cambridge analytica

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new tag cmbanl

merri ok

SEE SCL gp EMERDATA

see nix, alex 2 = bak

see wylie whistleblower

see mercer (node and tag)

officially went out of of biz in US 4/18?

see koch i360, AA voter suppression

Do So Trinidad

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worked with trump campaign and MRC media res ctr

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/steve-bannon-2655746168/

In 2016, the British data firm Cambridge Analytic (which supported Donald Trump during that year's presidential election) used Steve Bannon as its director of U.S. operations — and Cambridge had a billionaire backer in Rebekah Mercer. But now, according to the :{Daily Beast}:'s Roger Sollenberger, Mercer is distancing herself from the far-right MAGA Republican.

"The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center alleges that the Trump campaign and a pro-Trump super PAC run by Bannon illegally coordinated through Cambridge to pump out millions of dollars in political ads for Trump," Sollenberger reports in an article published on November 16. "Brendan Fischer, director of reform at CLC, said the evidence generated in the closed investigation specifically strengthens their case against Bannon, who was named in the foreign national probe but was never questioned."

Bannon and Mercer were allies in 2016. But now, according to Fischer, Mercer appears to be throwing Bannon under the bus.

"Federal election filings show the Trump campaign paid Cambridge Analytica $5.9 million in the 2016 cycle, and MAN1 reported paying another $5 million to the firm after the super PAC began backing Trump," Sollenberger explains. "It isillegal for campaigns and outside groups to coordinateelection-related activity through a common vendor without appropriate firewalls in place. Fischer pointed out that Mercer, Bannon's former business partner and billionaire Cambridge financier, appears to have betrayed Bannon, with the right-wing megadonor pinning the blame for any illicit activity on him."

Fischer told the Beast, "The response from Mercer's attorney was that Bannon was running the show, so the idea that he'd also been running both the super PAC and the Trump campaign — and that both of them were contracting with the firm Bannon had also been running just boggles the mind. These are not novel issues. It's anticipated in the law that a shared vendor might act illegally as a conduit between campaigns, but this is something we haven't really seen before."

According to Mercer's attorney, Mark Hansen, any problematic activity with Cambridge could not be blamed on her, but would lie with Bannon or Cambridge CEO Alexander Nix.

"While Hansen acknowledged that Mercer worked at 'a high level' in the organization," Sollenberger writes, "she had been 'simply swept in' with Bannon and Nix, he said. As the company's top executives, Hansen continued, it was Bannon and Nix who 'directed what CA employees did or did not do in their U.S. campaign work for US political campaigns.'"

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FB will rebrand as toxic

===

10 21 an

The regulatory office for Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine has announced that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been added as a defendant in connection with the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

According to NBC News, Racine filed the complaint under D.C.'s Consumer Protection Procedures Act which opens the door for individuals to be held accountable for violations.

The attorney general insists evidence compiled over the last two years makes it quite "clear Mr. Zuckerberg knowingly and actively participated in each decision that led to Cambridge Analytica's mass collection of Facebook user data, and Facebook's misrepresentations to users about how secure their data was."

Per the publication, the complaint has laid out a number of allegations against the company CEO.

"Zuckerberg was personally aware of the risks that sharing consumer data with apps posed, but actively disregarded those risks because sharing data was otherwise beneficial and lucrative to Facebook's business model and Platform growth."

Racine also insists Zuckerberg had a role in misleading not only the public but also the United States government regarding the social media platform's involvement in the scandal. Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone released a statement on behalf of the social media platform. According to Stone, Facebook is denying the allegations.

"These allegations are as meritless today as they were more than three years ago, when the District filed its complaint," Stone said in a statement. "We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously and focus on the facts."

The Guardian and The New York Times released reports about the Cambridge Analytica scandal back in 2018. At the time, it was revealed that the firm "harvested information from 50 million Facebook profiles." The social media platform later confirmed "data on as many as 87 million people were improperly shared with the company."

If it is determined that either Zuckerberg or his company broke the law, they could be forced to cover the costs of civil penalties, legal fees, and restitution to all victims involved.

===

BILL MOYERS: –said the Council for National Policy's executive committee president, Bill Walton.Ralph Reed, chairman of the nonprofit, Faith and Freedom Coalition told the CNP audience that conservatives are going to be harvesting ballots in churches. “We're going to be specifically going in, not only to white evangelical churches, but into Hispanic and Asian churches and collecting those ballots.'"And then, here's the one that really stands out. At that meeting, J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department official and the president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a charity, described mail-in voting as the number one left-wing agenda. He urged the activists not to worry about the criticism that might come their way. Quote, “Be not afraid of the accusations that you're a voter suppressor." Any of that surprise you?

ANNE NELSON: Not in the least. On the contrary, you'll find the footprints of those statements in my book. One of the techniques that this movement has used is using data profiles and directing information to voters to either get them to vote for Republicans or to suppress the vote if they're not likely to. The Koch brothers brought state-of-the-art political data operations to the table with an organization called i360. And that was harnessed to organizations that were run by CNP members.

So, for example, one of them was the Susan B. Anthony List, which is anti-abortion. One of them was the NRA. They also combined data from churches and from political data and consumer data. So that allowed canvassers for these organizations to do their door-to-door canvassing having a huge amount of information about each individual voter, and a tailored individual script for them. So, for example, if you are canvassing in Springfield, Missouri, and you're working for the Susan B. Anthony List, you know that at such-and-such an address, there's a Catholic housewife with six kids there who watched an anti-abortion film on Netflix and ordered LIVES OF THE SAINTS from Amazon. You have all of that in your cell phone, and you also have a script that's been prepared and tailored for that voter, right? But you're going to have a totally different script based on the data for the next-door neighbor who's a gun owner who's all about the second amendment.

And the Democrats have lagged behind, not in terms of the data they have, but the way they've networked data across state lines and to organizations that are doing their political groundwork. So that's been a factor.The use of data has been very important in the last few campaigns, and not always well-understood. But there's also a really important matter of how data is used to suppress votes. And that's where I would direct people to a news story done by Channel Four in Britain. The Council for National Policy partners and the Koch brothers' data platform i360 used data from Cambridge Analytica with several hundred million voters, with some2,000 data points for every voter. So that includes you and me, Bill, okay? They know a lot about us, and so what they did in this story documenting what happened with African Americans in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was find that if voters were not likely to vote for Republicans. If they leaned Democratic, they would target them with misinformation that would disincline them to vote at all. And in other cases, such as what's been documented in Michigan, some 90,000 African American voters were persuaded not to vote for the top of the ticket for Hillary Clinton by these methods. So, in these states, they always go by very, very narrow margins. So, I would argue that a lot of these data operations, some of them of questionable legality, have actually changed the course of electoral history.

BILL MOYERS: What do you think they're doing for this election in two weeks?

ANNE NELSON: Well, we know that the Trump 2020 app has highly questionable practices, in terms of its privacy and the way it accesses people's cell phone directories, all of their contacts, friends and family, and then sends messages out to them, often without the user knowing that they're doing it. They also combine that with consumer data. So, for example, if you downloaded their app on one phone that was a different account, they could trace your credit card records back to your own account. They also use geolocation, so once you download the app, they figure out where you are and what kind of messaging would appeal to you and leverage you to attract other voters. And they use this through beacons that are placed around areas like political rallies and churches, right, to locate the people with the apps and then engage them for political purpose. It has been recently revealed that thesebeacons had even been implanted in Trump yard signs. So, they're really, I would say, on the cutting edge of political technology. And it's in this very murky area of law where there are abusive practices involving privacy, but there's no clear legal framework to govern it.

BILL MOYERS: And what stuns me is their ability to connect this very sophisticated information gained by very up-to-date, modern technology to a lot of poor pastors in East Texas and Southern Alabama who are concerned about the state of the world. And here, they've been led into, one of the most sophisticated political campaigns that really has not their interest at heart. And they become soldiers in the crusade–

===

trump campaign targeted 3.5 million Black voters for suppression: report

White House

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement September 28, 2020

The Trump campaign focused its digital efforts on 3.5 million Black American voters in 2016, targeting them in an effort to deter them from voting.

A new report from the UK's Channel 4, which also helped expose how Cambridge Analytica precisely targeted voters for the Trump campaign during the 2016 election, makes the stunning revelation.

Pointing to "a vast cache of data used by Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign on almost 200 million American voters," Channel 4 reports it has obtained the data, which "reveals that 3.5 million Black Americans were categorized by Donald Trump's campaign as 'Deterrence' – voters they wanted to stay home on election day."

"In 16 key battleground states, millions of Americans were separated by an algorithm into one of eight categories, also described as 'audiences', so they could then be targeted with tailored ads on Facebook and other platforms," Channel 4 reports.

One of the categories was named 'Deterrence', which was later described publicly by Trump's chief data scientist as containing people that the campaign "hope don't show up to vote".Analysis by Channel 4 News shows Black Americans – historically a community targeted with voter suppression tactics – were disproportionately marked 'Deterrence' by the 2016 campaign.

Here's a promotional video from Channel 4, tweeted by the UK investigative journalist who exposed the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Here's video showing Channel 4 actually visiting voters in Wisconsin, and showing them what information the Trump campaign had on them.

The Trump campaign had data on voters' home address, date of birth, jobs, income, and housing status, and matched that to individual people to target them, Channel 4 revealed.

The plan worked."Overall turnout" in one Milwaukie, Wisconsin precinct, "fell from 75% in 2012, to just 56% in 2016."

In another, turnout fell from 81% to 55%.

Trump won the 2016 Electoral College by just 77,000 votes across three states. no lnx twt vid

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-campaign-targeted-3-5-million-black-voters-for-suppression-report/

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https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4499327-17416039-0-18384.html 403 no permission

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https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/cambridge-analytica-just-filed-for-us-bankruptcy

cambridge Analytica LLC, the American branch of the political consultancy firm that was hired by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, filed for bankruptcy late Thursday. The filing reveals previously unknown details about financial relationships at the organization, which was thrown into disarray due to revelations that it mishandled the Facebook data of millions of people.

The New York–based arm of the British outfit submitted a voluntary petition to declare Chapter 7 bankruptcy in a federal bankruptcy court in Manhattan. SCL USA, the US-based affiliate of Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Group, also filed for bankruptcy in the same court on Thursday.

While the filings were expected — the company announced earlier this month that it had begun bankruptcy proceedings in the United Kingdom — the documents reveal a spiderweb of affiliated entities, all of which have taken severe reputation hits following reports in March in the Observer and the New York Times that shed light on the company’s election work and procurement of Facebook user data. Cambridge Analytica’s filing was signed by board members and majority shareholders Rebekah and Jennifer Mercer, whose family, led by hedge fund magnate Robert Mercer, spent millions of dollars in support of Trump’s presidential campaign and conservative causes.

The document noted that the American entity had assets of about $101,000 to $500,000 and liabilities between $1 million and $10 million. It also said that the affiliated UK-based companies, including SCL Group Ltd., SCL Analytica Ltd., SCL Commercial Ltd., SCL Social Ltd., SCL Election Ltd., and Cambridge Analytica Ltd.,had begun bankruptcy proceedings earlier this month in the UK.

A source close to the company told BuzzFeed News earlier on Thursday that about 120 people lost their jobs with Cambridge Analytica’s shutdown.

Julian Wheatland, the chair of SCL Group who briefly took over as CEO of Cambridge Analytica following the suspension of former leader Alexander Nix, did not immediately return a request for comment. Adam Harris, a Schulte Roth & Zabel lawyer representing Cambridge Analytica LLC and SCL USA also did not immediately return a request for comment.

The bankruptcy documents from SCL USA and Cambridge Analytica LLC shed some light on a complex organizational structure that had been mapped out by independent journalists Wendy Siegelman and Ann Marlowe, but was not well understood. The filings show some of the shareholding relationships between the group's affiliates, including Emerdata, a company that was registered in August that some believed would ultimately assume ownership of the embattled companies. That notion was later dispelled by SCL Group founder Nigel Oakes, who told Bloomberg News last week, "The whole group has been closed down. There’s no other organization that’s been created."

Interestingly, the bankruptcy filings note that Emerdata was footing the legal bills for the two entities' bankruptcies and was paying Harris $30,000. Jennifer and Rebekah Mercer also sit on Emerdata's board.

The filings also list a long line of creditors between the two companies. Cambridge Analytica LLC lists various state attorneys general, which are all currently in the process of suing the company for its role in mishandling Facebook user data, while SCL USA has more than 50 creditors including Facebook, Google, and Twitter.A spokesperson for the Senate Commerce Committee, which is listed as a creditor to both companies, cited an on-going inquiry as the reason why it showed up on the documents.

“As one of multiple government investigators listed in the bankruptcy filing as a creditor (including the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Election Commission), the Senate Commerce Committee has an outstanding request for information from Cambridge Analytica,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

Google and Facebook declined to comment on why they appeared on the filings, while Twitter did not return a request for comment.A source familiar with Cambridge Analytica and SCL's business dealings noted that the companies may have owed those internet firms money for advertisement expenditures.

[docs]

ref charts

https://medium.com/@wsiegelman/chart-emerdata-limited-the-new-cambridge-analytica-scl-group-63283f47670d

https://medium.com/@wsiegelman/scl-companies-shareholders-e65a4f394158

https://theintercept.com/2020/04/09/coronavirus-trump-smartphone-tracking/

a SMARTPHONE TRACKING firm helping Donald Trump clinch his 2020 presidential reelection recently told investors it’s identified a promising new profit opportunity: the global coronavirus pandemic.

Phunware is part of a vast galaxy of obscure advertising technology companies that help clients follow and target their customers — to “capitalize on users’ daily digital trail,” as Phunware’s site puts it. By embedding Phunware code in their app, a developer can easily glean detailed records of where a user goes and what they do, creating a rich behavioral history to sell on to others...

https://theintercept.com/2019/12/11/the-donald-trump-campaign-is-deploying-phone-location-tracking-technology/

VIDEOS:

The Great Hack Netflix 3 min on do so /maxresdefault.jpg))

BBC 4 20 min https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpbeOCKZFfQ

Cambridge Analytica Uncovered: Secret filming reveals election tricks

Mar 19, 2018 Kenya

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy-9iciNF1A

17 min BBC 4 (Trump USA) origins in military psy-ops

Cambridge Analytica: Undercover Secrets of Trump's Data Firm

•Mar 20, 2018

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DN 6 parts see kaiser

5: https://www.democracynow.org/2020/1/10/2020_election_digital_manipulation_cambridge_analytica

longtime Facebook executive has admitted the company’s platform helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election, and it may happen again this year. In an internal memo, Facebook Vice President Andrew Bosworth wrote, “So was Facebook responsible for Donald Trump getting elected? I think the answer is yes.” Bosworth, who was a backer of Hillary Clinton in 2016, went on to write that the company should not change its policies in an effort to hurt Trump’s re-election chances. In his memo, Bosworth referenced the role of the shadowy data firm Cambridge Analytica but downplayed its significance. However, a new Oscar-shortlisted documentary called “The Great Hack” argues Cambridge Analytica has played a significant role not just in the U.S. election but in elections across the globe. The company harvested some 87 million Facebook profiles without the users’ knowledge or consent and used the data to sway voters during the 2016 campaign. We speak with the directors of “The Great Hack,” Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, as well as former Cambridge Analytica employee Brittany Kaiser and propaganda researcher Emma Briant.

....

AMY GOODMAN: I asked Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Brittany Kaiser to talk about how she became involved with Cambridge Analytica.

BRITTANY KAISER: I think it’s very important to note this, because there are people all around the world that are working for tech companies, that I’m sure joined that company in order to do something good. They want the world to be more connected. They want to use technology in order to communicate with everybody, to get people more engaged in important issues. And they don’t realize that while you’re moving fast and breaking things, some things get so broken that you cannot actually contemplate or predict what those repercussions are going to look like.

Chris Wylie and I both really idealistically joined Cambridge Analytica because we were excited about the potential of using data for exciting and good impact projects. Chris joined in 2013 on the data side in order to start developing different types of psychographic models. So he worked withDr. Aleksandr Kogan and the Cambridge Psychometrics Centre at Cambridge University in order to start doing experiments with Facebook data, to be able to gather that data, which we now know was taken under the wrong auspices of academic research, and was then used in order to identify people’s psychographic groupings.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, explain that, psychographic groupings, and especially for people who are not on Facebook, who don’t understand its enormous power and the intimate knowledge it has of people. Think of someone you’re talking to who’s never experienced Facebook. Explain what is there.

BRITTANY KAISER: Absolutely. So, the amount of data that is collected about you on Facebook and on any of your devices is much more than you’re really made aware of. You probably haven’t ever read the terms and conditions of any of these apps on your phone. But if you actually took the time to do it and you could understand it, because most of them are written for you not to understand — it’s written in legalese — you would realize that you are giving away a lot more than you would have ever agreed to if there was transparency. This is your every move, everywhere you’re going, who you’re talking to, who your contacts are, what information you’re actually giving in other apps on your phone, your location data, all of your lifestyle, where you’re going, what you’re doing, what you’re reading, how long you spend looking at different images and websites.

This amount of behavioral data gives such a good picture of you that your behavior can be predicted,as Karim was talking about earlier, to a very high degree of accuracy. And this allows companies like Cambridge Analytica to understand how you see the world and what will motivate you to go and take an action — or, unfortunately, what will demotivate you. So, that amount of data, available on Facebook ever since you joined, allows a very easy platform for you to be targeted and manipulated.

And when I say “psychographic targeting,” I’m sure you probably are a little bit more familiar with the Myers-Briggs test, so the Myers-Briggs that asks you a set of questions in order to understand your personality and how you see the world. The system that Cambridge Analytica used is actually a lot more scientific. It’s called the OCEAN five-factor model. And OCEAN stands for O for openness, C for conscientiousness, whether you prefer plans and order or you’re a little bit more fly by the seat of your pants. Extraversion, whether you gather your energy from being out surrounded by people, or you’re introverted and you prefer to gather your energy from being alone. If you are agreeable, you care about your family, your community, society, your country, more than you care about yourself. And if you are disagreeable, then you are a little bit more egotistical. You need messages that are about benefits to you. And then the worst is neurotic. You know, it’s not bad to be neurotic. It means that you are a little bit more emotional. It means, unfortunately, as well, that you are motivated by fear-based messaging, so people can use tactics in order to scare you to doing what they want to do.

And this is what was targeted when they were gathering that data out of Facebook to figure out which group you belonged into. They found about 32 different groups of people, different personality types. And there were groups of psychologists that were looking into how they could understand that data and convert that into messaging that was just for you.

I need to remind everybody that the Trump campaign put together over a million different advertisements that were put out, a million different advertisements with tens of thousands of different campaigns. Some of these messages were for just you, were for 50 people, a hundred people. Obviously, certain groups are thousands, tens of thousands or millions. But some of them were targeted very much directly at the individual, to know exactly what you’re going to click on and exactly what you care about.

...

do so trinidaD

...

AMY GOODMAN: Brittany Kaiser, can you talk about the “Crooked Hillary” campaign and how it developed?

BRITTANY KAISER: Absolutely. So, this started as a super PAC that was built for Ted Cruz, Keep the Promise I, which was run by Kellyanne Conway and funded by the Mercers. That was then converted to becoming a super PAC for Donald Trump. They tried to register with the Federal Election Commission the name, Defeat Crooked Hillary, and the FEC, luckily, did not allow them to do that. So it was called Make America Number 1.

This super PAC was headed by David Bossie, someone that you might remember from Citizens United, who basically brought dark money into our politics and allowed endless amounts of money to be funneled into these types of vehicles so that we don’t know where all of the money is coming from for these types of manipulative communications. And he was in charge of this campaign.

Now, on that two-day-long debrief that I talked about — and if you want to know more, you can read about it in my book — they told us —

AMY GOODMAN: Wait, and explain where you were and who was in the room.

BRITTANY KAISER: So, I was in New York in our boardroom for Cambridge Analytica’s office on Fifth Avenue. And all of our offices from around the world had called in to videocast. And everybody from the super PAC and the Trump campaign took us through all of their tactics and strategies and implementation and what they had done.

Now, when we got to this Defeat Crooked Hillary super PAC, they explained to us what they had done, which was to run experiments on psychographic groups to figure out what was working and what wasn’t. Unfortunately, what they found out was the only very successful tactic was sending fear-based, scaremongering messaging to people that were identified as being neurotic. And it was so successful in their first experiments that they spent the rest of the money from the super PAC over the rest of the campaign only on negative messaging and fearmongering.

AMY GOODMAN: And crooked, the O-O in “crooked” was handcuffs.

BRITTANY KAISER: Yes. That was designed by Cambridge Analytica’s team.

AMY GOODMAN: Karim?

KARIM AMER: And one thing that I think it’s important to remember here, because there’s been a lot of debate among some people about: Did this actually work? To what degree did it work? How do we know whether it worked or not? What Brittany is describing is a debrief meeting where Cambridge, as a company, is saying, “This is what we learned from our political experience. This is what actually worked.” OK? And they’re sharing it because they’re saying, “Now this is how we want to codify this and commoditize this to go into commercial business.” Right?

So this is the company admitting to their own know-how. There is no debate about whether it works or not. This is not them advertising it to the world. This is them saying, “This is what we’ve learned. Based off that, this is how we’re going to run our business. This is how we’re going to invest in the expansion of this to sell this outside of politics.” The game was, take the political experience, parlay it into the commercial sector. That was the strategy. So, there is no debate whether it worked or not. It was highly effective.

And the thing that’s terrifying is that while Cambridge has been disbanded, the same actors are out there. And there’s nothing has been — nothing has changed to allow us to start putting in place legislation to say there is something called information crimes. In this era of information warfare, in this era of information economies, what is an information crime? What does it look like? Who determines it? And yet, without that, we are still living in this unfiltered, unregulated space, where places like Facebook are continuing to choose profit over the protection of the republic. And I think that’s what’s so outrageous.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/cambridge-analytica-and-big-techs-history-of-manipulating-elections/

...

military:

BRITTANY KAISER: Absolutely. So, Cambridge Analytica was one of the companies under the SCL Group, Strategic Communication Laboratories. This is a company that has been around for over 25 years, and they started by using data-driven strategies in order to understand people’s psyche, how they make decisions and how they can be persuaded to take certain actions or to prevent people from taking certain actions.

AMY GOODMAN: It was a defense contractor.

BRITTANY KAISER: Originally they started in defense, yes. And once they found out how successful that was — that was actually in the Nelson Mandela election in ’93, ’94 in South Africa, they were preventing election violence for a defense contract — they realized that that was very useful in elections. And those strategies developed over two-and-a-half decades in order to no longer just do good things and good impact work, but, unfortunately, to undermine our democracies.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to a clip from the documentary The Great Hack. In this clip, the British journalist Carole Cadwalladr talks about Cambridge Analytica’s parent company SCL. We also hear the voice of former Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix, who was previously a director of SCL.

CAROLE CADWALLADR: SCL started out as a military contractor, SCL Defence.

ALEXANDER NIX: We have a fairly substantial defense business. We actually train the British Army, the British Navy, the U.S. Army, U.S. Special Forces. We train NATO, the CIA, State Department, Pentagon. It’s using research to influence behavior of hostile audiences. How do you persuade 14-to-30-year-old Muslim boys not to join al-Qaeda? Essentially communication warfare.

CAROLE CADWALLADR: They had worked in Afghanistan. They had worked in Iraq. They had worked in various places in Eastern Europe. But the real game changer was they started using information warfare in elections.

ALEXANDER NIX: There’s a lot of overlap, because it’s all the same methodology.

CAROLE CADWALLADR: All of the campaigns which Cambridge Analytica/SCL did for the developing world, it was all about practicing some new technology or trick, how to persuade people, how to suppress turnout or how to increase turnout. And then, it’s like, “OK, now I’ve got the hang of it. Let’s use it in Britain and America.”

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s a clip from The Great Hack. We’re going to go to break and then come back. We’re also joined by the directors. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Stay with us.

===

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/they-were-planning-on-stealing-election-explosive-new-tapes-reveal-cambridg/

...Why? For most of its employees, Cambridge Analytica was just another startup, battling for clients in the Wild West world of personal data and advertising technology (“ad-tech”). It overhyped its value proposition, its data architecture and processes were chaotic, not all projects went well; but many felt proud of their work. They compartmentalised the most controversial contracts, blamed Nix and his lieutenants for any sketchiness, and believed that Cambridge Analytica had become a scapegoat for the systemic abuses of the data brokerage industry. “Everyone is doing it,” I heard again and again.

The smoking gun

Brittany Kaiser spoke often about “the crazy things Alexander would say”. But it was hard to find the smoking gun. Then Kaiser and I found an old recording buried deep in her laptop files. It was Alexander Nix’s extraordinary pitch, recorded on her iPhone in the heat of that fateful summer of 2016.

Last March The Guardian, The New York Times and Britain’s Channel 4 News broke the story of Chris Wylie’s whistleblowing for the first time. Seventy-two hours later, Channel 4 News released undercover recordings of Nix and his fellow executives. They talked about ‘honey traps’ that used Ukrainian prostitutes and boasted of secret teams who “ghosted in, did the work, ghosted out” of countries, and “put information into the bloodstream of the internet… with no branding, so it’s unattributable, untrackable”. But even in the Channel 4 sting, Nix was careful to caveat his most inflammatory claims. Not so in Kaiser’s iPhone recording: the mask is truly off.

“What we sought to do here is… to build a workable model of persuasion that could be rolled out across the United States initially. To help us to target people at an individual level in a way that would increase compliance through communications.

“Our inventory has questions like, are you frequently lonely, do you enjoy taking part in new initiatives? It's not an opinion survey. Because we're not interested in what you think about the president. We're interested in you, and trying to work out...” Nix searches for the right phrase: “what are your buttons?

“A few years later we were in Nigeria again, and this was a campaign for [presidential candidate Umaru] Yar’Adua, who was the puppet for [incumbent president Olusegun] Obasanjo,” Nix continues. He appears to be talking about the 2007 elections, not the 2015 race in which Brittany Kaiser and Sam Patten were involved. “So we persuaded our client to do something quite unusual. We persuaded him to allow us to tell everyone in Nigeria that they were planning on stealing the election.

“And the reason we did this was to inoculate them. We ran this campaign for about 12 months saying, oh, the government's going to steal the election. And then, when the Jimmy Carter Center – who was monitoring the election – announced that the election was not ‘free and fair’, everyone was like… ‘Yeah, we know that.’ As opposed to going ‘WHAT?!!’ and getting really angry!” Yar’Adua won the election by a landslide, but the outcome was controversial and widely thought to have been rigged.

Nix’s UK company Strategic Communications Laboratories and its US wing Cambridge Analytica were usually careful to mask their most controversial activities in case studies. But I found one brochure in which further telling details of this Nigeria campaign slipped through: “SCL advised that rather than focusing on swing voters, the party should instead aim to dissuade opposition supporters from voting – an action that could be easily monitored. This was achieved by organising anti-election rallies on the day of polling in opposition strongholds, many conducted by local religious figures to maximise their appeal to rural communities.”

Kaiser heard Alexander Nix give this pitch many times. This previously unknown recording provides irrefutable evidence of him boasting to prospective clients about his experience in voter suppression, his comfort with sowing apathy and fatalism about corruption, and his readiness to facilitate election-stealing. Asked for comment about his own statements, Nix today denied that SCL had worked in Nigeria in 2007.

