it?

e.g. if you were the AfD running these ads

The German far right is running Islamophobic ads starring women in bikinis

"Number of racist attacks reported per Euro of PR spend" - might be in the right direction, but it's a bit vague, doesn't really tell you anything specific enough about the initiatives you've been funding to tell when e.g. one ad is having more impact on the number of racist attacks than another.

 

[newbie]

To be honest, I think they probably would try to find proxies for cultural change on the web because it's cheaper and easier than e.g. knocking on doors.

it's also where people are a lot more honest than they are in opinion surveys. We are what we google and so on.
I'm late so stopping now.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Helpfully, the AfD have actually articulated at least one of their objectives for their ad campaign in ways that are conducive to social media analytics.

One of the most important goals of the AfD's digital campaign is to make people less shy about identifying with the right-wing populist party. As part of that effort, the party has invited its fans to make solidarity videos and is encouraging them to frame their profile photos with AfD symbols.

Germany for Germans: U.S. Ad Agency Boosts Right-Wing Populist AfD - SPIEGEL ONLINE - International

So there are a bunch of things that one could potentially do around that target.

- You can get a metric for "less shy" by measuring the number of social media users you've targeted with any given initiative who start openly identifying with your brand and using your content.

- You could do social network analysis on the ones you've "flipped" to see who else they're communicating with and start targeting those people accordingly.

- You can do behavioural, demographic and psychographic metadata analysis to find people who are "similar" to them and send them similar content.

- You can support people thus identified as likely to proselytize on your behalf indirectly, e.g. with talking points, branded and unbranded content etc.

- You can support them directly by validating their decision to identify with your group. Connecting them socially with others, so creating community good vibes.

- You can identify influencers and potential leaders in those social networks for higher cost initiatives, e.g. contact by party cadres, based on the potentially higher payback.

- If you've recently done an initiative to covertly promote a particular 'Muslim rape gang' story online for example, if you have the resources and data access, you can see who propagates it and follow the impact as the information cascades across various social networks. Do any of the people passing it on "flip" to you later?

- You could also track how other social networks pick it up, does it go mainstream etc? What other actors are giving your meme a push? Are they competitors or allies?

- Can we detect a change of sentiment against a lexicon of 'interesting' (for a white supremacist) words along the path the story follows as it gets passed around? How predictive is such a change regarding someone "flipping" to identify with your brand?

- If you're really loaded you might even try to do some simulation modelling around this stuff (ironically a lot of the theory here apparently comes from disease modelling) and try to use real world data and machine learning to get better and better models of propaganda cascades and their impact in predicting who will "flip".

Fundamentally, what you'd be doing there is to try to continuously improve, by measuring and refactoring discrete initiatives, the impact per Euro spent in terms of getting people across that cultural inflexion point Wylie is talking about above.

The point at which they "come out" as far-right, embrace that as a social identity and experience liberation from social pressures against that ideology, instead doubling-down on white supremacist beliefs and becoming active advocates from within a supportive online community.

 

[Badgers]

Not sure if relevant?

 

[teqniq]

ICO seems to be taking an awful long time to get and / or execute that warrant.

What could be the problem I wonder?

Indeed, looking to me like massive delaying tactics to give someone time to remove anything incriminating. Given the people involved and the background of the parent company SCL is that any kind of surprise?

Cambridge Analytica: search of London HQ delayed by wait for warrant

...The office of the information commissioner (ICO) began the application process on Tuesday, but on Thursday it disclosed that it still did not have a warrant. In a statement on its website, it said: “A high court judge has adjourned the ICO’s application for a warrant relating to Cambridge Analytica until Friday.

“The ICO will be in court to continue to pursue the warrant to obtain access to data and information to take forward our investigation.”

It refused to give any more information about the delay.

On Tuesday, crates were seen being removed from the central London office that Cambridge Analytica shares with other tenants. No one on the scene would comment on the origin of the crates, and the ICO said it was not involved in their removal....

 

[craigxcraig]

Suspicious package found at Cambridge Analytica offices, everywhere cordoned off and we're confined to out office...

 

[teqniq]

Cambridge Analytica was offered politicians' hacked emails, say witnesses

 

[Bernie Gunther]

I don't quite see the parallel with Watergate tbh.

In another sense as well, besides the blowback as I mentioned on the first page.



There's a hilarious interview with Andrew Marr in which Chomsky makes a comparison between the coverage received by Watergate and the coverage received by COINTELPRO.

Chomsky: “Watergate is a perfect example, we’ve discussed it at length in our book in fact and elsewhere. It’s a perfect example of the way the press was subordinated to power.”

Marr: “But this brought down a president!”

Chomsky: “Let me give you a… Just a minute, let’s take a look. What happened there… Here it’s kind of interesting, because you can’t do experiments in history, but here history was kind enough to set one up for us. The Watergate exposures happened to take place at exactly the same time as another set of exposures, namely the exposures of COINTELPRO.”

Marr: “Sorry, you’ll have to explain that.”

Chomsky: “It’s interesting that I have to explain it because it’s vastly more significant than Watergate. That already makes my point. COINTELPRO was a program of subversion, carried out, not by a couple of petty crooks, but by the national political police, the FBI, under four administrations. It began in the late Eisenhower administration, ran up till…”

Marr: “This is aimed at the Socialist Workers Party…”

Chomsky: “The Socialist Workers Party was one tiny fragment of it. It began… By the time it got through, I won’t run through the whole story, it was aimed at the entire New Left, at the women’s movement, at the whole black movement. It was extremely broad. It’s actions went as far as political assassination. Now what’s the difference between the two? Very clear. In Watergate, Richard Nixon went after half of US private power, namely the Democratic Party. And power can defend itself. So therefore that’s a scandal. He didn’t do anything, nothing happened. I was on Nixon’s enemies list. I didn’t even know, nothing ever happened.