Crucially, this recording sets in context the claim by a senior Trump campaign source that “we have three major voter suppression operations under way”, made to Bloomberg in October 2016. By then Cambridge Analytica was working simultaneously with the Trump campaign; the Defeat Crooked Hillary Super PAC, overseen personally by Rebekah Mercer; an underground platform doing psychographic microtargeting of congregations and religious communities; the far-right Media Research Center; the National Rifle Association; and a massive, secretively funded campaign by the National Sports Shooting Federation of gun companies.

How to make black youth not vote

Nix moved on to pitch his next case study – a youth mobilisation campaign. Again, all is not as it seems. “Trinidad is a very interesting case history of how we look at problems,” Nix said. “Trinidad's tiny – it's 1.3 million people – but almost exactly half the country are Indian and half the country are Black, Afro-Caribbean. And there are two main political parties, one for the Blacks and one for the Indians… when the Indians are in power the Blacks don't get anything, and vice-versa, you know – they screw each other. So we were working, I think for the third time in Trinidad, and we were working for the Indians, and we did a huge amount for research, and two really important things came out.

“One was that all the youth, Indian and Afro-Caribbean, felt disenfranchised … And secondly, amongst the Indians the familial hierarchies were really strong. There was huge respect for their elders and their parents and their families, but not so for the Afro-Caribbeans. And that was enough information to inform the entire campaign.

“We went to the client and said, we only want to do one thing, we want to run a campaign where we target the youth – all youth, all the Blacks and all the Indians – and we try and increase apathy. And they didn't really understand why… but they allowed us to do this campaign, and the campaign had to be non-political, because no one, the kids don’t care about politics. It had to be reactive, because they’re lazy; inclusive of all ethnicities; bottom-up. It had to be exciting, because kids want to do something fun.

“We came up with this campaign which was all about ‘Be part of the gang, do something cool, be part of a movement.’ And it was called the ‘Do So’ campaign… A3 posters. And graffiti, yellow paint, you know, we cut stencils with the jigsaw… And we'd give these to kids, and they'd get in their cars at night, you know, just make a drawing, get in the car, and race around the country putting up these posters and getting chased by the police and all their friends were doing it, and it was fucking brilliant fun…

A poster from the 'Do So' campaign. Image: courtesy of Kierron Yip Ngow/Facebook.

“Do So. Don't vote. Don't be involved in politics. It's like a sign of resistance against – not government, against politics. And voting. And very soon they're making their own YouTube videos. This is the prime minister’s house that's being graffitied! … It was carnage.

“And the reason why this was such a good strategy is because we knew, and we really really knew, that when it came to voting, all the Afro-Caribbean kids wouldn't vote, because they ‘Do So’. But all the Indian kids would do what their parents told them to do, which is go out and vote. And so all the Indians went out and voted, and the difference on the 18-35-year-old turnout is like 40%, and that swung the election by about 6% – which is all we needed!”

Again, Nix was selling his company’s expertise in promoting cynicism and apathy to suppress turnout among the opposition. But this campaign was even more manipulative: enlisting young Afro-Caribbeans in what pretended to be an authentic youth movement, secretly designed to manipulate them into surrendering their votes. This is what ‘compliance’ means in psychological warfare: achieving the desired behavioural effect from a ‘hostile audience’.

Asked for comment on the Do-So campaign, Nix responded in an email earlier today, writing, “The objective of this campaign was to highlight and protest against political corruption. There is nothing unlawful or illegal about assisting with this activity. SCL / CA has never undertaken voter suppression and there is no evidence to the contrary.”

Nix’s closing comments in his summer 2016 pitch were tantalising: “We’ve got an in-house intelligence team, so we can do full intelligence protection… Opposition don’t hack your emails and everything else. And we're pretty good at getting intelligence too… You know what? We do a lot of counter operations. You can spend $10 million on an election. Or we can send one of our guys in to go offer the leader of the opposition a bribe, you know, three weeks before polling. It's a very good way to win an election.”

Beneath the veneer, this seems to have been some of the work Alexander Nix was most proud of. This is how he pitched his company around the world, just as he was finally starting to work for Trump. This is the man who the Mercers and Steve Bannon enlisted to help them reshape the American political mind.

On the US stage

this is a download link (spawns in browser)

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/download/:{05-16-18-wylie-testimony:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:

...9. SCL has a documented history of poor handling of

sensitive data. In 2014, SCL Group, the parent of CA,

was criticised by the UK Defence Science and

Technology Laboratory for its inability to properly handle

sensitive Ministry of Defence information. This Ministry

of Defence assessment was conducted the same year

as the Facebook data harvesting scheme.

RUSSIAN CONTACT

At the time, Dr Kogan was also working on Russian

state-funded research projects. He was based at times

in St Petersburg and also would fly to Moscow. The

Russian team at St Petersburg was also building similar

algorithms using Facebook data for psychological

profiling. The Russian project had a particular focus on

the “dark triad” traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism and

psychopathy. TheRussian project also conducted

behavioural research on online trolling.

It should be noted that CA was very much aware of this

work going on in Russia and in fact sought to pitch “the

interesting work Alex Kogan has been doing for the

Russians” to its other clients.

Contemporaneous to Dr Kogan’s data profiling work in

Russia, CA was also in close contact with senior

executives at Lukoil, one of Russia’s largest oil

companies. After receiving a request for information

from Lukoil executives in the spring of 2014, CA

discussed with Lukoil its experience with foreign

disinformation, rumour campaigns, microtargeting and its

American data assets. Mr Nix also emailed me to say

that he was passing on a white paper I wrote outlining

the US project to the CEO of Lukoil.

It should be noted that Lukoil has formal information

sharing agreements with the Russian Federal Security

Service (“FSB”) and is known to conduct intelligence

gathering on behalf of the FSB.

It should also be noted that CA’s parent company, SCL

Group, has managed information operations projects in

Eastern Europe and the Baltic region and may have

been an intelligence target at the time.

This means that in addition to Facebook data being

accessed in Russia, there are reasonable grounds to

suspect that (1)CA may have been an intelligence target

of Russian security services at the time of Project Ripon,

(2) that Russian security services may have been

notified of the existence of CA’s Facebook data and/or

methods through CA’s frequent contact with Russian

companies, and (3) that it was made known that certain

data assets could have been accessed inside Russia or

via accessing Dr Kogan’s work and computers using

something as simple as a keylogger device (with or

without his knowledge or consent).

Other CA contractors have worked on pro-Russian

political operations in Eastern Europe, including work in

Ukrainewith suspected Russian intelligence agents.

This may have influenced some of CA’s research in the

USA. During its research projects in 2014, CA also set

up focus groups, message testing and polling on

Americans’ views on the leadership of Vladimir Putin and

Russian expansionism in Eastern Europe.Of note,

Vladimir Putin was the only foreign leader tested by CA.

In short, Cambridge Analytica (1) used Russian

researchers to gather its data, (2) openly shared

information on “rumour campaigns” and “attitudinal

inoculation” with FSB-linked Russian companies and

executives, (3) pitched Russian-led profiling projects to

its other clients, (4) contracted people who worked for

pro-Russian parties in Eastern Europe with suspected

Russian intelligence operatives, (5) referenced the use

of former Russian intelligence agents in internal

documents, and (6) went as far as to test Americans’

views on Vladimir Putin’s leadership.

CA’s behaviour is more disconcerting given that its

parent company SCL had extensive experience working

in counter-extremism and military projects for the British

and American governments. It should have known

better.

39. To be clear, no allegation is being made that any CA

personnel, including Mr Nix or Dr Kogan, knowingly

colluded with the FSB, GRU or other Russian agencies.

However, what is clear is the gross risk of data breaches

and foreign intelligence gathering created by CA’s

recklessness in the face of skilled intelligence and cyber

operations.

...VOTER DISENGAGEMENT

CA did not operate in elections to promote democratic

ideals. Oftentimes, CA worked to interfere with voter

participation, including by weaponising fear. In one

country, CA produced videos intended to suppress

turnout by showing voters sadistic images of victims

being burned alive, undergoing forced amputations with

machetes and having their throats cut in a ditch. These

videos also conveyed Islamophobic messages. It was

created with a clear intent to intimidate certain

communities, catalyse religious hatred, portray Muslims

as terrorists and deny certain voters of their democratic

rights. I have seen this video, but to be clear, I had no

part in its creation, editing or deployment, and I left

before the company made use of it in the field.

41. If it suited the client’s objective, the firm was eager to

capitalise on discontent and to stoke ethnic tensions.

This was not just on its projects in Africa. As the CEO of

SCL said in a recorded conversation about the firm’s

work in the USA in 2016:

“It’s the things that resonate, sometimes to attack

the other group and know that you are going to

lose them is going to reinforce and resonate your

group. Which is why […] Hitler attacked the Jews,

because he didn’t have a problem with the Jews at

all, but the people didn’t like the Jews […] So he

just leveraged an artificial enemy. Well that’s

exactly what Trump did. He leveraged a Muslim

[…] Trump had the balls, and I mean, really the

balls, to say what people wanted to hear.”

I amaware that CA clients requested voter suppression

as part of their contracts. CA offered “voter

disengagement” as a service in the United States and

there are internal documents that I have seen that make

reference to this tactic. My understanding of these

projects, which I did not personally participate in, was

that the firm would target African American voters and

discourage them from participating in elections. Mr

Bannon was Vice President of the company at the time

of these voter disengagement projects.

FACEBOOK’S RESPONSE

...

no lnx nyt

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/09/books/review-christopher-wylie-targeted-brittany-kaiser-cambridge-analytica.html

In New Memoirs, Two Whistle-Blowers Offer Details From Inside Cambridge Analytica

Christopher Wylie, at left, and Brittany Kaiser, who have each written a new memoir about their time working for Cambridge Analytica.

Christopher Wylie, at left, and Brittany Kaiser, who have each written a new memoir about their time working for Cambridge Analytica.Credit...From left: Gabby Laurent; Julien Tse Photography

By Jennifer Szalai

Oct. 9, 2019

The voter-profiling firm Cambridge Analytica, which filed for insolvency last year, looked like the stuff of liberal nightmares. Enumerating its salient features was like playing a game of cartoon-villain bingo. There was the pretentious and slightly ridiculous name, redolent of a Bond-movie syndicate; there was mysterious funding from the right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer and his family, along with deep ties to Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist; and there was a chief executive, Alexander Nix, who was caught on hidden camera bragging about the unsavory lengths the company would be willing to go to sway an election — a political gun for hire in a Savile Row suit.

Two new memoirs by former Cambridge Analytica employees offer to illuminate the company’s shadiest dealings, though they differ wildly in both content and tone.

Christopher Wylie is the whistle-blower who first revealed how the company harvested data from millions of Facebook users without their permission; his book, “Mind____” (the second part of the compound word is a vulgarity), is freewheeling and profane. Brittany Kaiser came out as a whistle-blower, too, a week after Wylie did; her book, “Targeted,” is aggrieved and self-pitying. After reading Wylie’s memoir, you’ll have learned something; after reading Kaiser’s, you’ll wonder whether she herself has learned much of anything at all.

Wylie’s book recounts “how a liberal, gay, 24-year-old Canadian found himself part of a British military contractor developing psychological warfare tools for the American alt-right.” That contractor was SCL Group, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company; Wylie started working for the London-based SCL in 2013, before Bannon (“Steve from America”) arrived with an injection of Mercer’s cash to create an American subsidiary for conservative causes.

Wylie, a former tech consultant for the Liberal Party in Canada who was pursuing a Ph.D. in fashion-trend forecasting, initially believed his role at SCL would align with his values. He explains how his interests in culture were a good fit for researching methods to de-radicalize insurgents in developing countries. There’s an aesthetic to jihadist propaganda videos that makes them seductive, he says; cultural signifiers can be deployed as a devastatingly effective recruitment tool.

Of course, if you learn how to make a population more resistant to extremism, you could use that same knowledge to do the reverse. Some of Wylie’s pronouncements sound schematic and jarring, especially when he talks about “the rise of jihadism and the popularity of Crocs” as analogous “products of information flows,” but there’s often insight in the unexpected connections he draws, and it’s not hard to see why he and Bannon initially bonded over their shared obsession with culture. (“It felt as if we were flirting — but not, because that would be gross.”) Wylie’s appreciation for “the aesthetics of revolt” meant he was fascinated by the kind of anti-establishment voters Bannon wanted him to interview for research, including an incense-burning, kombucha-drinking suburban woman who insisted gay people “were going straight to hell.”

This woman was found by cross-referencing data from government sources and private brokers. Cambridge Analytica would go on, notoriously, to get reams of Facebook data for its microtargeting efforts, using an app devised by a researcher at Cambridge University. The app looked like a personality test but ultimately functioned as a way to harvest all the Facebook data from the user who downloaded it — as well as all the data from the user’s Facebook friends.

Wylie covers plenty of ground, explaining in illuminating and often scary detail how Cambridge Analytica exploited the data to create Facebook pages that would needle “neurotic, conspiratorial citizens,” propagating an outraged solidarity.(The efficacy of these techniques is still a matter of debate.)He describes another project that the company called “voter disengagement” — that is, suppression of African-American voters. Republican clients, worried that demographic changes were spelling electoral trouble for them, asked Cambridge Analytica to find “ways to confuse, demotivate and disempower people of color.”

It’s the kind of meddling that Cambridge Analytica’s parent company had been doing for years in the developing world, a form of colonialism that rich countries are more accustomed to perpetrating than experiencing themselves. Cambridge Analytica’s clients “were simply treating the American population in the exact same way they would treat the Pakistani or Yemeni populations on projects for American or British clients,” Wylie writes.

He left the company in late 2014, as the nefarious projects mounted and the toxicity, he says, became too much to bear. “Nix was a monster,” Wylie writes. “Bannon was also a monster. And soon enough, were I to stay, I worried that I would become a monster, too.”

A month later, Nix hired Brittany Kaiser to work in “business development.” Like Wylie, Kaiser says she was a liberal — though unlike Wylie, she so strenuously insists how fundamentally decent she is that her awkward remonstrations have a perverse effect on her credibility. She is frequently “humbled.” She is forever a “human rights activist.” She is worldly and smart and spectacularly connected while nevertheless “vulnerable” and helplessly “naïve.” All of this makes for a bizarre book: “Targeted” has the slightly sweaty smell of someone trying to launder her reputation.

Kaiser knows she has a lot of explaining to do. She stayed with the company for more than three years, coming out as a whistle-blower only after a tough exposé by Carole Cadwalladr in the Guardian delineated Cambridge Analytica’s attempts to sway a Nigerian election and highlighted Kaiser’s role in the plan. (Kaiser takes frequent swipes at Cadwalladr in “Targeted,” asserting, without offering much by way of evidence, that the journalist was “dead set on defaming me.”)

The recent documentary “The Great Hack” includes footage of Kaiser speaking on a pro-Brexit group’s panel at a public event; another scene has her worrying about a visit she paid to Julian Assange a few months after the 2016 election.In “Targeted,” she acknowledges helping develop a relationship with the oil company Lukoil, which is famously linked to the Kremlin, but says she had no idea it was a Russian company.

When it comes to personal revelations, the book is opaque and exceedingly repetitive, as if the prose had been pushed through the messaging mill of a P.R. firm. Kaiser concedes she did everything for the money — but even as she admits her actions might look “selfish,” she maintains she was ultimately selfless: Her salary, she says, was used to help her parents, who had been wealthy enough to send Kaiser to Phillips Academy, in Andover, Mass., but had lost everything since and were living in dire financial straits.

In their respective memoirs, Wylie and Kaiser cast aspersions on each other, which seems especially curious for two people who apparently have never met in person. Wylie even challenges the notion that Kaiser is a whistle-blower, depicting it as a conveniently timed rebranding; Kaiser calls Wylie a “disgruntled employee,” and seems incredulous that this “pink-haired high school dropout” was getting so much positive media attention. (That she calls herself “the Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower” in her subtitle is extremely telling, though not in the way she intends.)

Still, the documents Kaiser provided to authorities corroborated Wylie’s revelations, and regardless of her reasons for coming clean after breaking bad, she eventually talked to journalists on the record, when most other employees kept quiet. Whistle-blowers are often complicated people with a tangle of motives, and dueling memoirs aren’t necessarily the ideal place to tease out the definitive truth. As Kaiser put it to herself after she realized that refusing to ask meant she couldn’t tell: “It’s above my pay grade.”

https://www.metro.us/news/the-big-stories/cambridge-analytica-bannon-suppressed-black-voters

Cambridge Analytica, the Trump-aligned data firm which was found to have improperly harvested personal data from 87 million Facebook users, and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon worked to suppress the black vote in the 2016 election, a former employee told Congress on Wednesday.

Christopher Wylie, an ex-employee of Cambridge Analytica who blew the whistle on the company's misuse of Facebook, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the company offered strategies to discourage certain segments of the population from voting. He said that Bannon, who was CEO of the firm at the time, directed those efforts.

"Mr. Bannon sees cultural warfare as the means to create enduring change in American politics. It was for this reason Mr. Bannon engaged SCL (Cambridge Analytica's parent company), a foreign military contractor, to build an arsenal of informational weapons he could deploy on the American population," said Wylie.

...Asked by Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) if one of Bannon's "goals was to suppress voting or discourage certain individuals in the US from voting," Wylie replied, "That was my understanding, yes."

In an interview with CNN Wednesday night, Wylie said that Cambridge Analytica offered services to "discourage or demobilize certain types of people from voting" and that African-Americans were targets of those "voter disengagement strategies."

Wylie added that campaigns and political action committees had requested voter-suppression services from the firm, although he didn't say which ones. He said he did not personally work on voter disengagement.

Earlier this month, Cambridge Analytica announced it was shutting down in the US and UK. The company was primarily funded by Republican megadonor Steve Bannon and his daughter Rebekah, who sat on the company's board. Earlier this year, Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix was caught on hidden camera by the UK's Channel 4 boasting of using entrapment and extortion to compromise political candidates.

In March, a new company called Emerdatawas registered with the UK's Companies House. Several Cambridge Analytica backers and executives were listed as officers of the company, including Nix and Rebekah Mercer.

Black voters intentionally suppressed by Bannon using ...

https://www.metro.us › cambridge-analytica-bannon-suppressed-black-voters

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{May 17, 2018 - :(style="text-decoration-line:none;cursor:pointer;display:block;padding:7px 18px;outline:0px;overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:A whistleblower told Congress that :{Cambridge Analytica}:, the ... Christopher :{Wylie}:, an ex-employee of :{Cambridge Analytica}: who blew the whistle on ... and that African-Americans were targets of those ":{voter disengagement}: strategies. ... Earlier this year, :{Cambridge Analytica}: CEO Alexander :{Nix}: was caught ...

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/handmaidens-to-authoritarianism-watch-this-heroic-guardian-report-call-out-the-gods-of-silicon-valley-for-destroying-democracy/

no lnx guk https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla

Guardian and Observer reporter Carole Cadwalladr captivated the crowd yesterday at the TED talks. Speaking directly to the ‘Gods Of Silicon Valley’, she accused them of being responsible for the destruction of democracy.

https://www.ted.com/talks/carole_cadwalladr_facebook_s_role_in_brexit_and_the_threat_to_democracy

“My question to you is, is this what you want? Is this how you want history to remember you? As the handmaidens to authoritarianism?”

Watch as @carolecadwalla calls out the “gods of Silicon Valley” for being on the wrong side of history: https://t.co/SrTKzCbPSV #TED2019 pic.twitter.com/ETaXSdgWUq

— TED Talks (@TEDTalks) April 16, 2019

Cadwalladr is the journalist responsible for the amazing Cambridge Analytica whistleblower exposé: ‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower. What she learned in her year long research into Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and the ‘dark forces’ undermining our democratic system of government will leave you breathless.

Our democracy is broken, our laws don’t work anymore, and it’s not me saying this, it’s our parliament published a report saying this. This technology that you have invented has been amazing. But now, it’s a crime scene. And you have the evidence. And it is not enough to say that you will do better in the future. Because to have any hope of stopping this from happening again, we have to know the truth.

…

And what you don’t seem to understand is that this is bigger than you. And it’s bigger than any of us. And it is not about left or right or “Leave” or “Remain” or Trump or not. It’s about whether it’s actually possible to have a free and fair election ever again. Because as it stands, I don’t think it is.

…

And so my question to you is, is this what you want? Is this how you want history to remember you: as the handmaidens to authoritarianism that is on the rise all across the world? Because you set out to connect people. And you are refusing to acknowledge that the same technology is now driving us apart.

…

And my question to everybody else is, is this what we want: to let them get away with it, and to sit back and play with our phones, as this darkness falls?

Watch her entire extraordinary fifteen minute presentation here: Facebook’s role in Brexit and the treat to democracy

https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/mueller-subpoenas-director-of-controversial-data-firm-cambridge-analytica-in-russia-probe/

Brittany Kaiser, a director of data company Cambridge Analytica, has been subpoenaed as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible ties between Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia, the Guardian reports.

A spokesman for Kaiser confirmed she is fully cooperating with Mueller, according to the Guardian, and that she is working with separate “US congressional and legal investigations into the company’s activities.”

Kaiser is the second person from Cambridge Analytica who has been subpoenaed by Mueller. As the Guardian notes:

“In August, :{Sam Patten:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, a US political consultant who had worked for Cambridge Analytica on campaigns in the US and abroad, struck a plea deal with Mueller after admitting he had failed to register as a foreign agent for a Ukrainian oligarch.”

Patten worked with Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman who Mueller on Friday recommended spend up to 24 years in prison for “serious, longstanding, and bold” financial crimes,” and with Russian oligarch Konstantin Kilimnik, a subject of Mueller’s probe.

“Kaiser, however, is the first person connected directly to both the :{Brexit:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: and Trump campaigns known to have been questioned by Mueller,” the Guardian reports.

...

===

josh fox

===

https://www.alternet.org/how-do-we-know-whats-true

...excerpt, "The Ocean Inside You'," is from "The Truth Has Changed," the new book by Josh Fox, published by Seven Stories Press on September 11, 2018. Fox's solo performance, also called The Truth Has Changed, will tour nationally this fall to 40 venues in 23 Congressional districts. For more information,visit www.thetruthhaschangedtour.com.

In 2014, a young grad student from Warsaw named Michal Kosinski and some friends at Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre made a huge discovery. He could map your precise behavioral psychological profile to Facebook based on what you “liked.”

... in March 2018, Cambridge Analytica announced to the world that they were bankrupt and closing their doors. In the same month, however, practically the exact same board of directors and investors formed a brand-new company with the same mission. Emerdata.

===

authoritarian playbook anti-social media

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/8/1/a_threat_to_global_democracy_how

---

http://accesswdun.com/article/2018/3/650767

new YORK (AP) — The Latest on the alleged use of Facebook data to influence the U.S. presidential election (all times local):

3 p.m.

Kenya's opposition says lawyers are poring through a British broadcaster's investigation to see whether legal action is possible against data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica over its role in the country's disputed presidential election last year.

Cambridge Analytica already is being investigated by British and U.S. authorities over allegations the firm stole data from 50 million Facebook users and used it to manipulate elections.

National Super Alliance Chief Executive Norman Magaya says a legal team will look into whether Cambridge Analytica was involved in what Kenya's opposition claims is a hack of the electoral commission and manipulation of results in favor of President Uhuru Kenyatta.

In the Channel 4 report this week based on undercover video, Cambridge Analytica took credit for stage-managing Kenyatta's campaign. It denied any involvement in inflammatory videos targeting Kenyatta's opponents. There was no discussion of mining Facebook data.

---

1:05 p.m.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to speak sometime in the next day with a "focus on rebuilding trust."

That's according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly.

The person gave no further details on timing or where Zuckerberg will speak. But the person said the CEO's plan was "always to speak publicly" about Facebook's latest privacy scandal, which involves Trump campaign consultants who allegedly stole data on tens of millions of Facebook users in order to influence elections.

Criticism has been brewing as Zuckerberg and his No. 2 executive, Sheryl Sandberg, have been mum since the Cambridge Analytica story broke last Friday. Twitter users have been asking, using the "WhereIsZuck" hashtag.

__ Barbara Ortutay, New York

---

(previously from LONDON)

4:35 p.m.

The chairman of Romania's ruling partysays his Social Democratic Party did not hire Cambridge Analytica for its successful 2016 electoral campaign. And Cambridge Analytica itself reportedly said it did not work on the campaign, despite being interested.

Liviu Dragnea told The Associated Press on Wednesday that he "categorically" did not hire Cambridge Analytica or its parent company SCL Group, a British strategic communications company.

His comment came after a British consultant, Rupert Wolfe Murray, who was based in Romania at the time, said he was contacted by Mark Turnbull, a senior official at Cambridge Analytica, in August 2016.

He said Turnbull had "offered to embed a two-person team" into the Social Democrats' campaign team. Wolfe Murray said he declined the offer because he does not work for political parties.

He says Turnbull later told him Cambridge Analytica did not work on the 2016 Romanian election.

The Social Democrats won about 46 percent of the vote and the Liberals came second with 20 percent.

Separately, investigative platform RISE project reported SCL Group set up an office in Romania in 2011, though it is not clear who they worked for.

---

3:15 p.m.

The co-founder of WhatsApp, which was acquired by Facebook four years ago for $19 billion, has joined the movement to delete Facebook.

Brian Acton tweeted: "It's time. #deletefacebook."

That hashtag has been trending since reports surfaced in recent days regarding the improper use of personal information on Facebook by Cambridge Analytica, a political research firm used by the Trump campaign before the election.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has remained silent as nearly $50 billion in market capitalization of his company has been wiped out with investors fearing new oversight by government regulators.

---

1:10 p.m.

British Prime Minister Theresa May says allegations that Facebook users' data was improperly used by political campaigns are "very concerning."

May says she expects Facebook and data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica to "comply fully" with British authorities investigating how personal information was obtained and used.

May told lawmakers in the House of Commons that "people need to have confidence in how their personal data is used."

Authorities in Britain and the United States are investigating the alleged improper use of data harvested from tens of millions of Facebook users by Cambridge Analytica, which worked on U.S. President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign.

May said that "as far as I'm aware" the British government has no contracts with Cambridge Analytica or its parent company, SCL.

---

12:30 p.m.

A British consultant says Cambridge Analytica approached him before Romania's 2016 parliamentary elections to work for the Social Democratic Party.

Rupert Wolfe Murray told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Mark Turnbull, a senior official at Cambridge Analytica, contacted him in August 2016.

He cited an email where Turnbull wrote: "What we have offered is to embed a two-person team into the current campaign team... to provide ongoing strategic advice and assistance across the campaign.... over the next 2-3 months."

Wolfe Murray said he declined the offer because he does not work for political parties. It was unclear whether Cambridge Analytica played a role in the Dec. 2016 elections, where the Social Democrats won about 46 percent of the vote. The Liberals came second with 20 percent.

Separately, investigative platform RISE project reported that SCL Group, a British strategic communication company affiliated to Cambridge Analytica, set up an office in Romania in 2011.

---

12:20 p.m.

A sell-off in Facebook shares is heading into the third consecutive day, with almost $50 billion in market capitalization evaporating since the start of the week.

The stock fell 1.5 percent before the opening bell Wednesday and, after falling 9 percent, it's one of the worst weeks in company history.

Governments on both sides of the Atlantic are calling for CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify on the issue, but he has been silent since a story broke Friday about how a firm tied to the campaign of Donald Trump improperly lifted data on 50 million Facebook users.

That firm, Cambridge Analytica, suspended CEO Alexander Nix pending an investigation.

...

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Rebekah Mercer Standing by Cambridge Analytica After Blackmail Scandal

A source close to the family says that she intends to remain on the company’s board, and is ‘working to be part of the solution.’

BETSY WOODRUFF

03.19.18 6:10 PM ET

Billionaire heiress Rebekah Mercer is standing by embattled data firm Cambridge Analytica—at least for now. A person close to Mercer, who sits on the firm’s board, told The Daily Beast she has no immediate plans to leave her post there, despite abombshell report alleging the company used Ukrainian sex workers to try to get compromising material about its clients’ political opponents.

“She is working to be part of the solution,” said the source, of one of American conservatism’s most powerful mega-donors.

“She has always worked to make sure she observes and abides by all established norms and legal mandates,” the source added.

The source said Robert Mercer, former co-CEO of America’s most lucrative hedge fund, is just a passive investor in Cambridge Analytica and has never been on its board. Rebekah Mercer is his daughter, and conducts broad business oversight as a board member.

Cambridge Analytica broke into the American political scene in 2015, working for Sen. Ted Cruz’s primary campaign and touting its “psychographic” voter modeling program. During the primaries, it also worked alongside allies of Ben Carson and Donald Trump. Steve Bannon has long been close with the firm, and once owned a stake in it, per McClatchy. The firm drew the attention of Congressional investigators looking into potential coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. And its head, Alexander Nix, once reached out to Julian Assange to offer the firm’s services in releasing emails hacked from Hillary Clinton’s email account. Assange confirmed the outreach to The Daily Beast, and said he turned down Nix’s overture.

The Mercers were among Trump’s most generous supporters, spending millions to support his campaign.

ref

https://www.thedailybeast.com/ex-trump-consultant-and-cambridge-analytica-ceo-alexander-nix-offered-to-blackmail-politicians-with-prostitutes

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Executives from Cambridge Analytica, which was hired by the Trump presidential campaign, have been caught on tape promising an extraordinary package of propaganda strategies to potential clients including filming opponents in compromising situations with Ukrainian sex workers.

Over the weekend a whistleblower who worked with Cambridge came forward to claim that the company had surreptitiously misused the Facebook data of 50 million people in order to win election campaigns

Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, was seen on tape talking to undercover reporters from Channel 4 News saying that his operatives would never be caught because they worked all over the world using a number of front organizations.

The U.K. information commissioner responded to the Channel 4 News footage by announcing that she would apply for a warrant to enter the Cambridge Analytica offices to seize evidence. Hours later, at around 11 p.m. local time, a senior politician announced that Facebook “auditors and legal counsel” had just been ordered to leave the Cambridge Analytica offices by British officials.

British Prime Minister Theresa May backed an investigation into Facebook and Cambridge Analytica on Monday, and the European Union said it would launch a probe into the alleged misuse of private data.

On the undercover film, Nix’s colleague Mark Turnbull, the managing director of Cambridge Analytica Political Global, explained that the plausible deniability was a crucial element and said it was vital that people seeing false rumors online never discovered where they were coming from.[vid]“We just put information into the bloodstream of the internet and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again,” he said. “Like a remote control. It has to happen without anyone thinking, ‘That’s propaganda,’ because the moment you think, ‘That’s propaganda,’ the next question is, ‘Who’s put that out?’”

https://XXXtheguardian.com/uk-news/2018/may/05/cambridge-analytica-scl-group-new-companies-names

Cambridge Analytica is dead – but its obscure network is alive and well

The company’s executives have formed a web of linked companies, suggesting its work will continue

Wendy Siegelman

Sat 5 May 2018 08.05 EDT Last modified on Sat 5 May 2018 09.44 EDT

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Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica, in March.

Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica, in March. Photograph: Henry Nicholls/Reuters

The announcement that Cambridge Analytica is shutting has a certain inevitability to it. Ever since 17 March 2018, when Carole Cadwalladr broke Christopher Wylie’s whistleblower story at the Observer and in the New York Times, there have been continuous revelations about Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, SCL Group, and their brazen use – or misuse – of Facebook data and dirty tricks.

UK regulator orders Cambridge Analytica to release data on US voter

But given the complex business structure of SCL and Cambridge Analytica’s UK and US affiliates, there are reasons to question precisely what Wednesday’s announcement means. Already there are some suggestions that those associated with Cambridge Analytica may re-emerge in another form.

Are Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group attempting to evade recent negative coverage, only to re-form and continue their work as part of a new entity?

Damian Collins, the British MP who chairs the digital, culture, media and sport Committee that is investigating SCL and Cambridge Analytica, tweeted some words of caution on Wednesday after the news broke, noting that CA and SCL “cannot be allowed to delete their data history by closing”.

Certainly the news presents as many questions as answers.

Cambridge Analytica and SCL have at least 18 active companies, branches, and affiliates with similar names, based in the UK and the US. The complex relationship among these companies makes it very difficult to understand how revenues, employment, and data are shared. It almost seems as though the business structure was created to make it impossible to track decision-making and funding.

On Wednesday afternoon Cambridge Analytica issued a press release stating: “SCL Elections Ltd., as well as certain of its and Cambridge Analytica LLC’s U.K. affiliates (collectively, the ‘Company’ or ‘Cambridge Analytica’) filed applications to commence insolvency proceedings in the U.K.” It also stated that “parallel bankruptcy proceedings will soon be commenced on behalf of Cambridge Analytica LLC and certain of the Company’s U.S. affiliates in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York.”

It is notable that Cambridge Analytica’s press release does not mention SCL Group Limited, SCL Social Ltd, or SCL Insight Ltd. Is it closing only some affiliates and leaving others open?

Shortly after the whistleblower story on Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data broke in March, the Cambridge Analytica CEO, Alexander Nix, was suspended and three US states opened investigations into Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. In the following weeks, current and past employees of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook have testified in the UK, the US, Canada and other countries, and a US and UK class action lawsuit was filed against both companies in early April.

3:41

What is the Cambridge Analytica scandal? - video explainer

However, reporting on Cambridge Analytica – from Cadwalladr and others – had begun to appear in 2015 and 2016 and intensified throughout 2017. While Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group began to be the focus of more media scrutiny, in the background, company executives were quietly setting up a new company. Emerdata Limited was incorporated inAugust 2017 with SCL Group’s chairman, Julian Wheatland, and SCL’s chief data officer, Alexander Tayler, as original owners, but the company suddenly expanded with new directors and funding this year.

On 23 January 2018, four new directors were appointed to Emerdata, including Johnson Chun Shun Ko, who happens to be deputy chairman of Frontier Services Group. On the same day that Ko joined the board of Emerdata, shares were issued valued at £1,912,502. On 7 March 2018, Firecrest Technologies Limited was incorporated, with Alexander Nix listed briefly as director and then replaced by Alexander Tayler, and Emerdata listed as the owner. And on 16 March, a few days before the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower story broke, two more directors joined Emerdata, Jennifer and Rebekah Mercer.

There has been much reporting on how Robert and Rebekah Mercer have funded US political action committees (Pacs) that have paid Cambridge Analytica, but there had been little public evidence showing a current legal or business connection from the Mercers to Cambridge Analytica.

What does Cambridge Analytica closing mean for the Facebook data scandal?

The business purpose of Emerdata is not known, beyond the general description of “data processing, hosting and related activities”. However, in a Channel 4 News report, the SCL Group founder, Nigel Oakes, said it was his understanding that Emerdata was set up to acquire all of Cambridge Analytica and SCL.

Emerdata did not respond to multiple requests for comment sent to several company directors.

The news Wednesday about the closure of Cambridge Analytica does not mention Emerdata or its subsidiary Firecrest Technologies. And just one day earlier, on Tuesday, the UK Companies House website posted an update on Emerdata, noting two pending filings, for “Resolution of removal of pre-emption rights” and “Resolution of allotment of securities”. The documents are being processed and will be available in five days. Perhaps these filings will show that the company is dissolving, or perhaps they will be the standard filings of an active company. All of the other UK SCL-related companies are still listed as active and have no pending filings.

The beleaguered Nix is still listed as an active director and shareholder of SCL Group and many of the related companies.Wednesday’s news is big, but it is not clear yet what it means, and whether SCL, Cambridge Analytica, Emerdata and the same executives who ran these companies during the Brexit campaign and US election will re-emerge in a new entity to continue their work.

http://wjla.com/news/nation-world/cambridge-analytica

no linx twit

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower: Russia may have accessed Facebook data of 87M Americans

by Leandra BernsteinWednesday, May 16th 2018

Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, departs after meeting with House Judiciary Democrats, on Capitol Hill, Tuesday, April 24, 2018 in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

WASHINGTON (Circa) — Amid reports the data firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) is under investigation by the FBI and Department of Justice, a former research director turned whistleblower suggested the company engaged in voter suppression, "black ops" and coordinated its U.S. election operations with Russian government entities.

Much has been said about Cambridge Analytica's misuse of millions of Facebook users' data for sophisticated political targeting operations. On Wednesday, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee revealed that massive dataset could have been "easily" shared with a Russian intelligence-linked company.

According to a Tuesday report by The New York Times, the FBI and Department of Justice appear to be in the "early stages" of an investigation into Cambridge Analytica. Federal investigators are reportedly looking into the company's business practices and financial dealings.

Investigations of CA and its parent company, SCL, are currently underway in Britain, Australia, Canada, Nigeria, Kenya and India.

Christopher Wylie indirectly confirmed the investigation of his former employer, Cambridge Analytica. Asked by reporters if he was cooperating with the special counsel investigation into Russian election interference, he replied, "I have been contacted by the FBI."

In his testimony, Wylie again confirmed cooperating with U.S. authorities, saying he had provided relevant documents and information. He added, "It should be made clear, I am not the target of these investigations."

Cambridge Analytica was asked to participate in the Wednesday hearing but after announcing bankruptcy and shutting its doors earlier this month declined the invitation.

View image on Twitter

Cambridge Analytica, the data firm at the center of Facebook's privacy scandal is closing. https://bit.ly/2w3WgXK

1:45 PM - May 2, 2018

HOW RUSSIA MAY HAVE ACCESSED THE DATA

In his testimony Wednesday, Wylie faced questions about Cambridge Analytica's numerous ties to Russian government entities, at one point suggesting the Facebook data of 87 million Americans may have been acquired by the Russians.

That massive data transfer may have been facilitated, knowingly or uknowingly by Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica and its parent company SCL. Nix's London-based company was known for providing "strategic communications" and had defense contracts, commercial engagements and political campaign operations around the globe.

Circa

@Circa

Senate panel agrees with US intel that Russia intervened in 2016 election to help Trump. https://bit.ly/2IoWTkc

10:55 AM - May 16, 2018

See Circa's other Tweets

Wylie described a "high level of engagement" between CA's executive, Alexander Nix and Lukoil, Russia's second largest oil company. Lukoil, which has known ties to Russian intelligence services, was sanctioned in 2017 in connection with the Russian annexation of Crimea.

According to Wylie's account, Nix was in "close contact" with Lukoil executives and in 2014 gave them a whitepaper written by Wylie outlining Cambridge Analytica's U.S. data mining and voter targeting project,which was reportedly of special interest.

Asked by Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., if CA's dataset, with information on tens of millions of U.S. Facebook users was also shared with Lukoil, Wylie did not dismiss the possibility. He noted the information could have been "easily acquired" with or without CA's knowledge or consent.

"I can't say definitively, one way or the other, if these datasets did end up in Russia but what I can say is that it would have been very easy to facilitate that," Wylie said.

CBS News

@CBSNews

Feinstein: Do you think it's possible Facebook data harvested by Cambridge Analytica ended up in Russia?

Wylie: "I can't say definitively, one way or the other, if these data sets did end up in Russia but what I can say is that it would have been very easy to facilitate that."

7:49 AM - May 16, 2018

In their conversations with Nix, Lukoil executives were informed of "the scale of the data and the location of the data," Wylie said. "What was made known was that this data could have been easily acquired by something as simple as a keylogger on Dr. [Aleksandr] Kogan's computer when he was visiting Russia," he added.

Aleksandr Kogan was a researcher at Cambridge University and professor at Russia's St. Petersburg University and responsible for developing the Facebook quiz app that harvested thousands of datapoints from approximately 87 million unsuspecting Facebook users.

Around 2013, Kogan teamed up with Cambridge Analytica and gained access to the Facebook data. Facebook terminated its contract with Kogan in 2014 and in 2015 sent a letter requesting he delete the harvested data.

Facebook did not follow up and the user data, shared with Cambridge Analytica, was not deleted. Facebook officially suspended Cambridge Analytica's account in March 2018.

The Guardian

@guardian

Cambridge Analytica kept Facebook data models through US election https://trib.al/uw0yqVr

5:48 AM - May 6, 2018

Cambridge Analytica kept Facebook data models through US election

Social network failed to make firm delete valuable models derived from data until campaign was over

theguardian.com

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WIKILEAKS AND 'BLACK OPS'

Among Wylie's other concerns about SCL and Cambridge Analytica's tactics included the firm's so-called "black-ops" capabilities, which he said involved hackers breaking into computers to obtain intelligence or compromising material to use against opposition candidates.

"Some of the targets of these intelligence operations are currently heads of state in various countries," Wylie asserted, saying his former employer hired former members of Russian and Israeli intelligence services for these "special IT services."

In addition,CA also recruited at least two individuals who were "closely associated" with WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, according to Wylie.

DNC sues Trump campaign, Russia, WikiLeaks over alleged 2016 election conspiracy. http://bit.ly/2JaN0CC

2:38 PM - Apr 20, 2018

These individuals were reportedly chosen because of their closeness to WikiLeaks, which was deemed a "hostile intelligence service," by former CIA director Mike Pompeo.

The company has been accused of using a playbook that resembles the WikiLeaks dumping of hacked emails during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, notably in the 2015 Nigerian presidential election. SCL and Cambridge Analytica denied allegations of hacking.

VOTER SUPPRESSION

Among the allegations Wylie made against his former employer is that it used social media data and complex algorithms to try to suppress the vote. The effort was reportedly done under the banner of "voter disengagement," and was cited by Wylie as one of the main reasons he left CA in July 2014.

At that time, Cambridge Analytica was a relatively new company. It was set up as a U.S. subsidiary of the London-based SCL.

In 2013, SCL's CEO, Alexander Nix, a British citizen, partnered with billionaire conservative donors Robert and Rebecca Mercer and then-Breitbart editor in chief Steve Bannon to set up Cambridge Analytica, or SCL USA. The firm worked on at least 44 congressional campaigns in 2014 and in 2016 managed the data and voter targeting services for President Donald Trump's campaign.

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower says Bannon wanted "weapons" to fight a "culture war" at the firm http://hill.cm/FRBTlQl

Wylie suggested this arrangement violated U.S. campaign laws and the U.K.-based parent company to handle "all" of CA's clients. The company reportedly received memos from lawyers warning against using foreign nationals in its U.S. political operations, but it "installed a non-American as its CEO [Nix] and embedded non-U.S. citizens in American campaigns," Wylie said.

Steve Bannon, who went on to serve as President Trump's chief strategist, was the company's vice president during Wylie's tenure and was reportedly very interested in how social media data could be used to identify, target and "exploit" certain subsets of the population, Wylie reported.

Much of Cambridge Analytica's political targeting was informed by the work of Stanford University behavioral researcher Michael Kosinski. Among other things, Kosinski found it was possible to accurately determine a person's sexual orientation, political party and race by analyzing 68 Facebook "likes." Deeper analysis of "likes" resulted in predictive powers that led some to conclude Facebook knows you better than your family.

CNN

@CNN

Facebook knows you better than you think:

• With 10 likes, a computer model fundamentally knows you better than a colleague

• With 70 likes, it knows you better than a friend or roommate

• With 300 likes, Big Data knows you better than your spouse https://cnn.it/2IIWc0Y

9:31 PM - Apr 10, 2018

What you 'like' on Facebook says a lot about you

Big Data can analyze your Facebook "likes" to accurately predict your race, religion, sexual orientation and more.

cnn.com

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1,377 people are talking about this

Twitter Ads info and privacy

According to Wylie, Cambridge Analytica's targeting operations were "designed to activate some of the worst characteristics in people, such as neuroticism, paranoia and racial biases."

Before he left the company, there were "the beginnings of discussions" about how to use the profiling data for "voter disengagement," Wylie told lawmakers. This activity, he said, "was intended to focus on African-American voters."

Whistleblower Christopher Wylie tells Sen. @amyklobuchar that he left Cambridge Analytica in part because of the “beginnings of discussions about voter disengagement” with ads intended to suppress African American voters #tictocnews

Asked by Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., if one of Bannon's goals was "to suppress voting or discourage certain individuals in the United States from voting," Wylie said that was his understanding.

Questioned further about whether "voter suppression" was "a service that U.S. clients could request in their contracts" with the company, Wylie referenced documents indicating clients had made that request.

There is room for doubt about the accuracy of Wylie's claims, according to testimony from Eitan Hersh, an expert in civic engagement and voter targeting at Tufts University.

"Persuasion is very, very hard," Hersh said, asserting CA's claims about its targeting accuracy seem "implausible."

"From everything I have seen publicly disclosed about Cambridge Analytica, I am skeptical of the idea that its strategies of voter persuasion were unusually effective or contributed meaningfully to the election outcome," he asserted.

It is not yet clear whether Wylie's allegations are being investigated by the FBI and Department of Justice. The FBI is reportedly coordinating with British authorities in the U.K. investigation of Cambridge Analytica.

According to reports, Robert Mueller's special counsel investigation is looking at Cambridge Analytica's data practices, finances and other activities.

CNN) -- Cambridge Analytica, the data company Donald Trump's campaign hired during the 2016 presidential election, has been under a magnifying glass this week after a whistleblower claimed that the firm misused the personal data of about 50 million Facebook users.

The firm is partly owned by GOP donor and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his family, and has ties to former and current Trump advisers. Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is the firm's former vice president, and White House counselor Kellyanne Conway consulted for the company.

But Trump isn't the only prominent GOP client to pay for services from the firm. Here are other Republicans who have hired Cambridge Analytica. There have been no allegations of unethical behavior by Cambridge Analytica on behalf of these Republican candidates or groups.

Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton

Cotton paid some $20,000 for Cambridge Analytica's consulting services from 2013 through 2014 as he was campaigning for the Senate.

Sen. Thom Tillis and the North Carolina Republican Party

Tillis and the North Carolina GOP spent $345,000 for "microtargeting" from 2014 through 2015, geared at helping Tillis defeat Democratic incumbent Kay Hagan in 2014, the most expensive US Senate race in historyat the time. Cambridge Analytica's website touts the success of their efforts in the race, saying they "were able to design and deploy messages tailored to these audiences according to their particular psychographic profiles."

Make America Number 1 Super PAC

The Mercer-backed Keep the Promise I/Make America Number 1 super PAC paid $1,476,484 to Cambridge Analytica from 2015 through 2016. The PAC funded a series of pro-Ted Cruz ads during the 2016 presidential campaign. The PAC was also led by Conway prior to her joining the Trump campaign.

John Bolton Super PAC

Former US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton isbeing considered to replace H.R. McMaster as White House national security adviser. According to FEC filings, Bolton's super PAC doled out $1,152,299 for Cambridge Analytica's work from 2014 through 2016. All of the services billed are for "research" and "survey research."

Ted Cruz and Ben Carson

During their 2016 presidential campaigns, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Dr. Ben Carson solicited Cambridge Analytica for media services, survey research, web services and database management. The Cruz campaign directly spent $5.8 million for the firm's services. In addition, Keep the Promise II super PAC, which is associated with the "Keep the Promise" network of the Mercer-backed PACs, was funded by Cruz supporter and Texas billionaire Toby Neugebauer. The PAC paid $570,000 for Cambridge Analytica's services -- the largest expenditure for the PAC during the election cycle.

Carson, meanwhile, spent $438,065 for the firm's work.

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c anal map

https://littlesis.org/maps/2928-cambridge-analytica-trump-brexit-fossil-fuels-and-climate-science-denial

bolton, tillis, 2014 3 states ark

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https://investigaterussia.org/media/2018-03-23/boltons-cambridge-analytica-connection

Former United States Ambassador to the United NationsJohn Bolton, President Trump's incoming national security advisor, hired Cambridge Analytica in August 2014 to work for his political committee called the The John Bolton Super PAC.

*The New York Times*:

In the two years that followed, Mr. Bolton’s super PAC spent nearly $1.2 million primarily for “survey research,” which is a term that campaigns use for polling, according to campaign finance records.

But the contract between the political action committee and Cambridge, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, offers more detail on just what Mr. Bolton was buying. The contract broadly describes the services to be delivered by Cambridge as “behavioral microtargeting with psychographic messaging.”

To do that work, Cambridge used Facebook data, according to the documents and two former employees familiar with the work....

https://www.desmog.uk/2018/03/29/mapped-cambridge-analytica-s-ties-fossil-fuel-industry

Revelations continue to emerge about Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy that has found itself embroiled in a scandal around data privacy and electoral manipulation.

Three whistleblowers have gone public in the Guardian and Observer to outline how Cambridge Analytica used Facebook data to influence the outcomes of the US presidential election and Brexit referendum.

DeSmog UK has previously mapped how the company ties to climate science denial through its Brexit and Trump connections. Now, Nafeez Ahmed over at Motherboard has outlined how Cambridge Analytica has ties to the fossil fuel industry.

Based on that research, it’s only a few steps between the company and some of the world’s biggest coal and oil companies, many of which have had a revival since the election of Donald Trump. It’s only a couple more steps to tie those connections to the already well-established web of power lobbying for Brexit.

Here’s an interactive map of how Cambridge Analytica has links to the fossil fuel industry:

View the full interactive map on LittleSis.

Big Oil

The main links to Big Oil companies including, BP, Shell and Exxon, come through a smaller company called Phi Energy, which has a presentation naming the companies as clients.

One of Phi Energy’s directors is Julian Wheatland, who is also a director of Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Group.

ExxonMobil’s former CEO is Rex Tillerson, who was until recently the US Secretary of State. He was appointed by Donald Trump, who Cambridge Analytica were influential in getting elected.

Big Coal

Cambridge Analytica also has ties to the world’s biggest coal company, Peabody Energy.

The link there is through Christian Patrick Teroerde, who was a director of SCL Elections - a subsidiary of Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Group.

Teroerde is also a director of Hanson Asset Management, which bought a major stake in Peabody in the 1990s, when it was the world’s largest coal company.

Peabody filed for bankruptcy in 2016 as coal prices crashed. Since Donald Trump got elected, Peabody has bounced back, big time.

Brexit and Climate Science Denial

Hanson Asset Management also links to DeSmog UK’s previous map that tied Cambridge Analytica to Brexit and climate science denial.

The company was built on the wealth of Lord James Hanson, who was a big Euro-sceptic. He founded the anti-EU campaign group Business for Sterling, whose Head of Research was Dominic Cummins.

Cummins went on to be the campaign director for the official Brexit campaign group, Vote Leave. One of the whistleblowers in the Guardian claimed Cambridge Analytica was working for Vote Leave via a youth campaign organisation called BeLeave and the company’s Canadian spin-off, Aggregate IQ.

Vote Leave was supported by two members of the Conservative party with climate science denial links: North Shropshire MPOwen Paterson and hereditary peer Matt Ridley. Both are well-known allies of the the UK’s most prominent climate science denial campaign group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

The Electoral Commission is currently investigating the unofficial Brexit campaign, Leave.EU, which Cambridge Analytica is also thought to have worked with, though the company denies this.

Leave.EU was bankrolled by climate science denier Arron Banks and was fronted by another climate science denier, former UKIP-leader Nigel Farage. Both were famously photographed in a golden elevator with Donald Trump.

Both Vote Leave and Leave.EU also have ties to the party currently propping up the government, the Democratic Unionist Party, through another Brexit campaign group - Grassroots Out. DUP MP and climate science denier Sammy Wilson was a key player in Grassroots Out.

Here’s an interactive map of how it all fits together:

===

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-trump-campaign.html

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How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions

By MATTHEW ROSENBERG, NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and CAROLE CADWALLADRMARCH 17, 2018

Christopher Wylie, who helped found the data firm Cambridge Analytica and worked there until 2014, has described the company as an “arsenal of weapons” in a culture war. Credit Andrew Testa for The New York Times

(After this story was published, Facebook came under harsh criticism from lawmakers in the United States and Britain. Read the latest.)

LONDON — As the upstart voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica prepared to wade into the 2014 American midterm elections, it had a problem.

The firm had secured a $15 million investment from Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, and wooed his political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, with the promise of tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior. But it did not have the data to make its new products work.

So the firm harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission, according to former Cambridge employees, associates and documents, making it one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history. The breach allowed the company to exploit the private social media activity of a huge swath of the American electorate, developing techniques that underpinned its work on President Trump’s campaign in 2016.

An examination by The New York Times and The Observer of London reveals how Cambridge Analytica’s drive to bring to market a potentially powerful new weapon put the firm — and wealthy conservative investors seeking to reshape politics — under scrutiny from investigators and lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Photo

Both Congress and the British Parliament have questioned Alexander Nix, chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, about the firm’s activities. Credit Bryan Bedder/Getty Images

Christopher Wylie, who helped found Cambridge and worked there until late 2014, said of its leaders: “Rules don’t matter for them. For them, this is a war, and it’s all fair.”

RELATED COVERAGE

Data Firm Tied to Trump Campaign Talked Business With Russians MARCH 17, 2018

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Cambridge Analytica and the Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz NOV. 19, 2016

“They want to fight a culture war in America,” he added. “Cambridge Analytica was supposed to be the arsenal of weapons to fight that culture war.”

Details of Cambridge’s acquisition and use of Facebook data have surfaced in several accounts since the business began working on the 2016 campaign, setting off a furious debate about the merits of the firm’s so-called psychographic modeling techniques.

But the full scale of the data leak involving Americans has not been previously disclosed — and Facebook, until now, has not acknowledged it. Interviews with a half-dozen former employees and contractors, and a review of the firm’s emails and documents, have revealed that Cambridge not only relied on the private Facebook data but still possesses most or all of the trove.

Cambridge paid to acquire the personal information through an outside researcher who, Facebook says, claimed to be collecting it for academic purposes.

During a week of inquiries from The Times, Facebook downplayed the scope of the leak and questioned whether any of the data still remained out of its control. But on Friday, the company posted a statement expressing alarm and promising to take action.

“This was a scam — and a fraud,” Paul Grewal, a vice president and deputy general counsel at the social network, said in a statement to The Times earlier on Friday. He added that the company was suspending Cambridge Analytica, Mr. Wylie and the researcher, Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian-American academic, from Facebook. “We will take whatever steps are required to see that the data in question is deleted once and for all — and take action against all offending parties,” Mr. Grewal said.

Alexander Nix, the chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, and other officials had repeatedly denied obtaining or using Facebook data, most recently during a parliamentary hearing last month. But in a statement to The Times, the company acknowledged that it had acquired the data, though it blamed Mr. Kogan for violating Facebook’s rules and said it had deleted the information as soon as it learned of the problem two years ago.

In Britain, Cambridge Analytica is facing intertwined investigations by Parliament and government regulators into allegations that it performed illegal work on the “Brexit” campaign. The country has strict privacy laws, and its information commissioner announced on Saturday that she was looking into whether the Facebook data was “illegally acquired and used.”