Marr: “Nonetheless, you wouldn’t say it was an insignificant event?”

Chomsky: “It was a case where half of US power defended itself against a person who had obviously stepped out of line. That’s… So, and the fact that the press thought that was important shows that they think powerful people ought to be able to defend themselves. Now whether there was a question of principal was involved happens to be easily checked in this case. One tiny part of the COINTELPRO program was itself far more significant in terms of principal that all of Watergate. And if you look at the whole program, I mean it’s not even a discussion. But you had to ask me what COINTELPRO is, you know what Watergate is. There couldn’t be a more dramatic example of the subordination of the educated opinion to power here in England as well as in the United States.

And I think there's another parallel here. It's totally OK to expose CA, because they used tech that's only meant to be used on disobedient foreigners to defeat the Dem candidate.

So Carol Cadwalladyr and her colleagues can get the CA/SCL scoop and maybe Mueller in the US can administer the coup de grace to Trump et al by substantiating the Russia stuff.

Maybe even they'll find the balls to do the same over the use of these techniques in the Brexit vote, although I doubt it.

What I don't think we'll see though, is any serious effort to engage with the issues raised by the NSA/GCHQ panopticon, nor any use of these techniques within the bounds of ruling class consensus.

 

[TruXta]

In another sense as well, besides the blowback as I mentioned on the first page.



There's a hilarious interview with Andrew Marr in which Chomsky makes a comparison between the coverage received by Watergate and the coverage received by COINTELPRO.



And I think there's another parallel here. It's totally OK to expose CA, because they used tech that's only meant to be used on disobedient foreigners to defeat the Dem candidate.

So Carol Cadwalladyr and her colleagues can get the scoop and maybe Mueller in the US can administer the coup de grace to the Koch/Mercer candidates.

Maybe even they'll find the balls to do the same over the use of these techniques in the Brexit vote, although I doubt it.

What I don't think we'll see though, is any serious effort to engage with the issues raised by the NSA/GCHQ panopticon, nor any use of these techniques within the bounds of ruling class consensus.

Ta, interesting angle.

It does link in with the FAZ essay killer b posted up - the fight we're seeing is perhaps more a result of bickering between corporate power and state power as to who has monopoly on surveillance and the power that derives from that, rather than any regard to democratic principles.

 

[teqniq]

This look really to have only come to light because of the current scandal.

UK political parties poised to gain data-processing powers to work out how people vote, despite the Cambridge Analytica scandal

 

[newbie]

bickering between corporate power and state power as to who has monopoly on surveillance

In the years before 1984, when the novel presented a chilling future, mass state surveillance was a future few were prepared to willingly tolerate. Since then the subject has faded a bit, despite Snowden and ever present CCTV and all the rest. Sure, identity cards were seen off, and few take it lightly, but that's not the fear it used to be. Instead we've had the internet, and particularly web2.0, resulting in us willingly handing over to corporations far, far more personal information- 'data'- than any paranoid anti state activist could ever have dreamed of. The state has a monopoly hold on some of our secrets- our income, health, driving and criminal records and so on, and has the capacity to join up those databases to produce a profile of sorts. That monopoly is not going to last.

Google knows almost every thought we have because we look up the detail, knows where we are and where we've been, can triangulate who we're with, can read a huge proportion of our personal email, knows our contacts and looks after our calendars. For their own subsets of users Apple and Microsoft aren't far behind, and they have somewhat greater reach into our work lives as well. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, Whatsapp and so on have very extensive knowledge of our social and work lives, our interests, our likes and dislikes, our contacts and our politics. We willingly share all our passwords with whichever corporation provides our browser. As is now more apparent than previously, those corporations are the vectors for others to manipulate our opinions and our actions. I say 'our', it's not 100% but it's getting more and more pervasive.

The state knows very little about any of that (except inasmuch as they've stolen or backdoored great chunks, see Snowden). Pre 1984 we'd have been horrified at how much they do know, but in those days it was literally inconceivable that anyone could possibly know what the corporations have now, and the possibility that we'd have willingly given it all to them, without demure, with minimal conscious consideration, would have been utterly baffling.

Did anyone, anywhere predict that the corporations involved would become the most profitable on earth, giving them unlimited budgets for individual profiling of every one of us, knowing the better the profiling the higher the advertising income, the greater the profitability? The state can't afford that. It's not only the state that is developing and deploying AI.

So no, it's not really about surveillance any more, it's about happily and willingly sharing our innermost everything in an explicit bargain that we may be manipulated, via open advertising at the very least, but that's just the tip. The rest of the iceberg is about cultural and political influence. Viral memes were intriguing, once upon a time.

The problem is, if CA or the Ruskies or whoever are shown to have manipulated the Trump election, Scottish or Brexit referendums or maybe Berlesconi's return (or whatever, whoever) there will be huge numbers who endorsed them who will flatly refuse to accept that they personally were manipulated, will insist that their choice was freely made and that the result should stand. They'd be right, of course. Because exposure to fake or spun news, however sophisticated the message, does not necessarily guarantee results- back to everyone knowing half of advertising works but no-one knowing which half.