In the United States, Mr. Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, a board member, Mr. Bannon and Mr. Nix received warnings from their lawyer that it was illegal to employ foreigners in political campaigns, according to company documents and former employees.

Photo

The conservative donor Robert Mercer invested $15 million in Cambridge Analytica, where his daughter Rebekah is a board member. Credit Patrick McMullan, via Getty Images

Congressional investigators have questioned Mr. Nix about the company’s role in the Trump campaign. And the Justice Department’s special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has demanded the emails of Cambridge Analytica employees who worked for the Trump team as part of his investigation into Russian interference in the election.

While the substance of Mr. Mueller’s interest is a closely guarded secret, documents viewed by The Times indicate that the firm’s British affiliate claims to have worked in Russia and Ukraine. And the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, disclosed in October that Mr. Nix had reached out to him during the campaign in hopes of obtaining private emails belonging to Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

The documents also raise new questions about Facebook, which is already grappling with intense criticism over the spread of Russian propaganda and fake news. The data Cambridge collected from profiles, a portion of which was viewed by The Times, included details on users’ identities, friend networks and “likes.” Only a tiny fraction of the users had agreed to release their information to a third party.

“Protecting people’s information is at the heart of everything we do,” Mr. Grewal said. “No systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked.”

Still, he added, “it’s a serious abuse of our rules.”

Reading Voters’ Minds

The Bordeaux flowed freely as Mr. Nix and several colleagues sat down for dinner at the Palace Hotel in Manhattan in late 2013, Mr. Wylie recalled in an interview. They had much to celebrate.

Mr. Nix, a brash salesman, led the small elections division at SCL Group, a political and defense contractor. He had spent much of the year trying to break into the lucrative new world of political data, recruiting Mr. Wylie, then a 24-year-old political operative with ties to veterans of President Obama’s campaigns.Mr. Wylie was interested in using inherent psychological traits to affect voters’ behaviorand had assembled a team of psychologists and data scientists, some of them affiliated with Cambridge University.

The group experimented abroad, including in the Caribbean and Africa, where privacy rules were lax or nonexistent and politicians employing SCL were happy to provide government-held data, former employees said.

Then a chance meeting brought Mr. Nix into contact with Mr. Bannon, the Breitbart News firebrand who would later become a Trump campaign and White House adviser, and with Mr. Mercer, one of the richest men on earth.

Mr. Nix and his colleagues courted Mr. Mercer, who believed a sophisticated data company could make him a kingmaker in Republican politics, and his daughter Rebekah, who shared his conservative views. Mr. Bannon was intrigued by the possibility of using personality profiling to shift America’s culture and rewire its politics, recalled Mr. Wylie and other former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had signed nondisclosure agreements. Mr. Bannon and the Mercers declined to comment.

Mr. Mercer agreed to help finance a $1.5 million pilot project to poll voters and test psychographic messaging in Virginia’s gubernatorial race in November 2013, where the Republican attorney general,Ken Cuccinelli, ran against Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic fund-raiser. Though Mr. Cuccinelli lost, Mr. Mercer committed to moving forward.

The Mercers wanted results quickly, and more business beckoned. In early 2014, the investor Toby Neugebauer and other wealthy conservatives were preparing to put tens of millions of dollars behind a presidential campaign for Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, work that Mr. Nix was eager to win.

When Mr. Wylie’s colleagues failed to produce a memo explaining their work to Mr. Neugebauer, Mr. Nix castigated them over email.

“ITS 2 PAGES!! 4 hours work max (or an hour each). What have you all been doing??” he wrote.

Mr. Wylie’s team had a bigger problem. Building psychographic profiles on a national scale required data the company could not gather without huge expense. Traditional analytics firms used voting records and consumer purchase histories to try to predict political beliefs and voting behavior.

But those kinds of records were useless for figuring out whether a particular voter was, say, a neurotic introvert, a religious extrovert, a fair-minded liberal or a fan of the occult. Those were among the psychological traits the firm claimed would provide a uniquely powerful means of designing political messages.

Photo

Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian-American academic, built an app that helped the firm harvest Facebook data.]

Mr. Wylie found a solution at Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre. Researchers there had developed a technique to map personality traits based on what people had liked on Facebook. The researchers paid users small sums to take a personality quiz and download an app, which would scrape some private information from their profiles and those of their friends, activity that Facebook permitted at the time. The approach, the scientists said, could reveal more about a person than their parents or romantic partners knew — a claim that has been disputed.

When the Psychometrics Centre declined to work with the firm, Mr. Wylie found someone who would: Dr. Kogan, who was then a psychology professor at the university and knew of the techniques. Dr. Kogan built his own app and in June 2014 began harvesting data for Cambridge Analytica. The business covered the costs — more than $800,000 — and allowed him to keep a copy for his own research, according to company emails and financial records.

All he divulged to Facebook, and to users in fine print, was that he was collecting information for academic purposes, the social network said. It did not verify his claim. Dr. Kogan declined to provide details of what happened, citing nondisclosure agreements with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, though he maintained that his program was “a very standard vanilla Facebook app.”

He ultimately provided over 50 million raw profiles to the firm, Mr. Wylie said, a number confirmed by a company email and a former colleague. Of those, roughly 30 million — a number previously reported by The Intercept — contained enough information, including places of residence, that the company could match users to other records and build psychographic profiles. Only about 270,000 users — those who participated in the survey — had consented to having their data harvested.

Photo

An email from Dr. Kogan to Mr. Wylie describing traits that could be predicted.]

Mr. Wylie said the Facebook data was “the saving grace” that let his team deliver the models it had promised the Mercers.

“We wanted as much as we could get,” he acknowledged. “Where it came from, who said we could have it — we weren’t really asking.”

Mr. Nix tells a different story. Appearing before a parliamentary committee last month, he described Dr. Kogan’s contributions as “fruitless.”

An International Effort

Just as Dr. Kogan’s efforts were getting underway, Mr. Mercer agreed to invest $15 million in a joint venture with SCL’s elections division. The partners devised a convoluted corporate structure, forming a new American company, owned almost entirely by Mr. Mercer, with a license to the psychographics platform developed by Mr. Wylie’s team, according to company documents. Mr. Bannon, who became a board member and investor, chose the name: Cambridge Analytica.

The firm was effectively a shell. According to the documents and former employees, any contracts won by Cambridge, originally incorporated in Delaware, would be serviced by London-based SCL and overseen by Mr. Nix, a British citizen who held dual appointments at Cambridge Analytica and SCL. Most SCL employees and contractors were Canadian, like Mr. Wylie, or European.

But in July 2014, an American election lawyer advising the company, Laurence Levy, warned that the arrangement could violate laws limiting the involvement of foreign nationals in American elections.

In a memo to Mr. Bannon, Ms. Mercer and Mr. Nix, the lawyer, then at the firm Bracewell & Giuliani, warned that Mr. Nix would have to recuse himself “from substantive management” of any clients involved in United States elections. The data firm would also have to find American citizens or green card holders, Mr. Levy wrote, “to manage the work and decision making functions, relative to campaign messaging and expenditures.”

In summer and fall 2014, Cambridge Analytica dived into the American midterm elections, mobilizing SCL contractors and employees around the country. Few Americans were involved in the work, which included polling, focus groups and message development for the John Bolton Super PAC, conservative groups in Colorado and the campaign of Senator Thom Tillis, the North Carolina Republican.

Cambridge Analytica, in its statement to The Times, said that all “personnel in strategic roles were U.S. nationals or green card holders.” Mr. Nix “never had any strategic or operational role” in an American election campaign, the company said.

Whether the company’s American ventures violated election laws would depend on foreign employees’ roles in each campaign, and on whether their work counted as strategic advice under Federal Election Commission rules.

Cambridge Analytica appears to have exhibited a similar pattern in the 2016 election cycle, when the company worked for the campaigns of Mr. Cruz and then Mr. Trump. While Cambridge hired more Americans to work on the races that year, most of its data scientists were citizens of the United Kingdom or other European countries, according to two former employees.

Under the guidance of Brad Parscale, Mr. Trump’s digital director in 2016 and now the campaign manager for his 2020 re-election effort, Cambridge performed a variety of services, former campaign officials said. That included designing target audiences for digital ads and fund-raising appeals, modeling voter turnout, buying $5 million in television ads and determining where Mr. Trump should travel to best drum up support.

The White House advisers Stephen K. Bannon and Kellyanne Conway with Ms. Mercer at the 2017 inauguration. The firm helped the Trump campaign target voters.

Cambridge executives have offered conflicting accounts about the use of psychographic data on the campaign. Mr. Nix has said that the firm’s profiles helped shape Mr. Trump’s strategy — statements disputed by other campaign officials — but also that Cambridge did not have enough time to comprehensively model Trump voters.

In a BBC interview last December, Mr. Nix said that the Trump efforts drew on “legacy psychographics” built for the Cruz campaign.

After the Leak

By early 2015, Mr. Wylie and more than half his original team of about a dozen people had left the company. Most were liberal-leaning, and had grown disenchanted with working on behalf of the hard-right candidates the Mercer family favored.

Cambridge Analytica, in its statement, said that Mr. Wylie had left to start a rival firm, and that it later took legal action against him to enforce intellectual property claims. It characterized Mr. Wylie and other former “contractors” as engaging in “what is clearly a malicious attempt to hurt the company.”

Near the end of that year, a report in The Guardian revealed thatCambridge Analytica was using private Facebook data on the Cruz campaign, sending Facebook scrambling. In a statement at the time, Facebook promised that it was “carefully investigating this situation” and would require any company misusing its data to destroy it.

Facebook verified the leak and — without publicly acknowledging it — sought to secure the information, efforts that continued as recently as August 2016. That month, lawyers for the social network reached out to Cambridge Analytica contractors. “This data was obtained and used without permission,” said a letter that was obtained by the Times. “It cannot be used legitimately in the future and must be deleted immediately.”

Mr. Grewal, the Facebook deputy general counsel, said in a statement that both Dr. Kogan and “SCL Group and Cambridge Analytica certified to us that they destroyed the data in question.”

Cambridge Analytica harvested over 50 million Facebook users’ data, one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history. Credit Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

But copies of the data still remain beyond Facebook’s control. The Times viewed a set of raw data from the profiles Cambridge Analytica obtained.

While Mr. Nix has told lawmakers that the company does not have Facebook data, a former employee said that he had recently seen hundreds of gigabytes on Cambridge servers, and that the files were not encrypted.

Today, as Cambridge Analytica seeks to expand its business in the United States and overseas, Mr. Nix has mentioned some questionable practices. This January, in undercover footage filmed by Channel 4 News in Britain and viewed by The Times, he boasted of employing front companies and former spies on behalf of political clients around the world, and even suggested ways to entrap politicians in compromising situations.

All the scrutiny appears to have damaged Cambridge Analytica’s political business. No American campaigns or “super PACs” have yet reported paying the company for work in the 2018 midterms, and it is unclear whether Cambridge will be asked to join Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign.

In the meantime, Mr. Nix is seeking to take psychographics to the commercial advertising market. He has repositioned himself as a guru for the digital ad age — a “Math Man,” he puts it. In the United States last year, a former employee said, Cambridge pitched Mercedes-Benz, MetLife and the brewer AB InBev, but has not signed them on.

Matthew Rosenberg, Nicholas Confessore and Carole Cadwalladr reported from London.

https://www.alternet.org/election-2016/bannons-firm-stole-millions-facebook-files-provoke-voters-trump-never-used-profiles

media frenzy and political umbrage over the apparent theft of upwards of 50 million Facebook user profiles in 2014 by Cambridge Analytica, a British-based voter targeting operation co-founded by Steve Bannon, to assist Trump’s 2016 campaign is overlooking a critical fact: Bannon’s data didn't deliver.

Cambridge Analytica developed psychological profiles of millions of American voters, yet its data wasn’t used by the Trump campaign in the runup to Election Day, its top officials have said. Apparently, the profiles weren't as current as Republican National Committee voter files, nor as effective as using Facebook’s platform for political advertising in 2016.

“When 60 Minutes asked Trump digital director Brad Parscale about Cambridge, though, he said that his team never actually used the data,” Colin Delany, an online media expert, noted Sunday for Epolitics.com. “Instead, they could target voters and potential donors more effectively using the information they gathered by actually running Facebook ads and measuring the results.”

The 2014 theft of the Facebook data—the subject of weekend exposes in the New York Times and abroad—also isn’t news.

That data breach, which raises all kinds of user privacy questions apart from the political arena, was first reported by the Guardian in late 2015. The Guardian then noted that Cambridge Analytica was using the pilfered data while backing Ted Cruz’s presidential bid.

“A little-known data company, now embedded within Cruz’s campaign and indirectly financed by his primary billionaire benefactor, paid researchers at Cambridge University to gather detailed psychological profiles about the US electorate using a massive pool of mainly unwitting US Facebook users built with an online survey,” the Guardian’s Harry Davies reported. The parent company boasted of its "massive data pool of 40+ million individuals across the United States—for each of whom we have generated detailed characteristic and trait profiles."

Nonetheless, the weekend reports in the New York Times and London newspaper, the Observer, have caused media and political firestorms. On Friday, Facebook announced it was suspending its relationship with Cambridge Analytica, prompting questions about why it hadn’t done so sooner if its user data had been stolen. Facebook also suspended the account of Christopher Wylie, a Cambridge Analytica whistleblower in the newspaper stories, drawing condemnation for what “they have known privately for two years.”

Meanwhile, on the domestic political front, there were calls for more investigations and regulatory oversight. A Democratic senator demanded that Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee. A House Intelligence Committee Democrat echoed that demand. In Massachusetts, the state attorney general, another Democrat, announced she was launching an investigation. An ex-Federal Trade Commission official speculated that the Facebook breach may have violated a 2011 federal court order protecting user privacy, exposing the social media company to multi-millions in fines.

“One member of Parliament, Jo Stevens, said Facebook’s relationship with its users’ personal data ‘reminds me of an abusive relationship where there is coercive control going on,’” the Washington Post reported. “At another point in the [Parliament] hearing, fellow lawmaker Rebecca Pow questioned whether Facebook was a ‘massive surveillance operation.’”In Europe, the political hyperbole was even more extreme, because Cambridge Analytica worked for the pro-Brexit campaign, which won a British national vote to leave the European Union and pre-dated Trump’s election as president in November 2016.

Some Perspective, Please

Perhaps some of the outrage and umbrage comes from the growing realization that social media platforms aren’t just friendly places where like-minded people associate, but companies with an advertising business model based on surveillance, data collection and targeting audiences—whether selling consumer goods or political messages. Nonetheless, the current media and political frenzy is ignoring a critical point—that Trump’s campaign didn’t use Cambridge Analytica voter profiles because they weren’t as current or as effective as the RNC’s data and Facebook’s advertising platform.

In other words, Bannon’s creation is getting far too much attention and credit for being more powerful than it was. Moreover, if the public wants to understand how social media has become a powerful political messaging tool, people should pause and understand that Facebook’s profiling of users is not unique among online marketers.

What Cambridge Analytica did in 2014 to steal Facebook data was not that unique, although it apparently was on a larger scale. It was in line with what many businesses do to try to game the biggest platforms to increase their audience or sales, Delany noted, pulling back the curtain on so-called psychographic profiling.Epolitic.com’s Delany explains why: “Count me as a +1 for the 'massive surveillance operation' critique [of Facebook]—though we agree to the spying every time we log in,” he wrote Sunday. “Remember: if you’re not paying, you’re not the customer, you’re the product! Actually, the fact that Facebook collects so much data on its users and (functionally) rents it to anyone advertising on the platform goes a long way toward puncturing the hype around Cambridge and its psychographic social mapping.”

“The company ran afoul of Facebook because it used a quiz app to gather data from users’ Facebook accounts—and those of their friends,” he said. “This kind of ‘scraping’ was apparently allowed back in 2014, though most vendors used it on a smaller scale than Cambridge seems to have done. Cambridge basically aimed to reconstruct the web of relationships and personal information embedded in Facebook so that it could manipulate the data without going through Facebook’s data interface—and Facebook’s rules on what they could access and share.”

Bannon apparently sold the concept of psychological profiling to the billionaire Mercer family, as an unprecedented way to provoke and push the American electorate to the far right, which resulted in the Mercers pouring millions into Cambridge Analytica. But as Delany explains, psychographic targeting isn’t new—and crucially, it is supplanted by newer information, users’ daily keystrokes that render it increasingly obsolete.

Delany explained that there's nothing new about psychographic targeting. He continued:

“Vendors have been pitching it for years, usually basing their models on the same kinds of data that corporate brands both create and consume in bulk. Data experts I’ve talked with generally say that psychographic models can be useful in your first rounds of outreach, since they should give you at least an idea of whom to target.

“But at soon as you start to gather information about which people actually respond to a given message, the models have mostly done their jobs: you’ll quickly see the difference between who SHOULD click on something and who DOES click on it. What voters actually do matters more than what you think they MIGHT do: data derived directly from voters’ choices quickly supersedes models that try to predict their behavior. Think of polling vs. canvassing: polls help you estimate what people think, while canvassing lets them tell you.”

So the Trump campaign, under Parscale's direction, found it was more effective to use the Republican National Committee’s voter files in combination with Facebook’s audience-targeting supercomputers. As Delany noted, “Parscale’s team famously automated Facebook best practices on a vast scale—on some days, they ran more than 100,000 different ad/ad targeting variations, collecting far more useful data than Cambridge could provide and building their lists at the same time. Who needs a model once people’s fingers tell you what they think?”

That final thought is essentially what Parscale told CBS’s *60 Minutes*. On Sunday, CBS posted a report on its website fleshing out the details of that decision. Basically, the Trump campaign hired Cambridge Analytica as a fallback as it was unsure it would able to use the Republican National Committee data, which in turn, Trump’s campaign did use—and found, together with Facebook’s platform, that it was more effective.

Bannon’s hyped voter profiling was too good to be true. Like many aspects of Trump’s campaign that endure, it was hype, smoke and mirrors. But that hasn’t kept it from a starring role in a media and political firestorm that’s eclipsing the real issue: how social media has revolutionized political messaging.

Steven Rosenfeld

===

Kellyanne Conway got into a heated exchange with CNN’s Alisyn Camerota on Friday over connections between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

In particular, Camerota asked Conway to comment on the revelations that Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix, whose company was instrumental in helping Trump’s election victory last November, sent out an email to Assange to offer the WikiLeaks founder his company’s help in tracking down emails that were deleted from Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

Conway insisted that it wasn’t a big deal that the CEO of a company that the Trump campaign paid $6 million for its services had reached out to a man whom American intelligence services allege runs a propaganda website that is a front for the Russian government.

“Are you comfortable that the Trump campaign, through Cambridge Analytica, had a connection to WikiLeaks?” Camerota asked.

“They didn’t have a connection to WikiLeaks,” Conway responded.

“They reached out to help with the data,” Camerota shot back.

“No, not to help with the data,” Conway insisted. “It was something about releasing the e-mails. I was the campaign manager and I couldn’t be bothered with that.”

Conway then insisted that reaching out to Assange was completely unnecessary anyway because Hillary Clinton ran such a bad campaign that the Trump campaign didn’t need WikiLeaks’ assistance to beat her.

Unprompted, Conway suddenly grew defensive about the fact that she had once again brought up Hillary Clinton as a way to deflect from alleged wrongdoing committed by associates of the Trump campaign.

guard uk no links (many)

gXardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage

Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media

With links to Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage, the rightwing US computer scientist is at the heart of a multimillion-dollar propaganda network

Carole Cadwalladr

Sunday 26 February 2017

This article is the subject of a legal complaint on behalf of Cambridge Analytica LLC and SCL Elections Limited.

Just over a week ago, Donald Trump gathered members of the world’s press before him and told them they were liars. “The press, honestly, is out of control,” he said. “The public doesn’t believe you any more.” CNN was described as “very fake news… story after story is bad”. The BBC was “another beauty”.

That night I did two things. First, I typed “Trump” in the search box of Twitter. My feed was reporting that he was crazy, a lunatic, a raving madman. But that wasn’t how it was playing out elsewhere. The results produced a stream of “Go Donald!!!!”, and “You show ’em!!!” There were star-spangled banner emojis and thumbs-up emojis and clips of Trump laying into the “FAKE news MSM liars!”

Trump had spoken, and his audience had heard him. Then I did what I’ve been doing for two and a half months now. I Googled “mainstream media is…” And there it was. Google’s autocomplete suggestions: “mainstream media is… dead, dying, fake news, fake, finished”. Is it dead, I wonder? Has FAKE news won? Are we now the FAKE news? Is the mainstream media – we, us, I – dying?

It leads to a website called CNSnews.com and an article: “The Mainstream media are dead.” They’re dead, I learn, because they – we, I – “cannot be trusted”. How had it, an obscure site I’d never heard of, dominated Google’s search algorithm on the topic? In the “About us” tab, I learn CNSnews is owned by the Media Research Center, which a click later I learn is “America’s media watchdog”, an organisation that claims an “unwavering commitment to neutralising leftwing bias in the news, media and popular culture”.

Another couple of clicks and I discover that it receives a large bulk of its funding – more than $10m in the past decade – from a single source, the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer. If you follow US politics you may recognise the name. Robert Mercer is the money behind Donald Trump. But then, I will come to learn, Robert Mercer is the money behind an awful lot of things. He was Trump’s single biggest donor. Mercer started backing Ted Cruz, but when he fell out of the presidential race he threw his money – $13.5m of it – behind the Trump campaign.

It’s money he’s made as a result of his career as a brilliant but reclusive computer scientist. He started his career at IBM, where he made what the Association for Computational Linguistics called “revolutionary” breakthroughs in language processing – a science that went on to be key in developing today’s AI – and later became joint CEO of Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund that makes its money by using algorithms to model and trade on the financial markets.

One of its funds, Medallion, which manages only its employees’ money, is the most successful in the world – generating $55bn so far. And since 2010, Mercer has donated $45m to different political campaigns – all Republican – and another $50m to non-profits – all rightwing, ultra-conservative. This is a billionaire who is, as billionaires are wont, trying to reshape the world according to his personal beliefs.

Donald Trump’s presidential campaigned received $13.5m from Robert Mercer.

Robert Mercer very rarely speaks in public and never to journalists, so to gauge his beliefs you have to look at where he channels his money: a series of yachts, all called Sea Owl;a $2.9m model train set; climate change denial (he funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland Institute); and what is maybe the ultimate rich man’s plaything – the disruption of the mainstream media. In this he is helped by his close associate Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager and now chief strategist. The money he gives to the Media Research Center, with its mission of correcting “liberal bias” is just one of his media plays. There are other bigger, and even more deliberate strategies, and shining brightly, the star at the centre of the Mercer media galaxy, is Breitbart.

It was $10m of Mercer’s money that enabled Bannon to fund Breitbart – a rightwing news site, set up with the express intention of being a Huffington Post for the right. It has launched the careers of Milo Yiannopoulos and his like, regularly hosts antisemitic and Islamophobic views, and is currently being boycotted by more than 1,000 brands after an activist campaign. It has been phenomenally successful: the 29th most popular site in America with 2bn page views a year. It’s bigger than its inspiration, the Huffington Post, bigger, even, than PornHub. It’s the biggest political site on Facebook. The biggest on Twitter.

Prominent rightwing journalist Andrew Breitbart, who founded the site but died in 2012, told Bannon that they had “to take back the culture”. And, arguably, they have, though American culture is only the start of it. In 2014, Bannon launched Breitbart London, telling the New York Times it was specifically timed ahead of the UK’s forthcoming election. It was, he said, the latest front “in our current cultural and political war”. France and Germany are next.

A determined plutocrat and a brilliant media strategist can, and have, found a way to mould journalism to their own ends

But there was another reason why I recognised Robert Mercer’s name: because of his connection to Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics company. He is reported to have a $10m stake in the company, which was spun out of a bigger British company called SCL Group. It specialises in “election management strategies” and “messaging and information operations”, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. In military circles this is known as “psyops” – psychological operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on people’s emotions.)

Cambridge Analytica worked for the Trump campaign and, so I’d read, the Leave campaign. When Mercer supported Cruz, Cambridge Analytica worked with Cruz. When Robert Mercer started supporting Trump, Cambridge Analytica came too. And where Mercer’s money is, Steve Bannon is usually close by: it was reported that until recently he had a seat on the board.

Last December, I wrote about Cambridge Analytica in a piece about howGoogle’s search results on certain subjects were being dominated by rightwing and extremist sites. Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who had mapped the news ecosystem and found millions of links between rightwing sites “strangling” the mainstream media, told me that trackers from sites like Breitbart could also be used by companies like Cambridge Analytica to follow people around the web and then, via Facebook, target them with ads.

On its website,Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters – its USP is to use this data to understand people’s deepest emotions and then target them accordingly. The system, according to Albright, amounted to a “propaganda machine”.

A few weeks later, the Observer received a letter. Cambridge Analytica was not employed by the Leave campaign, it said. Cambridge Analytica “is a US company based in the US. It hasn’t worked in British politics.”

Which is how, earlier this week, I ended up in a Pret a Manger near Westminster with Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s affable communications director, looking at snapshots of Donald Trump on his phone. It was Wigmore who orchestrated Nigel Farage’s trip to Trump Tower – the PR coup that saw him become the first foreign politician to meet the president elect.

Wigmore scrolls through the snaps on his phone. “That’s the one I took,” he says pointing at the now globally famous photo of Farage and Trump in front of his golden elevator door giving the thumbs-up sign. Wigmore was one of the “bad boys of Brexit” – a term coined by Arron Banks, the Bristol-based businessman who was Leave.EU’s co-founder.

Cambridge Analytica had worked for them, he said. It had taught them how to build profiles, how to target people and how to scoop up masses of data from people’s Facebook profiles. A video on YouTube shows one of Cambridge Analytica’s and SCL’s employees, Brittany Kaiser, sitting on the panel at Leave.EU’s launch event.

Facebook was the key to the entire campaign, Wigmore explained. A Facebook ‘like’, he said, was their most “potent weapon”. “Because using artificial intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts of things about that individual and how to convince them with what sort of advert. And you knew there would also be other people in their network who liked what they liked, so you could spread. And then you follow them. The computer never stops learning and it never stops monitoring.”

It sounds creepy, I say.

“It is creepy! It’s really creepy! It’s why I’m not on Facebook! I tried it on myself to see what information it had on me and I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ What’s scary is that my kids had put things on Instagram and it picked that up. It knew where my kids went to school.”

They hadn’t “employed” Cambridge Analytica, he said. No money changed hands. “They were happy to help.”

Why?

“Because Nigel is a good friend of the Mercers. And Robert Mercer introduced them to us.He said, ‘Here’s this company we think may be useful to you.’ What they were trying to do in the US and what we were trying to do had massive parallels. We shared a lot of information. Why wouldn’t you?” Behind Trump’s campaign and Cambridge Analytica, he said, were “the same people. It’s the same family.”

There were already a lot of questions swirling around Cambridge Analytica, and Andy Wigmore has opened up a whole lot more. Such as: are you supposed to declare services-in-kind as some sort of donation? The Electoral Commission says yes, if it was more than £7,500. And was it declared? The Electoral Commission says no. Does that mean a foreign billionaire had possibly influenced the referendum without that influence being apparent? It’s certainly a question worth asking.

In the last month or so, articles in first the Swiss and the US press have asked exactly what Cambridge Analytica is doing with US voters’ data. In a statement to the Observer, the Information Commissioner’s Office said: “Any business collecting and using personal data in the UK must do so fairly and lawfully. We will be contacting Cambridge Analytica and asking questions to find out how the company is operating in the UK and whether the law is being followed.”

Cambridge Analytica said last Friday they are in touch with the ICO and are completely compliant with UK and EU data laws. It did not answer other questions the Observer put to it this week about how it built its psychometric model, which owes its origins to original research carried out by scientists at Cambridge University’s Psychometric Centre, research based on a personality quiz on Facebook that went viral. More than 6 million people ended up doing it, producing an astonishing treasure trove of data.

These Facebook profiles – especially people’s “likes” – could be correlated across millions of others to produce uncannily accurate results. Michal Kosinski, the centre’s lead scientist,found that with knowledge of 150 likes, their model could predict someone’s personality better than their spouse. With 300, it understood you better than yourself. “Computers see us in a more robust way than we see ourselves,” says Kosinski.

But there are strict ethical regulations regarding what you can do with this data. Did SCL Group have access to the university’s model or data, I ask Professor Jonathan Rust, the centre’s director? “Certainly not from us,” he says. “We have very strict rules around this.”

A scientist, Aleksandr Kogan, from the centre was contracted to build a model for SCL, and says he collected his own data. Professor Rust says he doesn’t know where Kogan’s data came from. “The evidence was contrary. I reported it.” An independent adjudicator was appointed by the university. “But then Kogan said he’d signed a non-disclosure agreement with SCL and he couldn’t continue [answering questions].”

Kogan disputes this and says SCL satisfied the university’s inquiries. But perhaps more than anyone,Professor Rust understands how the kind of information people freely give up to social media sites could be used.

“The danger of not having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook and elsewhere is clear. With this, a computer can actually do psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour. It’s what the scientologists try to do but much more powerful. It’s how you brainwash someone. It’s incredibly dangerous.

“It’s no exaggeration to say that minds can be changed. Behaviour can be predicted and controlled. I find it incredibly scary. I really do. Because nobody has really followed through on the possible consequences of all this. People don’t know it’s happening to them. Their attitudes are being changed behind their backs.”

Mercer invested in Cambridge Analytica, the Washington Post reported, “driven in part by an assessment that the right was lacking sophisticated technology capabilities”. But in many ways, it’s what Cambridge Analytica’s parent company does that raises even more questions.

Emma Briant, a propaganda specialist at the University of Sheffield, wrote about SCL Group in her 2015 book, Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism: Strategies for Global Change. Cambridge Analytica has the technological tools to effect behavioural and psychological change, she said, but it’sSCL that strategises it. It has specialised, at the highest level – for Nato, the MoD, the US state department and others – in changing the behaviour of large groups. It models mass populations and then it changes their beliefs.

SCL was founded by someone called Nigel Oakes, who worked for Saatchi & Saatchi on Margaret Thatcher’s image, says Briant, and the company had been “making money out of the propaganda side of the war on terrorism over a long period of time. There are different arms of SCL but it’s all about reach and the ability to shape the discourse. They are trying to amplify particular political narratives. And they are selective in who they go for: they are not doing this for the left.”

In the course of the US election, Cambridge Analytica amassed a database, as it claims on its website, of almost the entire US voting population – 220 million people – and the Washington Post reported last week thatSCL was increasing staffing at its Washington office and competing for lucrative new contracts with Trump’s administration. “It seems significant that a company involved in engineering a political outcome profits from what follows. Particularly if it’s the manipulation, and then resolution, of fear,” says Briant.

It’s the database, and what may happen to it, that particularly exercises Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a Swiss mathematician and data activist who has been investigating Cambridge Analytica and SCL for more than a year. “How is it going to be used?” he says. “Is it going to be used to try and manipulate people around domestic policies? Or to ferment conflict between different communities? It is potentially very scary. People just don’t understand the power of this data and how it can be used against them.”

There are two things, potentially, going on simultaneously: the manipulation of information on a mass level, and the manipulation of information at a very individual level. Both based on the latest understandings in science about how people work, and enabled by technological platforms built to bring us together.

Are we living in a new era of propaganda, I ask Emma Briant? One we can’t see, and that is working on us in ways we can’t understand? Where we can only react, emotionally, to its messages? “Definitely. The way that surveillance through technology is so pervasive, the collection and use of our data is so much more sophisticated. It’s totally covert. And people don’t realise what is going on.”

Public mood and politics goes through cycles. You don’t have to subscribe to any conspiracy theory, Briant says, to see that a mass change in public sentiment is happening. Or that some of the tools in action are straight out of the military’s or SCL’s playbook.

But then there’s increasing evidence that our public arenas – the social media sites where we post our holiday snaps or make comments about the news – are a new battlefield where international geopolitics is playing out in real time. It’s a new age of propaganda. But whose? This week, Russia announced the formation of a new branch of the military: “information warfare troops”.

Sam Woolley of the Oxford Internet Institute’s computational propaganda institute tells me that one third of all traffic on Twitter before the EU referendum was automated “bots” – accounts that are programmed to look like people, to act like people, and to change the conversation, to make topics trend. And they were all for Leave. Before the US election, they were five-to-one in favour of Trump – many of them Russian. Last week they have been in action in the Stoke byelection – Russian bots, organised by who? – attacking Paul Nuttall.

You can take a trending topic, such as fake news, and then weaponise it, turn it against the media that uncovered it

“Politics is war,” said Steve Bannon last year in the Wall Street Journal. And increasingly this looks to be true.

There’s nothing accidental about Trump’s behaviour, Andy Wigmore tells me. “That press conference. It was absolutely brilliant. I could see exactly what he was doing. There’s feedback going on constantly. That’s what you can do with artificial intelligence. You can measure ever reaction to every word. He has a word room, where you fix key words. We did it. So with immigration, there are actually key words within that subject matter which people are concerned about. So when you are going to make a speech, it’s all about how can you use these trending words.”

Wigmore met with Trump’s team right at the start of the Leave campaign. “And they said the holy grail was artificial intelligence.”

Who did?

“Jared Kushner and Jason Miller.”

Later, when Trump picked up Mercer and Cambridge Analytica, the game changed again. “It’s all about the emotions. This is the big difference with what we did. They call it bio-psycho-social profiling. It takes your physical, mental and lifestyle attributes and works out how people work, how they react emotionally.”

Bio-psycho-social profiling, I read later, is one offensive in what is called “cognitive warfare”. Though there are many others: “recoding the mass consciousness to turn patriotism into collaborationism,” explains a Nato briefing document on countering Russian disinformation written by an SCL employee. “Time-sensitive professional use of media to propagate narratives,” says one US state department white paper. “Of particular importance to psyop personnel may be publicly and commercially available data from social media platforms.”

Yet another details the power of a “cognitive casualty” – a “moral shock” that “has a disabling effect on empathy and higher processes such as moral reasoning and critical thinking”. Something like immigration, perhaps. Or “fake news”. Or as it has now become: “FAKE news!!!!”

How do you change the way a nation thinks? You could start by creating a mainstream media to replace the existing one with a site such as Breitbart. You could set up other websites that displace mainstream sources of news and information with your own definitions of concepts like “liberal media bias”, like CNSnews.com. And you could give the rump mainstream media, papers like the “failing New York Times!” what it wants: stories. Because the third prong of Mercer and Bannon’s media empire is the Government Accountability Institute.

Bannon co-founded it with $2m of Mercer’s money. Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, was appointed to the board. Then they invested in expensive, long-term investigative journalism. “The modern economics of the newsroom don’t support big investigative reporting staffs,” Bannon told Forbes magazine. “You wouldn’t get a Watergate, a Pentagon Papers today, because nobody can afford to let a reporter spend seven months on a story. We can. We’re working as a support function.”

Welcome to the future of journalism in the age of platform capitalism. News organisations have to do a better job of creating new financial models. But in the gaps in between, a determined plutocrat and a brilliant media strategist can, and have, found a way to mould journalism to their own ends.

In 2015, Steve Bannon described to Forbes how theGAI operated, employing a data scientist to trawl the dark web (in the article he boasts of having access to $1.3bn worth of supercomputers) to dig up the kind of source material Google can’t find. One result has been a New York Times bestseller, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, written by GAI’s president, Peter Schweizer and later turned into a film produced by Rebekah Mercer and Steve Bannon.

This, Bannon explained, is how you “weaponise” the narrative you want. With hard researched facts. With those, you can launch it straight on to the front page of the New York Times, as the story of Hillary Clinton’s cash did.Like Hillary’s emails it turned the news agenda, and, most crucially, it diverted the attention of the news cycle. Another classic psyops approach. “Strategic drowning” of other messages.

This is a strategic, long-term and really quite brilliant play. In the 1990s, Bannon explained, conservative media couldn’t take Bill Clinton down because “they wound up talking to themselves in an echo chamber”.

As, it turns out, the liberal media is now. We are scattered, separate, squabbling among ourselves and being picked off like targets in a shooting gallery. Increasingly, there’s a sense that we are talking to ourselves. And whether it’s Mercer’s millions or other factors,Jonathan Albright’s map of the news and information ecosystem shows how rightwing sites are dominating sites like YouTube and Google, bound tightly together by millions of links.

Is there a central intelligence to that, I ask Albright? “There has to be. There has to be some type of coordination. You can see from looking at the map, from the architecture of the system, that this is not accidental. It’s clearly being led by money and politics.”

There’s been a lot of talk in the echo chamber about Bannon in the last few months, but it’s Mercer who provided the money to remake parts of the media landscape. And while Bannon understands the media, Mercer understands big data. He understands the structure of the internet. He knows how algorithms work.

Robert Mercer did not respond to a request for comment for this piece. Nick Patterson, a British cryptographer, who worked at Renaissance Technologies in the 80s and is now a computational geneticist at MIT, described to me how he was the one who talent-spotted Mercer. “There was an elite group working at IBM in the 1980s doing speech research, speech recognition, and when I joined Renaissance I judged that the mathematics we were trying to apply to financial markets were very similar.”

Play VideoPlay

Bannon scorns media in rare public appearance at CPAC

He describes Mercer as “very, very conservative. He truly did not like the Clintons. He thought Bill Clinton was a criminal. And his basic politics, I think, was that he’s a rightwing libertarian, he wants the government out of things.”

He suspects that Mercer is bringing the brilliant computational skills he brought to finance to bear on another very different sphere. “We make mathematical models of the financial markets which are probability models, and from those we try and make predictions. What I suspect Cambridge Analytica do is that they build probability models of how people vote. And then they look at what they can do to influence that.”

Finding the edge is what quants do. They build quantitative models that automate the process of buying and selling shares and then they chase tiny gaps in knowledge to create huge wins. Renaissance Technologies was one of the first hedge funds to invest in AI. But what it does with it, how it’s been programmed to do it, is completely unknown. It is, Bloomberg reports, the “blackest box in finance”.

Johan Bollen, associate professor at Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing, tells me how he discovered one possible edge: he’s done research that shows you can predict stock market moves from Twitter. You can measure public sentiment and then model it. “Society is driven by emotions, which it’s always been difficult to measure, collectively. But there are now programmes that can read text and measure it and give us a window into those collective emotions.”

The research caused a huge ripple among two different constituencies. “We had a lot attention from hedge funds. They are looking for signals everywhere and this is a hugely interesting signal. My impression is hedge funds do have these algorithms that are scanning social feeds. The flash crashes we’ve had – sudden huge drops in stock prices – indicates these algorithms are being used at large scale. And they are engaged in something of an arms race.”

The other people interested in Bollen’s work are those who want not only to measure public sentiment, but to change it. Bollen’s research shows how it’s possible. Could you reverse engineer the national, or even the global, mood? Model it, and then change it?

Google, democracy and the truth about internet search

“It does seem possible. And it does worry me. There are quite a few pieces of research that show if you repeat something often enough, people start involuntarily to believe it. And that could be leveraged, or weaponised for propaganda. We know there are thousands of automated bots out there that are trying to do just that.”

THE war of the bots is one of the wilder and weirder aspects of the elections of 2016. At the Oxford Internet Institute’s Unit for Computational Propaganda, its director, Phil Howard, and director of research, Sam Woolley, show me all the ways public opinion can be massaged and manipulated. But is there a smoking gun, I ask them, evidence of who is doing this? “There’s not a smoking gun,” says Howard. “There are smoking machine guns. There are multiple pieces of evidence.”

“Look at this,” he says and shows me how, before the US election, hundreds upon hundreds of websites were set up to blast out just a few links, articles that were all pro-Trump. “This is being done by people who understand information structure, who are bulk buying domain names and then using automation to blast out a certain message. To make Trump look like he’s a consensus.”

And that requires money?

“That requires organisation and money. And if you use enough of them, of bots and people, and cleverly link them together, you are what’s legitimate. You are creating truth.”

You can take an existing trending topic, such as fake news, and then weaponise it. You can turn it against the very media that uncovered it. Viewed in a certain light, fake news is a suicide bomb at the heart of our information system. Strapped to the live body of us – the mainstream media.

One of the things that concerns Howard most is the hundreds of thousands of “sleeper” bots they’ve found. Twitter accounts that have tweeted only once or twice and are now sitting quietly waiting for a trigger: some sort of crisis where they will rise up and come together to drown out all other sources of information.

Like zombies?

“Like zombies.”

Many of the techniques were refined in Russia, he says, and then exported everywhere else. “You have these incredible propaganda tools developed in an authoritarian regime moving into a free market economy with a complete regulatory vacuum. What you get is a firestorm.”

This is the world we enter every day, on our laptops and our smartphones. It has become a battleground where the ambitions of nation states and ideologues are being fought – using us. We are the bounty: our social media feeds; our conversations; our hearts and minds. Our votes. Bots influence trending topics and trending topics have a powerful effect on algorithms, Woolley, explains, on Twitter, on Google, on Facebook. Know how to manipulate information structure and you can manipulate reality.

We’re not quite in the alternative reality where the actual news has become “FAKE news!!!” But we’re almost there. Out on Twitter, the new transnational battleground for the future, someone I follow tweets a quote by Marshall McLuhan, the great information theorist of the 60s. “World War III will be a guerrilla information war,” it says. “With no divisions between military and civilian participation.”

By that definition we’re already there.

ref

XXXguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage

no lnx

Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media

With links to Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage, the rightwing US computer scientist is at the heart of a multimillion-dollar propaganda network

Sunday 26 February 2017 04.00 EST Last modified on Wednesday 5 April 2017 05.53 EDT

I click Google’s first suggested link. It leads to a website called CNSnews.com and an article: “The Mainstream media are dead.” They’re dead, I learn, because they – we, I – “cannot be trusted”. How had it, an obscure site I’d never heard of, dominated Google’s search algorithm on the topic? In the “About us” tab, I learn CNSnews is owned by the Media Research Center, which a click later I learn is “America’s media watchdog”, an organisation that claims an “unwavering commitment to neutralising leftwing bias in the news, media and popular culture”.

Donald Trump’s presidential campaigned received $13.5m from Robert Mercer.

Robert Mercer very rarely speaks in public and never to journalists, so to gauge his beliefs you have to look at where he channels his money: a series of yachts, all called Sea Owl; a $2.9m model train set; climate change denial (he funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland Institute); and what is maybe the ultimate rich man’s plaything – the disruption of the mainstream media. In this he is helped by his close associate Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager and now chief strategist. The money he gives to the Media Research Center, with its mission of correcting “liberal bias” is just one of his media plays. There are other bigger, and even more deliberate strategies, and shining brightly, the star at the centre of the Mercer media galaxy, is Breitbart.

It was $10m of Mercer’s money that enabled Bannon to fund Breitbart – a rightwing news site, set up with the express intention of being a Huffington Post for the right. It has launched the careers of Milo Yiannopoulos and his like, regularly hosts antisemitic and Islamophobic views, and is currently being boycotted by more than 1,000 brands after an activist campaign. It has been phenomenally successful: the 29th most popular site in America with 2bn page views a year. It’s bigger than its inspiration, the Huffington Post, bigger, even, than PornHub. It’s the biggest political site on Facebook. The biggest on Twitter.

A determined plutocrat and a brilliant media strategist can, and have, found a way to mould journalism to their own ends

But there was another reason why I recognised Robert Mercer’s name: because of his connection to Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics company. He is reported to have a $10m stake in the company, which was spun out of a bigger British company called SCL Group. It specialises in “election management strategies” and “messaging and information operations”, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. In military circles this is known as “psyops” – psychological operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on people’s emotions.)

Last December, I wrote about Cambridge Analytica in a piece about how Google’s search results on certain subjects were being dominated by rightwing and extremist sites. Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who had mapped the news ecosystem and found millions of links between rightwing sites “strangling” the mainstream media, told me that trackers from sites like Breitbart could also be used by companies like Cambridge Analytica to follow people around the web and then, via Facebook, target them with ads.

On its website, Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters – its USP is to use this data to understand people’s deepest emotions and then target them accordingly. The system, according to Albright, amounted to a “propaganda machine”.

Cambridge Analytica had worked for them, he said. It had taught them how to build profiles, how to target people and how to scoop up masses of data from people’s Facebook profiles. A video on YouTube shows one of Cambridge Analytica’s and SCL’s employees, Brittany Kaiser, sitting on the panel at Leave.EU’s launch event.

Facebook was the key to the entire campaign, Wigmore explained. A Facebook ‘like’, he said, was their most “potent weapon”. “Because using artificial intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts of things about that individual and how to convince them with what sort of advert. And you knew there would also be other people in their network who liked what they liked, so you could spread. And then you follow them. The computer never stops learning and it never stops monitoring.”

They hadn’t “employed” Cambridge Analytica, he said. No money changed hands. “They were happy to help.”

Why?

“Because Nigel is a good friend of the Mercers. And Robert Mercer introduced them to us. He said, ‘Here’s this company we think may be useful to you.’ What they were trying to do in the US and what we were trying to do had massive parallels. We shared a lot of information. Why wouldn’t you?” Behind Trump’s campaign and Cambridge Analytica, he said, were “the same people. It’s the same family.”

These Facebook profiles – especially people’s “likes” – could be correlated across millions of others to produce uncannily accurate results. Michal Kosinski, the centre’s lead scientist, found that with knowledge of 150 likes, their model could predict someone’s personality better than their spouse. With 300, it understood you better than yourself. “Computers see us in a more robust way than we see ourselves,” says Kosinski.

Kogan disputes this and says SCL satisfied the university’s inquiries. But perhaps more than anyone, Professor Rust understands how the kind of information people freely give up to social media sites could be used.

Emma Briant, a propaganda specialist at the University of Sheffield, wrote about SCL Group in her 2015 book, Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism: Strategies for Global Change. Cambridge Analytica has the technological tools to effect behavioural and psychological change, she said, but it’s SCL that strategises it. It has specialised, at the highest level – for Nato, the MoD, the US state department and others – in changing the behaviour of large groups. It models mass populations and then it changes their beliefs.

SCL was founded by someone called Nigel Oakes, who worked for Saatchi & Saatchi on Margaret Thatcher’s image,says Briant, and the company had been “making money out of the propaganda side of the war on terrorism over a long period of time. There are different arms of SCL but it’s all about reach and the ability to shape the discourse. They are trying to amplify particular political narratives. And they are selective in who they go for: they are not doing this for the left.”

In the course of the US election, Cambridge Analytica amassed a database, as it claims on its website, of almost the entire US voting population – 220 million people – and the Washington Post reported last week that SCL was increasing staffing at its Washington office and competing for lucrative new contracts with Trump’s administration. “It seems significant that a company involved in engineering a political outcome profits from what follows. Particularly if it’s the manipulation, and then resolution, of fear,” says Briant.

It’s the database, and what may happen to it, that particularly exercises Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a Swiss mathematician and data activist who has been investigating Cambridge Analytica and SCL for more than a year. “How is it going to be used?” he says. “Is it going to be used to try and manipulate people around domestic policies? Or to ferment conflict between different communities? It is potentially very scary. People just don’t understand the power of this data and how it can be used against them.”

You can take a trending topic, such as fake news, and then weaponise it, turn it against the media that uncovered it

“Politics is war,” said Steve Bannon last year in the Wall Street Journal. And increasingly this looks to be true.

There’s nothing accidental about Trump’s behaviour, Andy Wigmore tells me. “That press conference. It was absolutely brilliant. I could see exactly what he was doing. There’s feedback going on constantly. That’s what you can do with artificial intelligence. You can measure ever reaction to every word. He has a word room, where you fix key words.We did it. So with immigration, there are actually key words within that subject matter which people are concerned about. So when you are going to make a speech, it’s all about how can you use these trending words.”

Wigmore met with Trump’s team right at the start of the Leave campaign. “And they said the holy grail was artificial intelligence.”

Who did?

“Jared Kushner and Jason Miller.”

Later, when Trump picked up Mercer and Cambridge Analytica, the game changed again. “It’s all about the emotions. This is the big difference with what we did. They call itbio-psycho-social profiling. It takes your physical, mental and lifestyle attributes and works out how people work, how they react emotionally.”

How do you change the way a nation thinks? You could start by creating a mainstream media to replace the existing one with a site such as Breitbart. You could set up other websites that displace mainstream sources of news and information with your own definitions of concepts like “liberal media bias”, like CNSnews.com. And you could give the rump mainstream media, papers like the “failing New York Times!” what it wants: stories. Because the third prong of Mercer and Bannon’s media empire is theGovernment Accountability Institute.

In 2015, Steve Bannon described to Forbes how theGAI operated, employing a data scientist to trawl the dark web (in the article he boasts of having access to $1.3bn worth of supercomputers) to dig up the kind of source material Google can’t find. One result has been a New York Times bestseller, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, written by GAI’s president, Peter Schweizer and later turned intoa film produced by Rebekah Mercer and Steve Bannon.

This, Bannon explained, is how you “weaponise” the narrative you want. With hard researched facts. With those, you can launch it straight on to the front page of the New York Times, as the story of Hillary Clinton’s cash did. Like Hillary’s emails it turned the news agenda, and, most crucially, it diverted the attention of the news cycle. Another classic psyops approach. “Strategic drowning” of other messages.

As, it turns out, the liberal media is now. We are scattered, separate, squabbling among ourselves and being picked off like targets in a shooting gallery. Increasingly, there’s a sense that we are talking to ourselves. And whether it’s Mercer’s millions or other factors, Jonathan Albright’s map of the news and information ecosystem shows how rightwing sites are dominating sites like YouTube and Google, bound tightly together by millions of links.

Play VideoPlay

Bannon scorns media in rare public appearance at CPAC

Johan Bollen, associate professor at Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing, tells me how he discovered one possible edge: he’s done research that shows you canpredict stock market moves from Twitter. You can measure public sentiment and then model it. “Society is driven by emotions, which it’s always been difficult to measure, collectively. But there are now programmes that can read text and measure it and give us a window into those collective emotions.”

THE war of the bots is one of the wilder and weirder aspects of the elections of 2016. At the Oxford Internet Institute’s Unit for Computational Propaganda, its director, Phil Howard, and director of research, Sam Woolley, show me all the ways public opinion can be massaged and manipulated. But is there a smoking gun, I ask them, evidence of who is doing this? “There’s not a smoking gun,” says Howard. “There are smoking machine guns. There are multiple pieces of evidence.”

And that requires money?

“That requires organisation and money. And if you use enough of them, of bots and people, and cleverly link them together, you are what’s legitimate. You are creating truth.”

You can take an existing trending topic, AMP FDBK such as fake news, and then weaponise it. You can turn it against the very media that uncovered it. Viewed in a certain light, fake news is a suicide bomb at the heart of our information system. Strapped to the live body of us – the mainstream media.

Like zombies?

“Like zombies.”

This is the world we enter every day, on our laptops and our smartphones. It has become a battleground where the ambitions of nation states and ideologues are being fought – using us. We are the bounty: our social media feeds; our conversations; our hearts and minds. Our votes. Bots influence trending topics and trending topics have a powerful effect on algorithms, Woolley, explains, on Twitter, on Google, on Facebook. Know how to manipulate information structure and you can manipulate reality.

We’re not quite in the alternative reality where the actual news has become “FAKE news!!!” But we’re almost there. Out on Twitter, the new transnational battleground for the future, someone I follow tweets a quote byMarshall McLuhan, the great information theorist of the 60s. “World War III will be a guerrilla information war,” it says. “With no divisions between military and civilian participation.”

By that definition we’re already there.

Additional reporting by Paul-Olivier Dehaye

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/inside-secretive-trump-lobby-wants-profit-breakup-iraq

Ex-Bush administration officials with pro-Trump leanings have forged a secret alliance with a former private Iraqi Pentagon contractor who is a member of one of Iraq’s wealthiest dynasties. Their mission is to promote the breakup of Iraq as the only viable way to defeat the Islamic State. They have achieved partial success: on Monday, the Trump administration announced a seismic shift in U.S. policy toward the possibility of Iraq’s dissolution.

Yet this network has been intimately connected to Cambridge Analytica (the technology firm that ran Trump’s election campaign), entities that have sponsored ISIS and other Islamist militants, as well as to ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers — who might benefit from the breakup of the country. If you want an inside glimpse into how Deep State 2.0 under Trump is working, this is it. It’s all about networks of influence, vested interests and manipulation of public opinion, in the U.S. and Iraq, in particular. But it’s also about oil and raw materials, and how in some ways, sectarian tensions represent only the surface of deeper drivers of conflict.

By perusing documents, speaking to sources and digging into obscure public records, Insurge Intelligence was able to follow a thread that has so far only been guessed at: what is driving the Trump administration’s thinking on Iraq, a country the U.S. invaded and occupied in 2003, and where it still fights an endless "war on terror"?

A window into the answer comes from a little-known U.S.-Iraqi network, operating through the front of a supposedly patriotic American campaign group. The network was active through the latter half of 2016, coinciding with the final stages of presidential campaigning, and focused on opposing President Obama’s Iraq policy.

The locus of the activity is an organization called the Committee to Destroy ISIS, set up in July 2016 by Sam Patten. Patten served in the George W. Bush administration as a senior State Department advisor from 2008 to 2009, and previously was Bush’s presidential campaign coordinator in 2000. He is executive director of the Committee, which describes itself as a group of Americans and Iraqis campaigning for the western Sunni region of Iraq to achieve independence from the central government in Baghdad.

In October 2016, Patten’s Committee to Destroy ISIS provided financial support to the Hudson Institute, a conservative Washington DC think-tank with direct ties to the Trump transition team, to produce a report which calls for the breakup of Iraq along sectarian lines.

The curious implications of the connection between Patten and the Hudson Institute report were first highlighted in October 2016 by Ali Hadi al-Musawi for 1001IraqiThoughts. The report, "West Iraq: The Search for Leaders and Leverage," describes itself as a "feasibility study" of western Iraq becoming an independent or autonomous Sunni statelet. The proposal would end up giving neighboring Saudi Arabia significant influence on the envisioned statelet.

The idea of breaking up Iraq is not new. It was, according to high-level sources in Jordan, actively discussed by Bush administration officials based on a vague plan brokered by Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a year before the 2003 invasion. Officials talked about engineering the sectarian partition of Iraq into three autonomous cantons for Sunnis, Kurds and Shi’as. This could make it easier for the U.S. to control the country and access the oil-rich regions.

The plan never left the drawing board, but the strategic thinking behind it lingered and continued to surface in neoconservative planning for the future of the Middle East. This thinking seeped across party political lines and reared its head repeatedly among Democrats. In 2006, Joe Biden, as the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee, advocated splitting Iraq into three along sectarian divisions. Since then, pundits and policymakers have circulated the idea. But the U.S. government never formally adopted it as even a potential scenario , until now.

The lead author of the Hudson Institute report is Michael Pregent, with research assistance provided by Kevin Truitte. Pregent is a former intelligence adviser to General David Petraeus who served in Iraq and heads up a separate campaign group known as Veterans Against The Deal (VATD), set up to oppose the nuclear deal with Iran brokered by the Obama administration.

VATD launched in late 2015 with a million-dollar ad campaign against the Iran deal, claiming it would give Iran billions of dollars to fund terrorism in the Middle East. But the group did not disclose its donors.

To be sure, Iran has played an increasingly abysmal role in escalating atrocities in Iraq and Syria, fueling anti-Sunni sectarianism and, in turn, emboldening anti-Shi’a extremists. Yet conversely, Michael Pregent and his backers appear to have a curious blindspot on the role of Turkey and the Gulf kingdoms in supporting extremists linked to al-Qaeda and ISIS.

The Koch-Bush-Trump nexus

At its launch, VATD’s board members included Pete Hegseth, CEO of another pro-Republican campaign group, Concerned Veterans for America. Hegseth’s group was financed almost entirely by the Koch brothers’ $400 million political donor network.

A year later, Hegseth met with Donald Trump as a potential candidate for the post of Secretary of Veterans Affairs. He didn’t get the job. But Michael Flynn, Trump’s one-time National Security Advisor (before his untimely resignation in February) was also previously an advisor to VATD.

VATD’s PR campaign was run by a Washington DC PR firm, Javelin DC, founded by Matt Latimer, President George W. Bush’s deputy director of speechwriting and chief speechwriter to former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Javelin’s co-founding partner is Keith Urbahn, who served as Rumsfeld’s chief of staff.

VATD executive director Michael Pregent is also closely connected to the Center for Security Policy, a Washington DC think-tank founded and run by former Reagan defense official Frank Gaffney.Pregent frequently appeared as a guest on Gaffney’s CSP ‘Secure Freedom’ radio podcast from 2015 to 2016.

Gaffney — a staunch advocate of the Obama Muslim birther conspiracy theory — was asked by Trump to help him select his national security team, according to sources speaking to the Wall Street Journal. The Trump team denied that Gaffney formally advised the transition, but did not confirm or deny whether he had met with Trump.

Pregent declined to comment when asked whether he agreed with Gaffney’s bizarre conspiracy theories.

Cambridge Analytica

In their Hudson Institute report, Pregent and his co-author Truitte “acknowledge support from the Committee to Destroy ISIS, which helped defray expenses incurred during the preparation of this study.”

One of Donald Trump’s senior foreign policy advisors at the time of publication was George Papadopoulos, a former research associate at the Hudson Institute from 2011 to 2015. During his Hudson Institute tenure, Papadopoulos worked under Richard Weitz, director of the think-tank’s Center for Political-Military Analysis.

Sam Patten, whose Committee to Destroy ISIS funded the Hudson Institute feasibility study for the breakup of Iraq, has his own ties to the Trump administration.

Patten’s biography on the website of his lobbying firm, Office of Sam Patten LLC, describes him as having worked with “one of London’s most innovative strategic communications companies to introduce new technologies and methodologies to US campaigns during the 2014 congressional cycle. This beta run of a cutting-edge electoral approach included taking micro-targeting to the next level. Currently this approach is being adopted by at least one major US presidential candidate.”

It’s now well-known that the London-based technology firm engaged in presidential campaigning in this way was Cambridge Analytica. The company, which has become notorious for its role in supporting Trump’s presidential campaign, previously supported the campaigns of Ted Cruz and Ben Carson.

A spokesperson for the firm told me that Patten had indeed worked for Cambridge Analytica at the Oregon office of its parent company, SCL Group. Patten had got involved early when the firm was actively fine-tuning its methodologies in 2014 before the presidential campaign.

Trump’s chief strategist in the White House, Steve Bannon, is on the board of Cambridge Analytica, which is now actively using its close ties to Trump’s inner circle to pitch for new government contracts.

Michael Flynn — who advised Michael Pregent’s VATD — also served as an advisor to Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Group, to help expand its contracting work. Under Trump, the firm has just finalized a contract with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center on a new counter-extremism program.

Among the firm’s main financiers is billionaire Robert Mercer, one of Trump’s chief political donors, and previously a key funder for Bannon’s Breitbart News, among other projects.

In 2014, Bannon was the Mercer family’s political advisor, and played a key role in rolling out Cambridge Analytica for the US Republican election scene — precisely when Patten worked there.

In July 2016, the month Patten launched the Committee to Destroy ISIS, Patten was interviewed by Steve Bannon on Breitbart News’ radio show to discuss the Committee’s vision for a partitioned Iraq. Breitbart also published an op-ed by Patten putting forward the same views.

Asked about his relationship with Steve Bannon, and whether he believed the Trump administration might end up taking on the Committee’s proposals for a breakup of Iraq, Patten said: “One outcome of the US election is the likely change in approach to foreign policy. The new administration includes voices that oppose making America’s regional policy a hostage to a single Gulf nation’s ambition, and has been actively calling for new ideas.”

Patten also heaped praise on the White House chief strategist: “We met Mr. Bannon last summer and he struck us a thoughtful person, an avid student of history and an original thinker. We hope that new thinking may challenge the cynical, status quo of recent years….”

I asked the U.S. State Department whether it supported the Committee’s position, or still stood by the traditional U.S. position of previous administrations supporting a unified Iraq. A spokesperson sent me an excerpt from Monday’s press briefing, in which an official confirmed that the Trump administration was moving to accommodate the possibility of a divided Iraq: “With respect to the unity of Iraq, you’re right, that is something we make a point of saying. But ultimately, these are all internal political discussions that Iraq needs to have with all ethnic groups resident in the country.”

This is the first time that the State Department has officially declared the U.S. government’s willingness to contemplate the prospect of an Iraq breakup of some kind. The reality on the ground is that the process is already underway, but the Trump administration’s position is a major step toward formalizing it.

But former Bush PR guru Sam Patten is not just connected to the Trump administration. He simultaneously works with certain Sunni factions in Iraq — some of whom were suspected by U.S. intelligence of having ties to the anti-U.S. insurgency.

Flirting with insurgents

In 2014, as Iraqi writer Ali Hadi al-Musawi reported, Patten separately registered as a foreign agent on behalf of the Sunni-led Al Arabiya bloc, an Iraqi political coalition formed by then-deputy prime minister of Iraq, Saleh al-Mutlaq. Under Saddam, al-Mutlaq was a member of the Ba’ath Party until the late 1970s when he was expelled for insisting that five Shi’ite men should receive a fair trial.

Since then, however, al-Mutlaq unofficially maintained contacts with the Ba’ath Party on many levels, according to Jordanian writer Mohammed Hussainy. Disclosure filings confirm that during this time, Patten was paid from al-Mutlaq’s Jordanian office in Amman.

According to the Daily Beast, “some in U.S. intelligence have suspected him [al-Mutlaq] of having ties to Sunni insurgents over the years.”

In January 2007, U.S. forces were reportedly fired on from al-Mutlaq’s office in Baghdad, during a raid on a suspected al-Qaeda safehouse. “One of the buildings from which Coalition Forces received heavy enemy fire, including grenade launches, was later identified as belonging to Dr. Saleh al-Mutlaq,” said a US statement. Al-Mutlaq denied the incident.

On April 17, 2007, al-Mutlaq called for Iraq’s insurgent groups to unite against the U.S. during an interview with Reuters from Amman. He said that insurgents must agree on a future vision of Iraq if the U.S. military did not abruptly pull out of the country.

His rapport with the wider Sunni population is questionable, though. A declassified December 2007 intelligence assessment by the British government’s Joint Intelligence Committee described al-Mutlaq as commanding “little support from the Sunni street.”

But the key point is that Sam Patten didn’t seem particularly concerned by the fact that the U.S. administration he once served suspected al-Mutlaq of siding with the insurgency.

Lobbying for the dynasty

Patten’s loyalties are further revealed from documents he filed in accordance with lobbying regulations.

Congressional filings for the Committee to Destroy ISIS reveal that Patten’s Iraqi benefactors go far beyond al-Mutlaq and the al-Arabiya Coalition, to one of Iraq’s most powerful and wealthiest Sunni clans. The dynasty once maintained friendly relations with Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party, but went on to forge close relations with the U.S. military occupation run by the Bush administration.

The first filing, filed and signed by Patten in August 2016, reveals that the Committee is majority-owned by a foreign entity listed in the disclosure form as “Rhodes Precast Concrete Ltd.” The documents show that Patten is essentially acting as a lobbyist for this “foreign entity.”

http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/robert-mercer-bankrolls-trump-and-cambridge-analytica

...

DN mayer int link to artl

huffpo

...Robert Mercer and Cruz had met before during a conference in February 2014, when Lee Hanley had invited them to the five-diamond Breakers resort in Palm Beach for a grilling session. Robert was impressed by Cruz’s intellect, according to a person at the meeting, but worried that the 43-year-old senator was too young and might struggle to capture voters’ imaginations. Still, Robert warmed to him over the course of many weekends at various Hanley homes. Apparently, Cruz can hold his alcohol (his preference is cabernet), which is a prized attribute in the Hanleys’ circle.

As the Mercers weighed whether to get involved in a presidential race, their calculus was quite different from that of other megadonors, most of whom run massive corporate empires. Various people who have worked with the Mercers on campaigns told me they didn’t pressure their candidates to adopt policies that would benefit the family’s financial interests, such as favorable regulations for hedge funds. Instead, their mission was a systemic one. Steve Hantler, a friend of Rebekah’s, says she was determined to “disrupt the consultant class,” which she saw as wasteful and self-serving. She wanted to disrupt the conservative movement, too. Rebekah saw the Koch network as hopelessly soft on trade and immigration and was hungry for a mechanism to promote a more hard-line ideology. According to Politico and other sources, she was frustrated at the time that no one was taking her seriously. As it happened, however, the family owned what seemed to be an ideal vehicle for achieving her goals.

Around 2012, Robert Mercer reportedly invested $5 million in a British data science company named SCL Group. Most political campaigns run highly sophisticated micro-targeting efforts to locate voters. SCL promised much more, claiming to be able to manipulate voter behavior through something called psychographic modeling. This was precisely the kind of work Robert valued. “There’s no data like more data,” he likes to say. Robert had made his money by accumulating piles of data on human behavior (markets might move in a certain direction when it rains in Paris, for instance), in order to make extremely precise and lucrative financial bets. Similarly, SCL claimed to be able to formulate complex psychological profiles of voters. These, it said, would be used totailor the most persuasive possible message, acting on that voter’s personality traits, hopes or fears. The firm has worked on campaigns in Argentina, Kenya, Ghana, Indonesia and Thailand; the Pentagon has used it to conduct surveys in Iran and Afghanistan. Best of all, from the Mercers’ perspective, SCL operated entirely outside the GOP apparatus. (A source close to Rebekah said she wanted a “results-oriented” consultant.) As Rebekah saw it, SCL would allow the Mercers to control the data operation of any campaign they supported, giving the family enormous influence over messaging and strategy.

And it would be Rebekah who would actually carry out this plan. Robert preferred to focus on his work at Renaissance, often operating from his Long Island mansion, Owl’s Nest. “He wouldn’t look under the hood, because that’s not what he does,” says Bob Perkins, one of Caddell’s associates who worked on the Smith Project. Besides, Rebekah was the political animal in the family. (Her older sister Jenji has practiced law; her younger sister Heather Sue is, like Robert, a competitive poker player).

This was a relatively new phenomenon. Rebekah isn't known to have been particularly political earlier in adulthood, while gaining a master’s degree in management science and engineering from Stanford, or in early motherhood. (She has four children with her French-born husband, who became an investment banker at Morgan Stanley.) But, after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, which significantly loosened restrictions on political spending, Rebekah decided it was time to “save America from becoming like socialist Europe,” as she has put it to several people. She started attending Koch events and donating to the Goldwater Institute, a right-wing think tank based in Arizona. The family’s political advocacy accelerated rapidly. It was in 2012 that she really attracted attention in GOP circles when, not long after Mitt Romney lost the presidential race, she stood up before a crowd of Romney supporters at the University Club of New York and delivered a scathing but detailed diatribe about his inadequate data and canvassing operation. “Who is that woman?” people in attendance asked.

With SCL, Rebekah finally had the chance to prove she could do better. The company’s American branch was renamed Cambridge Analytica, to emphasize the pedigree of its behavioral scientists. And Rebekah started flying Alexander Nix, the firm’s Old Etonian CEO, around the country to introduce him to her contacts. Nix, 41, is not a data scientist (his background is in financial services), but he is a showy salesman. Dressed in impeccably tailored suits, he is in his element on stage making presentations at large conferences. He can, however, come across as arrogant. (“I love the fact that you're telling your story, but I'm the one giving the interview,” he told me in a conversation.)

Alexander Nix at Cambridge Analytica's New York office. Rebekah Mercer was impressed by Nix's command of data and artistry on the polo field.

According to Perkins and Caddell, Rebekah and Nix met with them a few times to discuss how CA could use the Smith Project. Rebekah was clearly impressed by Nix. In one meeting, according to Perkins, she gushed about his polo prowess and asked him to show off cellphone photos of himself on horseback. (Nix says he doesn’t recall this meeting or others with the three. He also doesn’t remember displaying such a picture and can “think of no good reason why Bob or Pat would be interested in horses.") Thepolitical veterans were skeptical. “I didn’t understand what Nix was talking about,” Perkins told me bluntly. Caddell says he was perplexed when Nix wouldn’t show him the instruments CA used to predict voter behavior. He also thought the firm didn’t grasp the seismic shift underway in American politics. And yet to his great surprise, Bannon vouched for CA, telling Caddell its scientists were “geniuses.” Caddell knew that Bannon was beholden to the Mercers—they were, after all, Breitbart’s part-owners. According to The New York Times, however,Bannon was also vice president of CA’s board.“Even if he did not have a financial investment, he intellectually owned it, which was invaluable,” says a fellow political strategist. After he learned of Bannon’s involvement, Caddell stopped asking Bannon questions about CA.

In the end, Bannon helped seal the deal between the Mercers and Cruz, with CA as the glue. In the fall of 2014, Toby Neugebauer, a garrulous oil-and-gas billionaire from Texas, took Cruz and his campaign manager, Jeff Roe, to the “Breitbart Embassy,” the website’s Washington headquarters near the Capitol. Bannon flitted in and out. Nix, as usual, did most of the talking. After Neugebauer and Roe visited SCL’s London headquarters, the Cruz team agreed that CA could play a key role in their operation, running models and helping with research. However, it was made clear to Rebekah and Nix that the entire data analytics operation would be supervised by Chris Wilson, CEO of the research firm WPA. A source close to Cruz told me that Wilson’s operation had played a crucial role when Cruz ran for the Senate with only 2 percent name recognition in Texas and defeated a far better-known opponent. Why, then, was CA necessary at all? “No one ever said directly that the quid pro quo for hiring CA was that the Mercers would support Cruz,” says someone close to Roe. Nevertheless, after CA was engaged, Neugebauer took a private jet to the Bahamas to meet Robert Mercer on the Sea Owl. When Neugebauer asked him to donate to Cruz’s bid, Robert was matter-of-fact. The family would start with $11 million.

(Clockwise, starting top right) Jeff Roe, Ted Cruz, Alexander Nix

All modern political campaigns have to balance their need for exorbitant sums of money with the obsessions of the people who want to give them that money. Roe, the straight-talking manager of the Cruz operation, has observed that running a campaign is like trying to solve a Rubik’s cube of complicated personalities and uncomfortable dependencies. He has also told people that he is careful not to get too close to the donors who make his campaigns possible, because they can be so easily annoyed by the most trivial of things—his laugh, for instance, or the way he eats a bread roll.

In the case of the Cruz campaign, the donor obsession in question was Cambridge Analytica. And it wasn’t long before Roe and his team suspected that Nix had promised them a more impressive product than he could deliver. On March 4, 2015, Cruz, Roe, Wilson and others gathered in the Hyatt in Washington D.C. for an all-day meeting with Nix and a group of CA senior executives. Wilson took notes on his computer. According to multiple members of the Cruz team, Wilson was dismayed to learn that CA’s models weren’t fully ready for his focus groups the following week. As far as the team could tell, the only data CA possessed that the campaign didn’t already have appeared to be culled from Facebook. In addition, they recalled, CA hadn’t set itself up with Data Trust, the Republican National Committee’s repository of voter information. At one point, they recall, Nix explained that the National Rifle Association’s database of members would be a valuable way to target donors. Wilson typed an emoji with rolling eyes next to the statement because it was so obvious. He told people that he came away thinking, “Red flag, red flag, red flag.”

In response to an extensive set of questions, Nix disputed this account of the meeting. He denied that Cambridge Analytica had obtained any data via Facebook—a source of controversy for the firm ever since The Guardian reported in 2015 that CA based its data on research “spanning tens of millions of Facebook users, harvested largely without their permission.” Nix also claimed that it was the Cruz team that didn’t have access to the RNC’s Data Trust for much of the cycle and that “all data used for the majority of the campaign was provided by Cambridge Analytica.”However, Mike Shields, then the RNC’s chief of staff and Data Trust’s senior adviser, told me the Cruz campaign was in fact the second to sign an agreement with Data Trust, in 2014.

Meanwhile, the red flags kept coming. Wilson found the data scientists that CA sent to Houston to be highly efficient at the day-to-day work of his research operation. But according to Cruz staffers, when he began to test CA’s specialized models, he found that they were notably off, with, for example, some male voters miscategorized as women. In phone surveys, staffers said, CA’s predictions fell short of the 85 percent accuracy the campaign expected. (“Different models have differing levels of accuracy,” Nix said in his response. “I suspect these numbers have been taken out of context to make us look bad. In many previous articles the Cruz campaign have highly rated the quality of our data scientists.”) By September, CA’s first six-month contract was up. A CA employee in the campaign’s Houston office accidentally left the invoice in the photocopier, and Wilson happened to fish it out. The invoice totaled an eye-popping $3,119,052 for work that Wilson estimated to be worth $600,000 at most. “I can’t fucking believe it,” Wilson told Roe, who concurred.

Jeff Roe (left) with Ted Cruz (right), who ultimately fell out of Rebekah Mercer's favor. “We felt to some extent she was being manipulated by Bannon," a Cruz adviser said.

Nix disputed this account too, noting that the firm’s fee was “clearly stated in our statement of work and contract.” However, a former consultant for the campaign, Tommy Sears, attended budget meetings “for two if not three days” over the matter. “There was an understanding between both parties that the totality of the contract through March 2016 would be $5.5 million,” he says. “The heartburn felt by the Cruz team was that over $3 million had already been spent by September 1, 2015.”

When the Cruz team decided not to pay the full $3 million, bedlam ensued. A phone call was scheduled with Rebekah, Bannon and CA’s attorney. “I understand she’s a nice lady,” Wilson says politely of Rebekah. According to multiple people on the call, she accused Wilson of undermining CA. Bannon, meanwhile, unleashed a torrent of profanities at the Cruz team. Someone on the call gave me a censored version of his outburst: “The only reason this campaign is where it is right now is because of our people and I. My recommendation to the Mercers is just to pull them out of there and we’ll have them on another campaign by Monday.” Bannon’s language was so foul it was difficult to listen to, says one person on the call who had never met him before. Another of the political pros, who knew Bannon well, wasn’t shocked. “That’s Steve doing business,” he says.

The Cruz team was taken aback by Rebekah’s reaction. Some even wondered if she’d been given all the facts. One person who was close to the campaign says, “She is somewhere between the daughter of a brilliant hedge fund manager and mathematician and somebody who runs a bakery in New York. She clearly has a skill set, but the skill set we’re discussing here regarding the understanding of the value of data and analytics doesn’t fall into that area. She is operating under the information she’s been given.”...

http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/mercers/

The article we talked about this morning may contain the reason why the outcomes of two recent major elections, Brexit and the US Presidential election, did not turn out the predicted way. Cambridge Analytica, described in the article, was involved in both. Using techniques with the internet to influence voters out of the sight of pollsters while evading campaign laws and spending limits.

The URL to the article, Google, democracy and the truth about internet search follows.

theguardian.XXX/technology/2016/dec/04/google-democracy-truth-internet-search-facebook

The following excerpts from the article are the parts that really struck me.

"Cambridge Analytica, an American-owned company based in London, was employed by both the Vote Leave campaign and the Trump campaign. Dominic Cummings, the campaign director of Vote Leave, has made few public announcements since the Brexit referendum but he did say this: “If you want to make big improvements in communication, my advice is – hire physicists.”"

"Steve Bannon, founder of Breitbart News and the newly appointed chief strategist to Trump, is on Cambridge Analytica’s board and it has emerged that the company is in talks to undertake political messaging work for the Trump administration. It claims to have built psychological profiles using 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters. It knows their quirks and nuances and daily habits and can target them individually."

“They were using 40-50,000 different variants of ad every day that were continuously measuring responses and then adapting and evolving based on that response,” says Martin Moore of Kings College. Because they have so much data on individuals and they use such phenomenally powerful distribution networks, they allow campaigns to bypass a lot of existing laws.

“It’s all done completely opaquely and they can spend as much money as they like on particular locations because you can focus on a five-mile radius or even a single demographic. Fake news is important but it’s only one part of it. These companies have found a way of transgressing 150 years of legislation that we’ve developed to make elections fair and open.”

"Did such micro-targeted propaganda – currently legal – swing the Brexit vote? We have no way of knowing. Did the same methods used by Cambridge Analytica help Trump to victory? Again, we have no way of knowing. This is all happening in complete darkness. We have no way of knowing how our personal data is being mined and used to influence us. We don’t realise that the Facebook page we are looking at, the Google page, the ads that we are seeing, the search results we are using, are all being personalised to us. We don’t see it because we have nothing to compare it to. And it is not being monitored or recorded. It is not being regulated. We are inside a machine and we simply have no way of seeing the controls. Most of the time, we don’t even realise that there are controls."

Along with the following chart.

===

“It’s an information war,” says Albright. “That’s what I keep coming back to.”

But it’s where it goes from here that’s truly frightening. I ask him how it can be stopped. “I don’t know. I’m not sure it can be. It’s a network. It’s far more powerful than any one actor.”

So, it’s almost got a life of its own?“Yes, and it’s learning. Every day, it’s getting stronger.”

https://medium.com/@d1gi/the-election2016-micro-propaganda-machine-383449cc1fba#.ckslpl36q

The more people who search for information about Jews, the more people will see links to hate sites, and the more they click on those links (very few people click on to the second page of results) the more traffic the sites will get, the more links they will accrue and the more authoritative they will appear. This is an entirely circular knowledge economy that has only one outcome: an amplification of the message. Jews are evil. Women are evil. Islam must be destroyed. Hitler was one of the good guys.

[Analysis Fake news and a 400-year-old problem: we need to resolve the ‘post-truth’ crisis

The internet echo chamber satiates our appetite for pleasant lies and reassuring falsehoods and has become the defining challenge of the 21st century

Background and methods:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

SCL Group calls itself a "global election management agency"^[5] known for involvement "in military disinformation campaigns to social media branding and voter targeting".^[3] SLC’s involvement in the political world has been primarily in the developing world where it has been used by the military and politicians to study and manipulate public opinion and political will. SCL claims to have been successful to help foment coups.^[3]

When SCL Elections formed Cambridge Analytica in 2013 it hired researchers from Cambridge University, hence the name.^[6] CA collects data on voters using sources such as demographics, consumer behavior, internet activity, and other public and private sources.According to The Guardian, CA is using psychological data derived from millions of Facebook users, largely without users' permission or knowledge.^[6] Another source of information is the "Cruz Crew" mobile app that tracks physical movements and contacts and invades personal data more than any other app of presidential candidates.^[7]

"Today in the United States we have somewhere close to four or five thousand data points on every individual. ... So we model the personality of every adult across the United States, some 230 million people."

— Alexander Nix (Chief Executive, Cambridge Analytica), October 2016.^[8]

Information is analyzed using “data enhancement and audience segmentation techniques” providing “psychographic analysis” for a “deeper knowledge of the target audience”. The company uses the OCEAN scale of personality traits.^[2][9] Using what it calls "behavioral microtargeting" the company indicates that it can predict "needs" of subjects and how these needs may change over time. Services then can be individually targeted for the benefit of its clients from the political arena, governments, and companies providing "a better and more actionable view of their key audiences." According to Sasha Issenberg, CA indicates that it can tell things about an individual he might not even know about himself.^[1]

Cambridge Analytica derives much of its personality data on online surveys which it conducts on an ongoing basis. For each political client, the firm narrows voter segments from 32 different personality styles it attributes to every adult in the U.S. The personality data informs the tone of the language used in ad messages or voter contact scripts, while additional data is used to determine voters' stances on particular issues.^[10]

The data gets updated with monthly surveys, asking about political preferences and how people get the information they use to make decisions. It also covers consumer topics about different brands and preferred products, building up an image of how someone shops as much as how they vote.^[11]

Activities:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

United States of America:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

2016 presidential election:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

CA's involvement in the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries became known in July 2015.^[3] As of December 2015 CA prided itself to have collected up to 5,000 data points on over 220 million Americans.^[9] At that time Robert Mercer was a major supporter of Ted Cruz.^[1][12] The Mercer family funded CA directly and indirectly through several super-PACs as well as through payments via Cruz's campaign.^[6]

Ted Cruz became an early major client of CA in the 2016 Presidential Campaign. Just prior to the Iowa caucuses the Cruz campaign had spent $3m for CA's services.^[13] with additional money coming from allied Super Pacs.^[13] After Cruz's win at the Iowa caucus CA was credited with having been able to identify and motivate potential voters.^[14][15] Ultimately the Cruz campaign spent $5.8 million on work by CA.^[16]

Ben Carson was a second client of CA; his campaign had paid $220,000 for "data management" and "web service" as reported in October 2015.^[2] Marco Rubio's campaign was supported by Optimus Consulting.^[17]

After Cruz dropped out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination in May 2016, Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah started to support Trump.^[18] In August it became known that CA followed their allegiance and worked for Trump's presidential campaign.^[16][18] Trump's campaign also worked with Giles Parscale.^[16]In September, the Trump campaign spent $5 million with CA to target potential voters.^[19]

After Trump's win of the presidential election on November 8, 2016, Matthew Oczkowski, Head of Product for CA, indicated that "(o)ur internal data showed the race tightening in the last few weeks of the election because of previously hidden trends within voter sampling and demographic abnormalities in absentee ballots and early voting (particularly in rural areas). These trends, in part, were responsible for the boost towards the president-elect in the industrial Midwest. Our models predicted most of the late movement correctly."^[20] Alexander Nix indicated that CA's involvement took an "instrumental part" in the win.^[20]

2014 midterm elections:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Cambridge Analytica had entered the U.S. market in 2012^[21] (or 2013),^[1] and was involved in 44 U.S. congressional, US Senate and state-level elections in the 2014 midterm elections^[21]

The company worked with the John BoltonSuper PAC on a major digital and TV campaign focused on senate races in Arkansas, North Carolina and New Hampshire, and helped turnout voters for the Republican candidates in those states. Two of the Republican candidates backed by the Bolton SuperPAC, Thom Tillis in North Carolina and Tom Cotton in Arkansas, won their Senate bids, while Scott Brown lost in New Hampshire. The PAC ran 15 different spots each in North Carolina and Arkansas and 17 in New Hampshire—mostly online with some targeted directly to households using Dish and DirecTV. All were intended to push Mr. Bolton's national security agenda.^[22]

Cambridge Analytica also supported Thom Tillis's successful campaign to oust Kay Hagan as the senator for North Carolina. The firm was credited for its role in identifying a sizeable cluster of North Carolinians who prioritized foreign affairs—which encouraged Tillis to shift the conversation from state-level debates over education policy to charges that incumbent Kay Hagan had failed to take ISIS’s rise seriously.^[23]

United Kingdom:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

2016 Brexit referendum:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

CA became involved in the 2016 Brexit referendum supporting "persuadable" voters to vote for leaving the European Union.^[24]

Privacy concerns:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

The use of personal data collected without knowledge or permission to establish sophisticated models of user's personalities raises ethical and privacy issues.^[6] CA operates out of the United States; its operations would be illegal in Europe with its stricter privacy laws.^[7] While Cruz is outspoken about protecting personal information from the government, his data base of CA has been described as "political-voter surveillance".^[7]

Regarding CA's use of Facebook users, a speaker for CA indicated that these users gave permission when signing up with the provider, while Facebook declared that "misleading people or misusing information" is in violation of Facebook's policies.^[6] Facebook indicated that is investigating the matter.^[6]

While Nix suggests that data collection and microtargetting benefits the voters as they receive messages about issues they care about, digital rights protection groups are concerned that private information is collected , stored, and shared while individuals are "left in the dark about (it)" and have no control.^[19]

References:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#cite_ref-issenberg_1-1) ^c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#cite_ref-issenberg_1-2) ^d(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#cite_ref-issenberg_1-3) ^e(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#cite_ref-issenberg_1-4) Sasha Issenberg (November 12, 2015). "Cruz-Connected Data Miner Aims to Get Inside U.S. Voters' Heads". Bloomberg. Retrieved February 2, 2016.
^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#cite_ref-wpost_2-1) ^c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#cite_ref-wpost_2-2) Frances Stead Sellers (October 19, 2015). "Cruz campaign paid $750,000 to 'psychographic profiling' company". Washington Post. Retrieved February 7, 2016.
^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#cite_ref-politico_3-1) ^c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#cite_ref-politico_3-2) ^d(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#cite_ref-politico_3-3) ^e(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#cite_ref-politico_3-4) Kenneth Vogel (July 7, 2015). "Cruz partners with donor's 'psychographic' firm". Politico. Retrieved December 27, 2015.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Alex Altman (October 10, 2016). "Silent Partners". Time magazine: 44.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ SCL Group website
^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#cite_ref-guardian_6-1) ^c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#cite_ref-guardian_6-2) ^d(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#cite_ref-guardian_6-3) ^e(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#cite_ref-guardian_6-4) ^f(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#cite_ref-guardian_6-5) Davies, H (December 11, 2015). "Ted Cruz using firm that harvested data on millions of unwitting Facebook users". The Guardian. Retrieved February 7,2016.
^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#cite_ref-ap0216_7-1) ^c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#cite_ref-ap0216_7-2) Michael Biesecker, Julie Bykowicz (February 11, 2016). "Cruz app data collection helps campaign read minds of voters". Associated Press. Retrieved February 13, 2016.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Cheshire, Tom (21 October 2016). "Behind the scenes at Donald Trump's UK digital war room". Sky News. Archived from the original on 21 October 2016.
^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#cite_ref-ca_9-1) "About Us". Cambridge Analytica. Retrieved December 27, 2015.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Cruz's Data Company Works Into the Night After Big $3 Million Payout". adage.com. Retrieved 2016-02-26.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Inside the Tech That Puts Political Ads on Your Screen". DC Inno. Retrieved 2016-02-26.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Lichtblau E, Stevenson A (April 10, 2015). "Hedge-Fund Magnate Robert Mercer Emerges as a Generous Backer of Cruz". New York Times. Retrieved February 6,2016.
^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#cite_ref-guardian2_13-1) Harry Davies (February 1, 2016). "Ted Cruz erased Trump's Iowa lead by spending millions on voter targeting". The Guardian. Retrieved February 7, 2016.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Sasha Issenberg (February 2, 2016). "How Ted Cruz Engineered His Iowa Triumph". Bloomberg. Retrieved February 8, 2016.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Cambridge Analytica Congratulates Senator Ted Cruz on Iowa Caucus Win". PR Newswire. February 2, 2016. Retrieved February 8, 2016.
^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#cite_ref-adage_16-1) ^c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#cite_ref-adage_16-2) Kate Kaye (August 24, 2016). "Trump Spending With Cambridge Analytica Looks Like Peanuts Compared to Cruz". Advertising Age. Retrieved October 4,2016.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Sean J. Miller (February 2, 2016). "Organization and Analytics Help Take Down Trump in Iowa". Campaigns & elections. Retrieved February 23, 2016.
^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#cite_ref-nr_18-1) Eliana Johnson (August 5, 2016). "The GOP nominee makes a late attempt at data-driven targeted messaging". National Review. Retrieved October 4, 2016.
^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#cite_ref-nbcnews_19-1) Kate Brannelly (November 4, 2016). "Trump Campaign Pays Millions to Overseas Big Data Firm". NBC News. Retrieved November 5, 2016.
^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#cite_ref-canov_20-1) "Cambridge Analytica Congratulates President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence". Cambridge Analytica. November 9, 2016. Retrieved November 9, 2016.
^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#cite_ref-wp_21-1) Sellers, Frances Stead (2015-10-19). "Cruz campaign paid $750,000 to 'psychographic profiling' company". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2016-02-26.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Much-Hyped Data Firm's Promise Could Be Tested in Iowa". adage.com. Retrieved 2016-02-26.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Cruz-Connected Data Miner Aims to Get Inside U.S. Voters' Heads". Bloomberg.com/politics. Retrieved 2016-02-26.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Rhys Blakely (September 22, 2016). "Data scientists target 20 million new voters for Trump". The Times. Retrieved October 4, 2016.

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Official website

Categories:

SCL (Strategic Communication Laboratories) Group is a private British behavioral research and strategic communication company. SCL is known as Cambridge Analytica in the United States.^[1] It performs data mining and data analysis on its audience. Based on results, communications will be specifically targeted to key audience groups to modify behavior in accordance with the goal of SCL's client. The company describes itself as a "global election management agency"^[2] London-based SCL was founded by Nigel Oakes who serves as its CEO.^[3]

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In 1990, Nigel Oakes who had a background in TV production and advertising founded the Behaviour Dynamics Institute (BDI) as a research facility for strategic communication.^[3] The study of mass behavior and how to change it led him to establish Strategic Communication Laboratories in 1993.^[2] Oakes thought that in order to shift mass opinion academic insights as gained through psychologists and anthropologist at BDI should be applied and would be more successful than traditional advertising methods.^[4] BDI became an non-profit affiliate of SCL.

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After an initial commercial success, SCL expanded into military and political arenas. It became known for involvement "in military disinformation campaigns to social media branding and voter targeting".^[5] According to its website, SCL has participated in over 25 international political and electoral campaigns since 1994.^[2] Since 2009, it has also started to apply its operations for disaster management and disease prevention.^[2]

SLC’s involvement in the political world has been primarily in the developing world where it has been used by the military and politicians to study and manipulate public opinion and political will. It uses what have been called “psy ops” to provide insight into the thinking of the target audience.^[4] SCL claims to have been successful to help foment coups.^[5] According to its website, SCL has influenced elections in Italy, Latvia, Ukraine, Albania, Romania, South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Mauritius, India, Indonesia, Thailand, Taiwan, Colombia, Antigua, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, St. Kitts & Nevis, Trinidad & Tobago.^[2] While the company initially got involved in elections in the United Kingdom, it ceased to do so after 1997 because staff members did not exhibit the same "aloof sensibility" as with projects abroad.^[4]

SCL claims that its methodology has been approved or endorsed by agencies of the Government of the United Kingdom and the Federal government of the United States, among others.^[6]

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Main article: Cambridge Analytica

SCL formed Cambridge Analytica to participate in the election process in the United States. It entered the U.S. market in 2012, and was involved in 44 U.S. congressional, US Senate and state-level elections in the 2014 midterm elections^[7] In 2015 it was disclosed that the company had entered the Republican Party presidential primaries, 2016, primarily in support of Ted Cruz. CA is heavily funded by hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, a major supporter of Ted Cruz.^[5]

References:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Sellers, Frances Stead (2015-10-19). "Cruz campaign paid $750,000 to 'psychographic profiling' company". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2016-03-07.
^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCL_Group#cite_ref-scl_2-1) ^c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCL_Group#cite_ref-scl_2-2) ^d(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCL_Group#cite_ref-scl_2-3) ^e(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCL_Group#cite_ref-scl_2-4) SCL Group website
^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCL_Group#cite_ref-bb_3-1) "Nigel Oakes". Bloomberg Business. Retrieved February 9, 2016.
^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCL_Group#cite_ref-issenberg_4-1) ^c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCL_Group#cite_ref-issenberg_4-2) Sasha Issenberg (November 12, 2015). "Cruz-Connected Data Miner Aims to Get Inside U.S. Voters' Heads". Bloomberg. Retrieved February 2, 2016.
^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCL_Group#cite_ref-politico_5-1) ^c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCL_Group#cite_ref-politico_5-2) Vogel, Kenneth P (July 7, 2015). "Cruz partners with donor's 'psychographic' firm". Politico. Retrieved December 27, 2015.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ SCL Elections
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Sellers, Frances Stead (2015-10-19). "Cruz campaign paid $750,000 to 'psychographic profiling' company". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2016-03-07.

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Behaviour Dynamics Institute

Categories:

... vogel politico

...

Cambridge Analytica is connected to a British firm called SCL Group,which provides governments, political groups and companies around the world with services ranging from military disinformation campaigns to social media branding and voter targeting.

So far, SCL’s political work has been mostly in the developing world — where it has boasted of its ability to help foment coups. Cambridge Analytica entered the competitive U.S. political data market only last year.

Cambridge Analytica is owned at least in part by the family of the press-shy New York hedge fund manager Robert Mercer, multiple sources confirmed to POLITICO. The Mercers this year provided the lion’s share of the $37 million raised by a quartet of unlimited-money super PACs supporting Cruz’s campaign for the GOP presidential nomination. Cruz’s presidential campaign has contracted with Cambridge Analytica to provide data services, and the company has had talks with at least one of those super PACs, according to sources.

It’s not uncommon for political campaigns, parties and PACs to pay huge contracts for data and other services to companies affiliated with their consultants. But it’s less common for such contracts to go to firms affiliated with the donors funding the whole enterprise.

Cruz spokesman Rick Tyler said Chris Wilson, the campaign’s director of research and analytics, is using Cambridge Analytica to buildmodels that identify and sort persuadable voters in early primary states by six key personality types, which will be used to target the campaign’s outreach.

===

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/features/2015-11-12/is-the-republican-party-s-killer-data-app-for-real-

no links

I had spent about a half hour in the headquarters of Cambridge Analytica before I realized why my arrival at the tech firm—in a low-rise office building lodged inconspicuously on a dead-end service alley behind the Japanese Embassy, a block from Piccadilly—had been greeted so warmly. The company’s staff had been primed to attend to a psychological abnormality. “You’re in the top half percent of openness for everyone in Pennsylvania, which is quite stark,” marveled analytics director Alexander Tayler. “This is like a three-sigma event, to find someone that far out!”

I had traveled to London because the mysterious capability Tayler showcased with his welcome—to segment the American electorate not only by ideological predisposition but also by individual psychological characteristics—amounts to the most audacious new analytical innovation foisted on American politics this year. Of the thousands of companies making money off the presidential election, Cambridge Analytica also boasts the most compelling patrimony. Despite being a new arrival to American politics, it is an offshoot of an established British firm, SCL, which made its name advising governments and militaries on what it called “psy ops.” Even when it rebranded itself to compete for American political clients, as a specialist in profiling individuals’ personality characteristics in order to better tailor messages, SCL, curiously, chose not to obscure its foreign heritage.

Instead, the company swathed itself in an exaggerated Anglophilia, calling itself Cambridge Analytica. The firm initially kept a low profile in the U.S., but was outed as a vendor to Ted Cruz’s campaign in July, when Politico reported that its investors included the family of Robert Mercer, a secretive hedge-fund investor who also happened to be one of the most generous donors to Cruz’s super-PAC. Mercer wasn’t talking publicly about his investment, but I could understand why someone with a background as a coder and a willingness to spend down his net worth, millions at a time, to support conservative causes was drawn to the company. Amid the appetite for high-tech innovations in Republican campaigns, Cambridge Analytica could claim it was not merely matching the Democrats—it was going where the opposition had not.

In my years of writing about the use of data in politics, other firms had developed a variety of profiles of me using public and private sources; each time I was told what campaigners who had never interacted with me assumed about my identity or attitudes. I had seen statistical models anticipating my likelihood of casting a ballot in various upcoming elections, of being married, of owning a gun. In an ideal world, campaigns would have access to this information from a less speculative source: my telling a canvasser how I intended to vote, a warranty form on which I had identified a spouse, or the inclusion of my name on a publicly available list of licensed hunters or private membership rolls shared by the National Rifle Association. But if those were not available, or out of date, statistical models could make inferences from facts that were available. Algorithms could trawl through as many of thousands of different variables—my past political behavior, consumer choices, the demographic composition of the Philadelphia neighborhood in which I was registered—and isolate the interaction of a few that would determine how much I statistically resembled people who were known to be married, or to own a gun. Campaigns could then communicate with me based on those calculated likelihoods.

“If we were marketing Ted Cruz to you, we would emphasize the fact that he’s in a new generation of Republican leaders, that he’s not afraid to stand out from the crowd.”

Harris MacLeod

Cambridge Analytica’s assessment differed in one crucial way: The firm promised to tell me things I might not even know about myself. It claimed to predict where I would fall on the five-factor personality model, which won widespread adoption by psychologists starting in the 1980s as a standard inventory of universal traits known as “the Big Five.” According to Cambridge Analytica, I fell in the middle range for extroversion. When it came to neuroticism, I was in the seventieth percentile. I scored very low on conscientiousness and agreeableness, a combination which, when paired with my high openness, defined my individualism. “Fanciful/Imaginative Types are unconventional nonconformists who pride themselves on being different from others,” read a potted description attached to my numerical assessment. “In extreme cases they might be regarded as eccentric, but in most cases they are perceived by others as complex, well-read, imaginative and industrious.”

Of all the microtargeting profiles of myself I had seen, none had flattered my self-concept like this one. Its predictions already seemed more plausible than those of the Democratic data warehouse that had my religion pegged as Lutheran—a prediction likely tethered to the only slightly less dubious profiling of my ethnicity as German. (I presume that was the result of an algorithm which heavily weighted my surname’s Teutonic build and the preponderance of white people in my census tract who report German ancestry.)

“And so you can imagine with that information as well as all the other information about your political orientation it is possible to put you with the like-minded people to receive a very, very specific communication,”Cambridge CEO Alexander Nix told me.

The next day, I met with two of the employees Nix identified as the firm’s “message people” to understand what that communication might look like. Tim Glister is a former copywriter and one-time literary agent from Newcastle; Harris MacLeod a Nova Scotian who worked as a political journalist in Ottawa. Both spent much of 2014 working for Cambridge Analytica’s marquee American clients. Harris worked for John Bolton’s super-PAC, which was attempting to bring more attention to national-security issues in three select Senate races ahead of a prospective presidential campaign by the hawkish former UN ambassador. Glister was dispatched to North Carolina, where he was tasked with helping the state Republican party on behalf ofThom Tillis’s ultimately successful campaign to defeat Senator Kay Hagan. “I was English enough to be an entertaining curiosity,” he said.

I showed them my personality scores, and they nodded knowledgeably as I read through the description. Cambridge Analytica’s standard client pitch uses the example of gun rights to illustrate how a campaign could shape its messaging to voters based on assumptions about their individual personalities. “If you are extroverted and conscientious, you understand the argument about the Second Amendment in terms of the responsibilities that accompany it,” Nix says. For “closed and agreeable people, this is really about understanding these peoples’ need for tradition and value and community and family.” That made enough sense, but most campaigns were not trying to change voters’ views on fundamental issues like gun control, or their intensity of feeling about them. I had a harder time imagining how a campaign would tailor its messaging about a candidate based on the awareness that I was likely to be an “Individualistic and Imaginative Type.”

“If we were marketing Ted Cruz to you, we would emphasize the fact that he’s in a new generation of Republican leaders, that he’s not afraid to stand out from the crowd,” MacLeod said. “He’s got new ideas, fresh ideas, innovative ideas—you’ll be able to file your taxes on a postcard, whatever, abolish the IRS.”

“Pushing that even further, if you are low-conscientiousness,” Glister added, “it’s about being the Washington outsider, blowing through the received way of doing things.”

“You’re not the type of person where we’d say, Well, we have a ten-point plan,” he went on. “That’s not going to resonate with you. It would be ‘everything is bigger in Texas’—it would be bold visuals, bold statements.”

As he made his way through an office in which the median attire fell somewhere between ad agency and hackathon, Nix—a bespectacled, lanky man with the angular affect of the comedian Stephen Merchant—stood out among his own employees for carrying himself like a City banker. Nix had worked as a financial analyst before joining Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL, a little more than a decade ago as a director helping to guide its global expansion. Since then, he has been the face of Cambridge Analytica to prospective clients in the U.S., and has a salesman’s slick patter even if he often seems to be speaking a foreign language. When he deployed phrases like “the guys who’ve got guns under their pillows because they don’t want to get burgled”—describing a potential Second Amendment constituency—I wondered how he would be received in often-insular campaign conference rooms, where I knew difference was not always prized. “He has no American political sense whatsoever,” an experienced Republican consultant who has met with Nix told me.

Indeed, the fact that this London-based firm was already working for a well-funded American presidential campaign represented a dramatic inversion of the natural order. Political consulting, after all, has been among of the most durable of the United States’ exports. The world’s political class often maintains a conflicted view of American professionals: envious of the sophistication of their extravagant electoral pageants; resentful of the idea that the mere fact of their passport gives them standing to direct strategy in countries they are often visiting for the first time. The idea of the dispassionate political legionnaire has been a trope familiar enough to Hollywood at least since 1986, when Sidney Lumet’s Power introduced its protagonist (played by Richard Gere) as a consultant who finds himself an unlikely arriviste in a Latin American political scrum. Little has changed: This fall, Sandra Bullock plays an operative who parachutes in to help a Bolivian presidential candidate in Our Brand Is Crisis, based on the 2005 documentary of the same name about the Bolivian adventures of James Carville, Stan Greenberg, and Bob Shrum.

In each case, the Americans play the same role: jet-set hirelings, alternately ruthless and naïve, imposing cookie-cutter strategies on campaigns worldwide. “Politics in country after country has become as similar as Starbucks—and about as surprising. The assumption underpinning the international consultancy business is that the same principles apply everywhere, that a foreign country is just like another swing state, just like Ohio,” James Harding wrote in Alpha Dogs, his book about American consultants who pioneered cross-border political consulting. “The battle is ever more for hearts, not minds: America’s winning and irresistible formula has been to repackage an intellectual argument inside an emotional appeal.”

When he launched Strategic Communication Laboratories in 1993, Nigel Oakes embraced the image of the worldly mercenary, albeit with an English accent. If the Americans abroad justified their emotional appeals as the result of instincts honed in the world’s most intense political environment, Oakes—a former Monte Carlo TV producer who had gained notoriety when he dated the daughter of the Queen’s cousin—marketed the rigor of Britain’s ancient universities. Oakes, who had also worked for the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, argued that traditional advertising was incapable of effecting the type of mass opinion shifts necessary for social change. Instead, he marshaled scholarly research, much of it from psychologists and anthropologists filtered through the Behavioral Dynamics Institute, an affiliated non-profit that Oakes had established as “a research facility for understanding group behaviour.”

Over the course of the 1990s, Oakes applied upon this academic foundation a gloss of new technology. When he advised IndonesianPresident Abdurrahman Wahid, the country’s first credibly elected leader, Oakes set up a control room filled with computers, oversized monitors, and TV screens dubbed the Jakarta International Media Research Centre. A photograph of the high-tech installation still appears in the company’s pitch presentation without any description of what exactly Oakes’s team was monitoring on those screens. “It was fun and exciting, but also a bit dangerous because everything he did was so secretive,” an Indonesian who worked for Oakes told The Independent in 2000. “We didn't know the purpose of it all, we just did what he asked. We called him Mr. Bond because he is English, and because he is such a mystery.”

In its early years, Oakes’s company worked with the Conservative Party, according to an executive, but after the 1997 elections his firm pulled back from British politics. SCL tacticians had found that they were unable to maintain the same aloof sensibility that their London-based workforce brought to overseas politics. “It’s difficult to ask people in their own country to work on a campaign they don’t support,” says Nix, who joined fellow Etonian Oakes’s firm in 2003 as a director guiding its expansion. Over the next decade, SCL continued its international work, steering as many as ten campaigns for prime minister or president annually in countries as far-flung as South Africa, Argentina, Thailand, and Italy. “Literally everywhere around the world from first world to developing countries, from quite modern elections to really quiet complex rural communities that have very limited technologies and a lot more field work and grassroots consulting and so forth,” Nix says. “Everywhere but the United States.”

In 2010, Nix traveled to the United States to learn more about the country’s political sector but left discouraged by the insularity of the consulting industry. Instead, seeing military and security budgets boosted by post-September 11 spending, SCL expanded the range of services it could sell to governments. With former British Defence Minister Sir Geoffrey Pattie installed as the firm’s chairman, SCL in 2005 relaunched as a specialist in “psychological warfare,” designing communication that could be deployed to demotivate military opponents or influence civilian populations in conflict areas. A few years later, the firm launched SCL Social, a non-profit division that focused on changing behavior for humanitarian ends, still under the rubric of what its employees casually call “psy ops.” For both NGO and governmental clients, SCL analysts developed programs to increase condom use across the Caribbean, improve the effectiveness of tsunami warnings delivered by text message, and guide a Unicef project to discourage child marriage in South Sudan. “We used to be in the business of mindbending for political purposes, but now we are in the business of saving lives,” Oakes said.

After the 2012 election, Nix found an American marketplace far more receptive to his entreaties. The overseas work in conflict zones amounted to a promising calling card, a new comparative advantage over entrenched American political firms.“This is really trying to use psychology to understand why hostile audiences do what they do, and to use this methodology to deconstruct that behavior and then use communication to try and change attitudes and ultimately behavior,” Nix says. “Persuading somebody to vote in a certain way,” he goes on, “is really very similar to persuading 14- to 25-year-old boys in Indonesia to not join Al Qaeda.”

Among those apparently motivated by this pitch was the family of Robert Mercer, whom Forbes has repeatedly ranked among the country’s highest-earning hedge-fund managers. Mercer made his fortune as co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies, a Long Island fund unusually proud of its appreciation for academic credentials over investing experience. In that respect, Mercer was a typical Renaissance man, having worked at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Center before entering finance, trying to teach computers to recognize human language.He remains uncommonly discreet: articles about him invariably note that few pictures of him exist and perhaps the only known detail about his personal life—that he is a toy-train hobbyist—emerged when he filed a $2 million suit against a model-railroad builder for overcharging him on a project.

Mercer is the type of wealthy citizen most emboldened by the Citizens United decision, unlikely to engage in the greasy work of bundling others’ contributions but happy to directly sponsor his preferred causes. Along with his wife, Diana, Mercer gave just shy of $10 million to Republican campaigns and committees in 2014, making him the country’s fourth-largest individual donor, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Yet his public appearances are few, and even then detached from his political objectives. "What I am is simply a computer programmer," Mercer said in a speech last year to the Association for Computational Linguistics, after receiving a lifetime achievement award. "I've taken great pleasure in programs that do remarkable things."

Mercer emerged as a major financial force in conservative politics just as it became an ideal sphere in which to indulge his pursuit for interesting technical programs. In 2013, SCL Elections spun off its American operations into a district entity, Cambridge Analytica, while also also removing the phrase “soccer mums” that appears in SCL Elections materials. “We want to look, feel like an American company,” says Nix.

Just as significantly, it then became a Republican company. The Mercers have repackaged Cambridge Analytica as an ingenious cog in the GOP party machinery that can crank out votes using methods unavailable to Democrats. Earlier this fall, the firm moved its Washington office to Alexandria’s Old Town, the seat of the Republican consulting sector. “It’s pretty clear that in America you’ve got to pick a side in this business,” says Nix. “It’s not really our decision. The market makes our decision.”

Nix crossed the Atlantic as though bearing a passel of Enlightenment-era insights about the ways the political profession had failed to appreciate the complexities of personal experience. “Your behavior is driven by your personality and actually the more you can understand about people’s personality as psychological drivers, the more you can actually start to really tap in to why and how they make their decisions,” says Nix. “We call this behavioral microtargeting and this is really our secret sauce, if you like. This is what we’re bringing to America.”

Cambridge Analytica’s trophy product is “psychographic profiles” of every potential voter in the U.S. interwoven with more conventional political data. The emphasis on psychology helps to differentiate the Brits from other companies that specialized in “microtargeting,” a catch-all term typically used to describe any analysis that uses statistical modeling to predict voter intent at the individual level. Such models predicting an individual’s attitudes or behavior are typically situational—many voters’ likelihood of casting a ballot dropped off significantly from 2012 to 2014, after all, and their odds of supporting a Republican might change if the choice shifted from Mitt Romney to Scott Brown. Nix offered to layer atop those predictions of political behavior an assessment of innate attributes like extroversion that were unlikely to change with the electoral calendar.

Oakes may have cautioned against “focusing on individuals or audience segments,” but Nix was doing exactly that, albeit disingenuously characterizing how other firms sorted through the electorate in order to make his approach appear more humanistic. Conventional microtargeting, he argues, “of course has to be flawed because you’re making this presumption that all women think the same simply because they are women, or all African Americans likewise because of their skin color or whichever demographic you want to choose, which is archaic, really.”

For a generation, pollsters have been attempting to move past simple demography by accounting for the psychological baggage that voters tote with them from one election to the next. As early as 1984, Ronald Reagan strategist Richard B. Wirthlin included batteries of abstract questions in his surveys, looking to identify relationships between what he called voters’ “values” and the messages that could shift their political preferences. For Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection, Mark Penn conducted what he branded a “NeuroPersonality Poll.”

What has changed is the range of data available about those voters whom a pollster didn’t reach, which in the 1980s and 1990s included little beyond what was on the public electoral rolls. Campaigns already used algorithms to infer political and demographic attributes about voters they couldn’t contact directly; why couldn’t those same statistical models predict innate psychological characteristics, as well? While Wirthlin and Penn could isolate archetypes—Penn christened “soccer moms” as part of such an exercise—they lacked the data about the electorate to identify the individuals who comprised each of the clusters so they could be contacted directly. By 2012, such data—and the statistical tools necessary to sift through 200 million potential American voters along its terms—were widespread.

SCL began hiring Ph.Ds, many of them from the University of Cambridge, from fields where manipulating large data sets is routine. As a result, it is probably the only political consulting firm whose employee bios delineate sub-disciplines within the hard sciences, separating those who studied astrophysics from theoretical physics, condensed matter physics, theoretical solid state physics. Very few of them have ever before stepped near a campaign office, and they demonstrate little familiarity with political life in the United States. In casual conversations about the subject, Cambridge Analytica employees speak of “the Tea Party” and “conservative Christians” as distant oddities, in a manner typical of educated Europeans.

“For most people who work here, it’s more about being professional and treating your clients as your clients,” says Tayler, whose Cambridge doctorate is in nuclear magnetic resonance, and who previously worked for the oil-services company Schlumberger. “They have their beliefs and you’re going to do your best for them, because that’s what a professional does.”

The associations with Cambridge serve to situate the company as heir to a specific scientific tradition. Starting in 1886, the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory—where James Watson and Francis Crick would later map the structure of DNA—became the site of the first lab devoted to a field known, alternately, as psychometrics and psychophysics. What one researcher who had lectured at Cambridge described as “the quantitative estimate of some of the less commonly and less easily measured of the human faculties” was initially done with weights and forceps, hallmarks of the eugenics movement.

In the century’s second half, researchers found less ominous ways to sort individuals into categories based on innate psychological attributes, leeching out insights through confessional interviews. In the years after World War II, Isabel Briggs Myersisolated 172 questions that would reveal the internal architecture of an individual’s mind. By the 1980s, the Myers-Briggs questionnaire was displaced by the personality battery that University of Oregon psychologist Lewis Goldberg dubbed “the Big Five.” Yet even among the extroverted, any new self-knowledge was usually well guarded. “It’s very difficult to get people to trust you to share psychological data with them,” says Vess Popov, development strategist of the University of Cambridge’s Psychometrics Centre.

A decade ago, the centre’s David J. Stilwell and Michal Kosinski uncovered a new way to get people to part with personal data: social-media quizzes. Since their MyPersonality app was launched in 2007, six million people have completed the questionnaire—nearly half of them allowing the Cambridge’s Psychometrics Centre to access their Facebook profiles as they did so. Once a user grants such access, algorithms trawl through likes and posts to train statistical models that use such “digital footprints” to predict personality types. Scholars are allowed to dip into that pool of anonymized data for worthy academic research, and the fruits of those models are promoted commercially as Apply Magic Sauce, a data stream that allows online marketers to adjust their appeals to potential consumers based on their likely attributes.

College ties may have shaped the company’s intellectual heritage, but Cambridge Analytica’s prospects are now determined by its links to American hedge-fund wealth. It is Robert Mercer’s daughter,Rebekah, otherwise responsible for the Mercer Family Foundation, who said to be the biggest booster of Cambridge Analytica’s methods. By all accounts, the company’s business has become deeply intertwined with the family’s political interests. In Manhattan, the company shares an address with the free-market advocacy group Reclaim New York, where Rebekah Mercer serves as treasurer.“To break into the U.S. political market you need more than just a good idea, you actually need to have people to believe in you,” says Nix, who refuses to specifically discuss any of the company’s investors.

Yet as Politico noted in its story about the Mercer investment, all of Cambridge Analytica’s clients in 2014 were also recipients of contributions from the financier. In 2013, the company’s only American client was the Middle Resolution PAC, a Virginia conservative group then working to elect Ken Cuccinelli as the state’s governor, an unpaid pilot project to show how SCL might work.

“The traditional microtargeting vendors I’ve worked with, they were all waiting for me to call them, I guess,” says Paul Shumaker, a North Carolina general consultant who hired Cambridge Analytica to work for Thom Tillis’s successful campaign for the Senate last year. “We were one of the top US Senate races in the country and I never got approached by anybody else—which told me they were either too busy or took me for granted.”

Cambridge Analytica might not have had to work so hard for one of its more lucrative 2014 accounts. With a $1 million contribution, Robert Mercer was the largest single donor to the John Bolton super-PAC. The group had one objective—to convince voters to support Republican candidates based on national-security issues—and it served well to demonstrate a personality-driven theory of political persuasion. Bolton’s committee agreed to communicate over satellite-television systems like Dish and DirecTV, which, unlike broadcast and most cable systems, permitted ads to be assigned differently to specific subscribers, allowing Cambridge Analytica to fully exploit the benefit of its individual-level modeling.

The firm, which was paid $341,025 for its work, advised Bolton’s team on the design of six ads, thirty seconds each, with wildly different creative approaches. One ad, targeted at voters modeled to be conscientious and agreeable, was set to upbeat music and showed Bolton standing outdoors on a bright day, matter-of-factly addressing the need to “leave a stronger, safer America for our children.”

In another, aimed at neurotics, the diplomat was invisible—replaced by storm clouds, foreigners burning American flags, and an admonition to “vote like your life depends on it,” intoned by an disembodied narrator. “That’s obviously something that’s quite emotive,” says Nix, “as we’re really looking to drive an emotional reaction from an audience who would be inclined to give you one.”

At the same time, Jobs, Growth & Freedom Fund, a leadership PAC launched by Ted Cruz in preparation for his presidential campaign, paid Cambridge Analytica just under $400,000,most of it to support digital advertising on behalf of other candidates. (Over the course of the fall of 2014, Mercer donated $1.75 million to another committee, the Ending Spending Action Fund, that has backed Cruz.) By the time the committee transitioned this spring into a full-fledged presidential campaign, Cambridge Analytica was fully integrated into the Texas senator’s political plans. Even before he formally announced his candidacy, opened his Houston office, or had a pollster in place, Cruz had a London-based firm on call to tell him which Iowans were introverted and which were neurotic.

Cruz for President has relied on Cambridge Analytica as a ready-made data-science department that spares the campaign the challenge of having to hire (and compensate) its members individually. This is already enough of a challenge for Republican campaigns, who have trouble identifying friendly quants from academia or the tech sector, even without sixteen different presidential campaigns all angling for the same talent. Finding astrophysics postdocs who will happily work for Ted Cruz may be easier in Cambridge, England, than Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rebekah Mercer is said to talk bullishly about the innovative potential of “psychographic” modeling,but her greatest gift to Republican analytics may be as an end run around a dispiritingly tight labor market: finding foreigners to do the analytics jobs that Americans just won’t do.

There is little evidence yet that Cruz’s campaign has determined if, or how, to use Cambridge Analytica’s “psychographics” at what the company depicts as their fullest potential. Chris Wilson, a pollster who had guided Cruz’s microtargeting efforts in his 2012 campaign, was unconvinced that predicting voters’ personalities was as universal a tool for unlocking their attitudes and behavior as Cambridge Analytica executives claimed. But if the method ever were to prove its utility, he thought it would happen in a fractured primary field, where—as opposed to a general election featuring stark choices between different parties—campaigns are constantly looking for ways to magnify ultimately minor differences among candidates into major distinctions in voters’ minds.

"In a primary composed of Republicans, there's not a big gap of difference between where each of the candidates are on a single issue, so your ability to connect with a voter on an issue is very important,” says Wilson, who now serves as the campaign’s director of research and analytics. “You're appreciating the reason they care about the issue."

Indeed, few of Cambridge Analytica’s clients appear to be taking full advantage of what employees describes as its “bespoke” service, the tailoring of messages and targeting tactics to align with its personality profiles. “I’m not convinced it would make any difference whatsoever,” says one veteran consultant who has worked closely with the Republican party’s data infrastructure and has met with Nix. “Even if what they are pitching is tangible and legitimate and can really give you voters to talk to in a different tone no campaign has the bandwidth…There’s not the targeting ability to do it.”

In most cases, Cambridge Analytica appears to be functioning as the type of straightforward microtargeter that Nix considered insufficiently alert to the vagaries of human psychology. In North Carolina, where the company was paid $150,000 by the state party and $30,000 by Tillis’s campaign, Cambridge Analytica developed models to predict individual support, turnout likelihoods, and issues of concern that would recalibrate continuously based on interactions with voters. Shumaker says that dynamic process allowed Tillis’s campaign to identify a sizable cluster of North Carolinians who prioritized foreign affairs—which encouraged Tillis to shift the conversation from state-level debates over education policy to charges that incumbent Kay Hagan had failed to take ISIS’s rise seriously. “It gives you an edge in increasing the probability that voters would pay attention to your message,” says Shumaker.

In conference calls and pitch meetings, Cambridge executives and analysts have betrayed confusion, if not outright ignorance, about some basics of American campaigns—from the definition of precincts (the smallest unit at which voter data is collected) to the difference between turnout patterns in primaries and caucuses. When Nix and Tayler showed me my record, they seemed to suggest that a prediction that I had an infinitesimal chance of voting in the Republican primary reflected my ideology, rather than Pennsylvania laws that exclude those registered as independents (as I am) from participating in any primaries. When it comes to describing the process behind the psychological predictions, they seem even more deliberately obtuse. “Our conversations with the Cambridge guys left us befuddled,” says a Republican consultant who has been on the receiving end of their proposal. “Their team is enamored by the promises of psychometrics, but they were surprisingly vague about its specifics and too quick to dismissively cry 'Analytics!’ in the hopes that would be enough to sell us. Their technical ambition is obvious, but they've got a ways to go before they impact the U.S. electoral space."

A few weeks after I visited their London office, I went to the University of Cambridge Psychometrics Centre’s website to see what I could learn about myself from a psychological assessment detached from political considerations. The centre’s site shows users who sign in with their Facebook accounts the personality profile that Apply Magic Sauce generates from their digital footprints, but I hadn't liked or posted enough to adequately feed its algorithm. Instead I was directed to a familiar-looking series of agree-or-disagree questions that promised to plot me on both the Myers-Briggs and “Big Five” matrices.

It took nearly half an hour to complete the 100-item questionnaire before receiving a diagnosis. The modeled assessment I had been shown by the Cambridge Analytica team had been accurate in placing me in the middle range for extraversion and low on agreeableness. But on other personality traits, the company’s prediction had been wildly off. I fell in the 16th percentile for neuroticism, while Cambridge Analytica had placed me in the 70th. The inverse was true on conscientiousness: the online test said I was in the 76th percentile, while Cambridge’s model put me in the 11th. While I was more open than closed, I was not much of an outlier—in the 60th percentile—and far from the psychological curiosity that Cambridge Analytica's test had revealed.

The summary generated by these scores conjured an entirely different person. “You seem to describe yourself as someone who avoids foreseeable trouble through purposefully planning, and achieves success through persistence,” the site told me. “From your responses it appears that you are reliable and prepared for life's challenges.” This was far from the creative free spirit than I had been revealed to be in London, but it, too, managed to flatter me. How I would decide my vote for president remained a mystery to us all.

Brittany Kaiser

Business Development Director at Cambridge Analytica & The SCL Group

New York, New YorkInformation Technology and Services

Current

Cambridge Analytica, SCL Group

SCL Group, Pathfinder Trade and Invest, Pace Group

Education

World Bank Institute

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Summary

I am an international law, diplomacy and data-driven campaigning professional with significant global experience. My work involves developing successful strategies for politicians, governments, and corporations to achieve their goals using cutting edge research, data science and campaigning/marketing technology.

Experience

Cambridge Analytica

Business Development Director

Cambridge Analytica

February 2017 – Present (3 months)Greater New York City Area

Cambridge Analytica

Director of Program Development

Cambridge Analytica

2014 – Present (3 years)Greater New York City Area

Cambridge Analytica's proprietary Behavioral Microtargeting uses our dataset (up to 5,000 data points on over 240 million Americans) to grow your audience, customers and voter base. I help commercial and political clients use data insights to solve problems and achieve campaign goals.

SCL Group

Director of Program Development

SCL Group

February 2015 – Present (2 years 3 months)London, United Kingdom

SCL Group

Special Advisor

SCL Group

December 2014 – January 2015 (2 months)London, United Kingdom

Director of Operations

Pathfinder Trade and Invest

August 2013 – December 2014 (1 year 5 months)London, United Kingdom

Promoting trade and investment with Global Growth Markets by working directly with senior government officials to produce a high level programme for top executives interested in development. We connect top officials in both the public and private sector to help each achieve their goals. Our annual programmes consist of political & economic briefings, Ambassador's breakfasts, VIP speakers' lunches and Match Maker Trade Missions. Currently working with the UK, EU, GCC, USA, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, Burma, Azerbaijan and Mongolia. Visit www.pathfindertradeandinvest.com for more information.

Communication Manager

Pace Group

August 2012 – July 2013 (1 year)

Assisting emerging countries meet their development goals through active engagement with senior level representation from both the public & private sectors. Main project: Bringing together the international community to collaborate on the new Libyan administration's development needs. Bringing expertise, products, services and investment to the growing, post-conflict economy, while creating opportunities for knowledge sharing and partnership building by producing high-profile networking events, conferences, roundtables and summits. www.fdilibya.com

London's Air Ambulance

Marketing Officer

London's Air Ambulance

April 2012 – August 2012 (5 months)London, United Kingdom

Legal Researcher

South Asia Human Rights Documentation Center (SAHRDC)

November 2011 – March 2012 (5 months)

U.S. Department of Commerce

Field Operations Management and Administration Clerk

U.S. Department of Commerce

April 2010 – June 2010 (3 months)

Amnesty International

Rights Education Action Programme (REAP) Programme Assistant

Amnesty International

October 2009 – January 2010 (4 months)London, United Kingdom

Tenteleni

Project Coordinator

Tenteleni

February 2009 – September 2009 (8 months)

Research, Networking and Advocacy Intern

Human Rights Without Frontiers International

April 2008 – June 2009 (1 year 3 months)

DialogueDirect

Campaign Manager

DialogueDirect

June 2008 – September 2008 (4 months)

U.S. PIRG

Field Manager and Campaigner

U.S. PIRG

May 2008 – May 2008 (1 month)

Education

World Bank Institute

Certificate, Violence, Conflict and Fragility

2013 – 2013

Middlesex University

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), International Law and Diplomacy under the direction of William Schabas

2012 – 2015

Researching on how to improve diplomatic strategy for prevention of atrocity crimes and to secure sustainable human rights protections.

U.S. Institute of Peace

Certificate, Conflict Analysis

2012 – 2012

Birkbeck College, University of London

LLM, Human Rights

2010 – 2011

Alexander Tayler

Chief Data Officer at Cambridge Analytica

Alexander Nix

Sheryl Harkins

Hannah Evans

Senior Project Manager at Cambridge Analytica

Christian Morato

Vice President at Cambridge Analytica

Emily A. Cornell

Senior Vice President at Cambridge Analytica

Federica Nocera

Data Scientist at Cambridge Analytica

Duke Perrucci

Chief Revenue Officer at Cambridge Analytica

Livia Krisandova

Operations Executive at Cambridge Analytica

Matthew Oczkowski

Head of Product at Cambridge Analytica

“I’ve seen their product, and it’s better than anything I’ve ever seen,” said Tyler. “We know what a Cruz supporter looks like demographically … and this allows us to go into Iowa and match those traits with likely caucus-goers.”

The group of super PACs supporting Cruz, Keep the Promise, did not respond to questions about their arrangements with Cambridge Analytica. The company did not respond to interview requests, while a spokesman for the Mercer family declined to comment.

In recent years, the Mercer family — Robert Mercer; his wife, Diana Mercer; and their daughter, Rebekah Mercer — have emerged as among the leading financiers of conservative causes and candidates.

Their quiet involvement in Cambridge Analytica — which is known in elite conservative finance circles but has yet to be reported — seems to mark a transition from purely financing political campaigns to running their own political operation. It’s a model that’s been pursued to varying degrees by billionaires ranging from the liberal hedge funder Tom Steyer to the conservative industrialists Charles and David Koch. It was made possible partly by the Supreme Court’s 2010 *Citizens United* decision, which opened new avenues for unlimited political spending.

With their investment in Cambridge Analytica — and the Cruz campaign’s embrace of their product — the Mercers also have become competitors in an increasingly cutthroat conservative political data race. Some of the right’s most influential and well-funded players — including the Koch brothers’ operation and the Republican National Committee — are jockeying for market share and 2016 prospects in a political sub-industry expected to consume a huge portion of the billions spent in the campaign. The result of the competition could go a long way toward determining the winner of the White House and the Republican Party’s direction after the election.

So far, most of Cambridge Analytica’s work appears to have come from campaigns and committees funded in large part by the Mercers. And sources familiar with the Mercers’ political efforts said that Rebekah Mercer, who has steered the family’s political expansion, has made introductions between Cambridge Analytica and the political committees the family supports.

Federal Election Commission filings show that nearly 93 percent of the $2.6 million Cambridge Analytica has received in traceable federal payments has come from committees to which the Mercers donated generously. The payments — which all came last year and were for polling, micro-targeting, advertising and other services — came from Cruz’s leadership PAC and a handful of GOP-aligned big-money organizations, including Ending Spending Action Fund, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton’s super PAC and a pop-up super PAC created to boost 2014 Republican Senatecandidates. Other Cambridge Analytica clients included the campaigns of GOP Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, as well as unsuccessful GOP House candidate Art Robinson of Oregon. The Mercers combined to donate nearly $3.3 million to those groups in 2014, according to FEC filings.

Representatives from most of the groups and campaigns did not respond to questions about whether there was any connection between their support from the Mercers and their payments to Cambridge Analytica.

Garrett Marquis, a spokesman for Bolton’s super PAC, said the $340,000 his group paid to Cambridge Analytica in 2014 was money well spent.

“It’s something that no one has done in politics. Period,” said Marquis. “It was the most cost-effective, efficient way to reach voters. We were very pleased.”

Marquis said the firm created five categories of potential voters, including “soccer mom” and “working dads,” by layering responses to surveys atop voter data, and then targeted voters based on which category they fell in. The firm’s “core offering,” according to its website, “combines advanced data analytics and the creation of a psychographic framework to help you gain increased insight into your target voter groups.”

Bolton’s super PAC spent $5 million on digital ads in 2014 on key Senate races, and Cambridge Analytica boasts on its website that the online and Direct TV ad campaign it ran for Bolton’s super PAC appealed “directly to the personality traits, priority issues and demographics of specific groups” that “had a real impact in sending Thom Tillis to the US Senate.”

It’s not clear precisely which services Cruz’s campaign or its supportive super PACs will purchase from Cambridge Analytica, or how much the work will cost. Those committees won’t be required to publicly detail their finances until later this month.

Some of Cambridge Analytica’s employees already appear to be have been dispatched to work on Cruz’s campaign. One described himself on a social media page as a systems administrator for SCL Elections who was working in Houston “Providing Infrastructure Administration for The Honourable Republican Senator Ted Cruz in the 2016 Presidential Campaign.”

SCL Group’s director, a Brit named Alexander Nix, has worked to expand Cambridge Analytica’s market share in the deep-pocketed world of Washington-based conservative outside groups, offering a data service that targets individual voters based on a “psychographic score” of personality traits.

“It sounds ridiculous and it probably is,” said one GOP operative who has worked closely with organizations using the service.

The company is one of 10 startups set to participate this month in the Reboot Conference — a major political technology event — in San Francisco. Conference organizers included Cambridge Analytica among participants they consider “up and coming companies with technology not to be missed.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/ted-cruz-donor-for-data-119813#ixzz3zR4A2d8U

Cambridge Analytica - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Cambridge**_**Analytica**

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Trump Campaign Pays Millions to Overseas Big Data Firm - NBC News

www.nbcnews.com/...election.../trump-campaign-pays-millions-overseas-big-data-fir...

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In the news

Cambridge Analytica, The Data Gurus Who Anticipated the Election Result

PR Newswire‎ - 2 days ago

The firm knew that Mr. Trump had a very solid shot at winning, ... Ahead of the election, Cambridge Analytica's internal data showed the race ...

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How a little-known data firm helped Trump become president - Mashable

mashable.com/2016/11/10/donald-trump-polling-data/

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:{3 days ago - :{Cambridge Analytica:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: saw increase in unlikely :{voters:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: for Trump in the Rust Belt.:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Trump Camp Says It Capitalized on Early Voting Data | Campaign ...

adage.com/article/campaign-trail/trump-camp-capitalized...voting-data/306690/

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px !important;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{4 days ago - That's according to Matt Oczkowski, who headed up the Trump campaign's team of embeds from U.K.-based :{data firm Cambridge Analytica:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:.:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Trump Campaign's Data Firm Partner Cambridge Analytica Worked for ...

www.nationalreview.com/.../trump-campaigns-data-firm-partner-cambridge-analytica...

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px !important;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{Aug 5, 2016 - Trump has turned to a :{data firm:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: that worked with Ted Cruz to try to make ... game and :{voter:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:-targeting operation, met with :{Cambridge Analytica:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Donald Trump's mind readers try to win him voters - CNNPolitics.com

www.cnn.com/2016/11/04/politics/donald-trump-political-ads-cambridge-analytica/

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px !important;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{Nov 4, 2016 - Donald Trump's mind readers try to win him :{voters:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: .... :{Cambridge Analytica:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: is crunching :{data:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: for the Trump campaign; They use personality tests .... to success, the :{firm:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: said it works on eight to 10 political campaigns each year.:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Cambridge Analytica – Better Audience Targeting

https://cambridgeanalytica.org/

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px !important;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{At :{Cambridge Analytica:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: we use big :{data:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: and advanced psychographics to grow audiences, identify key influencers, and move people to action.:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Cambridge Analytica | CA hailed as key to Cruz win in Iowa

https://cambridgeanalytica.org/news/ca-hailed-as-key-to-cruz-win-in-iowa

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px !important;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{New York, NY 10017; ny@:{cambridgeanalytica:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:.org; Phone: +1 (646) 892 ... Iowa could be defined by a battle between two :{data:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: analytics :{firms:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:: :{Cambridge Analytica:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, ... By the time Trump began investing in :{voter data:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: and targeting analytics, ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Inside Donald Trump's Data Analytics Team on Election Night - WSJ

www.wsj.com/.../inside-donald-trumps-data-analytics-team-on-election-night-14787252...

4 days ago - The upset win by Donald Trump was a coup for a tiny data firm called Cambridge Analytica that helped the campaign target ads based on ...

https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?cycle=2016&strID=C00575373

Official PAC Name:

Keep the Promise I

Location: ,

Industry: [ Treasurer: JAMES, JACQUELYN FEC Committee ID: C00575373

(Look up](https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/industry.php?txt=&cycle=2016)actual documents filed at the FEC)

Contrib	Occupation	Date	Amount
MERCER, ROBERT EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733	RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES	04/10/15	$11,000,000
MERCER, ROBERT EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733	RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES	07/14/16	$2,000,000
MERCER, ROBERT EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733	RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES	03/17/16	$2,000,000
MARCUS, BERNARD ATLANTA, GA 30327	PHILANTHROPIST	09/06/16	$2,000,000
MOSKOWITZ, CHERNA MIAMI, FL 33140	HAWAIIAN GARDENS CASINO	08/23/16	$1,000,000
MERCER, ROBERT EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733	RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES	02/26/16	$500,000
JUNG, JM NOVI, MI 48376	INFORMATION REQUESTED	02/22/16	$100,000
SAUNDERS, THOMAS A III PALM BEACH, FL 33480	INVESTOR	03/31/16	$100,000
CHILDS, JOHN VERO BEACH, FL 32963	J.W. CHILDS ASSOCIATES	04/22/16	$100,000
PRINCE, ERIK DEAN MIDDLEBURG, VA 20118	INVESTOR	09/21/16	$100,000
PRINCE, ERIK DEAN MIDDLEBURG, VA 20118	INVESTOR	08/21/16	$50,000
PRINCE, ELSA HOLLAND, MI 49423	EDP	09/29/16	$50,000
GALE, SANDRA E SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94133	RETIRED	09/15/16	$25,000
ALGER, FRED PALM BEACH, FL 33480	INFORMATION REQUESTED	12/29/15	$10,000
ALGER, GALE PALM BEACH, FL 33480	INFORMATION REQUESTED	12/29/15	$10,000
JORIE, KENT PALM BEACH, FL 33480	ABERCROMBIE & KENT	01/04/16	$10,000
HANLEY, WILLIAM LEE JR PALM BEACH, FL 33480	LEXINGTON MANAGEMENT GROUP INC	06/30/15	$5,000
BROADBENT, CHRIS ASHBURN, VA 20147	CONTEMPORARY ELECTRICAL SERVICES	09/20/16	$5,000
THE MONACO GROUP SANTA ANA, CA 92705		01/31/16	$4,000
NEUGEBAUER, TOBY DORADO, PR 00646	INVESTOR	07/08/15	$1,000
BENDER, BRUCE SIERRA MADRE, CA 91024	RICBERAY	02/17/16	$1,000
CLOVEN, BRADLEY TACOMA, WA 98403	110 CONSULTING	11/03/15	$1,000
WISMER, ANN KEMAH, TX 77565	WISMER DISTRIBUTING CO.	08/05/16	$1,000
COLEMAN, CHRIS ARLINGTON, VA 22207	LOOKINGGLASS CYBER SOLUTIONS, INC	09/20/16	$1,000
WRIGHT, JOHN TIBURON, CA 94920	RETIRED	08/05/16	$500
MCBRAYER, CHARLEEN ROSWELL, GA 30075	RETIRED	02/22/16	$500
COOK, GLENN SAINT HELENA, CA 94574	WINERY OWNER	01/22/16	$500
DOOLEY, JAMES LINCROFT, NJ 07738	STONE HARBOR	01/26/16	$500
JOHNSON, STEVE SPRINGFIELD, MO 65809	BUSINESS OWNER	02/25/16	$500
WILLIAMS, THERESE RIVERSIDE, CA 92505	ENCORE ORTHOPEDICS S/C, INC	03/01/16	$500
NEUMANN, PETER COLLEYVILLE, TX 76034	ARAMCO SERVICES COMPANY	10/31/15	$500
CLARK, MICHAEL SAN LUIS OBISPO, CA 93401	REFUSED	03/24/16	$500
FITE, RALPH HOUSTON, TX 77042	WELCOME GROUP LLC	01/20/16	$250
GOMEZ, RAFAEL JACKSONVILLE, FL 32216	RETIRED	08/08/15	$250
MCHENRY, DENNIS NEW BETHLEHEM, PA 16242	DAIRY FARMER	02/25/16	$250
KIM, KAREN SAVANNAH, GA 31410	PHYSICIAN	02/04/16	$250
SCHILLING, PAUL SAINT AUGUSTINE, FL 32084	PHYSICIAN	08/04/16	$250
REYNOLDS, WILLIAM CEDAR, MI 49621	LEELANAU IND LLC	02/24/16	$250
HAVERLY, VICTOR VENTURA, CA 93001	HAVERLY SYSTEM INC	09/01/16	$25

cambridge analytica

Cambridge Analytica Uncovered: Secret filming reveals election tricks

Cambridge Analytica: Undercover Secrets of Trump's Data Firm

The smoking gun

How to make black youth not vote

On the US stage

Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton

Sen. Thom Tillis and the North Carolina Republican Party

Make America Number 1 Super PAC

John Bolton Super PAC

Ted Cruz and Ben Carson

Big Oil

Big Coal

Brexit and Climate Science Denial

Contents

Background and methods:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Activities:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

United States of America:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

2016 presidential election:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

2014 midterm elections:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

United Kingdom:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

2016 Brexit referendum:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Privacy concerns:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

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Contents

History:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Activities:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Cambridge Analytica:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

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